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He hit up the wolf next, and drank deeply from him while he explored the man’s brain, but whoever had wiped this man’s memories had done a decent job.
Gavin went through seven people before he found someone with intact memories buried and hidden, and he found his foe.
Medved. The bears don’t have a king, but if they did, it would be him.
Vampires can’t be shapeshifters in the traditional sense. Once you’re a vampire, getting bitten by a shapeshifter can’t change you. And shapeshifters, as a general rule, can’t be turned into vampires.
Medved, however, is rumored to have been a bear shapeshifter who was turned into a vampire, and somehow, the process allowed him to daywalk.
Medved wasn’t terribly old by vampire standards — around eight hundred years, if Gavin had it right. The other vampire had sent wolves and birds, rather than bears, when rumor had it he owned a posse of bears, both natural and shifters.
Finally, Gavin went to the strongest and last heartbeat. While he drank the eagle shifter down, he pierced the man’s brain in the most painful of ways. He drank and he searched, and he found what he wanted.
Ambrose had made it to their floor by this time, and he telepathed everything he saw into the demigod’s mind.
Lauren was gone for a portion of the time, as Gavin had ordered Queenie to bring the nurse who was part of the flock, so she could work on the tiny human’s leg. Lauren was back by the time he finished, though, sitting in the observation room. Observing.
Gavin had pulled out of her mind once the nurse injected the lidocaine into Lauren’s calf, so he had no idea what she was thinking.
His people had moved the bodies to the incinerator as he’d finished with them, and when they carried the last shifter out, he turned to the open window between them. There were no two-way mirrors here, only titanium bars to protect the people observing, should someone get loose in this room.
“You need food.”
“I ate a little when the nurse worked on my leg. It’s kind of a mess. The shot she gave me is wearing off, and I have ice on it to keep it from hurting. What did you do to it, so it didn’t hurt so bad earlier?”
Mostly, he’d turned off the pain alarms in her mind, but that wasn’t the only thing he’d done, so he could honestly tell her, “I milked some of my venom into it, focusing on the painkiller form of it. Queenie has located a local tattoo artist who specializes in reptiles and fish. Do you have an idea of the style of axolotl tattoo you want?”
“I do, though I haven’t tried to sketch it. I have a few images saved on my phone, though.”
“When we have a chance, let’s see if I can sketch something you like. Once the sun goes down, I can have one of the vampires who overnighted in the theater bring him to us.”
“Do we know if Nick is okay?”
Gavin sighed. Life would be simpler if he could just rip Nick’s heart from his chest and then install a new Rex. “He’s fine, but some of his people are missing. He was working at the Cirque theater when his cabin was attacked. Every supernatural leader aligned with me was attacked, and most of their top people. My security staff is still taking stock of the overall damage.”
“Dusty and Link?”
“Were not attacked. They’re putting the yacht into storage mode so they can move in here for at least a couple of weeks. We’ll also need to rethink you living with Ambrose until I’ve dealt with Medved.”
“Will he attack the theaters? Or is he too afraid of the Concilio to risk bringing humans into it?”
“Medved is neither he nor she, but both. Medved was born a bear shifter, and a hermaphrodite. Rumor has it, Medved dresses as both male and female, depending upon his mood, though most have only seen him as a man. There are theories that the vampirism took hold because of the dual nature of the creature, but I don’t buy that. Something was obviously off enough, though, to allow it.”
“So, Medved is both bear shifter and vampire, both male and female?”
“That’s what they say.”
“And he, or she, or they, I guess, wants to be Master of Branson?”
“Seems to be the case.”
“Where does Medved live?”
“I have no idea.”
“That’ll make a counterattack difficult.”
“I saw images in the minds of the birds, but no city names. Mountains, but no mountain names. If I had to guess, from the terrain, the Appalachians in West Virginia, Virginia, or slightly north. I’m leaning towards West Virginia, based on the sparsity of people.”
