Katarina, who had been quiet since her hard fall back in the float, spoke up. “If you were human and found out about creatures that way, what would you do?” She rubbed her arm, which had been temporarily wrapped. It hung at an unnatural angle, but only the downward twitch of her lips showed any pain.
They needed to get her to the hospital, but with Vale gone she’d have to wait until they were finished speaking with the police.
She answered her own question before Cael could. “I know! You’d fancy yourself a vampire hunter, get a bunch of stakes and garlic, and set out to kill the Big Baddies who murdered someone you loved. Is that what you want for these humans? To place them in a fight they can’t possibly win?”
Cael leveled her with a glare. “For the rest of their lives, what took these men away from their families will be a lie. It’s necessary,” he acquiesced. “But it’s wrong.”
“What we can do,” Raphael said in a quiet, dangerous voice, “is get to the bottom of the vampires in this city. And we can start by paying a visit to the vampires we know we can find.”
Christian’s group.
“We’ll come with you.” Charlotte gestured to herself and Raj. Raphael had already told them about Christian and the vampires living in Metairie, as well as their deal with Aiyanna. The officers had been less excited about vampires living in New Orleans than Cael was, but even they admitted Aiyanna’s involvement was smart.
Anything to prevent harm—something the weres and shapeshifters agreed on.
Charlotte and Raj pulled the remaining officer away for a second and spoke quietly, purposely making it so Cael, Mary, Raphael and Katarina couldn’t hear them. Mary leaned against Raphael, setting her head on his shoulder, while Katarina shifted her injured arm uncomfortably.
“Would you take Katarina to the hospital?” Cael asked Mary. She looked exhausted, and Katarina wouldn’t be any help to anyone until her arm was set and she’d been given something for her pain.
The almost-warlock shook her head vehemently. “I don’t have insurance,” she said quietly, staring at the ground. “Please, I don’t like hospitals.”
Energy came back into Mary’s expression. She still leaned against Raphael, but there was a new light about her as she watched Katarina inspect her worn-out Chucks.
“Briony’ll be able to help you, and I’m sure she’ll explain everything she does so you’ll know it for any future issues. Let’s go see what herbs she can find for you.”
Mary kissed Raphael goodbye and lifted her arm to hail a cab. A minute later they pulled away in a van, Mary talking quickly while the younger Katarina rested her head against the glass, nodding at Mary’s words.
The police officers were also dispersing. A male officer accompanied Eve, still talking on the phone, to one SUV while Charlotte made for another.
“Let’s go!” she called, waving at Cael and Raphael.
“I’m glad you sent that blonde girl off to get her arm looked at,” Charlotte commented, pulling out onto Canal Street with the lights and sirens on. “This much more pressure, and that would’ve been a compound fracture. Been there.”
“It was gross.” Raj shivered. “Your arm didn’t look like an arm anymore.”
“Not for long,” she said cheerfully. “Aiyanna really saved my ass that time.”
At the mention of her name, an awkward silence fell in the car. Cael broke it with a growl.
“When we’re finished with the vampires, you need to call the Elders. I need my powers unbound, now.”
His face completely neutral, Raphael regarded Cael for a long moment. “I’ll do my best to get them in the city tonight.”
It was getting close to dusk, and that still didn’t seem soon enough. Not with Aiyanna on the other side of the country, in the hands of a healer Christian suggested.
His trust in that vampire was questionable at best.
Pull through, Aiyanna. He couldn’t, wouldn’t imagine the alternative.
Chapter 9
“THIS place smells like ass.” Normally Aiyanna at least made an effort to be polite, but with the pain in her chest and the weariness threatening to overtake her body, she really didn’t care.
Hospitals, at least, smelled clean. This place had the same scent she would expect from a frat house: sweat, dirt and other unmentionables, with an attempt to cover them all up with incense.
“Hey, we’re exactly where I was told to go.”
She wasn’t sure, but she very well could have been with Vale for a while, moving from place to place so quickly she became confused and closed her eyes. She much preferred planes to his method of travel, no matter how inefficient. She wanted to see how she got where she was going, like the cities or states she passed over.
With Vale it was just poof!
Now I’m here, now I’m not. I was there…now I’m…where am I again?
Not cool.
Closing her eyes, she sighed. “Don’t listen to ’em,” she grumbled, unaware who she was talking about. It sounded logical enough. The idiots sent them here, to a frat house, after all.
“Do you need me to flick back and forth between here and a tundra to keep you awake? The way we’re dressed, it would risk some frostbite, but it’ll do the trick anyway.”
Suddenly, Aiyanna wanted to stay awake. It was hard, but she opened her eyes to squint at their surroundings and wrinkled her nose. “Maybe not a frat house, but a home fallen victim to a hoarder.”
“Think what you like,” a female voice said. Vale whipped around to face the speaker, and it took pure strength of will for Aiyanna not to vomit. Well, that and she had a feeling it would really hurt the place where she’d been shot. That was the trouble with injuries around the torso—they were in so much movement from breathing, or in her case, dry-heaving—that they often healed more slowly than a place on a body that could be held still with a cast or sling.
“This isn’t a healthy environment,” Vale answered, ice in his voice. Aiyanna couldn’t find the strength to look up at him, but she’d certainly underestimated his mood. He was angry, and it was all aimed at the woman whose shadow she could just make out from the corner of her vision.
“No, it’s not. May I see her?”
A very short woman—older, from the way she moved—shuffled close to Aiyanna, who kept very still. It burned her chest, turning to the woman’s view, but the bullet wound was what she wanted to see, and if the other healer was anything like her, she wouldn’t mind causing a moment of pain in order to access the damage.
Aiyanna had been in and out of consciousness while Vale took her from place to place, but she hadn’t missed the term “healer” being used, especially now that she knew it wasn’t being applied to her.
Having stayed in New Orleans for so long, she hadn’t seen another healer in decades.
She didn’t know how long the other healer inspected her. The fatigue was growing, and it would only be so long until her eyes closed and refused to open until she’d gained some rest.
Maybe if I sleep for only a minute, they won’t notice.
The healer told Vale a series of numbers that made no sense, but did help Aiyanna sink into sleep. She’d never been into numbers.
“What the hell, Vale?”
Snow fell onto her face, and the temperature dropped from nice to so-cold-your-extremities-are-toast.
“I warned you.” Despite the clatter of his teeth, there was humor in Vale’s voice.
A single blink later, the stark white wasteland that damn werewolf had landed them in turned into a warm apartment with a view of San Francisco Bay, which Aiyanna only recognized from the sappy Hallmark movies she loved so much.
This was not how she’d planned on seeing San Francisco for the first time. If she had her way, Cael would be here, she wouldn’t have a hole in her chest, and they’d be in a lavish hotel room with this very view, their clothes strewn everywhere…
“Better,” Vale observed, interrupti
ng her fantasy.
“We had to make sure you were safe to bring here, even if Christian vetted you two.”
Vale said nothing. Aiyanna wondered how Christian fit in with the rest of the vampires in New Orleans, but it didn’t concern her like it normally would have. She was so tired.
“You’ve wasted our time.” Vale laid her down on a couch. She bent back slightly, moving her chest and causing her to gasp. “Can’t you see she doesn’t have long?”
“That’s the idea.” The same woman she’d seen earlier pulled a bright, fluffy turquoise tuffit beside the couch and sat down. Can she travel through the air, too?
Aiyanna couldn’t help but notice the healer wasn’t much shorter sitting than she was standing. The woman hummed, running her hands over Aiyanna without healing.
“What?” From his shadow, Vale loomed over the both of them, his height making this poor woman look like a child.
“She has to be on the brink of death for me to heal her at all,” the woman answered, unperturbed. “That’s the trouble with being a healer. You can help other people, but helping each other?” She waved. “We’re not meant to fight the way this one did.”
A caustic retort rose in Aiyanna’s throat—and it was a good one too—but it died, along with her memory of the healer’s comment. She was so comfortable, maybe now Vale would let her sleep.
She had no trouble remembering him taking her to Antarctica.
The healer and Vale’s shadow drifted away, along with the dull pain under her ribs. Maybe the woman was healing her. Aiyanna’s eyes fluttered shut on their own accord, and she forgot about the threat of ice and snow. Before she fell into sleep, she thought of Cael and the furious expression on his face when he first realized what the vampires had done to so many humans. Their lives could be so brutal, witnessing such disregard for others.
It hit Cael the hardest—ever since she’d first met him, it always had. He would save everyone if he could. She couldn’t help but think, if he’d been released from his sentence already, he’d be here with her, hovering protectively and commanding her to patch herself up already.
Aiyanna lost consciousness with a hint of a smile on her face.
* * * *
“You led homicidal vampires to our city, and you didn’t think to warn us.” Raphael stood less than a foot away from Christian, his hands clasped behind his back. His statement was irrefutable.
Cael was glad the Alpha got straight to the point. He had a bad feeling about Aiyanna, and he needed this conversation and his meeting with the Elders completed quickly. He had every intention of being in California within the next hour.
Now, he was in the same living room where the vampires fed last night, standing next to Raphael while the five bloodsuckers stared at them both.
“We didn’t lead them here. They followed us!” Charlie stepped forward, her fists clenched. “This would have happened wherever we went.”
Christian sent her a withering look that caused heat to rise to her cheeks.
“She’s right, and we should have told you before discussing anything else.” Despite his contrition, he didn’t back down before Raphael. He met the werewolf’s eyes levelly, an Alpha in his own right.
Although Cael could respect that, he would have already killed the vampire had Raphael advised him not to. That didn’t mean he couldn’t tell the man exactly what he thought of his actions.
“Because of you, almost two dozen humans are dead,” Cael said.
That made Christian flinch, and it caused Charlie and almost every other vampire in the room to blanch. Only Oren seemed unaffected. He looked at his phone, frowning, but didn’t appear surprised by the day’s death toll.
Raphael, Heath, Sophia and even Cael had misjudged this group. They’d trusted them far too much, and the results were disastrous. We won’t make that mistake again.
“I accept responsibility for the humans. I miscalculated when they would be able to follow us. We all thought they wouldn’t get here until the end of the month at the soonest.”
“They didn’t find us so quickly before,” Porter chimed in, his eyes grave. “Last time it took them two months, and then we were much more careless. We covered our tracks after Denver to protect ourselves and whatever humans we’re near—there’s no reason for us to have expected them so soon.”
“We did everything we could,” Ira added. “Trust me, we didn’t want them to find us.”
“Why?” Raphael asked.
Charlie answered before Christian could. “Because they’re here to kill all of us.”
Cael and Raphael looked at each other, and then Cael shook his head. “What reason would a group of vampires have to kill their own kind?” Vampires were lethal, sure, but they weren’t stupid. Hurting each other would only weaken them against other creatures who wanted them dead.
They were parasites who threatened to expose all creatures to humans. More than any other race, vampires had a perpetual target on their backs, and at the moment Cael wanted to hit that bulls-eye with something very long and sharp.
“We left Phoenix,” Christian answered solemnly. “That’s not something you do unless you’re willing to die for it.”
“Phoenix is the leader of one of the biggest groups of vampires in the country,” Charlie explained. “It’s a secret most of our kind keep because if we aren’t involved with them, we have no way of proving it. And once word of what they do gets out—”
“We’ll all be hunted like monsters,” Christian finished for her.
“What makes these vampires so much worse than others?” Raphael asked the question in a low voice, and Cael could almost see him thinking as he took in the others’ words. Raphael was trying to decide what to do, whether they should trust a single word they heard.
Cael attempted the same, not sensing any deceit, but knowing his instincts weren’t always foolproof. If this was true about vampires led by a man named Phoenix, it was crucial they warn the rest of the pack, as well as their allies in the city.
Whether they would tell the Elders, and thus the rest of the werewolves, would be up to Raphael. It was a decision Cael didn’t envy. He had no love for vampires, but if some of them tried to not hurt humans, they didn’t deserve the execution their brothers and sisters would receive.
“They take more from humans than they need, for starters,” Christian answered. “They call themselves Purebloods, because they live like they’re above humans and other creatures. Rather than teaching young vampires to be cautious and take only what they require from humans, they teach pride in our race as well as power many are too scared to take.”
“They’re fearless; they think every Pureblood should be.” Porter moved to stand beside Christian, slightly closer than Cael expected him to. “It’s intoxicating, going from living in the shame of being what we are, to living like gods walking Earth. We were all sucked in, but it didn’t take us long to understand how terrible Pureblood was underneath all of the well-crafted words and comfortable exterior.
“Christian came up with the idea to leave the main camp in New Mexico, and we followed. We knew the rules: abandonment meant execution. That’s why they’re here, and that is why they murdered those people. They aren’t people to them, but a food source they can use and throw away later.”
Cael’s mind reeled. How could these vampires have gone undetected for so long?
He didn’t buy it. Either this group wasn’t as lethal as Christian made them out to be, or other creatures knew of them and said nothing. The latter was probably the truth. He wouldn’t put it past the Fey to help Pureblood…for the right price. It was how they operated, which they were open about to anyone who asked. He couldn’t see shapeshifters or weres working with the group unless they were corrupt, but that wasn’t out of the question.
The one type of creature he didn’t anticipate to have dealings with Pureblood was the kelpies. They were the most private of all creatures, and certainly woul
dn’t have anything to do with those who might risk exposing them to humans.
“This might interest you,” Charlie said, her eyes wide, earnest. She seemed more honest than the others, and it wasn’t because she was a woman. There was an openness about her, one that reminded Cael of Aiyanna. “Pureblood believes they’re above everyone else, not only humans. In the past year, they’ve begun to drink from other creatures. It gives them temporary strength and powers you wouldn’t imagine, and of course, they always kill whoever they take from.”
“I’ve watched them kill a werewolf,” she whispered. Tears formed in her dark eyes. “He begged them to let him go, because it would kill his mate too. They didn’t listen.” The tears didn’t leak, showing her strength. “That was the moment I decided to join Christian. All of us have those moments—we’ve seen things that would cause a civil war among creatures.”
Every vampire nodded, all with the same haunted looks in their eyes.
Raphael wore the hard expression of someone resigned to believe what he was told—without trusting the ones who told him. Cael couldn’t help but agree.
“You broke our trust by not telling us this from the beginning,” Raphael said. There was no mercy in his gaze, but there wasn’t condemnation either. “And now those humans have died. Do you have an idea of how many Pureblood vampires are in New Orleans? We killed fifteen today.”
Christian looked up, his hands clasped behind his head. “I don’t know. I wish I could tell you an exact number, or have an address for you to find the rest of them, but I just don’t know. I seriously doubt that was all Phoenix sent—there should be at least another dozen or so left in the city, and more will come to replace the dead.”
Together, Raphael and Cael turned to go, but Cael stopped, meeting Christian’s eyes.
“You said you were more careful the last time you ran from Pureblood, right?”
The vampire nodded slowly.
“Then you should consider whether one of you betrayed your location to Phoenix. If you have a mole, the lot of you will be dead before Mardi Gras ends.”
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