Kiefer’s hand balled into a fist at his side. “Why did you and Tom come here earlier, Theo? How did you know about me and where to find me?”
“Celia,” Theo said. “When she bit us, she showed you to us. In our minds, you know. You and the vampire who’d put her into the ground. She was real angry about it. Hates the both of you with a passion. We found this place by following the traces left behind by your using magic here all the time. And we were able to break into your office ’cause your wards had gotten sloppy.”
Again, Kiefer made a fist.
“Celia bit you?” Nathan finally spoke up, addressing Theo. “I thought you said you and Tom had escaped from her.”
“We did. After she bit us. She didn’t drain us all the way, obviously. Didn’t try to kill us or turn us. Probably full already by the time she got to us, I don’t know. Anyway, Tom and I woke up later and got away. Called Dorian, told him what’d happened. He was real interested in learning a vampire had been responsible for trapping Celia. Said he’d send another group of guys to come down and look for her, but that me and Tom ought to come and find you,” Theo looked at Kiefer, but still in an unfocused way, “and the vampire who’d helped you. He wants him, too. Wants Nathan.” He looked at Nathan, who said nothing.
“What’s he want him for?”
“Couldn’t tell you.”
Kiefer paced back and forth for a second, and then stopped in front of Theo again. “When you were in my office earlier, you got a phone call. Right after you quit whaling on me. That was why you stopped rifling through all my stuff and took off. Was it Dorian calling you?”
Theo nodded. “Yep. He said he’d had reports Celia had attacked some other people around town. He wanted us to go join the other guys he’d sent to look for her, forget about you for now and just help them find Celia before she went completely berserk and blew the whole operation.”
“Is that where you’ve been since then? Looking for Celia?”
“Yeah, but we can’t find her,” he reiterated.
Kiefer and Nathan looked at one another again. Some silent signal passed between them, and Kiefer said, “Alright, Theo, you’ve been helpful. Get some sleep now.” He touched the captive’s forehead, and Theo’s head lolled forward on his neck, his chin resting on his chest. Jessica heard him snore.
“Wow, that was crazy,” she breathed, bringing her hand to her mouth. Everyone else, looking stunned, ignored her.
Kiefer rubbed his face and exhaled, widening his eyes at Nathan. “What the what, man? Who is this Dorian guy, and what does he want with Celia? With you?”
“I cannot begin to imagine, but this is bad. Very bad.”
“Understatement of the century,” Kiefer muttered, but in his good-natured way. “Okay, so, let’s work this out. The last incident I saw reported happened a few days ago. I’d wondered why Celia had stopped attacking after only biting a few people, and why she hadn’t killed anybody. Now I know she was probably ‘full,’ like Theo said, and just going around biting for the fun of it—and to turn a few folks.” He glanced at Aaron and Jason. “I’m guessing now she’s probably found someplace to sleep off her food coma. Somewhere underground, maybe, which is why they couldn’t find her—”
He was cut off by the sound of Aaron suddenly letting out a low, painful groan. Everyone’s attention went to him, and Jessica saw him doubling over, his hands pressed to his temples.
“Aaron!” Lucy put her arm around his shoulders.
Nathan went over and helped Aaron into a chair. “Lucy, get him some water, please,” he directed. While Lucy scampered off to do as he’d said, Nathan tilted back Aaron’s head and looked into his eyes. “Aaron, what is the matter? Can you hear me? Are you seeing something?”
It did look like Aaron was looking at something, Jessica thought. Something none of the rest of them could see. His gaze was fixed beyond Nathan’s shoulder, and his breathing was coming in shallow gasps, as though whatever held his attention was upsetting him. Lucy came back and handed Nathan an open bottle of water. He joggled Aaron by the shoulder, repeating his name until he seemed to snap out of it, his eyelids fluttering as he shook his head. “Are you alright?” When Aaron nodded, Nathan passed him the bottle. “Here, drink some.”
Jessica watched Aaron down almost half the water before bursting out with, “What just happened, Aaron? Did you have a vision or something?” She knew she sounded demanding, but she couldn’t help it. She’d never been very good at waiting for things.
“Jessica,” Lucy glared at her, “can you please give him a minute?”
“Sorry,” Jessica murmured, but she looked beseechingly at Aaron again.
“Take your time, Aaron,” Lucy told him, touching his shoulder.
“No, it’s okay,” he said, patting his assistant’s hand. “This is important.” He looked at Nathan, his gaze even and solemn. “I know where she is, man.”
“Celia,” Nathan guessed.
Aaron nodded. “She got into my head somehow. I saw what she was seeing. Which means we can go find her, right? We can catch her…?” His words trickled away, and his head fell back. His eyes slid shut, and the water bottle rolled from his slack fingers, striking the floor as he drooped over to one side.
“Aaron!” Lucy cried. But he was already gone, lost in a sea of unconsciousness.
Chapter Fifteen
Everything seemed wrong with Celia. Her limbs were stiff and clumsy, and her brain was muddled. Her senses were nowhere near as sharp as they should be. Her internal clock told her she’d been underground for almost nine years. Nine years! All that time spent in the dark, starving, had taken its toll on her. Because, while it was one thing for a master vampire to choose to sleep for a few decades out of lassitude or boredom, it was another matter entirely to be snatched off the street, have a bag thrown over one’s head, and be forced into hibernation without any prior preparation or consent. A portion of Celia’s subconscious had remained awake all these years, fighting her unwarranted imprisonment and yearning to feed. As a result, she’d arisen feeble and exhausted. It angered Celia to think of how boorishly she’d been disrespected, but it was a dull sort of rage, barely eddying in the pit of her stomach. As though even her emotions remained stunted, and she lacked the capacity to even be appropriately livid.
She needed more food. That was the only thing that would fix her. Drinking the blood of a dozen men and then taking a long nap had certainly helped, but now she was awake and hungry again…
Striding down the street, following the scents of two of her most recent victims, she found herself in a quaint town square that reminded her of the time she’d spent in England during Victoria’s reign. The streets were lined with pavers and the light posts topped with imitation gas lamps. A storefront across the way beckoned to her, and she went to it, stumbling as her toe caught on a sidewalk crack. She quickly righted herself and looked around, but there was no one here to witness her blunder. The courtyard was deserted.
Celia turned and stared at the storefront again. A vampire lurked in the window. No, not a real vampire, she realized now. A cardboard painting of one, standing beneath a full moon with a woman wrapped in his arms. There were words on the painting, too, but Celia’s poor, blood-deprived brain couldn’t unscramble the letters to decipher them. Still, the painting called to her, as did the lingering scent of her victims. Of the ones she had turned.
When she had been awake before—prior to her latest ignominious burial—Celia had harbored no intention of ever making another vampire again. Lesser vampires, those that were not masters, were, as she had learned the difficult way, generally a nuisance. But these two men, those whose aromas she could now sense, had not only been profoundly lovely specimens of humanity, they had also had an innate goodness about them she’d found captivating. She’d felt instantly compelled to corrupt their souls and decimate their lives. It was always more fun, she thought, ruining people if they were good. If they had virtue. And so she had bitten those two, and said the proper words over
them.
Now they were out here, somewhere, waiting for her to come and collect them. Or they were somewhere nearby. She couldn’t tell for certain. Everything was so confused.
Celia blinked and looked in the window again, this time considering her own pale reflection in the glass. What she saw there left her well-pleased. Sluggish she might be, but at least she remained stunningly attractive, her face smooth and luminous, flawless as the day she’d first been turned, a nineteen-year-old sacrifice to some monster that had descended from the mountains to ravage her village. Her neighbors had sought to appease the beast by offering her to him. She supposed it had worked. Instead of killing her, he had turned her and kept her as his consort for many long years.
Celia frowned of a sudden, wondering if perhaps her master had seen something good in her all those centuries ago, and had wanted to extinguish it. Had she been virtuous, once upon a time? Was that why he had made her into what she was? It was a disconcerting thought, and thankfully didn’t linger long. She was distracted, once again, by the painting in the window, and by the books arranged in artful stacks around it, strewn with offerings of silk flowers and bags of tissue paper, as though this were some sort of shrine to the cardboard vampire. This place must be friendly to her kind, she mused with a pensive frown, though she couldn’t fathom how such a circumstance would ever come to be. Surely, the living must understand how the vampire race loathed them? How they abhorred human beings as little more than food and slave labor?
Ah, well, it didn’t signify. She would go into the store, she decided. She would rest another while there, and then look for the human animals she’d turned, compelling them to lead her to the others. The despicable sorcerer and vampire who’d joined forces to put her into the ground.
At the thought of those two miscreants, a shock of hatred wracked Celia’s body. And this time she felt the emotion far more intensely, all the way down to her marrow. I’m getting better, she thought, and her lips twisted into a snarl. I’m coming back. Touching her palms to the window, she pressed until the glass began to fissure, cracks radiating like spiderwebs across its surface…
Chapter Sixteen
“Why does Aaron seem telepathically connected to Celia, but Jason doesn’t?” Lucy asked Nathan. Aaron was awake again, and seemed to have recovered from his latest psychic attack. He was sitting at a table with Jason, Dara, and the others, drinking another bottle of water. His ears seemed to perk up when he heard Lucy’s question, even though he was sitting several yards away from her.
“I’d like to know the answer to that, too,” he said, smiling faintly at her and Nathan.
“I do not know the answer,” Nathan admitted. “As I mentioned before, the vampire’s bite affects different people in different ways. There is no way for us to anticipate everything that might happen to any given victim.”
Lucy looked at Nathan and then at Kiefer. It frustrated her to know that these two men, who were supposed to be experts on the subject, seemed to actually know precious little about vampires. Certainly not much more than she or her friends did, just from having read Professor Nosferus and running a bunch of Google searches over the past few days. But she knew it wasn’t their fault, and that it was no use complaining about their collective ignorance. These two guys still represented their group’s best hope for curing Jason and Aaron. She was just glad Aaron’s weird vision had passed, and left him seemingly unscathed for the time being.
“So, what did you see, Aaron?” Jessica had been sitting on her hands, politely waiting for him to recover, but now her impatience bled through, and she wriggled in her chair like a fidgety schoolchild. “Where’s Celia?”
“I’m not sure,” he answered. “It was like I was looking through a window. I saw a big cardboard picture of a vampire and a woman standing under a full moon. I know I’ve seen it somewhere before, but—”
Jessica and Dara both gasped, and Lucy rushed over to join them. “The bookstore!” they chorused.
“Bookstore?” Aaron said. “What bookstore?”
Jessica laid her hand against her chest. “My bookstore. It’s called Book of Love. We sell romance novels.”
“Oh, right.” Aaron tipped his water bottle toward her. “That’s where I’ve seen that picture before, on the postcard Lucy gave me for your release party.”
“Why would a vampire go there?” Jessica, bewildered, asked no one in particular.
“To read about that dude in the picture?” Aaron suggested. Amusement quirked up the corners of his mouth. “She’s probably lonely. It’s been nine long years alone in a coffin, after all, and he did look pretty shredded…”
“More likely, she was looking for you,” Nathan told him grimly.
Aaron’s smile faded as he looked up. “Me?”
“And/or Jason,” Kiefer said. “She was probably following your scents.”
“Scents?” Jessica inclined her head. “But neither of the guys has been to my store before.”
Nathan said, “I assume Lucy has.”
“Yeah, and I was there, too,” Dara said. “Why? Do you think we had the guys’ scents on us when we went there, and that’s what Celia’s picking up on?”
“It is possible. Celia may be confused right now, and unable to distinguish the difference.”
Jessica looked at Aaron. “What was she doing there? Celia, I mean. At my store. Could you see?”
Hesitancy contorted Aaron’s face, making his brow furrow and his gaze cut away. “She was, uh…She was breaking the window.”
“What?!”
“And knocking things over. Ripping up some of the books and breaking the furniture…”
Jessica shot to standing, her chair scraping the floor tiles. She whipped her head around to look at Nathan. “We have to go there! Now. She’s going to trash my store!”
Nathan held up his hands in a calming gesture. “Of course. Kiefer and I will go there straight away.”
“You and Kiefer? What about the rest of us? I thought we’d already decided we were all going to stick together? To fight Celia as a group?”
“That was before we’d heard what Theo had to say. We do not know who this Dorian is, or what he is capable of. This endeavor could prove even more dangerous than we’d initially anticipated.”
“Which means you could use all the help you can get, right?” Aaron said. “I think we should go with you.”
“I agree,” Jessica said, shooting Aaron a grateful look. “Especially since it’s my store, Nathan. My responsibility. I have to come.”
Nathan’s expression hardly changed. It was as if he’d already realized from the beginning that the others wouldn’t consent to stay behind. But he’d had to try. “Very well,” he said, “but you will stay behind Kiefer and myself. You will follow our instructions.”
“Jessica, does your store have an alarm system?” Kiefer wanted to know. When Jessica nodded, he asked, “Does it automatically call the police if it’s tripped?”
“No, the security company sends out its own people first to investigate, then they decide whether or not to call the police. You know, just in case it turns out to be a false alarm.”
“That’s good,” Kiefer said. “This will be easier if the cops aren’t involved. Alright, everybody, let’s grab our gear and get going.”
“What do we do with Theo?” Jason wondered, eyeing the thug still duct-taped to his chair with distaste.
“Tie him up, throw him in the trunk, and bring him with us,” Kiefer said, as though it should be obvious—and as though this was something he did every day. “We can decide what to do with him later.” He pulled a folding knife from his pocket, sliced through Theo’s restraints and started to haul the still-sleeping man onto his shoulder.
“Hang on a second.” Jason stepped over to him. “Can I try carrying him?”
Kiefer glanced at him with curiosity, but stepped aside. Jason snatched Theo by the back of his collar, hoisting him so that his feet dangled off the floor. He did this with
one hand, and without straining, despite the fact that Theo was easily six feet tall and must’ve weighed two hundred pounds. “Okay, where do you want him?” Jason asked, a triumphant smile creasing his lips.
“Jason.” Dara brought her hands to her mouth.
Jessica nudged Dara with her elbow. “Well at least you know the gym membership money’s going to good use.”
“It is the vampire bite,” Nathan said, as if anyone doubted it.
Jason said, “I’ve just been feeling a lot stronger since I woke up. Like I could pick up anything I wanted and toss it around. I wanted to see if it was just in my head, or if I could really do it.”
Lucy turned to Aaron. “What about you? Do you feel any different?”
“Not especially. But here, let me try.”
Jason obliged, dropping Theo back into the chair. Aaron went over and curled his fingers around Theo’s collar. He yanked, but Theo hardly moved. Aaron tried again, and almost tipped the guy onto the floor. “Sorry, man,” he mumbled, righting him. Theo, however, didn’t even seem to notice, much less care, he was being manhandled. His eyes fluttered open, but only for a second, and then he went right back to snoring. Aaron looked sheepishly at the others. “Guess I didn’t get the whole super-strength thing.”
“Are you sure?” Jason asked. “Here, try to hit me.” He spread his arms, offering his torso as a target.
Aaron’s brow wrinkled. “Dude, I’m not going to hit you.”
“Come on, it’s okay. I can take it.”
“Naw.”
“Come on.” Jason grinned and shoved Aaron’s shoulder to motivate him. Lucy could tell it had been a playful tap with no real momentum behind it, but Aaron barreled over backward anyway, toppling a stack of chairs before colliding with the wall.
Lucy gasped and darted over to him.
Jason cursed and covered his mouth. He scrambled over to help Lucy get Aaron back on his feet. “I am so sorry, dude,” he said, straightening Aaron’s shirt. “I did not mean to do that. For real. I don’t even know what happened, I just…”
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