“Hey, Tamara, I’m Diana Duvail. I hear you’ve been asking for me.” Panic hit her face, and I grabbed her hand to help calm her. The moment our hands touched, a large cavernous room flashed inside my head. It was filled with vampires—drooling, mindless vampires. They were hanging from the ceiling and crawling across the floor like bugs. As the bile raced up my throat, I quickly released her hand, instantly severing the connection, and took a step back. Holy shit, what was that?
“You have to save them.” Her ravaged voice made me flinch.
“Save who?” I asked.
“The other girls.”
“Can you tell me where they are?”
“Underground somewhere, I don’t know.” She started crying.
I reached for her hand again, then thought twice about it, and patted her arm instead. “Hey, we’re going to figure this out, okay. “Can you tell me about Jessie?”
She shook her head. “He didn’t have anything to do with it.”
“Okay, well, just so you know, I spoke with Anya and Naya. They said that Jessie took you to SangreLa. What happened after that?”
Her eyes widened with fear. “Please don’t tell that I went there. It’s against the code.”
“I won’t,” I lied. “It’ll be our little secret.”
She let out a sigh of relief. “Jessie wanted to go to SangreLa. His friend, Ernie, owns it, so he gets us in for free.”
“Us?” I asked.
“Whoever he’s with. That night it was just me. I had a lot to drink. At some point, I started to feel dizzy, like the room was spinning. I must have blacked out because I woke up in the dark. I couldn’t see anything.”
“What can you tell me about the room?”
“It smelled horrible. The floor felt like dirt, and I wasn’t alone. Other girls were there with me.” She pointed to the pitcher of water. As I poured her a glass, I thought about how hard to push. The last thing I wanted was to cause her more trauma.
“You’re doing great,” I said, handing her the water.
She took a sip, then continued, “They wouldn’t leave us alone. One girl would come back, and another would take her place.”
I held up my hand. “Whoa, back up a second. Who are they?”
“The handlers. I counted six but think there were more.” Zack chose that moment to return. I quickly filled him in, minus the part about Tamara going to SangreLa.
Tears poured from her eyes as she told us how the handlers would come and get the girls. They would take them one at a time, or sometimes in pairs, to a dark, cavernous room filled with vampires.
“They let them feed from us. It hurt so bad that I wanted to die.”
“A nest,” Zack hissed. I gave him a questioning look, and he shook his head. He grabbed Tamara’s hand and must have done some vampire voodoo on her because she suddenly calmed.
“What happened then?” he asked.
“When they thought we’d had enough, the handlers would pull us from the room and feed us their blood. Some of the girls didn’t come back,” she said in a lifeless, monotone voice.
“How did you escape?” I asked.
“One time, when they were taking me back, a door opened at the end of the hallway. I thought I saw some stairs. I thought, if I could get to them then maybe I could find a way out. The day before I escaped, three new girls were brought in.” Her eyes jerked to mine, and she gasped. My stomach dropped. “I recognized one of them,” she said, and burst into tears. Zack moved to calm her, but I stopped him.
“S-s-she was a friend from college. I wanted her to go with me, b-but they’d been extra rough on her, and she was too weak. S-s-she said to find you, that you would help get the other girls out. She wanted me to tell you that s-s-she loves you.”
My heart froze. Blinding fear pulsed through my veins as I jumped to my feet and shouted, “Who told you to find me, Tamara?”
“Bailey,” she whispered. And my world came crashing down around me.
9
Amos had tried to call me. Why didn’t I answer? Because he was a sniveling weasel who I could barely tolerate. Regardless of how I felt about my brother-in-law, I should have answered his damn calls. While my sister was getting eaten alive by rabid vampires, I’d been floating in a fucking pool—so busy obsessing over count Zackula that I’d let everything else go. They had my baby sister. The thought of her in that place, with those things, made me want to cry. It also made me angry, beyond livid, furious enough to kill them all, including the vampire standing in front of me.
Zack watched me while Tamara explained how she escaped—that while the girls caused a commotion in the holding room, she managed to get down the hallway and through the door. She made it up several flights of stairs before they caught up with her, but by then it was too late. As she opened the door and the sun hit her face, the two vampires on her heels disintegrated into ash. She couldn’t tell us where she was; she just ran until someone picked her up and drove her to the police station.
Ignoring Zack’s watchful eye, I pulled my phone from my pocket and walked out the door.
I had twelve missed messages: seven from Amos, two from my former precinct, and three from Tymon—all concerning my missing sister. I called Amos first.
“Diana, where have you been? Bailey’s missing. I’ve been calling since yesterday. I even called the precinct, but they said you no longer worked there. She’s gone!” He broke into sobs. For all his faults, he did love my sister.
“I know. I’m sorry, Amos. I’m here now, and I need you to calm down so I can ask you some questions.”
“Sure, sure, go ahead,” he sniffled.
Guilt beat at me as I questioned him about the night Bailey went missing. He explained how she’d gone out with a few friends,
