I took a deep breath; I could do this calmly. “About twelve miles out, someone put up a fence. Silver-alloy razor wire across the trail. It was a trap, enough of a barrier to slow us down. Jerome was shot with a silver-tipped crossbow bolt.”
The reactions were various: Ariel covered her mouth and looked away, Lee hissed in sympathy. Tina stared, Jeffrey bowed his head. Grant just looked colder than ever.
“How did you get away?” Grant said.
“Jerome bought me time. Stayed between me and the shooter and bought me time.” And I couldn’t even thank him for it. I shook my head. I could thank him by not succumbing to panic now.
“But why?” Ariel blurted. “Why kill any of us?”
“Do you really have to ask?” Anastasia said, standing by the basement door. She was pale, chalk-white. She hadn’t fed yet and was standing here under sheer willpower. In the candlelight, she looked like a ghost. A couple of us gasped. I wanted to look away, but I didn’t. I moved toward her, but she gestured and shook her head, to convince me she was all right.
“Whoever did this was watching the way out. They expected at least some of us to run. They were waiting,” I said.
“There are more than one?” Grant said.
“I don’t know. The smells outside are mixed up. There’ve been so many people running around here over the last few days, it’s hard to pick out individuals. And it’s hard to know who’s involved and who isn’t.”
Lee leaned forward. “So you think Provost and the production crew are in on it?”
“I knew it,” Tina said. “I’ve been feeling weird about this since we got here.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Three of the PAs are dead. Provost, Valenti, and Cabe are missing. They may have been kidnapped, killed, bribed away, anything. I just don’t know. But I know it isn’t over.”
“What do we do?” Ariel said, her voice small.
Grant didn’t say anything. Then everyone was looking at me. Like I was more likely to have answers.
“I don’t know, I need to think.” I chuckled harshly, looked away. “Part of me didn’t want to come back. Part of me wanted to just keep running. But the only way I can pay Jerome back for saving me is to figure out what happened, who did this, and stop them.”
“Easier said than done,” Grant said.
“Oh, come on,” I said. “We’re all smart people here—we can handle this, right? It’s not like we’re stuck in a horror movie or something.” Except we were. We were a bunch of horror-story monsters and characters stuck in our very own horror story. I put a hand over my mouth to keep from laughing again. “Oh, the irony,” I whispered. I’d have appreciated it if it wasn’t me in the middle of it.
I started pacing, my nerves finally getting the better of me. “Okay. Fine. You know why horror-movie characters always get killed? Because they’ve never seen horror movies. They don’t know how it works. Right? But we do. So no one go into the basement alone. No one go screaming off into the woods alone. No one has any sex.”
Tina and Jeffrey actually looked at each other sadly. Oh my God, we had to get out of this.
Thankfully, Ariel diverted my ranting before I could get really hysterical. “Anastasia. How’s Gemma doing?”
After a pause, the vampire said, “She’s weak. She needs to feed. We both do.”
The expressions on the humans in the room grew even more wary. “And how exactly are you going to manage that?” Tina said.
We were too screwed to be worrying about petty crap like this. “I’ll do it,” I said. “It’s okay. I’ve done it before. I heal fast.”
“Thank you,” Anastasia said, ignoring the stares of the others. “I’ll bring Gemma up.”
As soon as she was gone, Tina leaned forward, demanding, “Kitty, what are you doing? Are you serious?”
“They’re targets just as much as the rest of us. We need to help each other if we’re going to get out of this.”
“But they’re… they’re…”
My grin turned bitter. “What’s the matter? Some of my best friends are vampires.” Nobody was happy, and the situation was getting worse. “If it upsets you that much, you don’t have to watch.”
“Jeffrey, have you sensed anything?” Grant said, moving forward and back into the conversation. “Do you think Dorian or Jerome might try to communicate with us?” Jeffrey could channel the dead. Could our dead tell us anything?
I expected Jeffrey’s answer. He shook his head. “It’s not so simple. Not everyone who’s passed on can communicate. I can’t just summon them. They may not have anything to say.”
“Can you try? Both of you?” the magician said, including Tina in the question. I understood the logic: at least they’d be doing something. They’d keep busy, distracted. And we might even get some answers.
I went toward the stairs.
“Kitty?” Grant said.
“I’m going to check on Conrad.” I headed upstairs.
Conrad’s room was in the back of the house, near the stairs. I knocked softly and got no answer. Big shock there.
“Conrad?” I said. “It’s Kitty. Can we talk?”
“I’ve barricaded the door! Stay away from me!” His voice was rough with panic. Now, here was someone acting like a character in a horror movie.
“Conrad, I think you need to come downstairs with the rest of us. We need to come up with a plan for how we’re going to get out of here.”
“I’m not leaving this room!”
Sighing, I tried to imagine how I’d deal with a two-year-old. “I don’t know if they told you, but Jerome’s dead. And I don’t think this is going to stop. I think we’re all in danger.”
“Of course we’re in danger! I’m trapped in a house with a bunch of monsters!”
“Monster is in the eye of the beholder, Conrad,” I said tiredly.
“You. I saw you. That’s… that’s not…”
“I warned you,” I said. “And you had to be all smug about it.”
There was a long pause. I didn’t hear anything inside. I could imagine what the room looked like: the bureau pulled across the front door, the shades drawn, Conrad huddled in the middle of the floor with a sputtering flashlight, trembling in the dark. Poor guy. Not.
“That’s it,” I said. “I’m sending Ariel to get you. You can deal with her, can’t you? She’s human.”
“How do you know that? I don’t know anything about any of you!”
I walked away.
Back downstairs, everyone else was still huddled in the kitchen, bent over candles and looking grim. Grant stood by the kitchen window and gazed out, either standing watch or searching. He looked like a sentinel carved from stone, and for my part I felt a little safer with him on duty.
Anastasia and Gemma were in the living room. The younger vampire was curled up on the sofa, her knees pulled to her chin, her brown hair hanging loose and limp around her face, like she’d been pulling at it. I didn’t think it was possible, but she seemed even more pale than Anastasia. More than that, she was listless, glassy-eyed. Grief-stricken, I wanted to say. Except that she smelled cold, didn’t breathe, didn’t blink, didn’t move at all—so she looked dead.
Anastasia had laid out equipment on the coffee table: gauze, blood collection tubes, a sterile pack with a brand-new hypodermic syringe inside. I was a little relieved.
I sat across from her. “I admit, I think I like this a little better than teeth. It’s a little cleaner.”
“If you didn’t like the teeth, your host was doing it wrong.”
“Oh, no, no. She was doing it just right. That’s kind of the problem.” I winced.
That was the secret behind vampire seductions. They could hypnotize their victims, arouse them, bring them to ecstasy even as they drank blood from them. They didn’t have to kill their prey. Why would they, when they could make their victims keep coming back for more? Blood was a renewable resource.
Anastasia gave a knowing smile.
