“Extend it?” Holly squawked and then snapped her mouth closed. She seemed to be building up a good head of steam with her thoughts and he was just wishing he could read them and know what to expect, when she suddenly relaxed and dropped to sit in the chair next to him with a little sigh. Shaking her head, she muttered, “We were supposed to go out with Elaine and Bill tomorrow night. I guess I’m not going to make it.”
“No,” Justin agreed.
“And I’ll be out two weeks’ pay and two weeks of classes,” she added unhappily and shifted in her chair.
“Yes,” Justin agreed, guilt plucking at him.
“But at least you’re alive to miss it,” Gia pointed out. “If Justin hadn’t turned you, you wouldn’t be.”
“Right,” Holly muttered and offered him an apologetic, “Sorry. I do appreciate that, I guess.” She didn’t sound overly certain on that point and seeming to realize it herself, smiled at him crookedly and said, “I’m sorry, but I’m a little unclear on exactly what happened to make you turn me. I mean, I know you explained this to me in the hotel. At least I think you did, but I’m afraid I—”
“Thought I was a lunatic so wasn’t paying attention?” Justin suggested wryly.
“Basically,” she acknowledged apologetically, blew out a breath and then said, “If I recall, I think you said I was running with scissors and fell?”
Justin nodded.
“Why was I running?” she asked. “You said I misunderstood something. What was it?”
Justin grimaced and glanced from Anders and Decker to Gia, but there was no help there. Sighing, he said, “Anders and I were in the crematorium. It scared you.”
“Why?” she asked with a frown. “Your just being there wouldn’t scare me. So, you must have been doing something that scared me,” she reasoned, and then tilted her head. “What was it?”
Justin shifted uncomfortably. It was pretty early on for him to have to explain this. She would be horrified, he was sure. “I’m an Enforcer.”
“What is that?” she asked at once.
“It’s basically an immortal police officer. We go after rogues, which are immortals who break our laws,” he explained.
“Rogue Hunter,” she murmured and he thought Gia must have mentioned the term to her.
“Yes, we’re sometimes called Rogue Hunters because that is the most important part of our job, hunting down rogues, or immortals who have broken our laws.”
“Okay,” she said slowly. “And what were you doing at the crematorium? Is John Byron an immortal? Were you after him?”
“No. John Byron is mortal,” he assured her. “Actually, we had already caught our rogues.”
“More than one?” she asked curiously.
Justin nodded. “This time it was a group. Sometimes it’s just one rogue. Other times . . .” He shrugged. “We’ve had to go into nests of twenty and thirty rogues on occasion. This time there were only a dozen or so in the nest, but they were bad ones. Their leader was old and quite mad, but his turns were all mortals of a criminal nature. He apparently made a practice of turning sadistic, conscienceless men who were angry, nasty fellows happy to torment and rip out the throats of mortals . . . and for pleasure, not to feed on.”
Holly frowned at his description and shook her head. “I haven’t heard anything on the news about people getting their throats ripped out in town.”
“They lived in the foothills,” Justin explained. “A small town about an hour away from your own and there were no bodies found, no murders reported, just a couple of locals going missing. The majority of their kills were tourists driving through with no way to be sure where they had actually gone missing from.” He paused briefly and then continued, “We went into the nest, tried to take them peaceably to present them to the council for judgment, but they weren’t interested. They fought, we won, and we were disposing of their bodies when you came upon us in the crematorium.”
“Disposing of their bodies?” she asked with dismay.
“They were immortals. We can’t allow our dead to land in the hands of mortals. If they autopsied them . . .” He shrugged. “All our dead are cremated quickly to prevent that risk.”
“Cremated,” Holly murmured as a memory of a head lying in a pool of blood on the floor came to mind. In that memory, she saw Justin, she also saw—her gaze slid to Anders, and she recalled his picking up the head by the hair and tossing it into the retort like a bowling ball. She clearly recalled it wobbling its way into the flames.
“She’s remembering,” Anders warned in a low tone.
“I think I’m going to be sick.” Holly heard the words, but was so disassociated at that moment that it took a count of ten before she realized that they’d come from her.
“Okay,” Gia was suddenly there beside her, lifting her to her feet with a hand under her arm. It didn’t seem like more than a heartbeat later that she found herself in a bathroom, on her knees in front of a porcelain bowl. How the hell had they got there so quickly?
“We’re fast,” Gia answered the unspoken question as she brushed the hair back from her face. “Take deep breaths. It will help.”
Holly took deep breaths.
“You remember everything now,” Gia murmured.
Holly nodded and took another deep breath. Yep, she remembered it all. The stacked-up bodies, the head, the headless body they threw in after it. That one made her stomach roll over again and she leaned her head on the cold porcelain, trying to breathe slowly. But she was wondering why they had all been beheaded.
“It’s one of the few ways to kill our kind—decapitation or fire,” Gia said quietly, rubbing her back. “Lucian, Anders, Decker and Bricker were up against three times their number. They couldn’t afford to merely maim or wound. The rogues would have simply healed quickly and continued to battle. Besides, they weren’t sure there weren’t others there in hiding. Quick, efficient death blows were necessary.”
“Right,” Holly breathed, her mind already moving on to her reaction to the sight of those bodies. Her terror, running . . .
“I stabbed Justin in the throat,” she realized with dismay. Jeez, and she’d thought just trying to rip his throat out had been bad.
“Slashed, I’d say from the memory I read,” Gia said conversationally. “And he healed.”
“Right,” Holly breathed. Because he was a vampire.
“Immortal,” Gia corrected gently.
“Right,” Holly repeated, not really caring what they wanted to call it. But then her brows drew together on her forehead and she said, “I remember him leaning over me in the dark. The ground was cold beneath me. The night sky a hazy starless mist behind him.”
“And you had those scissors buried in your chest,” Gia nodded, apparently still picking up her thoughts.
“I was dying. I knew it,” she whispered. “And I was so scared.”
“But instead, he turned you,” Gia said soothingly.
“Yes.” Holly breathed, recalling how fangs had suddenly appeared in his mouth and he’d used them to tear into his own wrist. He’d then pressed the gushing wound to her open, gasping mouth. She’d tried not to swallow, tried to turn her head away, but she was too weak and then he’d plugged her nose, like she was a child he was trying to get medicine down, and she’d had no choice. She’d swallowed in an effort to clear her throat and breathe, and then she’d swallowed again, and then . . . the memory ended.
“You probably passed out, piccola,” Gia said sympathetically. “And that is good. You do not need memories of the turn. It is supposed to be terribly painful.”
“Is it?” she asked, glancing to her with surprise.
“I was born immortal so cannot say for sure, but yes, I understand it is very bad.”
“I guess I’m glad I wasn’t awake for it then,” Holly muttered. She had never been a fan of pain. Toothaches, earaches and headaches could all reduce her to a sniveling mass. She wasn’t much better at being sick either; pathetic really, and whiny.