“Summarettes,” Rick repeated dryly. It was a cute name for an ugly beast, and he knew it would stick. He turned the TV off and hurried down to the lobby.
The manager, McCreary, was there and looked relieved when he spotted Rick. He wiped off his gleaming face. “Do you know what these things are, Mr. Pæga? Are we in danger here in the hotel?”
“I wouldn’t go down into any basements and I’d guard the entrance to the underground pedway to the mall. Let people into the hotel, but no one goes into the tunnel.”
“Good thinking, sir.” Then McCreary shifted into customer service mode. “Are your two friends safe and sound?”
“No. If you don’t mind, I’m going to wait here until they return.”
“Very well, sir. I’m going to take care of the pedway entrance.”
“And shut any windows that are open!” Rick called after him. “It’s nearly sunset.”
Marcus was the first to return. The rented Vauxhall pulled up under the portico and barely stopped before Marcus almost fell out of the car in his haste to get out. He raced into the foyer, straight-arming the glass doors, looking around wildly.
Rick stood up and Marcus’ face sagged in relief. He hurried over to him.
Rick was so glad to see him, he hugged him, right there in the foyer.
Marcus’ grip was just as tight. “Ilaria?” he said quickly, stepping back.
Rick shook his head. “I made her take a taxi this morning.”
“You knew this was going to happen?”
“It was just a hunch.”
Marcus gripped his arm hard. “I will never, ever ignore your hunches, ever again.”
They sat down to wait for Ilaria and watched the sky darken through the big glass doors.
* * * * *
Kate stood at the windows, taking photos and biting her lips until they were red and swollen. She was crying silently, the tears dripping down her cheeks.
Finally, Roman couldn’t stand it any longer. He took the camera away from her and led her into the kitchen, where the only windows were the high ones over the cabinets.
She let herself be pushed onto one of the bar stools.
Garrett got up from his stool where he had been hunched over a laptop, pounding out a warning email to everyone on his substantial contact list and started coffee for her.
Kate kneaded her fingers together. “There are all the night shoots. They’ve been keeping the Summanus away with armed guards, but they can’t stop this….”
“They have trailers, Kate. The trailers will protect them.” Roman took one of her hands and held it between his.
The sound and smell of coffee was distracting, yet even the hissing espresso didn’t quite mask the soft pattering of bodies hitting the windows. The sound went on and on, long after the espresso was made.
It was going to be a long night.
* * * * *
“What happens in the morning?” Dominic asked, breaking the long silence that had fallen. Everyone was in the big living room, even Kimball and Efraim and the three security guards who had been caught out in the open when the first wave had descended. The guards had been closer to the house than the sentry box at the front gate.
Winter sat with her hand in Sebastian’s, while Nial paced.
Patrick turned his cell phone in his hands. Every now and then, he thought of someone else to check on and send a text. It was too late to warn anyone. Sebastian had pulled up CNN on his tablet and they reported that the swarms were everywhere. Not a corner of the city was spared. More reports were coming in from around the world.
Patrick was getting responses to his texts, too. Sandy Ackerman had been one of the first he had messaged, when it was still early enough to warn people. Ackerman had texted back two hours later.
Family safe. I owe you.
That warmed Patrick in a small way.
Even Blythe Murray had texted him. All safe. Jake is asleep.
That pleased him more than any other message he received.
There were enough response to his texts that he realized with a start that he was no longer the crazy, drunk former movie star to them. When had that changed? The phone had stayed silent for weeks. Was this a shift in attitude?
He was startled to realize that the growing responsiveness from Hollywood left him unmoved.
How strange.
“I mean,” Dominic said now, spreading his hands. “There are going to be many questions and we don’t have answers.”
“They’ll expect us to know,” Sebastian added. “Especially Roman, as everyone thinks of him as the expert.”
“We can make assumptions and extrapolate,” Nial said from the far corner of his pacing circuit. “Rick will be able to help. He was on to this before any of us. He might already have most of the answers.”
Sebastian snorted. “He didn’t have any idea. He was just guessing. Even he said it was a hunch.”
“And he was right,” Nial pointed out. “He doesn’t pull hunches out of thin air. All that staring at information actually works.”
“For him,” Sebastian said dryly. “All right, I agree he knew enough to try to warn us. Not that it helped.”
“It should have,” Nial said, his voice harsh. “We’re supposed to be guarding them and we let this slip by us, even despite warnings. “ He squeezed his hand into a fist. “It’s not good enough!”
“Could you have predicted this?” Winter asked quietly. “Not even Rick could pin down the details.”
Nial turned to glare at her. “There have been warning signs for days. The smell that everyone was complaining about, coming up from underground places. The absence of birds. Pets refusing to go outside. None of those events happened when the Summanus first rolled into town. They were all new and should have alerted us.”
“It’s a shame someone didn’t find the eggs before they hatched,” Sebastian said.
Dominic shook his head. “It wouldn’t have happened. The smell would have driven anyone away. We almost ran past the culvert that day.”
“Even so,” Nial said pedantically. “The Summanus have carapaces. We’ve known that for weeks now. Despite walking around on two legs, they’re more closely related to insects than mammals. We should have asked ourselves how they lay eggs. How the eggs hatch. What the infant cycle looks like. These are basic questions. Instead, we got lulled by their intelligence and their numbers…and their numbers should have alerted us, too.”
“Insects communicating telepathically by touching heads together?” Dominic asked. “Even I didn’t think of insects. It just doesn’t compute.”
Dominic had been the one to discover how the Summanus talked to each other. The cloud of telepathic thought was what he picked up on when he hunted them. It was so alien, he couldn’t read it, although he had put that together with the reports from the hunters of the Summanus’ habit of touching heads together.
Nial shook his head. “Winter, you’re the closest to a biologist in the room. Is this a larvae stage?”
“Human biologist,” she corrected. “We won’t be able to determine that until we can look at the bodies and the eggs…if there are any. There might be sacks, which would indicate larvae. However, these little ones resemble the parents, which makes me think they’re hatched from eggs and will develop to adult size. No metamorphosis, like larvae go through.”
“Why are they swarming like this?” Patrick asked.
Winter shrugged. “For the same reason any other species swarms. For food. Most creatures, when they emerge from the egg, are starving. There are millions of them and not enough food for all of them, so it’s a competition.”
“Survival of the fittest,” Kimball muttered from his seat by the door.
“The strongest individuals who fight off all the others and acquire enough food will go on to develop into adults,” Winter added.
“And even the adults have disappeared,” Dominic said suddenly.
Everyone looked at him.
“We haven
’t found a single Summanus out after dark in three days,” he said. “It’s like they knew this was coming, too.”
“Yes, they did,” Winter said. “So did the dogs and the birds. It’s an animal thing.”
Nial rubbed his temple. “Any speculation on how long this hatching season will last?”
The room was silent. Even Winter seemed to have no answer.
“Then we wait it out,” Nial said grimly. “Tomorrow, when the sun is up, we go and find answers to give to the humans. If we can’t stay one step ahead of the humans we are expected to protect and actually serve them, then we’re a parasite, too.”
Chapter Sixteen
Dominic stopped playing, the chord breaking unevenly, the sour notes making him winced.
“Don’t stop!” Patrick said quickly from the armchair he had pulled over to the side of the piano. “I was enjoying it.”
Dominic sighed. “I play badly. I haven’t touched a piano in years. Concert level players practice for hours a day. Hours.” He shook his head. “Besides, you listen to it all wrong.”
Patrick’s face sagged. “Wrong?”
Dominic stood. “You only hear half the notes. Not even the important ones, the quiet ones. And you don’t hear the silences.”
Patrick pushed himself to his feet. “Are you saying I don’t appreciate music?”
“You like music just fine,” Dominic said tiredly. “You just don’t hear it all. No one does.”
“Except you?”
“Even I don’t. I hear more than you and I hear different music from what you hear.”
“You’re not making sense.” Patrick’s anger was growing. Whenever his creativity was challenged like this, he got defensive.
“Pachelbel,” Dominic said flatly. “Everyone knows the tune.” He bent down and pounded out the first few bars of Canon. “What you hear when you listen to it is different from what I heard when I used to listen to it. That’s why people like what they like. And you don’t hear all the notes.”
“So I’m only fit to listen to simple tunes?” Patrick asked. His voice was dangerously quiet.
“I’m saying that your gift is for reading people and knowing what lies beneath. And it is a gift. Music is just a bonus for you, but for me, it was everything.”
“It still can be.”
“No, it can’t!” Dominic cried. His eyes widened as he heard his shout echo in Patrick’s mind. His chest was suddenly heaving.
He swallowed.
Patrick drew closer, moving slowly, as though he might startle Dominic into another radical reaction if he moved too fast. “There has to be a way. You’ve got this much back.”
Dominic closed his eyes. “Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
His eyes were stinging. He blinked to clear them. “You think if you can make my music come back, then you’ll be saved, too. It doesn’t work like that. No one gets to go back.”
Patrick held his face still. The pain radiated from him both mentally and from the way he was standing.
A throat cleared from the back door, making them both turn, startled.
Blythe stood there. She wasn’t wearing the hunting uniform she had been wearing this morning, when they had ventured into the culvert with gas masks and flame throwers.
Nial, Sebastian, Patrick and even Winter had been with them, all wearing masks and carrying weapons of one sort or another. There were not as many Summarette bodies lying around the culvert as there had been where humans congregated. In those areas, the bodies were as thick as hail, piled up against the sides of buildings and littering the sidewalks. The clean-up would take days, if not weeks.
“There might be adults guarding them,” Blythe had pointed out as they approached the man-sized culvert. It was bone dry, for L.A. had been short on rain this summer.
“Probably not,” Winter had replied. “The babies would be left to fend for themselves. Only mammals raise their young.”
“And birds,” Sebastian added.
However, the culvert had been empty, except for a mountain of calcified shards on the ground.
“Shells,” Winter decided, kicking them with her boot. Her voice was muffled behind the mask. “They must find their own nest once they’ve hatched. More competition for safe places.”
Nial straightened up from his examination of the shells. “Then we’ll have to find those places and deal with them there,” he said.
Blythe had an encyclopedic memory of all the dark and enclosed places in the neighborhood and a fast search of all of them proved fruitless.
“It makes sense that the babies would find far more secure places to hide,” Winter said. “They’re much smaller and what they ate last night would tide them over for days.”
Blythe swallowed. Her friend Peter had been one of the victims. Dominic squeezed her fingers in sympathy.
“They could burrow deep. Perhaps they even hibernate in some way, until they’re bigger.”
“So after the swarming,” Patrick said, “they become individuals?”
“They were all individuals to start,” Winter said. “No hive mind. They just all wanted the same thing, so they swarmed to find it.”
That was when Nial had called a halt for the day and they had made the long trek back to Patrick’s house. On the way, they saw hundreds of human work crews out cleaning up the bodies, along with human hunting parties with their knives and swords and the glowing safety vests that marked their new profession, digging into any likely or unlikely holes, looking for more.
When they reached the house, Dominic knew he should sleep the afternoon through, because tonight he would be out again, knife in hand. Patrick had asked him to play and despite his reluctance, he had sat at the piano and tried.
Tiredness was dogging him as he studied Blythe’s fresh appearance, now. She looked energetic and happier than he had noticed in days. She wore a pair of jeans that made her long legs seem even longer. The red sweater made the most of her dark hair and clung to every curve.
She looked good. Very good.
“I’m sorry to interrupt,” she said, “The man in the kitchen said to come straight through.”
“You came to see me?” Dominic asked.
She hesitated. “Is Winter around?”
Patrick smiled and a warm, happy glow came from him. He was pleased about something. “She’s in the back family area. If you go back through the kitchen, then keep going, you’ll find it.”
Dominic looked from one to the other. They both had the air of shared secrets about them. That made him uneasy but he didn’t know why.
Blythe gave them both a stiff smile. “Well…thanks. I’ll see you later, then?”
She was talking to Patrick.
Patrick nodded. “I’ll be here.”
“Okay.” She didn’t glance at Dominic as she headed back toward the kitchen.
Patrick turned away, too. He headed over to the piano and picked up the sheet music that had mysteriously appeared there a week or so ago. More silent inducement to play.
“I’m tired,” Dominic said abruptly and he realized, truthfully. “I’m going to sleep. Tonight is going to be a bitch.”
Patrick lowered the sheets, studying him. “Is everything okay?” he asked.
His damn sensitivity. Sometimes it seemed as though Patrick could mind-read, too. Dominic shook his head. “I’m just tired,” he lied and gave him the best smile he could manage.
He didn’t know if that sold Patrick or not because he didn’t wait to find out. He went upstairs to the bedroom suites and paused outside Patrick’s. Then, with a decisive turn on his heel, he walked away, back down the passage to the bedroom that was nominally his.
* * * * *
As Patrick had suggested, the back family area was easy to find. There was only one other exit from the kitchen on that side of the house and Blythe climbed down the three steps into a quiet oasis.
The room looked like it had first started life as a pillared courtyard overlooking th
e big swimming pool. The area had been enclosed with glass walls and roofed in. Outdoor carpet had been added. In California’s summers, the room should have just boiled under all that glass, except that the household air conditioning was holding the temperature as a tolerable level.
The humidity was higher in here because of the glass and Blythe could feel her skin relax.
Everywhere there were potted plants, like an old-fashioned Victorian greenhouse. Plants that could not survive the torrid summers outside were thriving here, including lilies and orchids and lush ferns.
Blythe paused to absorb the riot of colors and textures and enjoy the fresh feel of the air in here. The plants were responsible for that.
“It’s very soothing here, isn’t it?” Winter’s voice came from behind a bank of big tubs of what looked like fishtail ferns with curled edges, only they were huge.
Blythe saw that there was a deck chair there, with the feet extended. Winter’s toes were showing from behind the tubs and Blythe walked around them to see her properly.
Winter gave her a warm smile. Her green eyes always reminded Blythe of Sebastian’s eyes. “I’d get up, but…”
There was an IV needle taped to her elbow, the line leading up to a pole from which hung a bag of blood, nearly empty.
“Are you…?” Blythe began, then wondered if that sort of direct question was rude.
“A vampire?” Winter finished. “No. You know I can heal people, right?”
“That’s why I’m here.”
“I see.” Winter didn’t seem offended or curious. Blythe realized that she probably got a lot of requests for help.
“Is the healing…does healing people mean you need more blood?”
“A long time ago, Sebastian and I were partners in a small business venture. He didn’t tell me he was a vampire and I didn’t tell him I could heal people. So when someone shoved a broken-off broomstick through his heart, I healed him.” She grimaced. “I made him human again.”
She looked up at the bag, then reached up and shook it.
Blythe let that sink in. There was so much she was learning about vampires and the other types of people that had hidden away from humans until now. It was a complex world and there was always another layer to uncover. “And that’s why you need blood?”
Blood Revealed Page 17