Nothing moved in the building, and the only sound was the wind and my feet crunching on the snow. The vampires weren’t there, and I’d just wasted half an hour. It was now fully dark, and the light filtering in was from the streetlights outside.
I carefully retraced my steps to the outside of the building, stowing the pistol back in its concealed holster as I did. It was generally a bad idea to walk around a Canadian city, waving firearms everywhere. The building creaked in the wind around me, and I started to worry more about the damn thing coming down on top of me than a vampire surprising me!
Thankfully, I made it out of the condemned building without incident and set off further east—to the old hotel Shelly had picked out as the other likely target. Even though it was dark, the sidewalks were still full enough that I didn’t stand out, which helped soothe my rampant paranoia that I was being watched until I reached the hotel.
Silent and unlit, the long blue building looked amazingly creepy in the dim light cast by the streetlights. It looked like an old barn, and light reflected off an unlit neon sign on the roof. I stopped across the street from it, closer to the homeless shelter to the north, and studied the building.
Many of the windows were boarded up, and the others looked to have been covered by dust cloths. I didn’t think a normal human could have picked that out, at least not at night, and it would serve double purpose to a vampire—blocking light leaking out at night, or leaking in during the day.
On the other hand, if someone was working on internal renovations—turning the place into low-cost housing, as appeared to be the rumor around town, for example—they’d do much the same. Scaffolding was set up around the front entrance, concealing any scuffing done in the snow there while also lending evidence to the renovations possibility.
From the outside, there was no way I was going to be sure. I was actually going to have to enter the building I had every reason to believe was a vampire lair. With a sigh, I crossed the street to inspect the scaffolding. It looked sturdy enough for being covered in snow and reached up to the top of the three-story building. A small ladder provided a way for workmen to reach the upper levels.
I quickly, and as quietly as possible, climbed to the second level of the scaffolding. For my efforts, I discovered a window just large enough for me—if I could get it open. Luckily, it wasn’t one of the ones boarded shut, but the lock was obviously on the other side.
Wishing, once again, for the telekinetic powers of stronger fae, I snuck a tendril of fire through and cut the lock, allowing the window to swing free. I opened it a tiny crack and listened for a moment. The other side was silent, so I pulled the window all the way open and slipped inside.
The room on the other side was small and completely empty. It had clearly once been a hotel room—there were indentations in the carpet where a bed had stood for longer than I’d been alive.
A sound rustled behind me, and I spun to point the pistol at a large rodent that squeaked in horror and dived for a nearby hole in the wall. I stood stock-still for a moment, trying to control my rapid breathing as I realized I’d nearly blown everything because of a rat—the pistol wasn’t silenced, and if I’d shot the rat, anyone in the building would have known I was there.
My heart still beating quickly, I stowed the pistol. If I ended up having to shoot someone or something, I’d already screwed up pretty badly. I carefully stepped over to the door and checked it out. At some point, it had been locked from this side and never unlocked.
Carefully, I unlocked the door and opened it, peering out into the corridor. It was empty, and I moved out into it. A piece of wooden debris shoved in to make sure the door didn’t close and lock behind me, and I was ready to move on.
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.