Christian looked impressed. “You found the tunnels?”
“Yeah,” said Eddie. “But like she said, they were useless.”
“We should see them before we go,” Christian told me. “It’d be kind of cool, and if the data was bad, there’s no danger.”
“No,” I snapped. “We’re going home. Now.”
Mason looked tired. “We’re going to search the city again. Even you can’t make us go back, Rose.”
“No, but the school’s guardians can when I call and tell them you’re here.”
Call it blackmailing or being a tattletale; the effect was the same. The three of them looked at me like I had just simultaneously gut-punched them all.
“You’d really do that?” asked Mason. “You’d sell us out like that?”
I rubbed my eyes, wondering desperately why I was trying to be the voice of reason here. Where was the girl who’d run away from school? Mason had been right. I had changed.
“This isn’t about selling anyone out. This is about keeping you guys alive.”
“You think we’re that defenseless?” asked Mia. “You think we’d get killed right away?”
“Yes,” I said. “Unless you’ve found some way to use water as a weapon?”
She flushed and didn’t say anything.
“We brought silver stakes,” said Eddie.
Fantastic. They must have stolen them. I looked at Mason pleadingly.
“Mason. Please. Call this off. Let’s go back.”
He looked at me for a long time. Finally, he sighed. “Okay.”
Eddie and Mia looked aghast, but Mason had assumed a leadership role with them, and they didn’t have the initiative to go on without him. Mia seemed to take it the hardest, and I felt bad for her. She’d barely had any real time to grieve for her mother; she’d just jumped right on board with this revenge thing as a way to cope with the pain. She’d have a lot to deal with when we got back.
Christian was still excited about the idea of the underground tunnels. Considering he spent all his time in an attic, I shouldn’t have been all that surprised.
“I saw the schedule,” he told me. “We’ve got a while before the next bus.”
“We can’t go walking into some Strigoi lair,” I argued, walking toward the mall’s entrance.
“There are no Strigoi there,” said Mason. “It’s seriously all janitorial stuff. There was no sign of anything weird. I really do think the guardians had bad information.”
“Rose,” said Christian, “let’s get something fun out of this.”
They all looked at me. I felt like a mom who wouldn’t buy her kids candy at the grocery store.
“Okay, fine. Just a peek, though.”
The others led Christian and me to the opposite end of the mall, through a door marked STAFF ONLY. We dodged a couple of janitors, then slipped through another door that led us to a set of stairs going down. I had a brief moment of déjà vu, recalling the steps down to Adrian’s spa party. Only these stairs were dirtier and smelled pretty nasty.
We reached the bottom. It wasn’t so much a tunnel as a narrow corridor, lined in grime-caked cement. Ugly fluorescent lights were embedded sporadically along the walls. The passage went off to our left and right. Boxes of ordinary cleaning and electrical supplies sat around.
“See?” said Mason. “Boring.”
I pointed in each direction. “What’s down there?”
“Nothing,” sighed Mia. “We’ll show you.”
We walked down to the right and found more of the same. I was starting to agree with the boring assessment when we passed some black writing on one of the walls. I stopped and looked at it. It was a list of letters.
Some had lines and x marks next to them, but for the most part the message was incoherent. Mia noticed my scrutiny.
“It’s probably a janitor thing,” she said. “Or maybe some gang did it.”
“Probably,” I said, still studying it. The others shifted restlessly, not understanding my fascination with the jumble of letters. I didn’t understand my fascination either, but something in my head tugged at me to stay.
Then I got it.
B for Badica, Z for Zeklos, I for Ivashkov . . .
I stared. The first letter of every royal family’s name was there. There were three D names, but based on the order, you could actually read the list as a size ranking. It started with the smaller families—Dragomir, Badica, Conta—and went all the way up to the giant Ivashkov clan. I didn’t understand the dashes and lines beside the letters, but I quickly noticed which names had an x beside them: Badica and Drozdov.
I stepped back from the wall. “We have to get out of here,” I said. My own voice scared me a little. “Right now.”
The others looked at me in surprise. “Why?” asked Eddie. “What’s going on?”
“I’ll tell you later. We just need to go.”
Mason pointed in the direction we’d been heading. “This lets out a few blocks away. It’s closer to the station.”
I peered down into the dark unknown. “No,” I said. “We’re going back the way we came.”
They all looked at me like I was insane as we retraced our steps, but nobody questioned me yet. When we emerged from the mall’s front, I breathed a sigh of relief to see that the sun was still out, though it was steadily sinking into the horizon and casting orange and red light onto the buildings. The remaining light would still be enough for us to get back to the bus station before we were really in any danger of seeing Strigoi.
And I knew now that there really were Strigoi in Spokane. Dimitri’s information had been correct. I didn’t know what the list meant, but it clearly had something to do with the attacks. I needed to report it to the other guardians immediately, and I certainly couldn’t tell the others what I’d realized until we were safely at the lodge. Mason was likely to go back into the tunnels if he knew what I did.
Most of our walk back to the station proceeded in silence. I think my mood had cowed the others. Even Christian seemed to have run out of snide comments. Inside, my emotions swirled, oscillating between anger and guilt as I kept reexamining my role in everything.
Ahead of me, Eddie stopped walking, and I nearly ran into him. He looked around. “Where are we?”
Snapping out of my own thoughts, I surveyed the area too. I didn’t remember these buildings. “Damn it,” I exclaimed. “Are we lost? Didn’t anyone keep track of which way we went?”
It was an unfair question since I clearly hadn’t paid attention either, but my temper had pushed me past reason. Mason studied me for a few moments, then pointed. “This way.”
We turned and walked down a narrow street between two buildings. I didn’t think we were going the right way, but I didn’t really have a better idea. I also didn’t want to stand around debating.
We hadn’t gone very far when I heard the sound of an engine and squealing tires. Mia was walking in the middle of the road, and protective conditioning kicked in before I even saw what was coming. Grabbing her, I jerked her out of the street and up against one of the building walls. The boys had done the same.
A large, gray van with tinted windows had rounded the corner and was headed in our direction. We pressed flat against the wall, waiting for it to go past.
Only it didn’t.
Screeching to a halt, it stopped right in front of us, and the doors slid open. Three big guys spilled out, and again, my instincts kicked in. I had no clue who they were or what they wanted, but they clearly weren’t friendly. That was all I needed to know.
One of them moved toward Christian, and I struck out and punched him. The guy barely staggered but was clearly surprised to have felt it at all, I think. He probably hadn’t expected someone as small as me to be much of a threat. Ignoring Christian, he moved toward me. In my peripheral vision, I saw Mason and Eddie squaring off with the other two. Mason had actually pulled out his stolen silver stake. Mia and Christian stood there, frozen.
Our attackers wer
e relying a lot on bulk. They didn’t have the sort of background we had in offensive and defensive techniques. Plus, they were human, and we had dhampir strength. Unfortunately, we also had the disadvantage of being cornered against the wall. We had nowhere to retreat to. Most importantly, we had something to lose.
Like Mia.
The guy who’d been sparring with Mason seemed to realize this. He backed off from Mason and instead grabbed her. I barely saw the flash of his gun before its barrel was pressed against her neck. Backing off from my own adversary, I yelled at Eddie to stop. We’d all been trained to respond instantly to those kinds of orders, and he halted his attack, glancing at me questioningly. When he saw Mia, his face went pale.
I wanted nothing more than to keep pummeling these men—whoever they were—but I couldn’t risk this guy hurting Mia. He knew it, too. He didn’t even have to make the threat. He was human, but he knew enough about us to know that we’d go out of our way to protect the Moroi. Novices had a saying grilled into us from an early age: Only they matter.
Everyone stopped and looked between him and me. Apparently we were the acknowledged leaders here. “What do you want?” I asked harshly.
The guy pressed his gun closer to Mia’s neck, and she whimpered. For all her talk about fighting, she was smaller than me and not nearly as strong. And she was too terrified to move.
The man inclined his head toward the van’s open door. “I want you to get inside. And don’t start anything. You do, and she’s gone.”
I looked at Mia, the van, my other friends, and then back to the guy. Shit.
NINETEEN
I HATE BEING POWERLESS. AND I hate going down without a fight. What had taken place outside in the alley hadn’t been a real fight. If it had—if I’d been beaten into submission . . . well, yeah. Maybe I could accept that. Maybe. But I hadn’t been beaten. I’d barely gotten my hands dirty. Instead, I’d gone quietly.
Once they had us sitting on the floor of the van, they’d bound each of our hands behind our back with flex-cuffs— strips of plastic that cinched together and held just as well as anything made of metal.
After that, we rode in near silence. The men occasionally murmured something to each other, speaking too softly for any of us to hear. Christian or Mia might have been able to understand the words, but they were in no position to communicate anything to the rest of us. Mia looked as terrified as she had out on the street, and while Christian’s fear had rapidly given way to his typical haughty anger, even he didn’t dare act out with guards nearby.
I was glad for Christian’s self-control. I didn’t doubt any of these men would smack him if he got out of line, and neither I nor the other novices were in a position to stop them. That was what really drove me crazy. The instinct to protect Moroi was so deeply ingrained in me that I couldn’t even pause to worry about myself. Christian and Mia were the focus. They were the ones I had to get out of this mess.
And how had this mess started? Who were these guys? That was a mystery. They were human, but I didn’t believe for an instant that a group of dhampirs and Moroi had been random kidnapping victims. We’d been targeted for a reason.
Our captors made no attempts to blindfold us or conceal our route, which I didn’t take as a good sign. Did they think we didn’t know the city well enough to retrace our steps? Or did they figure it didn’t matter since we wouldn’t be leaving wherever they were taking us? All I sensed was that we were driving away from downtown, off toward a more suburban area. Spokane was as dull as I’d imagined. Unlike where pristine white snow lay in drifts, slushy gray puddles lined the streets and dirty patches dotted the lawns. There were also a lot fewer evergreen trees than I was used to. The scraggly, leafless deciduous trees here seemed skeletal by comparison. They only added to the mood of impending doom.
After what felt like less than an hour, the van turned down a quiet cul-de-sac, and we drove up to a very ordinary—yet large—house. Other houses—identical in the way suburban homes often are—stood nearby, which gave me hope. Maybe we could get some help from the neighbors.
We pulled inside the garage, and once the door was back down, the men ushered us into the house. It looked a lot more interesting on the inside. Antique, claw-footed sofas and chairs. A large, saltwater fish tank. Swords crossed over the fireplace. One of those stupid modern art paintings that consisted of a few lines splayed across the canvas.
The part of me that enjoyed destroying things would have liked to study the swords in detail, but the main floor wasn’t our destination. Instead, we were led down a narrow flight of stairs, down to a basement as large as the floor above. Only, unlike the main floor’s open space, the basement was sectioned off into a series of halls and closed doors. It was like a rat’s maze. Our captors led us through it without hesitation, into a small room with a concrete floor and unpainted dry-wall.
The furniture inside consisted of several very uncomfortable-looking wooden chairs with slatted backs—backs that proved to be a convenient place for rebinding our hands. The men seated us in such a way that Mia and Christian sat on one side of the room, and the rest of us dhampirs sat on the other. One guy—the leader, apparently—watched carefully as one of his henchmen bound Eddie’s hands with new flex-cuffs.
“These are the ones you especially have to watch,” he warned, nodding toward us. “They’ll fight back.” His eyes traveled first to Eddie’s face, then Mason’s, and then mine. The guy and I held each other’s gaze for several moments, and I scowled. He looked back over at his associate. “Watch her in particular.”
When we’d been restrained to his satisfaction, he barked out a few more orders to the others and then left the room, shutting the door loudly behind him. His steps echoed through the house as he walked upstairs. Moments later, silence fell.
We sat there, staring at each other. After several minutes, Mia whimpered and started to speak. “What are you going to—”
“Shut up,” growled one of the men. He took a warning step toward her. Blanching, she cringed but still looked as though she might say something else. I caught her eye and shook my head. She stayed silent, eyes wide and a slight tremble to her lip.
There’s nothing worse than waiting and not knowing what’ll happen to you. Your own imagination can be crueler than any captor. Since our guards wouldn’t talk to us or tell us what was in store, I imagined all sorts of horrible scenarios. The guns were the obvious threat, and I found myself pondering what a bullet would feel like. Painful, presumably. And where would they shoot? Through the heart or the head? Quick death. But somewhere else? Like the stomach? That would be slow and painful. I shuddered at the thought of my life bleeding out of me. Thinking of all that blood put me in mind of the Badica house and maybe having our throats slit. These men could have knives as well as guns.
Of course, I had to wonder why we were still alive at all. Clearly they wanted something from us, but what? They weren’t asking for information. And they were human. What would humans want with us? Usually the most we feared from humans was either running into crazy slayer types or those who wanted to experiment on us. These seemed like neither.
So what did they want? Why were we here? Over and over, I imagined more awful, gruesome fates. The looks on my friends’ faces showed I wasn’t the only one who could envision creative torments. The smell of sweat and fear filled the room.
I lost track of time and was suddenly jolted out of my imaginings when footsteps sounded on the stairs. The lead captor stepped into the hall. The rest of the men straightened up, tension crackling around them. Oh God. This was it, I realized. This was what we’d been waiting for.
“Yes, sir,” I heard the leader say. “They’re in here, just like you wanted.”
Finally, I realized. The person behind our kidnapping. Panic shot through me. I had to escape.
“Let us out of here!” I yelled, straining at my bindings. “Let us out of here, you son of a—”
I stopped. Something inside of me shriveled up. My
throat went dry. My heart wanted to stop. The guard had returned with a man and a woman I didn’t recognize. I did, however, recognize that they were . . .
... Strigoi.
Real, live—well, figuratively speaking—Strigoi. It all suddenly clicked together. It wasn’t just the Spokane reports that had been true. What we’d feared—Strigoi working with humans—had come true. This changes everything. Daylight wasn’t safe anymore. None of us were safe anymore. Worse, I realized these must be the rogue Strigoi—the ones who had attacked the two Moroi families with human help. Again, those horrible memories came to me: bodies and blood everywhere. Bile rose in my throat, and I tried to shift my thoughts from the past to the present situation. Not that that was any more reassuring.
Moroi had pale skin, the kind of skin that blushed and burned easily. But these vampires . . . their skin was white, chalky in a way that made it look like the result of a bad makeup job. The pupils of their eyes had a red ring around them, driving home what monsters they were.
The woman, actually, reminded me of Natalie—my poor friend whose father had convinced her to turn Strigoi. It took me a few moments to figure out what the resemblance was because they looked nothing alike. This woman was short— probably human before becoming Strigoi—and had brown hair with a bad highlighting job.
Then it hit me. This Strigoi was a new one, much as Natalie had been. It didn’t become obvious until I compared her with the Strigoi man. The Strigoi woman’s face had a little life in it. But his . . . his was the face of death.
His face was completely devoid of any sort of warmth or gentler emotion. His expression was cold and calculating, laced with malicious amusement. He was tall, as tall as Dimitri, and had a slender frame that indicated he’d been Moroi before changing over. Shoulder-length black hair framed his face and stood out against the bright scarlet of his dress shirt. His eyes were so dark and brown that without the red ring, it would have been almost impossible to tell where pupil ended and iris began.
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