Nathan snorted. "He withheld valuable intelligence about the danger she posed. If you hadn't been hurt, it could have been one of us. Not to mention she killed the companions."
"She said she didn't," I said. "She got there after they were already dead."
"And you believed her? After this? She almost killed you. She damn near ripped off that leg. Do you have any idea how long it would take you to regenerate that? Decades."
I was silent a long moment. All that was true.
"She's dangerous, Aileen. She can't be allowed to roam the city unchecked. I'm not even sure at this point if Thomas will allow her to live. Demon taint is very serious, and a wolf that can kill with its bite alone is a weapon he won't allow his enemies to have." Nathan straightened. "You should prepare yourself for the worst."
I stared up at him, unable to respond.
His shoulders bunched before he relaxed. "Come on. You should get a shower and clean up. You look like a murder victim right now."
"More like Carrie at the prom," I said.
He chuckled. "You're right. Only you don't have the cool powers."
True. Baby vampires were notoriously weak when it came to raw power. It'd be a century or more before I became any kind of player.
I let him lead me to a shower that was thankfully part of the same suite I'd found myself I in, since it meant I didn't have to walk around the mansion letting everyone stare at me. Even for a vampire stronghold, I would present quite the sight. He left me alone in the large space, with a shower as nice as the one in my room. What did they do—design every shower in this place with a hedonist in mind?
I discarded my ruined clothes on the bathroom floor and stepped under the warm water, letting it rinse the blood off me. I didn't let myself linger, even though I felt fragile after my brush with death—the closest I'd come in a very long time—since my turn in fact. There wasn't enough hot water in the world to wash that experience off.
I didn't have the luxury of indulging my weaknesses either. Caroline's life depended on me finding a solution to the problems facing us.
Despite her attack on me, I believed her when she said she didn't kill those people. Call me crazy or naive, but I know she would either have told me the truth or not remembered it at all. Even if it was a lie, I owed it to our friendship to verify it.
Her talk of Thomas’s descendants had gotten me thinking.
I stepped out of the shower, having scrubbed myself clean three times over, and wrapped myself in a big, fluffy towel—the kind you find in really high-end hotels. Clothes had been folded and left for me on the toilet. I wasted no time in getting dressed.
Nathan waited for me on a sofa in the next room. One wouldn't guess he was a century-old vampire from the way he watched his cell phone. He would fit right in with people my age who never seemed to lift their faces from their smart phones anymore.
Hearing me, he clicked a button and stuffed the phone in his pocket. "Liam wants you to stay here for now. He'll be down once he's done."
"I have a better idea. Why don't you take me to see the rooms of the companions who died?" I suggested.
He hesitated, the request unexpected.
"Look, you're all convinced she's the murderer. It won't hurt to let me take a look at their things." I shrugged. "If I find nothing, I find nothing. Maybe it'll even help me process this shit."
He frowned in consideration and studied me, looking for an angle. I kept my expression expectant without trying to seem impatient. There wasn't an angle. I really did just want to look around.
"Fine, but you don't go anywhere but those rooms, and you don't try anything like escaping to go find the mad wolf." He pointed his finger at me.
"Deal."
He sighed and looked up at me. "I have a feeling I'm going to regret this."
"Only if I'm right."
He shook his head.
*
Catherine's room looked like a unicorn had thrown up in it. It was a frilly, pink, purple, and blue mess. Not exactly a room I pictured a companion occupying.
"This was her room?" I asked in a skeptical voice. It looked more like a preteen’s.
The bed was wood carved with four posts that she’d hung gauzy sheets from. The coverlet was white, and there were pink and blue pillows at the head of the bed. It was a princess bed—the kind that featured in many a young girls' fantasies growing up.
She had a makeup table, one covered in various shades of eyeshadow, lipstick and nail polish. There were also stuffed animals all over the place.
Nathan looked around and nodded. "Yeah, this is hers. Anton always complained about feeling out of place every time he visited her here."
"What was their relationship like?" I asked, curious. He had seemed to have a great deal of feeling for her, but that could also have been the shock of her death.
"Fraught with tension." Nathan circled the room in the other direction.
"Really?"
"Yeah, they were a bad match. We all knew it, but nobody interferes with companions."
"The vamp code?" I asked with a sly smile.
He snorted. "Something like that. Anton's never been one to be tied down to one person. She was his companion, but he also had others. She was the jealous sort. It created a lot of tension."
"I thought it was an exclusive relationship," I said.
"It's exclusive one way. The vampire partner doesn't have the same restrictions. Some vampires see humans as little more than pets. You can feel affection for your pet, but they often won't let themselves feel more." He eyed a picture of a young Catherine with her friends in a pink, glittery frame with a hint of distaste.
"Sounds charming," I said, my voice sarcastic.
"Hm. Yeah. When you live as long as we do, it grows wearying to watch people die. After a while, it just doesn't seem worth the effort to get close only to have their light blink out in a flicker of a moment," he said. There was a hint of sadness in his voice, lingering behind his eyes that made me think the observation was a personal one. "Most of our families have long since died. A few of us track our descendants, check in on them from time to time. Even that becomes difficult after a while."
"Sounds like a lonely existence." One I would share in a few decades. It was something I tried not to think about. What would this world be like without my parents in it? My sister? My niece? How would I bear it when every person I'd known had gone into death's embrace? It was enough to keep me up at night, which was why I tried to live in the moment. If I was lucky, I wouldn't share that fate for several decades.
"It is. Why do you think Liam has been so insistent you cut ties?" he asked, spearing me with a hard glance. "The longer you hold on, the harder it will be when they go. We've all experienced it."
"You gave up possibly decades of knowing your family to spare yourself a little pain?" I asked.