“Okay, this is getting ridiculous!” Dawna finally exclaimed, exasperation plain in her voice. She grabbed my hand and shoved the yellow bottle into it. “You. Drink this before you go nuts. It’s been nearly four hours since you ate and you exerted yourself with that robber. Hold your nose if you have to.” She turned to Jones.
“You. Tell them why Kevin might die and what facility he’s at. I’m going to go back inside the mall and get us all something to eat. Apparently it’s going to be a long night—whether you plan to take me and Emma along with you or if we’re just waiting by the phone.” With that, she turned and started to jog back toward the mall entrance.
I shuddered and blinked and then grimaced at the bottle. She was right, of course, but I didn’t have to like it. Jones was already starting to look yummy, and that would be counterproductive on a number of fronts. I twisted off the lid, held my nose, and literally poured the drink down my throat, successfully avoiding most of my taste buds. I managed not to choke or gag, which was a plus.
Jones sighed, then opened the back door of the car and pulled out a sealed four-pack of chocolate Ensure, still in shrink-wrap. He tossed it toward me, but I let the bottles hit the ground at my feet. I’d wait for Dawna. Her I trust.
Emma spoke, her voice filled with anger fueled by fear: “Where is my brother? You still haven’t told me. You owe him your life, you know.”
“Several times over,” Jones agreed. “But I still find it difficult to believe Celia doesn’t already know the details. I thought all you’d have to do is mention you ‘saw’ the capture and she’d be racing to his side.”
“Believe it,” said a new voice. I jumped. I couldn’t help it. Even with my super new senses I hadn’t heard our newest member approaching. Damn it. I hate it when real vampires join the party. I hissed and moved back as Edgar, an extraordinarily powerful vampire, simply appeared in the shadow of a nearby palm tree.
If you saw Edgar walking the streets of L.A., you’d assume he was an ordinary businessman on his way home from the office. As long as you didn’t catch sight of the fangs peeking out from under his upper lip, you’d never have a clue he was the most dangerous person in a fifty mile radius. The fact that he was out in nearly broad daylight told me he was even more powerful than I’d realized, and I’d already put him at nearly the top of the list.
“She’s not lying, John. I’d know.”
Jones and Edgar were on a first name basis? Terrific. Why wasn’t I surprised?
Jones hadn’t even flinched when Edgar arrived, which meant he’d either invited him or could sense him. “She’s his Vaso, Edgar. She has to know. She’s blocking the connection or lying.”
“Vaso.” The word rang a bell, but it had been too long since lycanthrope cultural studies in college, so I turned to the resident expert, Emma. My questioning look made her nod and respond with lecturelike precision. “A werewolf often chooses a human partner, called a Vaso, to maintain its energy level. Excess energy is one of the leading causes of off-moon shifting and aggressive tendencies. In order for a werewolf to maintain a human appearance in normal society, the energy must be bled off periodically.”
Okay, that made sense. “Meaning Kevin has a Vaso, since he worked in IT at the university for a couple of years and nobody but us ever caught on that he’s a werewolf.”
She nodded. “Kevin always hinted that you served that role.”
That was news to me. He and I had never really talked about his condition. “Wouldn’t I know? I mean, that’s sort of personal, isn’t it?”
Jones cut in. “Precisely, because the partnership isn’t just a physical thing but a mental link. The human has to know where and when to find the wolf when he needs to have energy drained. So, you should know where he is.”
“But it makes no sense that I’d be the Vaso. Even when we were speaking, we barely spoke, and I sure as hell didn’t come running at his command.” I’d considered him one of my closest friends, but we weren’t close in the commonly understood sense. “Since when do you two chat? I thought Edgar was a hard target and you were hunting him.”
The organization Kevin had worked for in the past, and had gone back to work for recently, was some sort of quasi-governmental agency that ran black ops and hunted supernatural criminals—hard targets.
Edgar shrugged. “We live in a world of shifting alliances. Now that you’re out of play I figured helping get Landingham out will make him less likely to actively hunt me.”
Jones nodded and reached into the car to pull out a file folder. “Hewitt here is one of the best there is at getting inside locked buildings and removing people. So he’s useful even if he’s no longer affiliated with the Company.”
I was confident I didn’t want to know the history of either statement, so I didn’t reply or ask for details. But it was handy to know Edgar’s last name. It made him feel, oddly, like less of a threat. Weird.
“Besides,” he added, instantly quashing the whole idea of him being less than a threat, “I wasn’t there when you killed either Lilith or Luther, Celia, And I’m very curious about just how tough you are.”
In other words, did I do it alone or had it taken an army to kill two vamps, one more than a thousand years old? I didn’t answer, just raised my brows. Luther I’d done myself, but a devout reverend had held Lilith at bay with a glowing cross while I tossed a magical knife at her. Edgar had never seen my knives and I wasn’t about to share the details. Let him wonder. Just like he was letting me wonder how he had so much intelligence. That wasn’t supposed to be possible for vampires. How was he sane and smart enough to trust in an operation? And how had he traveled to the parking lot while it was still daylight? It was nearly sunset, and he was keeping to the shadows, but still.
My sire had been powerful enough to be able to be awake in daylight, but he couldn’t be out in it. Could Edgar? That was a very disturbing thought.
“If you’re done having a ‘who’s tougher’ lovefest, could we get on with saving my brother before he’s dead?” Emma’s voice was as sharp and angry as I’d ever heard it. Not that she had the right to be. We’d been shopping for the better part of three hours and she hadn’t said a word. So now it was my fault? I raised my brows at her and she blushed.
Jones handed me the manila folder and I flipped it open. Emma was beside me instantly, her golden hair brushing my arm in contrast to my own pale blonde as she leaned in to read the documents inside.
There were stacks of paper paper-clipped together and I quickly realized that they were dossiers of people. The first was for Ronald Tarnique, father of two pretty dark-haired girls. I frowned as I read about his perfectly normal life. What was I missing? “Okay, so he was a corporate executive for one of the major charities, nice house, good income, happy family. So?”
Jones flipped to the final page of Tarnique’s dossier. It was a court order sentencing Tarnique to life at the California State Paranormal Treatment Facility—aka “the zoo.” It was the very facility I’d fought not to be sentenced to. It was located in the desert outside my hometown of Santa Maria de Luna; I’d watched TV exposéon the place that would curl your hair and heard rumors that would make you lose your lunch. According to the paper, Tarnique had gone on a rampage and slaughtered forty people at a school bake sale. I flipped back to the original police report, which had the man—as a werewolf—chewing kids’ limbs off and then eating said limbs covered with cake frosting.
Emma grabbed the file from me and read the first few pages again. “This doesn’t sound right at all. Something doesn’t add up. Lycanthropes can’t put on acts this good. To raise a family, exist in the corporate world long enough to become a manager, participate in society, and then … this.” She looked at Jones with haunted eyes. “What sent him over the edge?”
“Therein lies the question.” He tapped a finger on the edge of the folder. “All of these cases didn’t add up. Amy got suspicious. She told Kevin and said something was very wrong.” Amy, Kevin’s girlfriend, is also a werewolf. “She said the one thing all of these people had in common is that they’d recently visited the zoo. Tarnique had been interested in having his charity provide resources to the facility to better the lives of the prisoners.”
He shifted another paper-clipped stack to the top so I could see the picture of a pretty woman with a Farrah Fawcett–style hairdo. “Tamara Cornith, also a lycanthrope, went on a similar rampage—right down to the bake sale—in the same week, two hundred miles to the south. She’d been to the zoo months before to see her husband’s aunt, who was a guard. But they met in the parking lot, just long enough for the older woman to sign some papers. Cornith never even made it inside.”
“What does this have to do with Kevin? Has he been frequenting bake sales?”
Jones shook his head and opened his mouth, but Edgar spoke up. He was now leaning against the fender of the sedan and watching us with interest. “No. Amy apparently got curious and decided to talk to the people in the file.”
“She’d mentioned to me,” Emma added, “that she was going to try to get a visitor’s pass to the zoo. She thought something was going on there and she wanted to see for herself.”
“She got inside.” Jones let out a noise that was both annoyed and frustrated. “And they decided to keep her. They locked her in a cage and Kevin called me to help get her out.”
Emma’s outrage was immediate. “They can’t do that! They have to have a court order to put someone in prison. They can’t just keep them.”
“Are you sure?” Jones sounded amused. “Amy is a werewolf. Kevin thought they might have some sort of sniffer that alerts the staff. It would be a small matter to lock up a guest and ask for a sanctioning order to keep them. What judge would refuse if it was claimed someone went berserk inside the facility?”