“All isn’t necessarily lost,” I said, nodding at the open elevation platform behind Tate.
He turned, watching as Bones flooded Madigan’s replacement heart with vampire blood in an attempt to bring him back as a ghoul. If he’d drunk more of it before he died, his transformation would be inevitable after switching his heart with a ghoul’s and reactivating it with vampire blood. But Madigan had swallowed only a few drops of Bones’s blood at most. Would it be enough?
I hoped so.
Finally, after Bones refitted Madigan’s ribs over his heart and covered that area with more blood, he stood up, running a weary hand through his snow-white hair.
“How long before we know if it works?” I asked him.
He shrugged. “He’ll rise within a few hours or stay dead forever. Either way, we need to leave. A distress signal could have been sent when our attack began, so we’ve stayed too long as it is.”
True, and we didn’t need the added complication of dealing with reinforcements while waiting to see if Madigan came back from the grave. But before we went anywhere . . .
“Has Denise found the child yet?” I asked Tate.
Before he could respond, a feminine voice beat him to it.
“She found me,” Denise said, sounding shell-shocked.
I turned, my eyes widening when I saw her. She’d shifted back to her own appearance, and her neck and mahogany-colored hair were drenched with fresh blood. The medical scrubs she wore were bloodier, too, and she had a large new hole in them right around her heart.
“I tried to warn you,” Dave called out from farther behind her.
“You should’ve been more specific!” she shot back, annoyance replacing her shock.
Tate shook his head. “This is my fault. A couple weeks ago, I told Katie that if she ever got the chance, she needed to escape and kill anyone who tried to stop her.”
“Kill?” I repeated in disbelief. “She’s a child, Tate.”
The look he gave me was pitying. “In age only. I told you that you didn’t know the half of what Madigan had done. Well, she’s the half.”
“She’s more than half,” Denise replied dourly. “That little girl snapped my neck as soon as she saw me, then cut my throat when I got up after that, and then impaled me with a pipe she ripped off the wall when I got up after that! Needless to say, after that last one, I stayed down until Homicidal Goldilocks left.”
I stared, my mind refusing to accept what Denise said even though I knew she wouldn’t lie. The auburn-haired child I’d glimpsed couldn’t have been more than ten years old. She also looked to be less than half of Denise’s weight. How could she have the strength to do all that, let alone the resolve to be that merciless?
“Bloody hell.” Bones sighed. “She’s it, isn’t she?”
“She’s what?” I asked, still trying to wrap my head around the idea that a fifth grader had whipped my supernaturally unkillable friend’s ass in three different, lethal ways.
“The culmination of all of Madigan’s work,” Tate said in a steady voice. “Katie’s human, but she’s also part vampire and part ghoul, and Madigan raised her to be a killing machine.”
Twenty-one
Katie wasn’t in the underground facility anymore. Tate followed her scent and discovered a secret shaft between the walls that led straight up to the surface. The thick metal plug over it had been kicked off. It was too narrow for an adult to fit through, so it might have been a ventilation shaft, once upon a time when this facility was a bomb shelter. But to a slender child with a double dose of inhuman genetics, it would have been a relatively easy climb to freedom.
Once topside, the ponds, lakes, and surrounding wetlands dissipated her scent enough to make it untraceable. Then the only footprints Katie left ended in a shallow canal, so we couldn’t find her that way. It was still daylight, too, which meant we couldn’t risk doing an aerial sweep. Something man-sized flying above the McClintic Wildlife area would fuel Mothman rumors for decades, and we couldn’t risk hanging around until after dark to do it then.
We’d have to come back another time to search for her. Superhuman or not, Katie was still only a child. She shouldn’t be too hard to find.