33
Sidney was a man proud enough of his opus that he’d put his name on it—someone like that wouldn’t be satisfied with disappearing into the mist, bereft of an audience. No, every instinct she had told her he’d have hit the Theater as soon as he could.
“Do you know what it’s like to watch a woman get her head torn off?”
Shutting down the resurgence of memory before it could incapacitate, she winged her way across the green space at the core of Manhattan. About to land in the correct section, her brain suddenly poked at her to consider the situation . . . and maybe part of that poke came from the echo of her father’s words, though she couldn’t think about that now.
As soon as she landed, she would become vulnerable in a way that—ironically—she’d never been as a human. Her wings would make it hard for her to run at speed, dodging between the trees near impossible. A vertical takeoff would also not be a viable option if the hunt went bad, since she couldn’t get aloft fast enough. Added to that, the Theater was in an isolated section of the park and, while night hadn’t yet fallen, winter darkness was starting to edge the light in the sky.
It’d be nice to think no vampire or angel in the territory would dare lay a hand on her, but there were always the outliers—and the mortals. If a group of hopped-up junkies took out her heart or injured her internal organs badly enough, she’d die, her immortality tenuous yet. Then there was the risk Raphael’s enemies had agents in the city just waiting for Elena to make herself a target.
“Yep,” she said to herself. “Landing right now would not be the most intelligent thing you’ve ever done, Elieanora P. Deveraux.”
Holding a hover—she was definitely getting better at that, thanks to the exercises Aodhan had taught her—she considered her options. It’d have to be the Guild, the Tower already stretched. “You have anyone who can back me up?” she asked Sara. “I’m at Central Park.”
“Gimme a sec.” A rustling, the phone going silent, then, “Deacon’s in the area with Slayer, and he has a crossbow. Why take a crossbow on the dog’s walk, I hear you ask? Because my beloved does not know how to leave home without being armed to the teeth.”
Elena laughed, Sara’s affectionate words giving her the respite she needed from the horrific images Jeffrey’s revelation had burned into her brain. “You know I’d never turn down Deacon.” Sara’s husband might no longer be an official member of the Guild, but they all knew he was one of them. “Wait, what about Zoe?”
“With my parents—they’re in town and spoiling her like only they can.” Elena could hear Sara’s smile. “Deacon’s yours long as you need him.”
“Thanks. I’ll call him to arrange a meeting spot.”
Less than two minutes later, she landed beside Deacon’s tall, heavily muscled form a short walk from her target location. “I appreciate this,” she said, after lavishing affection on Slayer, the huge black dog who was Zoe’s adored best friend.
“No problem.” Quiet green eyes that Elena was certain missed nothing, even though his stance was relaxed, Slayer leaning against his leg. “Where are we headed?”
“Blood Theater.” Nothing special during daylight hours, that particular part of Central Park transformed into a decadent, sex-laced vampire haven at night, one mortals were advised to avoid unless they intended to become well-f*cked dinner.
Deacon retrieved the crossbow he’d slung over his back. “Hardware has a good deterrent effect.” The instant the crossbow was in Deacon’s hands, Slayer turned from playful, tail-wagging pet to a silent menace.
“Yep.” Retrieving the longer blades from her thigh sheaths, she made certain the gleaming edges showed beneath her fists. “I don’t want to draw blood, but some of the younger ones are morons.”
A faint smile on Deacon’s lips as they set out along the narrow path to the Theater, the snow packed down as far as Elena could see. Given, however, that it hadn’t snowed since close to dawn, the crushed snow was probably evidence of the previous night’s debauchery, not a more recent event. The Theater was apt to be empty at this time of day and if she was right, and Sidney had made an appearance there, she might be able to pick up a trail.
Despite the high possibility she and Deacon were alone in this part of the park, she didn’t drop her guard, aware of every rustle, every tiny sound, then the distinct lack of it. “No birds,” she murmured sotto voce.
“Yes.” Deacon went back-to-back with her without any further discussion, her wings pressed against the dark green of his trench coat, while Slayer padded silent and dangerous in front of them.
Weapons held with open aggression, they turned right off the main access path and onto another that spilled them into the small clearing with a natural dip that turned it into a miniature amphitheater. Elena’s nape itched with the certainty of the eyes on them, instinct verified by the fresh lines of scent in the air, but no one appeared out of the deep pools of shadow between the trees.
Watery blood. A lot of it.
“Ellie.”
“I smell it.” If someone was dead inside the Theater, he or she hadn’t been dead long enough for the carrion birds to have become aware of the feast, the area devoid of the sounds of their feeding. Either that, or the birds had been held off on purpose, because beneath the snow-diluted blood, she caught the scent of disinfectant softened by lilies.
Shit.
“Deacon?”
“I have you covered.”
Shifting position, she made her way into the dip and to the gruesome sight that awaited. Sidney Geisman had lost his head. Literally. It was currently spitted on a crude wooden spear carved from a hacked-off branch, the vampire’s eyes orbs of bulging red and his tongue a grotesquely swollen black where it hung out of his mouth.
It was too cold for flies, the bloody snow below the head pounded into ice. The rest of the vampire’s body lay discarded a short distance away. She could see indications of arterial spray on the nearby trees, the blood having turned a putrid brown that nonetheless stood out to her enhanced vision. What interested her more were the multiple gaps in the pattern, as if this execution had had an audience that would’ve been sprayed with Sidney’s blood.
Breathing through clenched teeth, the cold paradoxically intensifying the miasma of scents for her, she stepped close enough to the head to read the note stabbed into Sidney’s forehead with what appeared to be a metal nail file. Inventive. The note consisted of a single word written in blood: DISEASED.
Oh, f*ck. F*ckety f*ck f*ck!
Continuing to breathe through her mouth, she crossed to the body and began to check Sidney for any visual signs of disease. It didn’t take long to find the sores on his hands. They were small, barely formed, so the infection had only just dug into his cells when he’d been killed. Which meant either there was now another carrier in the city or—best-case scenario—Sidney had been hoarding bottled blood in anticipation of his escape.
Raphael?
When she heard only silence in response, she remembered he’d mentioned he might be leaving the city to meet one of his senior angels. Digging out her phone from the pocket where she’d stuffed it, she called Tower operations, using the direct line that meant she’d get either Aodhan or Illium.
It was Aodhan who answered. Not wanting to say too much over an unsecure line, she simply told him she needed him in the Blood Theater. He didn’t ask any questions, saying that he’d be there within minutes.
That done, she began to walk the scene to see how many useful scents she could identify.
Aodhan arrived with the encroaching darkness, his wings glittering brighter than the snow. She saw immediate comprehension on his face when she pointed out the note. The vampires in the city were turning on one another—if this continued, it could spiral out into indiscriminate paranoia, painting the city bloodred.
But that wasn’t the most immediate problem.
“Could the infection have passed in the arterial spray?”Aodhan said, softly enough that his words wouldn’t travel to the vampires who continued to watch from the shadows; those vamps would soon find themselves with nowhere to go, Aodhan having instructed a squadron to surround the area.
Elena looked again at the rusty brown that marked the trees. “Depends if enough of it got into the mouth, as well as through the mucus membranes of the eye. Low risk, since a drop won’t do it, but a risk nonetheless—the spectators and the executioners were standing damn close.” More than one had likely had an open mouth as they no doubt screamed at Sidney and cheered one another on. “I can track at least some of the people here in the last few hours, but given the way he was beaten”—she pointed out the vicious marks on the body—“it looks like it might’ve been a mob attack.”
A hardness to Aodhan’s expression she’d never before seen, splintered irises hauntingly white with reflected snow. “Find as many as you can as fast as you can.”
Having already isolated the strongest scent trail, Elena started the track, Deacon at her back. The intensity of the scent told her the vampire in question had run from the Theater probably at daybreak, his body and face covered with Sidney’s blood, a strange mélange of disinfectant and lilies entangled with the vampire’s own natural scent.
The odd thing was, he hadn’t run out onto the street, but scrambled deeper into Central Park. Where she found him ten minutes later. Covered in patches of dried, flaking blood the color of dirt, he sat rocking to and fro under the shade of an oak devoid of its leaves, its arms skeletal against the incongruously stunning starlit night.
“They killed him. They killed him. They killed him.”
Crouching beside the male, far enough away that he couldn’t lunge for her throat, Elena said, “Who killed him?” her tone nonconfrontational.
“They killed him. They killed him. They killed him.”
Elena tried again, even chancing a touch, but the vampire was trapped in some personal mental hellhole he couldn’t escape.
She and Deacon stayed with him only until he was picked up for transport to the Tower. Returning to the main site, now busy with Tower staff, Elena chose the next most promising trail. Thirty minutes later, she received a message from Illium stating a friend of Sidney’s had confessed to supplying him with food blood out of her own frozen supply. He drank a bottle from Blood-for-Less. Bottle dated within the period of the original donor-carrier.
Five hours after that, she’d tracked down three other vampires who’d watched and/or participated in Sidney’s bloody execution, but who hadn’t stuck around to experience the aftermath. One was terrified, one defiant, but it was the third who was the most problematic: he’d started to show advanced signs of the disease.
Stepping outside the bedroom where the vampire shivered so hard his teeth clattered, his mind lost in a febrile haze, she met Deacon’s eyes. “You should get back home. Sara will be waiting.” She would not risk his mind, his memories.
A piercing look. “I already know what Sara knows.”
“You have to leave before you know more,” she said, then brought up the one thing she knew would get him to back off. “Zoe needs you. Don’t get involved in immortal bullshit that could bleed onto your family.”
“You change your mind, Ellie,” he said after a long minute of silence, “just call.”
That done, she contacted Illium. “None of the idiots I’ve found are talking and we need the names of the others who were there and might be infected. Can you do your mental voodoo?” Raphael was on his way back, but still at least an hour out.
“My mental voodoo is nowhere as well developed as the Sire’s, but I have a better idea.”
Arriving at the guarded warehouse where Elena had quarantined the two apparently uninfected vampires, the infected one in another warehouse, Illium asked the vampires for the names and, when there was no answer, withdrew his sword and sliced off the left leg of the brown-haired male.
The gleam of red on steel was not what she’d been expecting, her heart slamming into her throat, but the brutal tactic delivered: the uninjured vampire broke down even as her friend clamped his hand over his stump in an attempt to stanch the pumping blood. “I’m sorry! We made a pact not to nark!” Sobbing, she began to give them names, the maimed vampire joining in when she faltered in her recollection.
It took less than an hour to track down the nine other vampires who’d scattered, including—ironically—a number who’d been fans of Sidney’s work. One more was discovered curled up in bed, the disease ravaging her cells, the other eight terrified out of their minds.
“We need to find out where each one, but especially the two infected, went after the murder,” Elena said, furious at the stupidity that might’ve done more damage than the other attacks combined. “The only bright point in this situation is that the disease needs a blood transfer to infect.”
The interviews went fast—courtesy of the amputated leg sitting in the middle of the warehouse; none of these vampires was old enough to heal such an injury in anything less than twelve excruciating months.
Most of the murderous idiots had run home, but two had gone to a club. Where they’d fed on and been fed by fellow vampires. One of those two was the sick woman. Beautiful, sexy, and an unmistakable magnet for male vamps who wanted to sink their fangs into sweet, hot flesh.
“God damn it!”
Had the club been a high-class place like Erotique, where blood sharing was considered a seduction, a pair often spending hours together, there was a good chance they could’ve quickly halted any further spread. Unfortunately, Bezel was on the opposite end of the spectrum, catering to young vampires who were all about sex, blood, and more sex, multiple partners the norm in both categories.
The first indication Elena had of how bad this was going to be was when she landed in the club parking lot just as a tall, skinny vampire staggered out on four-inch heels, only to collapse to the concrete screaming that it hurt, it hurt!