I texted back. “Wolves were in New Orleans lockup. Not gonna shoot dogs with human witnesses.” Privately I added, “Idiot,” but I didn’t type that part.
I was free to chase the werewolves and the grindy and Leo and the IAW would pay me for it. My eyes on the news channels, watching while I changed, I flipped through from Asheville’s local channels to the national ones, learning that last night’s campers had been deep in a wilderness site near a small creek, over forty crow-flying miles from the previous attack site, and because it happened in the dark instead of by day, the media was again attributing it to vamps. Dressed in jeans, hiking boots, and layers of shirts, I filled a backpack with supplies I might need. I’d be hunting with the local sheriff and his deputies, guys I knew—cops who had questioned me extensively following another hunt—and so I was carrying only two handguns. No need to worry the local law enforcement by showing up armed like a mercenary.
Once dressed, I brought six knives and my backpack into the twins’ common room and finished weaponing up in front of their large, flat-screen TV. Brandon, his hair washed and combed back, was stretched out on the sofa, wearing a heavy white robe with the hotel’s logo on it. There was an open bottle of wine and an empty glass on the tea table beside him, and two dainty wounds in his neck. He looked satiated, and happy. Which ticked me off.
The local early morning TV personality was a cute, energetic blonde with a perky voice. When Brandon flipped back she was saying, “—pires kill like that, don’t they Mason? With fangs, and claws?” A grim smile on my face, I shoved my favorite vamp killer, eighteen inches of heavily silver-plated steel in a hand-carved elk-horn handle into its sheath.
Mason, on a split screen, was standing in front of trees, emergency vehicle lights blinking in the distance. “The older ones don’t usually kill their blood supply, Marcy, but the young rogues do often kill their victims. These attacks appear to the law enforcement and park rangers very similar to the wounds suffered by the people killed a year or so ago.”
“Those attacks were brought to an end by Jane Yellowrock, the local vampire hunter, and a coven of local witches, right?”
I felt myself flush and an electric shock shot through me. Oh . . . crap. Molly’s husband was gonna kill me.
“Janie is famous,” Brandon said, laughing.
“For our viewers, here’s some footage shot by an amateur videographer, the morning when a local sheriff detective, Paul Braxton, was killed trying to take down the vampires in the cave system of the old Partman Place.”
“I remember that, Marcy,” Mason said. “The Partman Place was a nineteenth-century homestead until gemstones were discovered and the land was sold to a mining company.”
Marcy said, “The mine closed down when the gems ran out. Last year, a blood-family of young rogue vampires took it over and local residents started to disappear.” A poor quality feed ran. “When a camper saw two blood-covered females walk out of the mine he took a short video.” On the television screen, his feed zoomed in on my face, my peculiar amber-colored eyes seeming to glow, an effect that had been blamed on the golden sunrise. What else could it be, right? But it was Beast. And people might not be so sanguine about Beast in my eyes now.
“According to some sources, Jane Yellowrock is back in the area. What does she say about these attacks?” Marcy asked.
“We have people tracking her down now. But in unconfirmed reports, she told one law enforcement officer that no vampire caused the wounds.” Mason’s voice sounded skeptical. “Of course, one source suggests that she went to New Orleans to work for the vampires. So that might have changed her perspective.”
“Weird, to go to work for your enemy. But I guess money talks,” Marcy said.
I frowned. On the screen, Molly and I were both covered in blood, the sunlight hitting us as we came out of the mine, into the dawn light, me carrying Brax, Detective Paul Braxton, over my shoulder. Or what was left of him. One of the young rogue-vamps had killed him. The scar on my throat was clear in the video, the angled sunlight of early dawn catching on the raised, ridged, raw, partially healed, red scar. Back then it was four inches wide, brand-new, left over from a near beheading by an enraged young rogue. I had survived by shifting into Beast. And Beast had saved us all by taking down the last rogue-vamp. Dang Internet.
Brandon looked at my neck, still scarred, if you looked closely. “You heal up good.”