I stared at the screen as it began to fill with images. Soon the monitor was full, and the pictures began to scroll upward. Hundreds of faces flashed across the LCD display, most of them young men and women.
“Jesus Christ,” Emily said. “How many of them are there?”
Greg tapped at his keyboard, and a number popped up at the top of the screen. “Nine hundred and five in the last ninety days.”
“Holy shit,” I said, sinking down into my chair. “How has this not gotten some news coverage? That has to be just a ridiculous spike in disappearances.”
Greg tapped around a few more seconds, then put the keyboard down and turned to me. “It’s just barely over the statistical average, bro. Charlotte-Mecklenburg PD handles around 3,500 missing persons cases every year, so nine hundred in a three-month span isn’t even a noticeable increase. This guy could take two or three people every week forever without raising suspicion.”
“I had no idea,” I said, leaning back. “And most of those faces look young.”
Greg looked at the data displayed on the tabletop. “Seventy percent of the missing persons reported are teens, so yeah, they are young.”
“Okay, put up what we know about the victims left for me,” I said.
Greg minimized the wall of the disappeared, and three young faces appeared, side by side. All were crime scene photos, since there were no morgue photos of the first two and Emily was still beside us.
“We know Emily Knightwood, age twenty-eight. She’s the oldest of the victims by a pretty wide margin,” Greg said. He kept his tone clinical, but I knew looking at his sister’s face up there tore him up, even if he could just look to the side and see her standing beside my chair.
Greg highlighted the first girl’s picture. “The first victim we were alerted to was Julia O’Connell, aged eighteen. Smart girl, loving family, no indicators that she would run away. Worked late shift at a diner.”
“We should see if there is any security camera footage from Landmark we can get for Emily to look over. She might recognize one of the guys from the bar,” I said.
“I sent an email to Sabrina suggesting that very thing. She says welcome to the family, Emily, and don’t take after your big brother,” Greg replied.
“I think I’m going to like this chick,” Emily said, and it was the first real smile she’d given us since she woke up.
“What about the second victim?” I realized that I knew absolutely nothing about the woman, just that I’d killed her in a parking lot for something that she couldn’t control. Whoever this vampire was, he had a lot to answer for when I found him.
“Kara O’Grady, twenty-three.”
“I’m not much older than that,” Emily said.
“Five years, kiddo,” Greg said.
“Kiss my ass, big brother.”
“Anyway,” I said, interrupting the siblings and motioning for Greg to go on.
“We don’t know a lot about Jennifer. Theatre degree from North Carolina School of the Arts—”
“I think it’s UNC School of the Arts now,” I said.
“Whatever. You get the idea. She was a theatre kid, went to college, got a degree. Last known place of employment was a lighting rental shop up on North Graham Street. She got off work one Saturday and wasn’t seen again until her body was located. Also pretty low-risk overall. Worked some odd hours, and spent a lot of time in clubs, but from what the police have been able to drum up in the last couple of days, she was usually there working lights for concerts.”
“So, we’ve got a high school kid, a lighting technician, and your sister. What do they have in common?” I looked at the three pictures and couldn’t see it. Two brunettes and a blonde, One Asian woman in her late twenties, two white girls. One teen and two women in their twenties. All working pretty mundane jobs that put them in contact with the public, but nothing high profile. I couldn’t connect the dots.
“You said that most missing persons are really young, right?” Emily said, leaning forward onto the table.
“Yeah, most are under eighteen,” Greg agreed.
“What if this Julia kid is the pattern and I’m an outlier?”
“What are you getting at?” I asked.
“We already know our vamp thinks I’m too old. Why? I’m not the demographic he’s hunting. If there are a couple thousand missing teenagers in Charlotte every year, then what’s a few more? As long as he picks them up from high-risk groups or areas, goes for the drop-outs, they might not be missed. But he made a mistake with Julia.”
“Julia did live on the east side. That’s a neighborhood in transition, but there’s still a high dropout rate,” Greg said.
“And a teenaged girl working until midnight on a school night would probably look like somebody without a strong family structure, regardless of the facts,” I added.
“So she looks like somebody that wouldn’t be missed,” Emily continued. “Because there’s a lot of turnover in restaurant jobs, and it’s not unusual for somebody just to not show up for work.” Emily ran her fingers through her hair. “So if he’s hunting high-risk teens, and just randomly catches Julia—someone with a strong family and who’ll be missed—that doesn’t fit the pattern, he tosses her out? Maybe?”
“But what about you and Jennifer?” Greg asked.
I jumped in. “Adults and college grads are more settled. They have steady jobs and are more likely to be missed. So he dumped us. But why would he keep Shelly and Quinn? Why not dump them, too?”
“Yeah, it sounds like at first he didn’t want to keep you, but something made him change his mind . . .” Greg’s voice trailed off as he looked at Emily.
“What?” she asked.
“Your purse was with you when we found your . . . you.”
“Yeah, so? I’ve gotta have my ID to go to the clubs.”
“Do you remember anyone going through your purse? In the car, or before they . . .”
“You can say ‘killed me,’ Greg. I’m not going to shatter.”
“Well, did they? Go through your purse?”
“I don’t know. Wait, yeah, the driver was rummaging through all our stuff while the leader was talking.”
“That’s it, then,” Greg said, and his face was grim.
“That’s what?” Emily asked, looking between us.
I didn’t say anything, but I knew where he was going.
“The driver must have said your name. The leader recognized it and stepped in to turn you before you bled out. That’s why you didn’t just die.”
“Because of my name? I don’t get it.”
“Not because of your name. Because it’s my name, too. Because of who I am.”
“And who your best friend is,” I said.
“What the hell are you two talking about?” Emily almost yelled.
“I’m the Master of the City. This guy has been leaving newborn vampires for me to find as a slap in the face to my authority, to show that he’s above my rules. He killed you to drive that point home even harder.”
“Because you’re my sister. Or at least we share a last name.”
“They’d know more than that,” Emily said. “If they know who you are, then the picture in my wallet would be a dead giveaway.”
“Picture?” Greg asked.
“Yeah, from when you took me to Carowinds for my birthday when you were in college. You still look exactly the same.”
“I would,” he said. “I turned less than three months after that.”
“So the goon sees the picture, reads the name on the license, and makes the connection,” I said.
“He tells his boss, who decides to send a very personal message.” Greg finished my thought for me.
“Message received,” I said. “This son of a bitch wanted my attention, h
e’s got it. I just don’t think he’s going to like how it goes from here.”
Then my damned consistent phone of doom rang.
Chapter 25
GREG TOOK ONE look at my face when I hung up and said, “Do you ever get phone calls that aren’t something catastrophic?”
“Now are you starting to see why I break so many phones?”
“I thought that was accidental,” he said with the irritation of someone who’d had to spend his time replacing most of those broken phones.
“Let’s just say that I don’t feel too bad when some of those accidents happen, and leave it at that.”
Greg heaved the sigh of the long-suffering, a response he’d become proficient in during our years together. “Now what?”
“Rabbit found something. He needs me to come down and check it out.”
“Where is he?” Greg asked.
My fingers flew over the screen as I sent Sabrina a text and explained things to Greg at the same time. Or tried to. I don’t really type all that well, and autocorrect doesn’t really help with words like “Morlock.”
“Down near the main Morlock tunnels. He says he found more of the abandoned subway system, and it looks like it’s seen heavy use recently. I gotta go try to deal with this.” I walked to the closet and started to gear up.
“We can’t go with you,” Greg said. “Emily doesn’t know enough, and I can’t take a chance on her getting hurt.” The “again” in that sentence went unsaid, but was still loud as hell.
“I understand,” I said. I strapped a holster to my thigh with my Glock in it, then knelt down and wrapped the Velcro holster around my right ankle to hold the Ruger LCP that I keep as a backup piece. Sewers or not, I wasn’t going after this asshole without my heaviest artillery. So I reached back into the closet and pulled out my sword.
Excalibur didn’t really look like much, as swords go. The metal didn’t light up blue and make laser sword noises. The grip wasn’t a fancy ivory bone handle. The length wasn’t six feet long, and as far as I knew the sword had never been flung through the air by a blue-painted Scotsman. Excalibur was a simple longsword with a sapphire set into the pommel and a battered leather scabbard. But the second I unfurled the long belt and strapped it on, I felt better. Hell, I felt invincible. I wasn’t, of course, but with Excalibur in my hands or on my side, I was stronger, faster, and a lot more resilient than normal.
“Want my Kevlar?” Greg asked.
I managed to stifle every comment about being able to wrap his bulletproof vest around my skinny body twice, and just said, “Nah, I’ll trust Excalibur. Magic over tech, you know?”
“I do not approve that message,” he replied. “Try not to get your phone smashed. I’ll stay here and track you with the phone’s GPS. But you need some kind of backup.”
“Already took care of it. I texted Sabrina. She and Sean will meet me in the tunnels under my office,” I said.
“Oh, is Sean part of the team now?”
“No, but he knows the score, so he might as well make himself useful. Besides, he wants this guy pretty bad, too. The last girl almost killed him, remember?”
“What happened to her?” Emily asked.
I looked toward the couch and met her stare. In my prep to go hunting, I’d forgotten she was there. “I killed her,” I said. “I don’t let vampires kill humans in my city. We can drink a little now and then, but she was going to straight murder Sean, and I can’t have vampires killing CMPD detectives. That puts everyone in jeopardy, no matter how close I am to some people in the department. If Sean had died, there would have been a backlash against the supernatural like this city’s never seen, and I don’t have any idea if I could have contained it. So I killed her.”
Emily looked at me, her young eyes getting older by the second. After a long moment, she nodded. “I get it. It was your job, good of the many, that whole thing.”
I didn’t say anything, just nodded. There wasn’t anything else to say. She understood where I stood, and if she didn’t quite get what being the Master of the City meant, then she could ask Greg. He could educate his baby sister in the ways of living among the dead. I grabbed a duster out of the closet and slipped the coat on. It was cold outside, but the tunnels would be warm. That wasn’t why I wore it. The heavy oilcloth was good defense against knives and claws, and I had a few ceramic plates sewn into the lining in strategic places for a little help against bullets. Besides, the coat billowed around my legs when I walked and looked hella cool.
I walked over to the wall and tapped in a sequence on the keypad. The wall slid open to reveal an entrance into the sewer tunnels, and I stepped through. I slid the door closed behind me, then slipped the Bluetooth headset on over my ear and dialed Greg.
“Go for Rubber Ducky.” His voice came through my headset.
“God, I hate talking to you when you’re in a good mood. The crap movie references are just gonna be nonstop, aren’t they?”
“Hey, Convoy is a classic!”
“Just because a movie was old when you first saw it in middle school does not mean the movie’s a classic. It just means it’s old. Old things can still suck, you know.”
“Oh, I know. Remember, I’m best friends with you.”
“Touché. All right, I’m gonna meet up with Sabrina and Sean, then head over to the coordinates Rabbit gave me. I’ll call you if I hit trouble.”
“10-4, Snowman. Bandit out.” He hung up before I could protest. If anyone was going to be the Burt Reynolds in our Smokey and the Bandit, it was me. I sped up into a jog, keeping to the narrow walkways on the side of the sewers until I got to the level directly beneath the office building I inherited when we took out Tiram. I had to give ol’ Gordon credit—he was a dick, but he had good taste in real estate. My office building was sweet.
I found the three bricks in the wall that turned in a specific order to open the wall, and did so. If I turned them wrong, I was getting half a dozen stakes through my chest, every one of them silver-plated. I was full on blood and had my reinforced coat on, but even with that I didn’t want to test the limits of Excalibur’s healing power.
The wall pushed open on hidden hinges, moving as if on glass bearings, to reveal a server room in the basement of an office tower. Sabrina and Sean stood waiting for me, their sidearms out and leveled at the door. I held up my hands and gave them a grin. “At least wait until I’ve done something to deserve getting shot.”
“I have a list,” Sabrina said, holstering her weapon. Sean kept his gun drawn but did point it at the floor. I gave Sabrina a quick hug and a kiss on the cheek, and Sean and I exchanged a tough-guy nod, the kind of steely-eyed exchange that rarely looks as cool in real life as it does on screen. This was no different. He looked like he had something in his eye, and I’m sure I looked about as intimidating as a toothpick in a leather jacket.
“Anything on Emily’s clothes?” I asked, gesturing for them to precede me into the tunnel. I pulled the door closed behind us and reset the door.
“Nothing useful,” Sean said. “Some grass that matches the type used to sod football fields, a little bit of line paint, and a trace of dirt that doesn’t match anything we have in the system.”
“And a few flakes of glitter, but that probably came from Emily,” Sabrina said.
“She doesn’t seem like a glitter kind of girl,” I said.
“Well, maybe she picked it up wherever she was taken from,” Sean offered.
“That kinda works,” I agreed. “She did say she was out at a bar before she met the guys who took her. Let’s get moving. I don’t want to leave Rabbit waiting too long. He gets a hint that the guy who killed Julia is down here, and he’s liable to run off chasing him without waiting for us.
I put my earbud back in and dialed Greg. “I’ve got Sabrina and Fitzpatrick. Talk us in to Rabbit’s location.
”
“I’ll do what I can. I’ve got his phone pinged, but there’s a blank spot between his location and where my maps of the sewers ends. At some point he went off into tunnels that aren’t part of the city planning maps.”
“Okay, just do what you can.” I slipped the phone into my pocket but kept the connection open. The humans switched on a pair of red-lensed flashlights, which hopefully wouldn’t be visible quite as far, and we set out.
We meandered through the tunnels for a solid twenty minutes before Greg called a halt. “You’re parallel to where his phone is pinging from. He should be about twenty yards to your left.”
I turned to face blank stone wall. “That’s going to be difficult, since there’s nothing there, buddy.”
“That’s what I was telling you,” Greg shot back. “I’m out of tunnel, and I have no idea how to get you to where Rabbit is.”
“Okay,” I said. “We’ll take it from here. Go be with Emily. I’m sure she still has some questions about this new life, and they would probably be better answered by a guy who didn’t threaten to kill her if she stepped out of line.”
“Yeah, she’s covering it well, but I think underneath it, she’s pretty shaken up. Call me if you get into trouble.”
“You know me, pal. If I get into trouble, the first thing I’m doing is breaking this stupid phone.” I clicked off and dropped the earbud in my pocket. Turning to the others, I said, “Rabbit is fifty feet or so on the other side of this wall. We didn’t pass anything that looked like a side tunnel, so my best guess is to move forward and look for a turnoff, or some kind of secret passage.”
“You can’t bash through the concrete and dig your way to him or something?” Sean asked.
I looked at him, but he was either a great actor or completely sincere. “Dude,” I said. “I’m a vampire. I’m not the friggin’ Mole Man.”
He looked back at me, his face completely blank. “I have no idea who that is.”
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