I led her to the front yard of a neighboring house where no one had come out to check the scene. The drapes were all closed, driveway empty. Everyone gone for the day. The only sign of life was a triangular rose bed and a black swallowtail butterfly floating over it. Peaceful. For a moment I wondered if the butterfly was one of Warrick's pets, but there was no feel of power. It was just a butterfly floating like a tiny tissue-paper kite over the yard. I sat down on the grass. Caroline joined me, smoothing her pale blue shorts down in back as if she was more accustomed to wearing skirts. She took a drink of soda. Now that she had me to herself, she didn't seem to know how to start.
It might have worked better if I'd waited for her to begin, but my patience had been used up long ago. It wasn't one of my cardinal virtues to begin with. "What did you want to tell me?" I asked.
She sat her can of soda carefully on the grass, thin hands smoothing along the hem of her shorts. She had pale pink nail polish on her short nails that matched the pink stripes in her tank top. Better than pale blue, I guess.
"Can I trust you?" she asked in a voice as fragile and pale as she seemed.
I hate being asked questions like that. I wasn't in the mood to lie. "Maybe. It depends on what you want to trust me with."
Caroline looked a little startled, as if she'd expected me to just say, sure. "That was very honest of you. Most people lie without thinking about it." Something in the way she said it made me think that Caroline had been lied to often, by people she'd trusted.
"I try not to lie, Caroline, but if you have information that'll help us here, you need to tell me." I took a drink of my own soda and tried to appear casual, forced my body not to tense up, not to show how much I wanted to simply scream at her until she told me whatever it was. Short of torture, you can't make people talk, not really. Caroline wanted to tell me her secrets. I just had to be calm and let her do it. If I was overeager or abusive, she'd either fold and tell all, or clam up and let us rot. You never knew which way it would go, so you try patience first. You can always browbeat them later.
"I've been the human liaison for this halfway house for three months now. The guardian who oversaw the younger ones was Giles. He was strong and powerful, but he was trapped in his coffin until true darkness. Then two nights ago he woke in the middle of the day. The first time for him. The one on the stairs has to be one of the younger vampires."
She looked at me, brown eyes wide. She leaned into me, lowering her soft voice even further. I had to lean into her just to catch her voice, close enough that my hair brushed her shoulder.
"None of the younger ones has been dead two years. Do you understand what that means?"
"It means that they shouldn't have risen during daylight hours. It means that the one on the stairs should have been burnt to ashes."
"Exactly," she said. She sounded relieved to finally find someone who understood.
"Was this early waking restricted to your halfway house?"
She shook her head, whispering now. We had our heads together like first-graders talking in class. I was close enough to see the fine red lines in her eyes. Caroline had been losing sleep over something. "Every house and all the churches were suddenly having vampires rise early. The hunger seemed worse on the young ones." Her hand went to her neck and the messy wound. "They were harder to control, even by the guardians."
"Anyone have any theories as to why this was happening?" I asked.
"Malcolm thought someone was interfering with them."
I had several candidates for who might be interfering with the vamps, but we weren't here to get my answers. We were here to get Caroline's answers. "He have any ideas about who?"
"You know about our illustrious visitors?" she asked, voice even lower, as if she were afraid to say the last.
"If you mean the Vampire Council, I've met them."
She jerked back from me then, shocked. "Met them," she said. "But Malcolm has not met them yet."
I shrugged. "They paid their. . respects to the Master of the City first."
"Malcolm said they would contact us when they were ready. He saw their coming as a sign that the rest of vampirekind was ready to embrace the true faith."
I wasn't about to sit there and tell her why the council had really come to town. If the Church didn't know, they didn't need to know. "I don't think the council thinks much about religion, Caroline."
"Why else would they come?"
I shrugged. "The council has its reasons." See, not a lie, cryptic as hell, but not a lie.
She seemed to accept the statement. Maybe she was used to cryptic bullshit. "Why would the council want to hurt us?"
"Maybe they don't see it as hurting."
"If the firemen go down in there to save the young ones and they wake without a guardian. ." She drew her knees to her chest, hugging her legs. "They'll rise like revenants, mindless beasts, until they've fed. People could be dead before they come to themselves."
I touched her shoulder. "You're scared of them, aren't you?" I'd never met a human church member who was scared of vampires, especially not one that was donating blood as a human liaison.
She lowered the neckline of her tank top until I could see the tops of her small breasts. There was a bite mark on the pale flesh of one breast that looked more like a dog bite than one made by a vampire. The flesh had bruised badly, as if the vamp had been pulled off her almost as soon as he'd started sucking.
"Giles had to pull him off of me. He had to restrain him. Looking into his face, I knew that if Giles hadn't been there, he'd have killed me. Not to bring me over or embrace me, but just because I was food." She let her top slide back over the wound, hugging herself tight, shivering in the hot July sunshine.
"How long have you been with the Church, Caroline?"
"Two years."
"And this is the first time you've been scared?"
She nodded.
"They've been very careful around you, then."
"What do you mean?" she asked.
I unbent my left arm, showing the scars. "The mound of scar tissue at the crook is where a vamp gnawed on me. He broke the arm. I was lucky not to lose the use of it."
"What about that?" She touched the claw marks that trailed down the lower part of the arm.
"Shapeshifted witch."
"How did the cross get burned into your arm?"
"Humans with a few bites like you thought it was amusing to brand me with the cross. Just amusing themselves until their master rose for the night."
Her eyes were wide. "But the vampires in the Church aren't like that. We aren't like that."
"All vamps are like that, Caroline. Some of them control it better than others, but they still have to feed off humans. You can't really respect something that you see as food."
"But you are with the Master of the City. Do you believe that of him?"
I thought about that and answered truthfully. "Sometimes."
She shook her head. "I thought I knew what I wanted. What I was going to do for all eternity. Now I don't know anything. I feel so. . lost." Tears trailed out of her wide eyes.
I put my arm across her shoulders, and she leaned into me, clinging to me with her small, carefully painted hands. She cried soundlessly, only the shakiness of her breathing betraying her.
I held her and let her cry. If I took the nice firemen down into the darkness and six newly dead vampires rose as revenants, either the firemen were dead or I'd be forced to kill the vampires. Either way, not a win-win situation.
We needed to find out if the vamps were alive, needed some control over them. If the council was causing the problems, maybe they could help fix it. When big bad vampires come to town to kill me, I don't generally turn to them for help. But we were trying to save vampires lives here, not just human. Maybe they'd help. Maybe they wouldn't, but it couldn't hurt to ask. All right, it could hurt to ask, and probably would.