The crying from inside the building, however, wasn’t comforting at all.
“Who are you chasing?” I asked.
“Grendel,” Shane said matter-of-factly, then ducked through the broken glass.
The name meant nothing to Siobhan, apparently. She shrugged and went through behind him. Ignorance was bliss in her case, because I knew all too well who Grendel was.
The Grendel. The namesake of the monstrous beast in Beowulf was not a demonic creature, at least not in the traditional sense. Grendel was a medieval warlord in his living years, a ferocious killing machine with no sense of honor or morality. Then he became a vampire.
Something most people don’t understand about vampires is that they aren’t made evil by the vampire infection. When they shuffle off the mortal coil, they don’t become smarter or more beautiful, and the change doesn’t make them wicked.
Vampires were just immortal versions of the shitty bastards they were in their human life. Or the lovely wonderful people, if that were the case. But in my association with vamps, I tended to think most of them started life as pricks and ended it the same way. Thomas Hardy once had a character say, “I was born bad, and I have lived bad, and I shall die bad in all probability.” Tommy had unwittingly summed up vampires in a nutshell.
And Grendel had been born the worst of the worst.
If history held true, he had a penchant for flaying his victims alive. Removing their skin and picking them apart piece by piece until their insides fell out.
He was also a vigorous fan of the rape in rape and pillage.
My heart sank as I thought of him in there with some poor, innocent girl. Why was it the worst kind of monsters focused on the sweet, sunny little kids?
“I’m sorry, they sent you after Grendel?” I climbed through the damaged frame, avoiding shards of broken glass as I stepped onto the patchy floor within. Boards of plywood crisscrossed over gaping holes where I could see through to the lower levels of the apartment building.
A scream echoed through the walls, rattling upwards into the ceiling and falling again, quieter. She was still screaming in fear and not pain, which was a small comfort. Anguish had its own unique sound, and it was one I was becoming increasingly familiar with.
Shane was edging across a rotting two-by-four, and Siobhan was nowhere in sight. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“No offense, Shane, but hunting Grendel isn’t a job for a human.” As foolhardy as I could sometimes be, I wouldn’t have gone after the warlord vamp on my own, let alone send a single human hunter after him. “Did you piss off Juan Carlos?”
The third Tribunal Leader, a Spanish conquistador, tended to hold grudges, especially against me. When I’d been the bounty hunter in Shane’s place, I was often assigned some impossible hunts, usually because a certain someone wanted to do away with me. Was he punishing Shane now, since he couldn’t take it out on me?
“It’s because of you,” he said in a ragged whisper. “They’re spread too thin looking for Peyton. I was the only one around. Now shhhhhh.”
As if us trampling around on creaky wooden planks and stepping on broken glass hadn’t alerted Grendel to our presence. But we’d play it his way and sneak up like unstealthy ninjas if that was what Shane wanted.
I tested a piece of plywood with my foot, and it bounced back. If I stuck to the edges, I might be able to rely on some extra resistance from the original floor. Except the floor must be in pretty shitty condition if the plywood was necessary. Seemed like my chances of safe passage were about even with the likelihood of me falling into the room below.
Fighting a thirteen-hundred-year-old vampire would be bad enough. I didn’t need to try doing it with a broken leg.
“Is any of that blood his?” I asked hopefully.
Shane had reached the empty elevator shaft and shot me a glare for breaching his cone of silence. Admittedly, it looked a lot more menacing with the coating of red all over him. Adding a splash of gore made a man much…manlier.
Something was very wrong with me.
“You don’t want to know where this blood is from,” he answered.
“I’m not in the habit of asking questions I don’t want the answer to.”
Shane checked his gun—a stupidly large revolver straight out of Dirty Harry—and glanced up the shaft of the elevator rather than down. “He ripped a dude’s head off. This was the result.”
Provided with such a lovely visual, I sort of regretted asking. “Did you—?”
“There were no witnesses. Wardens were called to clean it up, but God only knows when they’ll show.”
Bless my twisted little soul. He was learning. I might make a real bounty hunter out of the boy after all.
I tucked my gun into its holster and jumped across the hole, bypassing the questionable plywood altogether. Below us the screaming had faded to whimpers, meaning we were running out of time. Soon the screaming would start again, and when it did, it wouldn’t be from fear anymore.
Inside the belly of the elevator shaft the rust-coated cables started to wobble and sway. I stopped next to Shane and followed his gaze upwards.
Siobhan slid down the cable and jumped between us, shaking her hands and swearing. Her palms were bloody, and the front of her dress had been worn threadbare in places from the friction of the cable. “Remind me never to do that again without the proper equipment.”
“Is your mountaineering gear in your other purse?” I asked.
“Har-har.” Siobhan wiped the blood on her dress. “The upper floors are clear, no additional guards. If he has anyone protecting him, they’re downstairs.”
This girl was nuts. I liked not being the craziest woman in the room for once. “Don’t suppose either of you have any special skills that might help us figure out how many we’re up against?”
“At least two,” Shane said, still the only one whispering. “I used my special skill of seeing.”
I arched a brow at him. If Siobhan was responsible for him growing a pair, I had to give her props. I’d always assumed Shane had no backbone, but maybe I scared him. I was a fan of him coming out of his shell, but perhaps the sass could wait until after we’d killed some vampires.
There was only room for one person to be sassy on the job, and I already filled the quota.
Right now, though, I had to worry about the fact we had at least two more vampires on our plate in addition to the already challenging rogue we’d come for. Not that I was worried or anything, but having a vampire sentry with us might come in handy.
Thanks to the paranoia for my personal safety, my irritatingly modern phone had been outfitted with a panic button that sent a message right to Holden with my GPS coordinates. There really was an app for everything, as it turned out.
I pulled out my phone, hit a button on my home screen, and it made a happy boop noise in return. The sound was a bit too cheerful to be attached to a kidnapping tracker app, but I wasn’t the one who’d designed it.
“Is now the most ideal time to be updating your Facebook status?” Siobhan pulled her weird black baton from a sling on her back. She’d managed to remember that but hadn’t considered the advantages of pants?
“Actually I was—”
Glass crunched near the window, and the three of us turned. Holden dusted bits of glass and wood off his suit jacket and cast a disgusted look around the room. “Cavalry is here. And he’s thrilled.”
Chapter Three