There wasn’t a lot of dust in the hallway, and what there was showed signs of being disturbed. People had been moving through these corridors—recently, and quite a bit. A number of the doors were broken down, showing empty rooms beyond; but other doors were closed, the handles showing recent wear.
Breathing shallowly, I slowly opened one of those doors. There was a bed in the room beyond, and a pair of suitcases. The room was empty, but the suitcases held clothes and the bed had been slept in recently. From the looks of the room, I’d only missed the occupant by an hour or so.
Sleeping during the day wasn’t an absolute guarantee of vampirism, but sleeping during the day in an abandoned building was a pretty good sign. I was pretty certain I’d found our nest now, but I didn’t want to unleash Talus and a squad of fae troops with shoot-to-kill orders if it turned out to just be a bunch of bums who’d found a sheltered place to hide.
I moved down the hallway, listening and watching for any sign I could use to judge further. I was halfway down the hotel and had checked two more rooms with very similar contents to the first, before I heard the whimpering. It sounded like a woman or child.
The logical, sensible part of me told me I knew what I needed to know and it was time to get out. There was nothing I could do for anyone in this nest. Even if someone was trapped there, they were better served by waiting until I could come back with Talus and his men.
Even as I was telling myself that, I was pinpointing the door the whimpering was coming from behind and crossing to it. Unlike the other doors, this one was locked. I needed a key to get in from the outside, and Powers alone knew who had that.
I was about to give up, but the whimpering continued. I had no subtle way through a door, but I didn’t have it in me to walk away from that sound, however much it might have been the correct decision.
With a slash of faerie flame, I cut the deadbolts and let the door swing open under its own weight. The whimpering stopped, choked off in a heart-wrenching sob as I stepped into the room.
The girl on the bed was human. No matter how adapted her eyes were to the dark, all she could see of me was a silhouette, likely that of her tormenter in her mind. My vision was much better, so I could take in the whole sight.
The girl was a ragged-looking blonde, probably either a runaway or a prostitute. She couldn’t have been more that fifteen. Her clothes were intact, so she probably hadn’t been raped, which was a very small mercy. Her hands were tied behind her back, and trails of dried blood ran up her chest to a series of bite wounds on her neck and upper chest.
She’d been fed on. Repeatedly. She watched me in a horrified silence, lacking even the energy to struggle. Not only was she suffering from massive blood loss, a vampire bite was mildly poisonous. With one bite, it acted as a sedative, subduing the victim. With this number of bites, it was massively weakening—and potentially fatal.
I watched the girl stiffen as I approached the bed, and rage boiled within me as I knelt beside her. Karl’s comments about the lack of choice feeders had had left me feeling a little sympathetic to them, but this was beyond choice. A vampire had to have some control to feed without killing the victim once, let alone more than half a dozen times. This was sadistic cruelty, nothing more.
“I’m not here to hurt you,” I whispered to the girl. “I’m not one of them.”
“Lies,” she whimpered. “Only monsters left. Only monsters.”
“No,” I told her, trying to fill the word with as much conviction as I could. “Not just monsters.”
28
“What’s your name?” I asked the girl.
“Jill,” she said, her voice still choked with sobs as she forced out the single word.
“Jill,” I repeated. “If I cut you free, do you think you can walk?”
She turned away from me. “Is this your new torture?” she demanded.
I didn’t know what to say to that, so I cut her free instead. I wasn’t carrying much in terms of blades, but even my little pocketknife was sharp enough to cut through normal rope with changeling muscle behind it.
Jill stayed perfectly still, clearly still utterly terrified and unsure if this was real.
“Are you a TV fan, Jill?” I asked quietly, hoping for something to break her fugue. The girl jerked in surprise and turned to look at me for the first time.
“What?!” she demanded.
“‘If you can’t run, you walk,’” I quoted to her. “‘If you can’t walk, you crawl,’” I continued, sliding my arms under her before she could resist. “‘And if you can’t crawl,’” I finished, “‘you find someone to carry you.”
I left the knife, hoping that it would throw some confusion into what had happened. If one of the vampires had left it within her reach, she would theoretically have been able to escape on her own.
The Firefly quote seemed to have done the trick, as Jill went limp in my arms, clinging to me as I gently and carefully carried her out of the room. I could hear footsteps on the floor now and moved in the opposite direction—back toward my open window.
I made it to the room I’d entered through before the owner of the footsteps rounded the corner, and gently shoved the door closed with my foot.
Eyeing the window and feeling the cold draft coming from it, I eyed my rescuee. She was still in shock from being suddenly rescued, and weak from her ordeal. She couldn’t take the cold. I could.
I removed my heavy winter coat—a new-bought replacement for the one the shifter had shredded last night—and wrapped the girl in it before she could protest.
“Hold on to me,” I instructed quietly. “I am going to carry you to safety; do you understand? Whatever happens, do not let go.”
The pale blonde nodded, wrapping her arms around my neck again as I tightened the coat around her and then carried her out into the cold. There was no way I was climbing down the ladder with ninety-odd pounds of underfed, blood-drained teenager in my arms, so I took a deep breath and jumped.
I think if she’d had the energy, Jill would have screamed fit to raise an army. As it was, she almost choked me before we hit the ground, the snow and a perfect landing on my part reducing the impact to a “DAMN, that hurts” to my legs.
Two people stared at me in complete shock and I gave them a calm “I know what I’m doing” nod, and then dashed around the corner, out of sight from the hotel.
My apartment was too far away to carry this girl, and right now, I had no idea who I could trust outside of a select few in this city. Carefully putting the girl down and keeping a spare hand on her to reassure her, I called Shelly.
“Shelly, it’s Jason,” I told her when she picked up. “I found our nest, but I have a little problem.”
She sighed. “I’m not here to solve all your problems, Jason,” she told me bluntly. “What happened?”
“They had a living victim in the hotel,” I replied. “I brought her out with me, but I have nowhere to take her.”
There was silence on the other end of the line. “Shelly?” I asked after easily ten seconds had lapsed.
“Your hero complex is worse than Talus’s,” she said quietly. “You are both going to get yourselves killed. And yet I can’t blame you.” She paused. “I can’t get away just now. Where are you? I’ll have someone pick you up.”
I told her the street intersection and alley I was hidden in.
“All right,” Shelly said. “Keep her warm, I’ll make a call and you should have a pickup shortly.”
Shelly hung up on me, and I turned to explain what was going on to Jill, to realize she’d slumped against my shoulder as I spoke on the phone. My momentary fear she’d died on me quickly faded as I realized she was breathing.
Safe and warm for the first time since she’d been kidnapped, the girl had passed out. I laid her gently on the ground, shivering against the cold myself. I’d barely managed to start thinking about using faerie flame to warm myself though when a bright orange Honda pulled up beside me.
The driver
rolled the window down and looked at me quizzically.
“Kilkenny?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I confirmed, looking over the small man in the passenger seat. He wore a scarf that covered his lower face, but something seemed slightly off about him.
“Put her in back,” the driver told me. “Take you to colony.”
I obeyed, laying Jill down in the passenger side of the backseat and then slipping into the front passenger seat myself, discreetly observing our driver.
He was perhaps five feet tall, fully clad in winter wear, and the scarf covered his lower face but still revealed his eyes. It was the eyes that gave it away—he was wearing contacts, and when he blinked at me, one slid aside, revealing a lizard like split pupil. That, combined with the mention of the “colony” and the odd accent, led to a simple conclusion.
“You’re one of Talus’s goblins,” I said aloud, eyeing the creature.
“Am,” he confirmed. “Name Krich. Swore to Talus. He save us from—” The goblin lapsed into another language for a few seconds. I realized it was Vietnamese just as he dropped into silence, realizing I didn’t understand him.
“Bad men,” he finished, and returned to silence as he drove us onward. Realizing I wasn’t going to get much more from the man, I leaned back in my seat and closed my eyes. Just to rest them. It had been a busy day.
The next thing I knew, Mary and Holly were waking me up and helping me out of the car. In front of us stood a quartet of brownstone buildings standing around a central courtyard. Five or six short people, their gender and species concealed by bulky winter clothing, were with them, helping move the still completely unconscious Jill from the back seat of the Honda.
Mary wrapped her arms around me and kissed me fiercely.
“Shelly called and let us know what had happened—Krich was apparently right there, thank the Powers,” she told me. Speaking of the old goblin, I looked around for him, only to catch him vanishing into one of the buildings.
“I didn’t even get to say thank you,” I said, watching the door close behind him.
“He wouldn’t want you to,” one of the goblins told me, his English perfect. “My grandfather is one of those who negotiated our travel here,” he continued. “He remembers our debt to Talus and your Court very well.” The goblin offered his hand to me. “I am Theino, grandson of Krich, son of Lorn, current Speaker to Outsiders for our clan.” I shook his hand, and he smiled. The smile shifted his scarf, and for the first time I saw why they all wore them—inch-long ivory-white tusks protruded from each corner of the goblin’s mouth.
“Please,” he said, “come inside so we can attend to your ward.”
“Do you have a doctor?” I asked.
“Not one versed in human physiology, I must admit,” Theino told me as he led us into a different apartment building than his father had entered. “Your lady here called her brother, however, and Dr. Clementine is on his way.”
I nodded as I followed the goblin and the two girls inside. “That’s good. She’s lost a lot of blood and is poisoned.”
“I thought vampires always killed when they fed?” Holly asked as the door closed behind us.
“Only the newly turned ones,” I said grimly. “The older ones have the self-control not to—they don’t need to. So, instead, one of them decided to keep this poor girl around as a portable blood bank.”
“We will take good care of her,” Theino promised. “Dr. Clementine will have all the help we can provide.”
“Thank you,” I told the goblin, bowing my head slightly. It wasn’t, after all, him I was angry at.
Theino wandered off, leaving the three of us with our privacy. With one of those cryptic exchanges of glances no male would ever understand, Holly and Mary decided that Holly would follow him, leaving me alone with my girlfriend.
“What are you going to do?” she asked quietly.
“Wait for Talus to get back into town with his hit squad,” I told her slowly. “Then we are going to kill every last fucking one of them.”
Shelly arrived shortly after Clementine. Where Clementine just nodded to me and then asked the goblins where the girl was, Shelly settled down into a chair in the neatly furnished living room in the apartment suite the girls were living in.
“I repeat what I said earlier,” she told me. “You are going to get yourself killed. They’re going to know someone rescued the girl.”
“So far as they know,” I drawled to her, my composure mostly recovered by now, “no one knows they’re there. Which seems more likely to you: someone finds your secret sanctum, breaks in without you noticing, rescues a single victim, and leaves without anyone seeing them; or someone dropped a knife by accident in the room and the girl escaped?”
Shelly sighed. “You have a point, and it’s not like I can really blame you,” she admitted. “You’re sure they’re in the hotel, then?”
“Most of the rooms on the upper floor were occupied, but had only recently been left—within the last hour,” I told her. “There wasn’t enough dust on the floor for the hotel to be unoccupied. Plus, the girl is a pretty damn good sign.”
“Good enough for me,” Shelly nodded. “I’m going to step outside and call Talus; I’ll let you know what the plan is beyond ‘kill them all’.”
Mary and I sat on the couch, waiting silently. She held my hand, and I appreciated her letting me think. Enough shit had gone down in the last few days to last me a lifetime, and we were nowhere near done yet.
Talus was back in town tomorrow, and Tarvers Tenerim’s funeral was the day after. At the funeral, Holly would give her evidence against Darius Fontaine, throwing out everyone’s prediction of how the election would break down. Oberis’s deadline to MacDonald would run out. Talus and I would hopefully have evidence to prove the existence of vampires—in all honesty, Jill was likely enough evidence on her own.
But oh, I wanted to bring more evidence. I wanted to bring the burnt and mangled bodies of the vampires and throw them before the court. I’d disliked vampires before, fought and killed them since coming to Calgary, but the fate of that one poor girl put just what they were in perspective.
“Talus agrees with us,” Shelly told me, coming back into the room. “He’ll be bringing his team—three gentry and three greater fae, he said—into town tomorrow afternoon. They’ll meet up with you and move in while there’s still some daylight left.”
“Good,” I replied grimly. “I’m looking forward to it.”
“He said,” she added, “that they could pick you up from work.”
That stopped my thoughts in their tracks. With everything else going, I had completely forgotten that I had to go back to work tomorrow.
The day at work passed in a blur of busy work and angry customers, none of which fazed me. It turned out, to my mild entertainment that I could hardly explain to my coworkers, that the prospect of walking into a firefight after work made facing the normal issues of a work day completely dismissible.
I walked out of work at the end of the day, Bill having kicked everyone out on time with “It’s Friday; get out of my damned building,” to find a black sedan waiting for me. The tinted window rolled down as I approached, and Talus wordlessly gestured for me to get into the back.
I obeyed, joining a dark skinned older woman in a conservative black pants suit. She wore a headscarf but her features were very much Greek, not Arabic. Talus, dressed in a plain black long sweatshirt and slacks, gestured toward her as the driver took off.
“Jason, be known to Celine Mattas,” he told me, and the lady bowed her head to me. “She’s a Fury. Our driver is George O’Malley, one of the gentry.”
“Howdy,” the ginger-haired driver told me in a thick Texan drawl. “Nice to meetcha.”
“We’re going to swing by your apartment so you can grab anything you need,” Talus told me, “and then meet up with the rest of the team at a property of mine near the target.”
“Sounds good,” I confirmed.
I lived
close enough to my work that I’d barely finished saying that before O’Malley pulled us up to the curb by my house. I had left everything I would need on the table in the morning, so it was a quick trip. I was already wearing the Queen’s armor, so all I picked up were the pistol and the Micro Uzi, strapping one concealed holster under each arm and the clips for both weapons into special pouches on my belt.
“I’m ready,” I told the others, returning to the vehicle.
We drove south, opposite rush-hour traffic until we’d pulled into downtown. O’Malley wove us through the traffic with consummate ease, eventually pulling us into a tiny parking lot behind a small apartment building on the south side of downtown.
“I own all four of the ground-floor apartments,” Talus told us, leading us into the back rooms. “Normally, three are rented out to cover what’s in the fourth, but I’d ordered renovations this month, so they’re all empty. Convenient for us.”
“What’s in the fourth?” I asked, and Talus smirked.
“Take a look,” he told me, opening the first door inside the plainly decorated apartment building.
For a moment, I got the impression of a normal-ish apartment. Same brown carpeting as the apartment building corridors outside. Plain white drywall. A single table, some chairs.
Then I stepped farther in and realized that as soon as you were out of the front hallway, that impression vanished. All of the internal walls of the apartment except the one in front of the main door were gone. It had been turned into one large spartan room with the single table at the left side.
The rest was filled with three rows of back-to-back floor-to-ceiling cabinets, clearly mounted straight down into the concrete under the carpet. If you blew up the building, those heavy metal cabinets would probably still be standing there, undamaged.
“I know you have armor,” Talus told me, “but throw a flak vest over top of it, will you? I prefer my people over protected to under, and, bluntly, you’re the weakest of us here.”
As I obeyed, Celine silently following me to the cabinets to help me pick out and fit a suitable jacket, I surveyed the other four people in the room. Shelly sat at the table, pointing out details in a low voice I couldn’t make out on what looked like a set of blueprints. Two men with the eerily perfect features of gentry passed a cigar back between themselves and a woman with skin black as night, a tiny flicker of red flame glittering over her skin to my eyes.
Changeling's Fealty (Changeling Blood Book 1) Page 23