Authors: Abby Blake
“Do we know who sired them?”
“Not yet, but I’m guessing they’re only a year old at the most. One of them matches the description of a human doctor wanted for malpractice who went missing only a few months ago. The other has a ‘homeless drug addict’ sort of vibe.”
Benjamin nodded. It wasn’t unusual for homeless people to end up on the vampire food chain—who would believe them if they told the human authorities?—but it was very out of character to turn them. Most vampires were happy to keep their community small and inconspicuous and, until Skye, Benjamin had been one to agree with them.
“Okay, we’ll meet you there in ten minutes.”
Thomas nodded and left the room. If he knew how his friend’s mind worked—and after fifty years working together, how could he not?—Thomas would not only know who the vampires were in their human lives but when, where, how, why they were transformed into vampires and who made them by the end of the night.
Samuel still held Skye close, his concern for her obvious in every stiff muscle. Physically they would protect her from any danger, but they had no defense against the mental anguish identifying her attackers might cause.
He briefly considered tracking down the nearest one-way mirror and putting her behind it, but it would be a considerable delay, and the longer they waited to catch the third vampire involved in the attack, the more chance they had that he would kill again.
Samuel was probably thinking the exact same things. It appeared that he came to the same conclusion when he sighed heavily and gently shook Skye awake.
“We’re sorry, sweetheart, but we need your help.”
* * * *
Her help?
The past couple of days, when she hadn’t been sleeping, she’d been trying not to think about how useless she felt. She was usually the one helping other people out, not the damsel in distress, so it felt very weird to be dependent on these two men. Not that she wasn’t enjoying their attentions. She sat up, grinning at the delicious soreness between her thighs. Simply pressing her legs together sent a rush of heat crashing over her.
But they needed her help. Help she was more than willing to give.
Samuel lifted her into his arms, carrying her to the bathroom as Benjamin smiled indulgently.
“We’re sorry to do this to you, baby girl, but we think we’ve apprehended the two vampires who drained you. We need you to confirm that we got the right guys.”
* * * *
Benjamin watched Skye closely. She looked a little nervous, but it was Samuel’s arms tightening around her that got most of her attention. Her gaze bounced between the two of them as Samuel slowly lowered her to her feet.
“You’ll be there?” she asked with a smile, obviously trying to hide her anxiety.
“Absolutely,” Samuel said in a voice that sounded like he was chewing nails. “But you don’t have to do this. We can find another way.”
Seemingly confused by Samuel’s statement, Skye sought Benjamin’s gaze once more. He shrugged, wanting to protect her just as much as Samuel did, but aware enough of both the situation and the lady’s stubborn streak to know the wisest choice was to leave the decision up to her. When she hesitated, Benjamin decided that it was probably best that she know all options and their consequences.
“A witness to the attack being able to identify them is the easiest way, but it does mean that they’ll see you face-to-face. Thomas says he can smell trace amounts of your human blood on them, but with you no longer being human, the case would balance solely on Thomas’s testimony—a situation we try to avoid if at all possible. We might be trusted operatives, but that doesn’t guarantee we’ll always be believed.” She shook her head, and he took that as her rejecting the second option. “Our third option is to find someone from the club that night who saw you leave with your attackers. The trouble with that is no one else seems to have witnessed the attack, so they’d only be testifying that you left the club with them. We have no laws against compelling humans, so we really only have the fact that they were in the general area when the attack took place—circumstantial evidence at best.”
Samuel turned on the shower, adjusted the temperature, and dragged Skye under the warm water with him. He started washing her down, apparently trying to distract her, but the woman proved just how stubborn she was by holding his hands away and turning to face him.
“Why don’t you want me to do this? What harm can come to me if I identify my attackers?”
Samuel smiled softly, but it was obvious by his expression that he was both proud and afraid for her in that moment.
“I just wish we had a proper interview room so that you wouldn’t have to come face-to-face with the men who stole your human life. I want to protect you from that. You’ve been through enough already.”
Skye reached up to touch his cheek, her concern for him obvious. “I’m not a delicate flower. In many ways I
need
to do this. I could never forgive myself if someone else got killed because I was too scared to do the right thing.”
Samuel pulled her into a crushing embrace, the raw emotion almost too private for Benjamin to witness. “We will be right beside you,” he said quietly. “We won’t let them anywhere near you.”
“I believe you,” she said with a soft smile.
Chapter Five
Samuel held Skye’s hand tightly in his own, unprepared for the fear that coursed through him. Dangerous situations had always thrilled him, gotten his adrenaline pumping, but when it was Skye’s safety at risk, he was shaking like a leaf in a tornado. It was difficult to comprehend how important she’d become to him so quickly.
He heard the confident, cultured voice of the man he assumed was the missing doctor, but judging by his words, it was even clearer now that he knew nothing about the Ruling Body or the dictates all paranormals were required to live by. He was currently threatening legal action for false detention despite the fact that paranormals had no such system of compensation and had no need to answer to the human one.
“Skye,” Benjamin said in a soothing tone. “Are these the men who attacked you?”
“Yes,” she said, trying valiantly to hide the shudder that being so close to these men evoked. Samuel truly wished he’d been able to save her this trauma, but it was also interesting to see her strength of character. Her voice was clear, her eyes wide open, and her gaze holding theirs unflinchingly.
“Good enough for me,” Alex said with a wink just for Skye. “Now we can get down to the fun part of the evening.”
“F–Fun p–part?” the younger of the two men asked. Judging by the man’s painfully thin frame, he was probably a drug addict before he’d been bitten. The transformation basically froze a person’s build and physique at the point of change, so even if he was stronger than he looked, thanks to his vampire status, his outward appearance would never change from that of a gaunt, malnourished drug addict.
“Sure,” Thomas said in his most friendly voice, “now that we know we’ve got the right vamps we can move on to the information gathering phase.” He picked up a small letter opener that appeared to be made of silver.
Samuel almost laughed when he realized that his team had secured the two vampires to their chairs with silver chains. They were the delicate necklace type but it didn’t take much silver to hold a new vamp down. It would require considerably more effort to restrain the older and more experienced vampires in their team, but it did however reinforce just how newly made these vampires really were.
He pulled Skye closer, wanting to leave, but sensing her need to be here as her attackers confessed all—well, hopefully, confessed all. It would be a damn sight easier if they just gave up their “friend’s” details, but Samuel was beginning to suspect that the guy was also their sire. It was much harder for a vampire to betray his or her maker, and it most likely explained why these guys were so clueless. Despite their sire’s instinct to keep them around, he’d never taught them anything they needed to know.
Samuel carefully hid his smile when he noticed that Thomas and Adam both wore rubber gloves as if the silver could hurt them. It was a little known fact that it was liquid mercury and not silver that could fatally harm werewolves—a fact werewolves were quite willing to go to extraordinary lengths to hide. Samuel couldn’t blame them. He would have happily hidden the truth about a vampire’s weaknesses, but these days it seemed nearly everybody who’d read a book, seen a movie, or watched a TV knew how to kill a vampire. Thankfully most thought their existence pure fiction.
Alex moved closer to the younger-looking fledgling vampire and held the letter opener as if he planned to cut into the man’s face. The ex-drug addict looked terrified, proving that Alex had chosen the right target. The man they suspected had once been a human doctor just looked bored.
“Look, man,” Thomas said in a faked sympathetic tone, “my partner here likes this part of the job. Me? Not so much, so maybe you can do me a favor and just tell us what we want to know before we get to the screaming part.”
Samuel felt Skye tense up in his arms, but he squeezed her gently and tried to ease her concern with his touch. He’d seen Thomas and Alex do their good cop, bad cop routine so many times that he could practically predict how things would go from here on out.
“Wh–What d–do y–y–you want to know?”
“Where is the third vampire? The one who killed the red-haired woman?”
The older man smirked, but the younger shook his head in panic. “We don’t know. When we woke up, he was just gone. We don’t know where he went.”
“Was he your sire?”
The younger man looked to the older for a moment before shrugging. Either he didn’t know who his sire was or he didn’t have a clue what the word meant. Samuel was leaning toward the latter.
“Do you know what name he was using?” Thomas had softened his tone, perhaps realizing that the young man in front of them had suffered considerably as a human child and had fared no better as a vampire.
“We just knew him as Ritchie. I don’t know if that was his first name or family name.” He glanced at his coaccused and seemed to shrink back from the man’s anger.
The older man growled low in his throat, the sound more wolf than vampire. “You’re as stupid as your whore of a mother,” he said vehemently. “That’s why Ritchie didn’t fucking tell you anything. Fuck! I should have just let you die in that rat-infested alley.”
* * * *
Benjamin ran a tired hand down his face. It took hours of patient, skilled interrogation but finally the story started to take shape. The older-looking vampire was indeed the missing doctor wanted for malpractice. Judging by additional information Wilson had been able to dig out of the closed police files, the man had been a cold-blooded killer long before he’d become a vampire. It was quite likely the reason “Ritchie” had turned him in the first place.
The younger-looking man fit the description of the doctor’s biological son. It would seem that in a moment of uncharacteristic fatherly kindness the man had made his son into a vampire to save him from a drug overdose. Despite having been in his early twenties, the younger man seemed to have very little education and even less understanding of the world around him. He’d been shocked to learn that he didn’t need to kill humans in order to feed.
“What will happen to them?” Skye asked as they finally stepped back into their own room.
Benjamin glanced at his watch. “A retrieval team will pick them up in a few hours and take them to headquarters for processing. Higgins—he’s the administrative supervisor for PUP Squad Alpha—and a minimum of three Judiciaries will be assigned to the case so ultimately it’s up to them. We’re recommending that the doctor be terminated and his son given a chance at rehabilitation.”
“Terminated? As in killed?”
Benjamin pulled her into his arms, holding her close as he tried to explain one of the harsher realities of paranormal life. “Yes, the human police files we were able to obtain say he’s wanted for questioning in over fifteen suspicious deaths that happened while he was human. The attack on you proved that he’s willing to continue killing as a vampire. We can’t allow such an individual, with absolutely no conscience, to put the rest of the paranormal community in jeopardy.”