In the hallway Nolan asked, “Will they remember more as time passes?”
“Yes,” Damian said.
“Yes,” Echo said.
“Why do neither of you sound happy about that?” I asked.
“Would you want to remember any of this?” Echo asked.
I looked into her lovely blue eyes, and said, “Hell, no.”
“Some people don’t ever remember their first night,” Fortune said. “Maybe they won’t either.”
“Edna Brady already remembers most of it.”
“The man doesn’t.”
“The best chance we have of finding the vampire that is doing this is to start with the teenage girls. One of them was the first victim. She’ll remember the most about the one that created her,” Echo said.
“They found Sinead Royce’s family,” Superintendent Pearson said. He’d come in late and mostly just monitored us. He didn’t want to see either of the victims in person. He was having a lot of trouble coping with them as vampires when he’d seen them alive and looking for their daughter just days ago.
“Your face says it’s not good news,” I said.
He shook his head. “The whole family was so brutally attacked that none of them rose as vampires.”
“How can you be sure?” Echo asked.
“They’re starting to rot.”
“Sinead had two younger brothers, as well as the parents,” Pearson said.
“Where were the bodies found?” Edward asked.
“In a shed three houses over. The smell alerted the neighbors.”
“Where were the owners of the house?” I asked.
“In the shed,” he said.
“I take it that they won’t be rising as vamps either.”
“No.”
“Is this the most victims that were torn up too badly to rise as the undead?” Echo asked.
“That we’ve found, yes.”
“Maybe it’s a clue,” I said.
“A clue to what?” Edward asked.
“I have no fucking idea, but it’s something different in the pattern and different is something.”
“Do you want to go look at the shed?” he asked.
“No.”
He smiled. “Want to go look for clues in a shed that was full of decomposing bodies?”
“When you put it that way, how can I resist?”
59
WE NEVER GOT to investigate the shed. Some of the neighbors decided that it must be evil, or full of some disease that was ravaging their town, so they set it on fire. We got to watch the fire department do its job, but that didn’t help us find a clue to what, or who, was spreading vampirism like a summer cold through Dublin.
In fact, everywhere we went that night, there were no clues, only more victims. Either the victims that the newly risen had attacked or the new vampires themselves, who weren’t much better at being vampires than Edna and Michael Brady. One thing was different about almost all of the newly risen, though: Once they took blood, they stopped being dangerous. They couldn’t always remember anything, but they were more coherent than any newbie vampires I’d ever met. They also looked more normally human.
“What bloodline is this?” I asked Echo and Fortune.
“I do not know,” Echo said, and Fortune just shook her head.
Kaazim and Jake didn’t know either. Since between the four of them they’d seen thousands of years of vampires, we were well and truly clueless. Eventually we got sent back to our hotel for sleep and food, but I was too tired to eat. The jet lag had finally caught up with me in a major way. As Nicky opened the door, I leaned beside it and stared at the opposite wall as Domino and Ethan opened the next door. Magda and Giacomo were on the other side of them. They’d left the three vampires at Nolan’s compound with its one working cell. Magda made a comment about the three new vamps tearing up the cell they were in the way she had done to the other one: “They have not the will, nor the training yet. The cell will be sufficient for the newly risen who are untrained in combat.”
I thought that was interesting wording and texted Edward to tell Nolan that they might need special accommodations for any vamps who had military, martial arts, or other physically trained backgrounds. He was staying at the compound with Nolan. Apparently there were living quarters there, though Magda said calling them apartments would be too much; they were more like barracks. Since I’d never been in the real military before, I didn’t actually understand the difference, but I was too tired to ask for an explanation. No, I was so tired, I didn’t care what the explanation was; that was the truth.
Fortune and Echo were beside us on this side of the hallway. Socrates had decided to stay at Nolan’s in the barracks, to continue to foster goodwill and to learn as much as he could about what the plans were for the paramilitary group. That left Pride in a room by himself, or sharing with Dev. Jake and Kaazim were bunkmates, but somehow if Socrates had been there, we’d have been short a bed. Nicky had bunked next door with Pride for the nap earlier, but I didn’t want to give up Nicky for the whole trip. I just didn’t. I was in love with him, and other than Nathaniel, that wasn’t true of anyone else on the trip with me. I liked some of my people very much, and was wildly attracted to others, but it wasn’t “in love.” This tired after the night we’d just had, being held by people you truly loved sounded just about perfect.
My phone rang as Nicky got the door open. It was Jean-Claude’s ringtone, so I answered as Nicky held the door for me. “Hey, tall, pale, and handsome, what’s up?”