his arm.
“Give me five minutes,” I said. “If I don’t come out, I want you to drive away like a bat out of Hell. Do you understand?”
He seemed poised to argue the point. Instead, he nodded.
I took a tire iron—the closest thing I had to a weapon—out of the trunk. Avoiding the platform and its potential fall hazards, I entered through the front. The door sported a brand-new padlock. It hung loosely on the hinge. I brushed a finger across its surface—no dust. Someone was there. My heart thudded; I willed it to slow. I wanted to warn Alex away, but curiosity drew me inside.
The knob turned without squeak or protest. The hinges were oiled. The thick odors of dust surprised me. My nose twitched. I pinched it to force back a sneeze.
The lobby was empty, illuminated by gaps in the boarded windows. The dusty floor sported a trail of footprints and smudges, all leading past the rows of glass ticket booths to a rear door marked PERSONNEL. I tiptoed toward it, following the trail, silent as the dead. Wood creaked, but not under my feet. Somewhere lower.
At the door, I stopped to listen. No voices, no footsteps. My hand ached, and I flexed my grip on the tire iron. It helped, but my heart still pounded like machine-gun fire. I wanted Wyatt—his gun, his courage, and his powers. I was weak in Chalice’s body, and I despised myself for it, but I had to press onward. If I quit or failed, Wyatt could die. No matter what Tovin demanded of him later, I couldn’t be responsible for his death. No one else I cared about was going to die before me.
The doorknob gave the tiniest squeak, which the hinges echoed. On the right were ticket windows long empty and relieved of their glass inserts. To the left was a staircase that descended into a distant light source. The old, grayed wood looked loud and dangerous, but I had no other way down. Progressing one foot at a time, I went down three steps before one creaked.
I froze. No movement below. No shouts or alerts. I was quickly running out my five-minute clock and had to keep going. Down three more. A narrow, dimly lit hallway came into view. Two bare bulbs hung from broken fixtures, set ten feet apart.
No sense of déjà vu overwhelmed me. No feeling of familiarity filled me or twisted my guts. Rufus said this was where I was kept, but I didn’t remember it—likely because I hadn’t been conscious during the trip down, and I’d certainly been dead during the trip back up. I needed to find the room I was held in.
The air shifted. I sensed it too late to duck properly. The cool body slammed into my shoulders instead of my back. I tucked and twisted and sent the body sailing over me. It hit the paneled wall with a rattling thud and a pained screech. I remained crouched, braced by my left hand, tire iron in the right, while the vampire righted itself with preternatural ease and flipped to its feet.
At first glance, vampire males are often difficult to distinguish from females—the same white-blond hair; the same pale, angular features; the same lithe, flat-chested figures—but this one was definitely female. Her violet eyes flashed. She bared brilliant white fangs. A feral growl bubbled up from her throat. She watched, but didn’t attack.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“The welcome wagon,” I said. “We heard the place had new tenants, and wanted to drop off a fruit basket.”
She sneered. “You are not afraid.”
“I used to kill things like you for a living.”
“Used to?”
“I lost my license.”
“Or your nerve.”
I laughed; I’d lost more than my nerve. She stood up straight, paying no attention to the weapon in my hand. Her nose twitched. Muscles rippled beneath pale, stretched skin. She was trained, probably a soldier out doing a little recon. Vampires are notoriously tall and skinny, rarely shorter than five foot ten, but this one put her own kind to shame. She clocked in at six foot two easy, and towered over my still-crouched position. Like a fashion model, she reeked of malnourishment and starvation.
Not surprising when all you ate was blood.
“You are not human,” she said.
“Now, that’s not nice.” I swung the tire iron.
She ducked. Her fist slammed into my mid section. I used the sudden change in momentum to bring the iron down in the opposite direction. It cracked against her ribs even as I fell to my knees, gasping for air. She retreated, snarling.
“Who are you?” she asked again.
I glared at her, still on my hands and knees. “I’m annoyed. Who are you?”
“I am impatient.”
“Nice to meet you, Impatient.”
Her purple eyes roved over my body, examining me. She inhaled deeply, nostrils flaring. “What is your business here?”
“House hunting. Is this place for rent?”
She bared her fangs. “Can you not provide a serious response, child? I could kill you where you crouch.”
I drew up to my full height—not very impressive next to her—and held the tire iron back like a baseball bat. Ready to swing for home the moment she moved. “I dare you. What are you doing here? This isn’t your part of town.”
“I suspect my purpose is the same as yours—to discover the identities of those who would spread lies of an alliance between goblins and vampires, and to stop them.”
My jaw dropped. I couldn’t help it. Behind her formal tone, I heard sincerity. A small spark of hope flared to life.
“You’re against the alliance?” I asked.
She tilted her chin. “I and most of my kind see no benefit in it, in the long term, and know nothing of its purported existence. Goblins are a disagreeable sort—disgusting, destructive, and incapable of forming a productive society. Many vampires share their view of humanity, but I would prefer to live alongside your kind than theirs. We would lose more by aligning ourselves with goblins than we could ever hope to gain.”
“Do your leaders share this opinion?”
Something flickered in her eyes—curiosity? “None of the Families speak of it openly, child, because it is not happening. I heard the rumors from an underling, but we do not act upon rumor, only upon facts. I fed the rumors to a human informant, and he was supposed to investigate the allegations, but I have since lost contact.”
Alarm bells wailed through my head. “What was your informant’s name?” I asked.
“He asks me to call him—”
“Evangeline!”
I spun toward the stairs, nearly tangling my ankles in my haste. Behind me, the vampiress snarled. Footsteps thundered down, followed moments later by the rest of Alex. He froze on the bottom step, hand on the narrow railing, attention fixed over my shoulder.
“I’m fine,” I said to him, keeping myself between the two. “He’s a friend, Impatient. He’s not a threat.”
She made a show of sniffing the air. “No, I suppose he is not. And my name is Isleen.”
“Evy. He’s Alex.”
“What’s going on?” Alex asked.
“Potential ally,” I said. To Isleen: “You were saying he asked you to call him what?”
“Truman,” Isleen said. “That was the name he gave me.”
Wyatt. He hadn’t told me who his informant was, the person who’d told him about the potential alliance. Turned out it was someone with pretty good intel and a direct link to the upper echelons of vampire power. An alliance that had once felt like only a possibility now inched closer to terrifying reality.
“You know him,” she said when I didn’t speak.
I really had to learn to control my facial expressions. “Yes, I do. He’s been captured by the Triads. They’re holding him for questioning, but I have a contact on the inside who can help us break him out.”
“To what benefit?”
