I had my suspicions about that day and who had transformed her; those suspicions pointed to the same vampire who had inexplicably been capable of saving me the day I’d bled myself dry attempting to transform Nathan back from being Damned. Bex, Master vampire of Erin, New York—and thanks to me, Master vampire of New York City’s new ally—had carried both my brother and me, half-dead and mostly unconscious, out of the woods and to the hospital, and she’d done so in broad daylight. The one person I’d told, whose name still eluded me, had said I was mistaken, and if I wasn’t, I should keep my mouth shut about it. Because if Bex had saved me and transformed Ronnie in broad daylight without bursting into flames, then that only meant one thing: Bex was a Day Reaper.
“May I come in?” Ronnie asked. She twitched her head up and to the side, looking down the hall. Then she twitched her attention back to me.
I opened my mouth, automatically about to invite her inside, and then I snapped my mouth shut. This was Ronnie, sure, but she was also a vampire.
I peeked down the hall where she’d been looking, but the hallway was empty. “Are you running from something?”
She rubbed her hands together methodically, worrying the scabbed skin at her knuckles. The movement reminded me of a fly.
This is Ronnie, I reminded myself, and although I couldn’t let her in, I couldn’t be rude either. I patted the silver knife in my leather satchel, assuring myself of its presence. I’d always preferred silver nitrate spray over weapons that could be turned against me, but I didn’t have Walker in my corner anymore. Without Walker, I didn’t have a ready supply of silver nitrate. I still wore a vial of Dominic’s blood on a necklace around my neck, but that was useful only if my other weapons failed. If I was injured, assuming I survived an attack, I could heal myself with his blood, but I had to be very careful. If I lost too much of my own blood, using his blood to heal myself would transform me into a vampire. Although, considering that the blood pumping through my veins was no longer night blood, Dominic’s blood might actually kill me now before it saved me.
Against my better judgment—with only my knife, silver jewelry, and crossed fingers to keep Ronnie at bay—I stepped across the threshold and joined her in the hallway.
“What’s wrong, Ronnie? What are you doing here?” I frowned at the fear and gaunt lines etching her face. “Does the Master of New York City know you’re here?”
Ronnie shook her head frantically. “No, Lysander doesn’t know I’m here. No one knows.”
Lysander! His last name filled half the gap in my mind. It wasn’t great, but anything was better than nothing. I’d take what I could get. “Then what’s going on?” I asked, focusing on Ronnie.
She tried to swallow. I could see her throat struggling to move before she succumbed to a bout of racking coughs. When the coughing subsided, she rasped, “I need help.”
“I know.” I reached out a hand to pat her back and froze. Her eyes caught my movement. Her head twitched, and her gaze focused with unwavering intensity on my wrist. I let my hand drop back down to my side. She looked at me again, pathetic and still trembling, and I sighed. “You haven’t visited Walker, have you?”
Ronnie shook her head.
“I know it’s hard. Walker, the house, the night bloods: they were your family. And now,” I stared at Ronnie and swallowed, “now, everything’s changed. It’s a huge adjustment, an unthinkable adjustment, but it happened. You have to move on from Walker, move on from that life, and make a new life for yourself with other vampires. Have you talked to anyone about it?”
She shook her head again.
“They were night bloods once too, you know. That’s something you have in common,” I said, trying and failing miserably to be positive. She’d been attacked and transformed against her will, not spending time in day care. She shouldn’t have to find something in common with her attackers. She shouldn’t have to try to make friends.
“It’s not just me,” Ronnie said. She looked over her shoulder and down the hallway again.
I followed her gaze, but the hallway was still empty. I glanced at my watch and suppressed a sigh. I was already late to the crime scene. I didn’t have time to play therapist, not even for Ronnie.
“You really need to eat something. You don’t look well,” I said, unthinkingly, and then I held up a hand. “But not here. Eat something on your way home, after you’ve left the city. I have enough crime here without you feeding, too.” I narrowed my eyes on her, remembering how she had struggled with the powers that came so naturally to other vampires. “Can you entrance a human?”
Ronnie growled. I didn’t recognize it at first because it was higher and threadier than the deep, clicking rumble I was accustomed to hearing from other vampires, but even higher pitched and softer around the edges, it still spiked the hairs at the back of my neck to attention.
I rummaged in my leather satchel for the hilt of my silver knife, wishing it were silver nitrate spray. I could stab Ronnie if I needed to. If it came down to her or me, I’d choose me, no question, but I didn’t want to. I couldn’t imagine the frail, kind woman I’d known, now a vampire, reduced to nothing but ash.
My breath caught as my thoughts drifted to Rene, Bex’s Second and the only vampire I’d ever witnessed crumble to ash from a silver broadhead to the heart. I swallowed down the pressure in my throat, compacted the ache deep in my chest, and slammed the lid shut on the burning behind my eyelids until my feelings were once again locked into a very tiny box. I couldn’t deal with the nightmares of my past now when Ronnie was standing before me here in the present, a living nightmare right in front of me.
“Ronnie,” I said, the warning in my tone sharp, “don’t do this.”
“You’re not listening,” she said, clearly distraught, but still growling and still inching closer.
“Calm down, and I’ll listen.”
“You don’t understand. We’re all like this.” She raised her hand, and her fingernails had pointed to claws. They didn’t lengthen to talons, like Lysander’s—the frustration of not knowing his full name still stung—but they could still do some serious damage against my easily wounded, human skin.
“I’m your friend, but I will hurt you before I let you hurt me. Do you understand?”
Ronnie stopped inching closer. “Hurt you? Why would I . . .” she began, and then she saw her own hand, raised and clawed, and dawning horror broke over her expression. “I won’t hurt you. This is just how my hand is. This is how I look now.”
“It doesn’t have to look that way, not if you would eat properly. But like I said, not here.” I relaxed my grip on the knife now that she’d stopped advancing.
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you,” she snapped, and then she closed her eyes, took a long, deep breath, and retreated a step. Her claws rounded to nails again, and when she opened her eyes, her expression, although still haunting, was less frantic. “We’re all weak. We don’t know how to use our vampire senses to our benefit. I heard a bird squawking while I was deep underground, within my room in Bex’s coven.”
“Well, you have exceptional hearing now,” I said.
Ronnie shook her head. “It was the sound of Keagan’s annoyance at the grate of my voice. I never even knew he thought of my voice as grating. I never knew someone’s annoyance had a sound, let alone that it sounded like a squawking bird.”
I nodded knowingly. “I’m sure it’s confusing, but you’ll get the hang of it. You have lifetimes to get used to it,” I said half-jokingly, trying to make light of her situation.
She stared at me with her crazy, otherworldly eyes, and I swallowed my jokes.
“I won’t have another week, let alone lifetimes, if I can’t eat,” she said. “None of us will. I don’t want to hurt anyone. You remember what happened to your wrist when I drank from you?”
“Well, yes, but—”
“I can’t heal a wound, so if I bite someone’s neck, they’ll die. Even if I managed not to kill them, I can’t use mind
control to make them forget the attack.” She touched my arm. I flinched, but she didn’t hurt me. She was reaching out. She was trembling. “We need help. None of us can do this except you.”
“Me? How can I help? I’m not a vampire.” I’m not even a night blood anymore, I thought, but Lysander and I had both agreed it was best to keep that knowledge between the two of us.
“We’re vampires, and we can’t use mind control,” Ronnie whispered, her voice soft and sincere and so damn hopeful it gave me goose bumps. “But you’re only a night blood, and you can entrance vampires. Please, Cassidy, you have to help us.”
I narrowed my eyes and focused on the one word in her argument that I could legitimately argue back. “ ‘Us’? Who are you referring to besides yourself?”
“Keagan, Jeremy, Theresa, and Logan. We were all in the house the day Bex attacked and transformed us.”
I breathed in sharply. Although that was exactly what I’d suspected had happened the night I’d returned from Bex’s coven to Walker’s empty house, having my suspicions confirmed was like a stake through the heart. I’d saved my brother during that fateful visit to Walker’s hometown, but the events that had unfolded because of my visit had irrevocably destroyed two families and the home that Walker had built literally with his own hands. I wouldn’t undo saving my brother even if I had the power to turn back time, but looking at Ronnie, at the sorrow in her eyes in her corpsey face, I could regret everything that happened to Ronnie and Keagan and all the other night bloods. I wouldn’t take it back, but I regretted it.
I reached out—wanting to help, needing to comfort—but before I could touch Ronnie’s shoulder or squeeze her hand in support, she twitched her head sideways, eyeing my arm like a bird will its prey.
I let my hand drop. The Ronnie I might comfort and support was dead and in her place was a creature that fed from my blood, and I couldn’t forget that. “Are you certain Bex was the vampire who attacked you?”
“Of course I’m certain,” Ronnie said, her voice rising in exasperation. “I saw her face, plain as day.”
“Keep your voice down,” I hushed. “The night has hundreds of ears, and that is not something we want everyone to overhear.”
“She might be your ally through your precious Dominic, but I don’t owe her a goddamn thing,” Ronnie snapped. “She attacked us, transformed us, and left us to die in her coven. I’m by far the weakest of the five of us, but we all need help harnessing our new abilities. We won’t survive much longer without your help, Cassidy, please. I’m begging you.”
Dominic! My mind soaked the name deep into my memory, fully refilling the gap from his command. I remembered his name again. Dominic Lysander, I thought to myself and smiled in relief. I finally felt whole again.
“This isn’t funny,” Ronnie said, and her voice cracked. She was near tears.
“No, it’s not.” I wiped the smile from my face. “Have you talked to Bex about any of this?” I asked, and Ronnie’s expression hardened. I held up a hand. “Not about you coming here. About harnessing your senses and mind control.”
“How can I talk to her when she’s not there?” Ronnie said slowly and loudly, like one might speak to the elderly.
I blinked. “What do you mean, she’s not there? You haven’t seen her lately?”
“I haven’t seen her at all. No one has since the day you transformed Nathan back from the Damned. She’s gone.”
I raised my eyebrows. “No one knows where she is? Not anyone?”
“I can think of only two people who might know where she’s hiding: Rene and Ian.”
My heart ached at the mention of Rene, but I ignored it. “Walker and I aren’t speaking.”
“Well, Ian and I certainly aren’t on speaking terms either,” Ronnie said, exasperated.
“I doubt she’d leave her coven unprotected,” I said skeptically.
Ronnie shook her head. “We’re not unprotected. In fact, it’s just the opposite. There are several aged, very powerful vampires keeping order in her absence. No one knows where she’s gone, but everyone was prepared.”
“That’s good. Maybe one of those vampires could—”
“They’re busy being Master by proxy, and I don’t know them, Cassidy. They’re vicious and evil and horrible and—” Ronnie’s voice broke. She took several deep breaths before she was able to compose herself again. “They’re vampires.”
“Well,” I said softly, very softly, “so are you.”
“They’re not my friends. I don’t know them. The only thing I do know about them is that they’ve attacked and killed people. They’re animals. You’re my friend, Cassidy, and I need your help. Please, teach me to harness my vampire abilities.”
I rubbed my forehead, an expanding headache throbbing between my eyebrows. “I’ll do what I can, but to be honest, I don’t know if mind control is the same for vampires as it is for me. I barely know how I do it myself.”
“Anything you can teach me is more than I know now,” she said, the hope in her expression overflowing.
“I can think of another person who might know where Bex would hide,” I said thoughtfully. “And he might be able to help you harness your abilities better than me.”
Ronnie’s expression fell flat. “No.”
“Formally introducing you to Dominic is a good thing. You’ll have a resource if something ever happens to Bex.”
“Something has happened to Bex!”
“Don’t jump to conclusions, but that’s exactly why you should meet Dominic. He’s your ally. He can help, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned over the past month, it’s that you need to gather as many allies as possible and surround yourself with them like Kevlar.”
“I don’t want more vampires involved. No one knows I’m here. I just need your help, no one else’s, and especially not Lysander’s.”
I dropped my arms to my side and shrugged. “I’ll do what I can,” I muttered, feeling defeated. How could I teach anyone mind control when I’d lost the ability to do it myself?
“Thank you, thank you, thank you!” Ronnie shouted in a litany. She launched herself at me and wrapped her arms around my neck.
I patted her back carefully, wincing at the feel of her bony ribs through her tissue-paper skin. “You’re welcome. I’ll see you back here tomorrow night. Meet me on the rooftop.”
She pulled back. “Tomorrow? But I thought—”
“I was just on my way out. I have business tonight, but I’ll see you tomorrow.” I stared into her eyes, trying to decipher what else was wrong, what else I was missing, but I couldn’t see anything in those otherworldly, swirling orbs except my own reflection. “Okay?”
Ronnie was struggling with something. She bit her lip, and since she was still unaccustomed to having fangs, one punctured her skin. I watched it embed in her lip and winced for her, but she didn’t even blink. She just licked at the wound and stared at me, trying to find the words.
“Okay?” I pushed, feeling bad that I was pushing at all, but if I didn’t show my face at Harry Maze Playground tonight, Carter would have my ass on a platter.
She nodded. “All right. I’ll see you here tomorrow night.”
“On the rooftop,” I reminded her.
“On the rooftop,” she murmured back, and I wondered if maybe I hadn’t lost my mind-control abilities. Ronnie had always been meek and compliant, even as a night blood, but I was missing something. Judging by the lost, frantic expression on Ronnie’s face as I walked away, that something was big. For the life of me, though, as I rounded the corner of the hall, the same corner that Ronnie had kept in her peripheral vision, I couldn’t see any holes I’d missed.
Nothing sprang out from around the corner as I turned toward the elevator. Nothing attacked me as the elevator doors opened, and Ronnie didn’t stop the elevator doors from closing as I left, but it didn’t matter if I couldn’t see the hole. Unseen, it would still leak until I was drowning. By then, even if I found the leak, it’d be too late.
After over five years of investigative journalism, I knew that no matter how big or small, a missing piece to the puzzle was the piece that inevitably got people killed.
Chapter 4
Harry Maze Playground was still in massive chaos when I turned the corner onto East 56th Street. Detective Greta Wahl and her team were efficient and diligent and damn good at their jobs, but assessing them on this scene alone, I would have thought rookies were running the show. Barriers hadn’t been properly established, and members of the media were going wild, snapping close-ups of victims, trampling across the playground to snag statements, and wrestling one another to interview witnesses.
Five years ago, I might have joined the mob. I might have elbowed my way into the thick of it, shouting questions at sobbing victims and scrapping for quotes, but my hip couldn’t tolerate that kind of pressure. If someone threw an elbow my way—based on the groans and grunts and sway of the mob, I’d say more than a few elbows were landing on target—I didn’t have the strength to elbow back. I’d easily become one of the victims being trampled. Since I couldn’t join the big boys in the trenches anymore, I had to snake along the sidelines and fight my battle more strategically.
Even without a busted hip, evidently Meredith felt the same way. I caught her speaking to two women sitting on the curb next to an ambulance. Judging from the yellow tags around their wrists and the fact that they hadn’t been loaded into the ambulance for immediate transport to the hospital, there must be other, more critical victims on scene for the medics to triage.
I stepped forward to join Meredith at the ambulance when someone caught my arm. I turned to set straight whoever was manhandling me, but the hand belonged to Officer Harroway. His grin, as usual, was part genuine and part mischief. If the gleam in his baby blue eyes was any indication, I’d say mischief won the majority.
Officer Harroway was a handsome, block-jawed, stubborn man. He never knew when to stop teasing or when a joke was more inappropriate than funny, and our shared history only made his inability to resist a joke at my expense that much more frustrating.
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