fist shot out, punching through drywall and splintering a wall stud. His face never changed, betraying nothing of his anger or frustration. “I had no idea anything was wrong. You’ve seen this before? Do you know who’s doing this to our people?”
“Not yet.” I dissolved the gun back into its book long enough to re-form and reload it, then tucked both book and weapon into my pocket.
One of the other vampires hurried through the playroom. “What’s going on in here?”
“Keep the kids outside,” Kyle snapped.
The vampire glared at us. At Lena, mostly. The love magnet deflected any anger and suspicion from me, but it didn’t do anything to help her. “What did they do to-”
“Marisha!” Kyle hunched his shoulders and hissed, a sound that made me think of an angry jaguar preparing to pounce. The other vampire drew back as if struck. She bowed her head and retreated.
“We need you to take us underground,” I said quietly.
“What about the children?” asked Lena. “Are we just going to leave them here?”
“Their babysitters know the rules.” I glanced at Kyle, who once again appeared fully human, albeit bloody. “Kyle knows exactly what will happen if they hurt or turn even one of these children. They’re smarter than that.”
“No slayings, and no turnings without the human’s consent.” He raised a hand. “To forestall your next question, according to our laws, no human can give consent to be turned before age seventeen. These children are safer here than they are at home.”
“You expect us to believe that?” Lena asked.
“The worst they get is the occasional mental nudge to keep them in line, but I’ve been trying to cut back on that. I don’t like messing with their heads, especially at that age. I’ve been making the staff watch old episodes of Supernanny, trying to adapt her reward system to the daycare. It’s… not taking off as well as I’d hoped.”
A shout from outside preceded quick footsteps as several of the kids raced into the playroom, apparently having evaded their vampire babysitters. “Where’s Mister Puddles?”
“My staff are strong enough to fight a bear, but they can’t keep kids out of a house.” Kyle sounded more amused than annoyed as he grabbed a jacket out of the closet and threw it on, hastily zipping it up to hide the blood on his shirt. “Mister Puddles was sick. These people are going to take him to the vet.”
“Is it rabies?”
“Did that spider bite Mister Puddles?”
“Is the doctor going to casterbate him?”
Marisha raised her voice. “Why don’t we do music time next? Everyone into the music room, please!”
Her words jabbed the base of my skull. The children obeyed at once, turning away from us and marching silently to grab instruments from the shelves.
I stepped closer to Kyle, pitching my words for him alone. “If I hear of even one child gone sick or missing from this place, I will burn it-and you-to the ground.”
He nodded.
“Good.” I brushed myself off. “In that case, I think it’s time you take us to your leader.”
A heavy padlock protected the door to the basement stairs. Kyle unlocked the door and led us down wooden steps into an unfinished basement, well-stocked with cans of food, powdered juice mix, diapers, baby food jars, and more, all neatly arranged on the steel shelves that lined every wall. A broken tricycle and other old toys were stacked up in the corner.
Kyle ducked into the furnace room and pressed one of the cinder blocks near the top of the wall, which swiveled in place to reveal a small keypad and a glass plate. He typed in a six-digit code, then pressed his hand to the plate.
“Fingerprint scanner?” I guessed.
Kyle grinned. “I could tell you all of our secrets, but the powers-that-be get twitchy when humans know too much. You’re safer not knowing.”
That was one of the limits of the love magnet. If Kyle thought certain information would endanger me, he would go out of his way to keep those secrets in order to protect me.
He pushed the cinder block back into place with a click. At the same time, the wall behind the furnace slid open to reveal a stone staircase which descended three steps to an open elevator car. If the elevator made a sound, the humming of the furnace fans kept human ears from detecting it.
“Are you sure about this?” Lena asked softly.
“Nope.” Smudge continued to emit a red glow as I followed Kyle into the elevator car. I was no more thrilled than they were. The sparklers in Copper River would have killed me if not for Lena. Vampires had turned Deb, and who knew what they had done to Nidhi Shah? A nest full of potentially hostile vampires made the traditional lion’s den look like a box of kittens.
From the furrows on Lena’s forehead, she was thinking the same thing. I grabbed her hand, eliciting a tight smile of thanks.
With my other hand, I checked my pockets, examining the items I had prepared: a UV flashlight, a thick lotion of silver and garlic, a pair of silver-tipped ash stakes, and more.
“You’ll have to turn those over before entering the nest,” Kyle said as the doors slid shut.
“Naturally.” I rubbed the lotion over my hands and neck, then offered it to Lena. I clutched the flashlight, my thumb over the button. For sun-fearing species, this would be just as good as a flamethrower.
Mister Puddles had been at the daycare center for a long time, presumably tracking who came in and out of the nest. If whoever was behind this-my mind whispered Gutenberg’s name-had another vampire waiting for us when we emerged, I wanted to be ready.
I was amused to note that even vampires obeyed the unwritten rules of elevator etiquette. Kyle kept to his own space and watched the doors as we sank deeper and deeper underground. I busied myself searching the featureless metal walls, trying to spot the cameras. I had found two hidden within the overhead light when the elevator slowed.
The air that rushed in through the doors was noticeably colder, and smelled of salt. I looked out at the inside of a steel vault that made me think of a bank safe. Three armed figures stood with machine guns pointed at us. They wore matching black Kevlar jackets, ammo magazines on their belts, and uniformly unamused expressions.
One drew back as we emerged, hissing at either my crucifix or the garlic lotion. “Hi,” I said cheerfully. Their eyes appeared normal, and none of them seemed to recognize me. “I’m Isaac Vainio of Die Zwelf Porten?re.”
Nervous as I was to be surrounded by creatures directly above me on the food chain, a part of me was excited to finally see the vampires in their self-made environment. They had built a fully functioning underground ecosystem, one which had survived for almost a hundred years. Reading reports was one thing, but few humans ever saw this place for themselves, and almost none of those humans emerged to share what they had seen.
The one with the garlic or crucifix allergy grabbed a radio from her belt and muttered something I couldn’t make out. She raised her gun. “Press your hands against the wall.”
Kyle had already assumed the position. I kept smiling as I joined him. They relieved Lena of her bokken, and I handed over my holy water pistol and stakes without a complaint. They took the UV flashlight and my crucifix as well, as I had expected. One grabbed my jacket.
I squeezed the pockets to prove there was nothing else. “We’re in a bit of a hurry here, if you don’t mind?”
Mister Puddles might have been able to resist the love magnet, but not these three. One of them punched a combination into the keypad beside the vault’s metal door, then yanked it open. That door was a good six inches thick, and looked to be solid steel, but she moved it like it was light as a screen door.
“Welcome to the Detroit nest,” said the largest of the trio, sounding like he was reading from a script. “By entering our territory, you acknowledge that you are leaving human law behind. Any act of aggression-”
“Can we get the short version, please?” I asked.
The woman rolled her eyes. “Behave, or we eat you.”
“Got it.”
She led us into a rectangular tunnel, thirty feet wide and twenty high. The other two guards hauled the door shut, and I heard heavy bolts clunk into place, trapping us down here. The only way out now was by the good
