Burning (Brotherhood of the Blade Trilogy #1) (18 page)

“
What’s Kristen’s favorite fairy tale that has a princess?”

“
The Light Princess
by George MacDonald.”

Samantha grinned and typed quickly in another window. “Okay, I can grab
The Light Princess
from Gutenberg.org. I’m going to copy and paste the text in a Word document and then change every occurrence of the word ‘Princess’ to ‘Princess Daffodil’ as a sort of secret message to her. At the end of the story, I’m going to put instructions for her to access the browser on her first-generation Kindle. It’s kind of a funky browser in that model.”

“
You’re putting that at the end,” I said, nodding, “in case anyone views the file, right?”

“
Right. Is she the inquisitive type who would read to the end?”

“
Oh, yes!”

“
My son is like that, too,” said Sam. She spent the next few minutes typing careful, easy-to-follow instructions at the back of the manuscript. She then turned to Ambra. “I’m sending the file to the Gmail address. Attach it to an email with the subject heading ‘Princess Daffodil.’ Nothing in the body of the email itself will show up on the Kindle, just the attached file, so don’t write anything in the body of the email itself.”

“
Okay.” Ambra showed the iPad to me and Sam. “Good to go? It’s attached.”

Sam nodded. “Address the email to the Kindle dot com address and click send.”

“Done.”

“
Now what?” I asked.

“
We see if Kristen replies with her half of the password that goes with Princess Daffodil.”

“
What if she doesn’t?” Daphne asked.

“
She will if she can figure out how to get to the hidden browser function of her old Kindle and access an email account,” said Sam. “Give her time. Ambra, can you refresh your iPad display every so often to see if she replies?”

She did so. After fifteen minutes, there was no reply to the fake publisher’s email account.

Sam refreshed the Amazon page of “Manage Your Kindle.”

“
Rand, we’ve got something. She bought
The New Goldilocks and the Three Bears: Papa Bear, Daddy Bear, and Baby Bear.
Does this make any sense to you in the context of our investigation?”

Joy suffused me. “I’m Daddy Bear! That’s the return password to her Princess Daffodil password. It’s Kristen! Oh, my God, it’s Kristen! My little girl is really alive!”

Sam smiled. “We got her.”

Tears streamed down my cheeks. I almost lost it when the hands of my vampire hunter friends were laid on me in support, patting my back and shoulders. I looked at Mikhail and he looked at me, smiling. He had predicted a miracle today, and he couldn’t have been more accurate. I could have kissed him. Hell, I could have kissed everyone in the room.

Samantha was choked up, too. “Look up here, Rand. We got another book bought by Kristen.” She met my eyes. “The book is titled
Technical Difficulties
by Tom Steele.”

“
That’s one smart little girl,” Daphne said.

“
That’s
my
smart little girl,” I said with tear-filled eyes.

Sam refreshed the Manage Your Kindle page.

“She bought a book called,
Uh Oh, I’ve Gotta Go
. I’m sorry, Rand, that might be all there is, for now. Don’t send anything right now. She might not be alone in the room.”

I nodded and looked at Ambra.

“Any emails come in from Kristen to the sock-puppet Gmail address?”

“
Not yet, Rand.”

I drummed my fingers on the table. Sweet hope filled me—and dread. I decided to focus on hope. “Maybe she will get the browser working and try and reply.”

“And maybe she will buy a book that has the name of the city in it where she is being held,” Sam said.

“
Do you think she knows where she is?” I asked.

“
I don’t know. Seems like she would’ve told us already, but maybe she will when she has the opportunity. They may be watching her very closely.”

“
I’m sure,” I said, running my fingers through my hair. I’m sure I looked like a crazy man. “Thank you, Sam. thank you so much! And now that I know she’s alive, my hope is that we can find her and bring her here.”

Daphne cleared her throat. “I need to play devil’s advocate.”

I nearly gasped. “What, Daphne?”

“
I think I know why Kristen didn’t contact you all this time. She certainly knows how to outsmart her captors, because it took her only a few minutes to latch onto what we were doing here and reply in a clever way.”

“
Go on.”

“
When she bought the book titled
Technical Difficulties
, I think she meant that she’s...that she’s...”

“
A vampire?” Ambra finished for Daphne.

“
No!” I cried out.

“
We don’t know that,” Samantha said.

“
Rand. She has had the opportunity and the ability to contact you for a long time. If she is a vampire, then they have already told her that you’re a vampire hunter. It is entirely possible that she has turned, and now embraces her captors, almost in a Stockholm Syndrome scenario, because she is like them now. They may be telling her that she risks her life by contacting you, and even risks their lives, as vampires.”

“
Technical Difficulties.
Why did I not see it?” I choked out. “Her technical difficulty is that she’s probably a vampire, not that someone is watching her on the internet. If she is a vampire, she probably thinks I would hurt her, or even kill her.”

Sam said, “If she’s a vampire, you have to win her trust back, but you have to do it without risking the safety of the Brotherhood and Sisterhood. Her kidnappers have had months to indoctrinate her, whether or not she is a vampire. If she has her old Kindle and is allowed to use it and is playing games online, that is likely her reward for trusting
them
and convincing them to trust
her
, as well. Do you understand?”

“
Yes,” I replied, dismay almost flattening my hope.

Lucas folded his arms. “Samantha, is there any reason to believe that this little girl is
not
a vampire?”

“
Turning her would provide a way that they could use her to set up Rand for assassination and infiltrate your organization,” said our resident vampire. “Additionally, if they turned her, that gives her motivation to fear Rand and, perhaps, to betray him. If she was human, she would be locked up under extreme security and not playing Neopets. I mean, they have a discussion board there.”

“
But she called me
Daddy Bear
, the return password.” My joy had quickly turned to fear.

“
Nobody faults you for having hope that she is still human,” Ambra said.

Lucas said, “I want to table any further contact with Kristen until we have a chance to discuss this logically and come to a consensus on how to handle the communication with your daughter. If she is a vampire, Sam has a point—she could take down our whole operation if she set us up in an ambush during a rescue attempt. Even unwittingly.”

“The same is true if she is not a vampire,” added Daphne. “They can and would use her to get to us. That’s probably why they didn’t kill her. They could easily use her as bait and set Rand up in a rescue situation but ambush him and whoever is with him.”

I moaned.

Ambra put a comforting hand on my shoulder, and said, “I wouldn’t put it past them to let her have internet access and be monitoring it in the actual
hope
that they can get intel on us.”

Choked up, I asked, “Do you think Kristen is well-treated?”

Sam said, “It’s more than an assumption that she is. She has a lot of freedom and privileges for a captive. They are trying to win her trust. I believe she is well-treated, otherwise, maybe she might have been confined without any internet privileges. They might even have fake-offered her an out, to come home, and when they told her that you might kill her for being a vampire, she decided to stay with them because they treat her well and because she feels accepted for what she is.”

“
Oh, God. What to do.” I looked at Sam. “Vampire children should be on the ‘Do Not Kill’ List.” Then I looked at Lucas. “It’s wrong to kill vampire children, do you all agree?”

Sam looked frightened for a moment, and then masked her expression.

“We haven’t come across this in the past,” Lucas said. “Let’s vote. Go around the table and give me your aye or nay. Do the vampire children go on the ‘Do Not Kill’ List?”

I thought Samantha was going to go postal on us, with fangs, if there was one “nay.” She
was
armed. Thankfully, everyone present said “aye.” After all, I had my suspicions that at least one of her children was a vampire, though I didn’t voice it. If that was true, she would keep such a thing close to her vest—very close—and I sure as hell wasn’t going to out her little darling.

“
Thank you,” Samantha said. “And please add a female cop and another friend of mine to your ‘Do Not Kill’ list.” She gave us names and descriptions to both.

Lucas looked at her, then looked at me, then said, “Any opposed?” No one said anything.

“Thank you,” said Sam, then added, “Instead of deciding what few vampires should be allowed to
live
, I think you should make a shorter list to decide what few vampires deserve to
die
.”

Lucas scratched his silvery eyebrows. “Interesting perspective, Samantha.”

“I hate to say it but I gotta go home right now and hug my children. I’m getting a very strong impression of imminent danger in Southern California. I’m sure you all understand.”

“
We do,” Lucas said. “And I believe that you have helped us as much as you can, for now. With the search for Kristen and with the test of the vampire trap.”

“
I was glad to help,” Sam said. “Call on me if you need anything else.”

“
Are you coming back?” Daphne asked.

“
I hope so. But I need to stay close to the home front for a while. I have this feeling that it’s dangerous to expect my sister to be my kids’ bodyguard while I’m off in Switzerland. For security reasons, I want to sit tight in California. For now.”

“
We hope you come back again,” Lucas said.

“
I hope so.”

“
Sam, next time you come,” Ambra said, “we will ski with the werewolf.”

She grinned. “I’d like that.”

“The next time we see each other, Sam, maybe my daughter will be with me,” I chimed in.

“
I’ll celebrate with you when you have her back. No matter if she is vampire or human.”

“
Thank you, my friend.”

Sam struggled to make a graceful exit. She apologized for leaving a day early. Since Corbin was busy taking care of an injured wolf cub, Daphne drove Sam to the airport.

The rest of us went into the library.

“
What have we learned here from Sam’s visit?” Lucas asked.

Ambra said, “Despite their intelligence, we learned that vampires can be tricked and that our vampire trap works.”

“That reminds me,” I said. “I want to reiterate that we are now armed and dangerous with the vampire trap. New mirrors are in place, silver darts are in place, and everything else is live now. It is a killing machine.”

“
Now we have to get an evil enemy vampire hot to get into the castle so we can nail him in the trap,” Ambra said.

“
Easier said than done,” Lucas said. “We don’t want them coming here on purpose, though I’m wondering if Kristen may have informed her captors that we made contact. If she did, we might expect to have company soon.
Bad company
.”

Chapter Thirty-one

When Daphne came back from taking Samantha Moon to the airport, she whipped up a ton of food. We were about to gather for dinner—it would be dawn in an hour and time to sleep—when a call came from Corbin at the gatehouse. I answered the red house phone because I was closest to it. Everyone stopped talking. I put it on speakerphone.

“Corbin? What’s up? Supper’s ready—”

“
You’re not going to believe this.”

“
What?”

“
Gabrielle’s here!”

Everyone gasped.

“She got away from Vlad? Inconceivable,” Lucas said.

“
She says she escaped,” Corbin said. “Just keep in mind, this could be a trick to get Vlad into the castle. I’m talking right in front of her and she is shaking her head no, that she’s
not
trying get Vlad into the castle.”