by Sierra Dean
I didn’t have the most warm and fuzzy memories of being down here, considering last time I made the trip it involved seeing my ex-boyfriend get his spine ripped out by a demon.
Literally.
Since Harry wasn’t here in an official FBI role—no badge—Mercedes couldn’t let him join us. Rules were rules. He was upstairs in an interrogation room, waiting for us. I hoped.
Emilio and I waited in silence as the heavy metal door closed and locked behind us, and an inner door into Davos’s cell swung outward. We stepped into the room, but the entrance remained open. They needed to be able to get inside in a hurry if shit went south.
Davos was seated on a cot, which was bolted to the floor. He was chained to the cot with a set of arm and leg shackles made of a silver and iron composite. It wouldn’t burn his skin, but it was uncomfortable and couldn’t easily be broken.
Lily had designed them.
Emilio and I sat on two chairs bolted to the floor on the opposite wall, out of Davos’s reach.
The vampire sneered when he saw me. “Missed me already?”
I wanted to throw up in my mouth.
“Where did you take Ingrid?” I had zero chill and absolutely no patience. It was a miracle I wasn’t throttling him right now.
“Who?”
He tried to come across as cool and dispassionate, but I wasn’t buying it. He was stuck, and he might not be willing to answer my questions, but we both knew he had the information I wanted.
“Playing stupid doesn’t suit you,” I told him.
“It’s more your forte, I agree.”
“Tell us where the woman is,” Emilio said, guessing correctly I was on the verge of murdering Davos with my bare hands.
“Yesterday you wanted to know about the vampire. Now you want to know about the girl. You should keep better track of your people, Ms. McQueen.”
I ignored his mention of Sig for the moment, sensing he was baiting me. I didn’t want to let him know what I had figured out in the car. “Then let’s talk about those men of yours who attacked me earlier today.”
He shrugged. “It’s a dangerous city. Women get attacked all the time. I was in here, and I’m sure your lovely detective friend can confirm I didn’t leave.”
Still, someone had instructed those men to come after me, and they’d gotten that message from Davos.
Emilio flipped through a file in his lap. “I find it interesting your lawyer came to see you twice in such a short span of time, between last night and the dawn.”
“I pay him handsomely for his services.”
“And how long has he been providing those services?” I asked pointedly. Glancing at the guest record in Emilio’s hand, I punched the lawyer’s name into my phone.
I could not have been less surprised by the photo looking back at me. Davos’s lawyer, one Beckett Howe, was also a dead ringer for a man I had seen in the old photos of Davos’s speeches in Georgia.
Thanks to his daytime servant bond, Howe looked exactly the same as I recalled him from those photos.
Now I knew how Davos was getting his messages out.
And I had another good reason to not like lawyers.
“I know why you took Sig,” I snarled at him. Well, so much for keeping that card up my sleeve.
“You don’t know anything,” Davos replied coolly. “Whatever you think you’ve figured out, you’re just a fool.”
“Buddy, I looked Belphegor right in the eye while I blew off the head of another demon.”
That shut Davos up. He glared at me, but I noticed he wasn’t in a hurry to call me an idiot anymore.
“Tell me where he is.”
“If you know what I’m doing, then you know it’s bigger than me. Bigger than Sig. Than any of us. It can’t be stopped now.”
“Then tell us where the girl is,” Emilio prodded. I noticed he changed from calling her a woman to a girl, to match Davos’s own phrasing. He was trying to create a connection.
“She’s not buried,” he said. “Yet.”
Great. Vampire riddles. My favorite.
“Davos, you don’t need to do this.” I was trying to appeal to his common sense now, if he had any. “Belphegor is already risen. Sacrificing Sig isn’t necessary.”
A cold smile spread over Davos’s lips.
“If Belphegor is already here, then he can be the first to welcome the rest of Hell with open arms. And you, little one, you can be the first to burn.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
I dropped my car back at the apartment building, since it was walking distance from the vampire club, and the three of us made our way over to the scene of the previous night’s kerfuffle. The door was still blocked off by yellow police tape, but with no one around to tell me not to go in, I ducked under the tape and through the unlocked front door.
We had two FBI badges between the three of us, and Emilio had his fancy bag of weapons, so I wasn’t worried about trespassing charges.
I was still shaking from what Davos had told us at the police station. He was a fucking lunatic who just wanted to watch the world burn.
You couldn’t use logic in a fight against madness.
But he’d said I had walked over Ingrid, and the only place he’d known I had walked was the club. So even though I was low on good ideas right now, I was taking the maniac literally.
Inside, the air felt heavy and thick, like the place had been neglected for years, rather than days. It made me wonder how much of what I’d seen the night before had been a result of vampire thrall. The effect didn’t work on me one-on-one, but there was a certain magic created by the thrall that impacted humans naturally. It kept them away from places they shouldn’t be, or in the case of the bar, might make something feel more alluring than it really was.
A bare bulb was lit in the middle of the room, and dust motes floated down from the ceiling like someone had recently given the old velvet curtains on the walls a good shake. The farther into the room we got, the more that sense of age and decay crept out from every corner. Yet for the most part the building looked clean and well kept.
It was just that yesterday there had been an invitation, and today the place was telling us to get out.
Sort of amazing what a little supernatural power of suggestion could do.
We wandered around for a few minutes, because I honestly wasn’t sure what we were looking for. Now that I knew Davos was planning to use Sig for the ceremony, it was too much to hope we would find him here, but this was obviously a place designed for Davos and his crew, the secret panel behind the bathroom stalls told me as much.
Which meant there had to be something here to connect him to the New York cult and perhaps give me some indication where they might have Sig or Ingrid. They had to be keeping them somewhere before the ceremony, right?
“See if you can find stairs somewhere. This place must have an upper or lower level, and I think we’ll find something there.”
“Something like this?” Harry asked, pulling back one of the thick curtains to reveal a heavy metal door.
“Seriously, dude, I could kiss you. You’re coming on every mission, forever. Emilio, let’s get him a badge.”
“No,” Emilio replied.
“You’re no fun,” Harry replied.
The door was locked, but Emilio was about two hundred times better at lock-picking than I was, and using two slim metal picks he pulled from his watch, he was quickly able to release the latch on the door, which opened towards us to reveal a dark, stone staircase that headed down.
Ugh.
Why did our searches always have to involve creepy stone staircases? Just once couldn’t my job take me to a nice, brightly lit room that smelled like a Bath & Body Works?
It’s like they weren’t creating these spaces to be comfortable and inviting, or something.
Almost like they were evil.
I engaged the flashlight on my phone and took the first step down the stairs, with the others right at my heels. At least if s
omething jumped out at me, I wouldn’t be the only one screaming.
Okay, so one of the dudes behind me was a demon and the other was a mercenary. There was a good chance I would probably still be the only one screaming.
We leveled out about twenty steps down, and the air was so much cooler it felt like entering a meat locker. There was no light aside from my little flashlight, but that gave me enough illumination to show me what we were facing down here.
The stairs stopped at a long hallway, and on either side were rooms with the same heavy metal doors we had seen at the top. Each one had a small, dark window in it, and I would have cut off my tit to not need to get face-to-face with those windows to see what was inside. That was way too obvious of a horror movie setup for my taste.
Yet I was here because people were missing, and these rooms were most definitely used to house people inside.
“I don’t like this,” Emilio said.
“There is literally nothing about this to like.”
Suddenly the room was flooded with light to the point I had to blink it away I was so surprised. I turned around to see Harry standing next to a light switch giving me the most incredulous look.
“What is the deal with you guys? You stalk around in the dark, all doom and gloom. Do any of you ever think there might be a light?”
Emilio glanced at me. “I guess if you go into enough rooms without lights, you start to assume no rooms have lights.”
“Well, stop being dummies and keep looking for lights. Yeesh.”
I turned off the flashlight on my phone and set about checking each of the doors to see if they were locked. Even with the lights on, this wasn’t a task I particularly relished. I expected someone to fly at the door and start pounding the glass every time I peered through one of the windows. But they all appeared empty, at least as far as I could tell from their unlit interiors.
I was starting to feel like we’d arrived at the party long after it was finished, and instead of a dance with the guest of honor, all we were going to find was a bunch of deflated balloons and champagne-soaked confetti.
There was nothing here we were looking for.
I got to the last door and was shocked to find that the handle turned easily under the light pressure from my grip. I pulled it open, and on the floor, lying still as death, was the unmistakable blonde form of Ingrid.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Finding Ingrid on the floor in the unlocked cell was almost too much for my poor brain to process.
It seemed beyond hope or reason that she should be there, precisely the place we were looking.
And yet, there she was.
“I found her,” I called out.
As Emilio and Harry rushed to join me, I stumbled into the room, falling to my knees next to her still body. I flinched as my knee reminded me I had taken a crowbar to it not that long ago, but I shoved the pain aside and put my hand on Ingrid. She was, unexpectedly, warm to the touch.
I felt for a pulse and found one.
Was this fucking Christmas? How was it even possible we were getting this lucky?
Gently I rolled her onto her back and double-checked her pulse to confirm I hadn’t imagined it the first time. I felt her chest rise and fall.
“She’s alive,” I announced, letting out a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding since I’d entered the room. “She’s alive.”
I squeezed her shoulder and gave her the gentlest of shakes. “Ingrid, can you hear me?”
Harry stood in the doorway, which was pretty much the only place I was comfortable with him being, considering he had a habit of jumping into near-death bodies and didn’t want him thinking Ingrid’s was on the market. Emilio knelt on the opposite side of Ingrid and was checking her vitals as I continued to nudge her.
I could tell she had a pulse, but Emilio actually understood the meaning of what he was feeling.
“Pulse is strong. I think she’s in okay shape,” he said.
Since she wasn’t responding to me, I started inspecting her body for wounds, which would have annoyed the shit out of her if she was conscious. If she wanted to stop me, she should open her eyes.
There had been an unbelievable amount of blood left behind at her apartment, and at least some of it must have been hers. I lifted her shirt, and sure enough she was covered in partially healed knife wounds. I showed Emilio, and he let out a low whistle. She had to have been stabbed over two dozen times based on the marks I could see, and no doubt more were out of sight, hidden beneath other pieces of clothing.
The clothes she was wearing were pristine, though. She’d been given knew ones, and had been healed since she was here.
Sig had been in this basement—maybe even at the same time I was upstairs the previous night—but he had been refusing to cooperate with Davos’s plan to raise the demons. Suddenly I knew exactly how this had all played out.
Davos must attacked Ingrid in order to get Sig to back down on his initial death warrant. It was the only logical reason for Sig to have told Shane to back down. Davos would have shown Sig evidence of what had been done to Ingrid, and told him to call off the warrant or she would die. Then, when it was time to release her, Davos double-crossed the Tribunal leader, and taking advantage of him being alone and emotionally unbalanced, managed to get him to turn himself over to the cult in order to save her..
I could picture the scene in my mind. Ingrid, bloody and dying, and Davos would have said something like, “Agree to my terms and I’ll let you save her.”
And Sig had.
He would have done almost anything to keep Ingrid alive.
I don’t know a lot about love, but after seven hundred years together, Ingrid was the closest thing to the love of his life that Sig would ever have. He wouldn’t let her die if there was a way he could save her. He would have agreed to Davos’s stupid terms in a heartbeat.
Which meant that somewhere out in the Manhattan night the mindless followers of a vampire cult now had a willing sacrificial lamb in a two-thousand-year-old master vampire.
Ingrid moaned and instinctively batted my hands away, pushing down the hem of her shirt. It took a moment or two longer before she opened her eyes, and then, in a flash, a wave of panic hit her. Suddenly she was sitting up and scrambling backwards, her arms raised in a gesture of self-preservation.
She was right back at the last thing she remembered.
And the last thing she remembered was almost dying.
“Ingrid.”
She’d wedged herself into a corner of the room next to a metal cot, her feet kicking out blindly to keep us at bay. I wasn’t sure how far gone she’d been when Sig had brought her back. If she’d been teetering into the afterlife, there was a very real possibility this version of Ingrid wasn’t going to be all there.
“Ingrid,” I repeated. “It’s Secret.”
As quickly as she’d turned on her fight-or-flight response, she went still, lowering her hands from in front of her face and staring at me like she didn’t quite believe what she was seeing.
“Secret?”
I waved a little pathetically.
A calmness came over her, and almost instantly she was Ingrid again. The Ingrid I knew. As if the panic were a jacket she had simply been able to shrug off.
She glanced around the room, her face wrinkling in unmasked disgust as she remembered where she was. Then her eyes widened as if she had just recalled a buried memory, and she asked, “Where’s Sig? Did they take him?”
“We’re trying to figure that out, but we need your help,” I said. “What do you remember?”
“For the last four days, that asshole Davos Kent has been bloodletting me like a goddamn medical experiment. He drains me to the point of near death, making Sig watch, then gives me a transfusion to bring me back.” She held up her arm where there were bruise marks from repeated needle pricks. “For the last few nights he’d also been dosing me with something that kept me really woozy. Tonight, they decided they were done playing games
and just started cutting into me. They told him he had one shot to save me. I guess it worked.”
“How did they even get you here?”
“I was sort of out of it when they took me from the apartment, but the men working for Davos aren’t shy about their chatter. Seems like this club is connected to the subway line underneath. They can come and go unseen that way.”
Which explained why the cops watching the club hadn’t seen anyone move Sig. He’d been taken underground.
“Do you remember them taking Sig, or saying anything about where they were going?”
“I know the guys holding me wouldn’t stop talking about a ceremony. Some great demon uprising, blah, blah, blah.”
“Yeah, I think Sig has something to do with that.”
I gave a condensed rundown of the theory I had come up with moments earlier, and was impressed that no one tried to argue or disagree. A hundred points for the obvious answer.
“This is all my fault,” she said, peeking under her shirt to look at the healing wounds, then letting the blouse fall back into place. “And whatever they were giving me for drugs, that’s in him now too. He’s strong, but that stuff will keep him fucked up for awhile.”
Her usually tidy blonde braid was in a state of absolute disarray. This was the first time I’d ever seen Ingrid look anything less than a hundred percent poised. It was jarring. I didn’t like it. Of course, I also wasn’t a big fan of someone trying to murder her.
Ingrid and I were never going to be friends. She didn’t like how much attention Sig paid to me, ironically, because I think she believed it made him weak. Now she understood that I was not Sig’s only weakness.
“You can’t blame yourself for this,” I told her. “They were going to find a way to make him do it, one way or another. You just happened to be the most convenient option.”
“I don’t understand you.” She got to her feet. “You had their strength, you had their healing, and you gave it all up. How can you be content to just be human? These bodies make us weak. They make us targets.”
Oh great, I should have her team up with Desmond so I could start hearing this song everywhere I went. “In case you’ve forgotten, I was pretty much always a target. No one cares if you’re immortal when they want to kill you. They’re going to try to do it no matter what.”
