Bloodborne (Night Shift Book 2)

by Margo Bond Collins

  Nothing in particular indicated that the children had been infected in their own homes. In fact, Lili’s notes suggested that it was most likely the two had been exposed at school, what she called the “most common vector” for diseases of this sort.

  Really, that part of the investigation was more in Lili’s line of work, and it was all I could do to keep from drifting off into a daydream of investigating these events with her. All day.

  And at night…

  Snap out of it, Chandler.

  I needed to get a grip on my emotions, or I was likely to fuck up this investigation through sheer inattention.

  Neither Felicity nor Kenny could afford that. I couldn’t, either; I didn’t want my bosses at the Bureau to find out what I was doing in Houston, and botching the case entirely was a surefire way for them to learn about it.

  For that matter, if the FBI discovered I was investigating a supernatural incident at all, they were likely to turn my suspension into an outright sacking.

  To my surprise, I found I didn’t care. Not as long as I saved those two kids.

  I took one last, long look at the Mays’s house then drove away, mind spinning with possible avenues to check during daylight hours: the kids’ schools, their neighborhood friends, after-school activities.

  Without my own credentials to fall back on, I really would need Lili Banta with me. As a CDC investigator, she could get into places I couldn’t these days. She could ask the disease vector questions. By all rights, I should be able to ask the paranormal questions—but the FBI trained me to hunt vampires, not…whatever this was.

  Background. I’m putting together a comprehensive background on the vics, not trying to hunt the monster down.

  That would come later.

  Once I knew for sure what I was hunting.

  Chapter 9

  Lili

  The FBI agent’s text had come through late the night before as I was leaving the hospital.

  What’s your schedule like tomorrow? I’d like to do some interviews with victims’ contacts. Could use your expertise.

  I had planned to do more rounds, but I was already beginning to feel extraneous in the isolation unit. Will had the basics under control: keep the children hydrated, run tests, manage symptoms.

  And if this infection ran the same course as the earlier versions of Yvonne’s Disease, the infected children would soon begin to sweat, then vomit, then bleed uncontrollably.

  Then they would die.

  Right now, we were barely staving off the inevitable.

  Let Will work on the cure. I could catch up with him on that at the end of the day.

  Maybe I could help keep it from spreading by working with Scott. So I texted the agent and we made arrangements for him to pick me up in the morning.

  It hadn’t occurred to me that I would find being in a car with him overwhelming.

  The smell of him permeated the tiny space—a mix of hotel-brand soap, a light aftershave, and something purely masculine. The combination made me dizzy.

  “Where first?” he asked, unaware of the intensely physical reaction I was having to him.

  I tried to keep my voice as steady as possible. “The children’s schools, I think. We probably won’t be able to talk to anyone other than administration, but we can get a basic idea of how many other kids we’re looking at here.”

  Scott plugged the address I gave him into the GPS and pulled the SUV out into the street. “Probably thousands by now, right?”

  I nodded. “If any patient dies, we’ll have to ask the districts to shut the schools down. For now, though, we’re hoping this is a non-lethal variant.”

  “And that the press doesn’t get hold of the story.”

  “Yeah. It’ll be Ebola in Dallas, all over again, but with kids instead of adults.”

  The agent shuddered. “You’ll be crucified for not telling the public sooner.”

  “If a child dies, we’d be crucified no matter what.” Outside the window, the view changed from the city blocks directly surrounding the hospital to more residential areas, streets of older houses interspersed with apartment complexes heading toward gentrification.

  The school was a low, sprawling building with a circular drive. In the parking lot, Scott made a point of removing one gun from the shoulder holster under his jacket and another from an ankle holster in his boot and shoving them both under the front seat.

  We had to push a buzzer to be allowed into the main office, and only my CDC badge kept the security guard from blocking our way entirely. The guard gestured me through an old-fashioned airport-style metal detector then turned his hard stare on Scott.

  “I’m FBI,” the agent said. “There’s a holster under my jacket, but I’m not carrying.”

  The guard’s stance relaxed marginally as Scott removed his suit coat and dropped it into a plastic bin. “Thanks for the heads up.”

  Once we were inside a small lobby, the main office door to our left buzzed open. Although we could see the rest of the school through the heavy glass doors, our entry to it remained blocked.

  I couldn’t help but think that they were guarding against the wrong threat.

  This time, at least.

  Drawing in a deep breath, I pushed open the office door, preparing to run the administrative gauntlet to get any useful information at all.

  Chapter 10

  Scott

  Watching Lili work was amazing—almost intoxicating, I would have said under other circumstances. For the most part, I stood in the background as she walked the school’s principal through her list of questions without ever allowing him to worry that she might be preparing for an epidemic among the school children.

  “No,” she said when he asked if he should be concerned about contagion. “There’s an extremely low chance of transmission. We like to have as much data as possible to put into the computers at the CDC.”

  By the time we left, she had the number of students in the school, in Kenny’s grade, and in his class, as well as how many of those students had school-age siblings in the district. She also had the principal’s assurance that he would ask some of the parents of those children to call her.

  Then she repeated the whole thing at Felicity’s school.

  Back in the SUV toward the end of a long morning, she flipped through the notes she had taken, a frown creasing her forehead. “I can run this through some of the programs, come up with statistical models, but if we were looking at any kind of simple transmission, at least some of these children would have fallen ill already.”

  “You already knew that, though.”

  Her gaze flicked up toward me then back to her notes. “Yeah. It’s good to have the math to prove it, though.”

  “Still doesn’t prove that it’s anything supernatural, though.”

  “Nope.” She opened one hand as if dropping something. “But it brings us one step closer. It’s not air- or waterborne. It’s almost certainly not easily transmissible through casual contact. That leaves only a few common modes of transmission before we can move from the medical to the mystical.”

  I reached past her into my glove box to hand her the map I had been examining for the last two days. Kenny’s house, Felicity’s house, and the hospital were all marked on it. “Can you do me a favor and add the two schools to this?”

  “You seeing some kind of pattern?” She used her pen to make notes on the map without waiting for my response.

  “Not yet. But I’m hoping I will.”

  She had me drop her off at the CDC field office so she could play with the numbers on their specialized computer programs. “I’ll call you if I figure anything out,” she promised.

  I wasn’t counting on it.

  Only a few days in, and I was as certain as Iverson that there was some supernatural connection between the murders and the children’s illnesses.

  Chapter 11

  Lili

  I will never find a logical reason for this.

  I had spent the rest
of the day inputting information into various statistical models, but I knew that it was a waste of time. I wasn’t going to solve this my usual way, with computer modeling and predictions.

  We wouldn’t solve it Will’s way, either, looking through microscopes at the direct cause of the illnesses. There was nothing new to be seen there.

  No, I was certain we would solve it Scott Chandler’s way—through a combination of intuition and legwork.

  Right now, my intuition was telling me that I needed to sleep on it. I had run the information I had in several different ways, and it all came back to a big, fat nothing. I wouldn’t be able to do more unless—until—another child fell victim to whatever this was.

  It was still early by the time I arrived home, but I was exhausted. It was all I could do to drag myself into the bathroom and wash my face. My eyes were red-rimmed, though I had gotten plenty of sleep the night before.

  By eight o’clock, I had crawled between the sheets of my bed at my mother’s house and was out almost immediately.

  When I opened my eyes again, I was outside.

  Flying.

  Free.

  Hungry.

  The voices echoed in my head, high-pitched and cheerful.

  I knew exactly where I was headed this time.

  The beacon was in place, and it called to me.

  Called to us.

  We are coming.

  Then I gave myself over to the sheer joy of flight—of being who we were in the night.

  And though the beacon called us, we laughed aloud. It would still be there in a few moments.

  First we soar.

  Then we eat.

  Chapter 12

  Scott

  Late that night, unable to sleep, I sat at the small desk in my hotel room. My fingers smoothed across the map, tracing lines from the hospital to the sites of the two infected children’s homes. There had to be some kind of pattern, but I wasn’t seeing it. The houses were different distances from the hospital, though it did sit roughly in between them. The children were of different ethnicities, different ages, different genders, different socioeconomic backgrounds.

  Whatever the pattern might be, it didn’t seem to be physical or social.

  I needed to quit thinking so hard about it.

  I rubbed my hand across my hair and stood up. Coffee might help. As I rinsed out the in-room machine and began reassembling it for coffee, I let my mind wander, thinking about the last case Iverson and I had worked together.

  The Dallas Blood House, an informal feeding place for local vampires and their bloodgivers, had all but burned down the night of the vampires’ annual ball, a fire that started in what appeared to be a liquor storage room.

  No bodies had been recovered, though Iverson and I had both speculated that Detective Davis and her contact might have headed to the Blood House after the ballroom bloodbath at the Adolphus Hotel. Iverson and I had met an officer from the Dallas County Fire Marshal’s office at the remains of the building for a walk-through as soon as we could arrange it—Iverson had still been on crutches from the broken leg he had gotten in the Adolphus raid. Oddly enough, some patches of floor in the very bottom level of the Blood House had survived the blaze, and every single one of those spots had held a symbol. Each of those symbols corresponded with one that had been carved into one or more of the women whose murders had prompted the investigation that ultimately led to the decimation of the Dallas Sanguinary that night.

  Symbols.

  Blood magic sigils.

  I wonder…

  As I waited for my coffee to brew, I marked on the map with a red pen, noting the spots where the Houston murder victims had been found.

  That was beginning to look more like a pattern.

  I began opening image files on my laptop.

  The smell of freshly brewed coffee and the hiss of the machine reminded me of the drink I had meant to pour, but I no longer had any interest in coffee.

  There it was.

  A photo of something scratched into a floor, a clear spot circled with scorched wood. And a second photo of the same symbol sliced into a young woman’s abdomen—bloody red marks scored into her pale, white skin, etched around her bellybutton.

  Without taking my eyes off the screen, I slid the map closer to me on the desk. Only then did I double-check my intuition.

  Yes.

  With the hotel pen, I traced light marks from one infection point to another, encompassing the sites where bodies had been found.

  The same symbol.

  Like two boomerangs, slightly offset and facing one another, the hospital forming the perfect center point of the design.

  If I was right, there would be several more victims, but the next one would be…

  I stared at the map intensely for a moment.

  Yes.

  There.

  I was fairly certain, within a block or so, where the next victim would be.

  And that meant that I knew where this thing was likely to strike next.

  I needed to drive.

  # # #

  Circling the blocks one at a time, I peered into the trees and bushes around the houses I passed.

  This had to be right. It fit the pattern—both the every-other-night timing and the crosshatch pattern I’d put together with the hospital at the center. I might not know the reason for the pattern, but I knew it existed.

  I drove slowly, moving from block to block, hoping to see something. Anything that might give me some hint of what was causing this epidemic.

  I finally saw it in flashes as it moved in and out of the shadows cast by the trees around the window.

  It wasn’t a vampire.

  At least, not like any vampire I’d ever seen.

  Vamps were beautiful. Alluring. Pale and languid, more often than not—at least until they went into a feeding frenzy.

  Sometimes I thought that beauty was what was most horrifying about them. Good predators can blend in with their prey, stalk them without their knowing. The best predators, though? They lured their victims in, convinced they were going not to their death, but something beautiful and pure.

  This thing would not be attracting any unsuspecting humans.

  It was thoroughly repellant.

  Brown, leathery skin covered the thing from head to toe. Its legs were curved, like a beast’s—like an old-fashioned depiction of werewolves from before the vampires had shown up for real and we had quit being so charmed by monster movies.

  It looked like it had wings, too, folded in against its back. Not feathery, like a bird’s or an angel’s, but made of the same leathery flesh as its skin. Like a bat’s wings.

  As it moved up to the window screen and ran its hand along the side, I saw huge, curved claws.

  It was cutting the screen to get at the window.

  That realization jarred me into motion. I realized I’d been staring at it openmouthed instead of moving to stop it.

  At my first step, the creature’s pointed ears perked up and it swiveled around to face me, peering into the darkness.

  I didn’t know how good its eyesight was, but it clearly had excellent hearing. Breaking into a run, I headed straight for it, gun drawn in one hand and a standard wooden stake in the other.

  It took a step away from the window and spread its wings wide. I stopped to take aim as it hissed at me.

  I wasn’t expecting it to speak in words, but it did.

  “The child is ours.” The sibilants were drawn out into that same hiss, and a long tongue flicked out, like a snake’s.

  “No, she is not,” I said, steadying my gun hand and breathing out.

  As I squeezed the trigger, the creature leapt into the air and the shot went low, thudding into the tree behind it. Bark fragments splintered out in several directions and I cursed.

  Following its progress in the air, I realized that it had quickly gotten too far for me to shoot it.

  No. Not it. Her.

  I had seen small, dark breasts on it, and h
ad to assume it was female.

  That detail had thrown me off for a second, just long enough for me to miss my chance at a second shot.

  Dammit.

  The whole event had taken less than thirty seconds. Behind me, lights were only now beginning to show through the windows, and porch lights were coming on up and down the street.

  Gunshots in the night clearly weren’t common in this neighborhood.

  I hesitated for a moment, half tempted to leave. I didn’t have any official ID with me, after all. Didn’t have any I could have brought, for that matter.

  The impulse lasted only the barest second, but I still felt ashamed of myself after the thought flashed through my mind. These people had almost lost a child tonight, even if they didn’t know it. I needed to tell them what was going on so they could take precautions.

  Local law enforcement would probably be showing up, too, and I would need to deal with them.

  Everyone involved would feel better if someone official flashed ID cards.

  I had holstered my gun and was in the process of dialing Lili Banta’s number when the bright beam of a flashlight fell across my eyes.

  “Hold it right there.” The voice that came out of the dark was gruff—with fear, I judged, rather than the authority a cop would bring to the situation.

  “I’m calling the authorities.” Raising my hands over my head, I waggled my phone at him and tilted my head toward the mangled screen. “I saw—” I paused, trying to come up with the right word. “I saw something trying to break in to your house.”

  The light dropped a few inches and the man’s voice rose. “Something?” He stepped closer. “That’s my son’s room. What’s going on?”

  I made my voice as soothing as possible. “I am in the process of calling Lieutenant Henry Iverson and Dr. Lili Banta from the CDC. They’ll be able to explain everything.” If I didn’t specify which police force Iverson belonged to, that couldn’t be held against me, could it?

  At that moment I saw two cruisers turn the corner, lights flashing red and blue. The man holding the light on me heaved a relieved sigh and stepped back again. “There are the police now. You can explain it to them.”