“They took her together. One drank while the other . . . the other . . . And then they switched places. They laughed. I can hear her crying. It took . . . a long . . . long time,” I blundered away, bumping into Jane. She led me out, helping me to get away. But it only got worse.
I pointed in the direction I needed to go. My footsteps echoed on a wood floor. Then carpets. “Two little girls. Little . . . Oh, God in heaven. They . . .” I took a breath that shuddered painfully in my throat. Tears leaked down my cheeks, burning. “They raped them too. Two males. And they drank them dry.” I opened my eyes, seeing twin beds, bare frames, the mattresses and sheets gone, surely taken by the crime scene crew. Blood had spattered up one wall in the shape of a small body. To the sides, the wall was smeared, like the figure of angel wings a child might make in the snow, but made of blood.
Gorge rose in my throat. “Get me out of here,” I whispered. I turned away, my arms windmilling for the door. I tripped over something. Fell forward, into Brax. His face inches from mine. I was shaking, quivering like a seizure. Out of control. “Now! Get me out of here! NOW!” I shouted. But it was only a whisper.
Jane picked me up and hoisted me over her shoulder. Outside. Into the sun.
I came to myself, came awake, lying in the yard, the warm smells of leather and Jane all around. I touched her jacket and opened my eyes. She was sitting on the ground beside me, one knee up, the other stretched out, one arm on bent knee, the other bracing her. She was wearing a short-sleeved T-shirt in the cool air. She smiled her strange, humorless smile, one side of her mouth curling.
“You feeling better?” She was a woman of few words.
“I think so. Thank you for carrying me out.”
“You might want to wait on the thanks. I dropped you, putting you down. Not far, but you might have a bruise or two.”
I chuckled, feeling stiffness in my ribs. “I forgive you. Where’s Brax? I need to tell him what I found.”
Jane slanted her eyes to the side, and I swiveled my head to see the cop walking from his car. He wasn’t a big man, standing five feet, nine inches, but he was solid and beefy. I liked Brax. He was a good cop, even if he did take me into some awful places to read the dead. To repay me, he did what he could to protect my family from the witch haters in the area. There were always a few in any town, even in the easygoing Appalachian Mountains. He dropped a knee on the ground beside me and grunted. It might have been the word, “Well?”
“Seven of them,” I said, “four men, three women, all young rogues. One family, one bloodline. The sire is male. He’s maybe a decade old. Maybe to the point where he would have been sane, had he been in the care of a master vamp. The others are younger. All crazy.”
For the first years of their lives, vampires are little more than beasts. According to the gossip mags, a good sire kept his newbie rogues chained in the basement during the first decade or so of undead life, until they gained some sanity. Most experts thought that young rogues were likely the source of werewolf legends and the folklore of vampires as bloody killers. Rogues were mindless, carnal, blood-drinking machines, whether they were brand-new vampires or very old ones who had succumbed to the vampire version of dementia.
If a rogue had escaped his master and survived for a decade on his own, and had regained some of his mental functions, then he would be a very dangerous adversary. A vampire with the moral compass of a rogue, the cunning of a predator, and the reasoning abilities of a psychotic killer. I huddled under Jane’s jacket at the thought.
“Are you up to walking around the house?” Brax asked. “Outside? I need an idea of which way they went.” He looked at his watch. I looked at the sun. We were about four hours from sundown. Four hours before the blood family would rise again and go looking for food and fun.
I sat up and Jane stood, extending her hand. She pulled me up, and I offered her jacket back. “Keep it,” she said, so I snuggled it around my shoulders, the scent of Jane rising around me like a warm animal. She followed as I circled the house, keeping between Brax and me, and I wondered what had come between the two while I was unconscious. Whatever it was, it crackled in the air, hostile, antagonistic. Jane didn’t like most cops, and she tended to say whatever was on her mind, no matter how insulting, offensive, rude, or blunt it might be.