House of Ravens (12 page)

And within about sixty seconds, the night
grows quieter. The trailer stops bouncing around. I watch it with
baited breath, poised on my toes, ready to spring into action at
the drop of a pin, my crossbow ready.

A moment later, Ian pokes his head out the
broken front door and waves me forward.

I step through the splintered doorway and
survey the damage.

The front door exploded into a million
shards at Danny’s impact. Walls are buckled, papers and dishes and
pans are strewn around the floor. The entire space smells heavily
like mold.

But on their knees, in the middle of the
floor, each of them with a gun pressed to their head and a stake
held firmly at their backs, are two men and a woman. Their hands
are tied behind their backs, they’re not moving anywhere without
immediately being put down, but each of them stares at me with
glowing yellow eyes and lengthened fangs.

“
That was fast,” I observe
as I stare at them, taking in the bloody lip one of the men has,
the bruises that are already forming across the woman’s
forehead.

“
Element of surprise is a
beautiful thing,” Smith says, and it’s possible it may be the first
thing I’ve ever heard him say.

“
And a terrible one,” I
say, standing before the three of them. “Do you know who I
am?”

“
Conrath, Royal Born scum,”
the uninjured man spits at me. Literally spits at me. The slick
mess lands on my boot.

A swift foot swings forward, and Danny’s
boot buries itself in the man’s stomach. He doubles over, crumpled
in pain, with probably a slew of broken bones.

“
Guess you do know who I
am,” I say, wiping the spit from my shoe on the man’s shoulder.
“What is it your group has against my family and my
kind?”

The woman laughs, an annoying and over the
top thing. “You’re kidding, right? Just thousands of years lived in
servitude.”

“
Yet, as far as I can tell,
your leader has put you into that same servitude,” I say, stepping
in front of her. “I have eighteen members of my House, and not one
of us has any Bitten with a Debt to us.”

This shuts the woman up, but she continues
to glare at me with glowing eyes.

“
You didn’t answer the
first part of my question,” I say, turning to the man with the
bloody lip. “What does your leader have against my
family?”

He stares at me a long moment, the hatred
burning so bright in his eyes. But something tells me it isn’t just
hatred for me. There’s a self-loathing there that I’m so familiar
with. And I pity this man. He’s had his free will taken from him.
Enlisted into a war he probably had no clue about.

“
History runs long,” he
finally mutters under his breath. “Birthrights should not always
just run through blood-”

The man Danny kicked suddenly lashes out,
smacking the crown of his head down on the other man’s nose. “Shut
your damn mouth!” he bellows.

Anna wraps her hand around the man’s neck,
shoving him back up against the wall, buckling the cheap plaster.
“No, not another word from you,” she seethes. “Unless you have
something helpful to add to the conversation.”

“
What else can you tell
me?” I ask, squatting down in front of the man with the bleeding
lip. I hope my expression is open, soft. That he might feel that he
can talk to me and that I won’t hurt him unless I have
to.

“
Nothing,” he says, hanging
his head, shame in his eyes.

“
You really think our
leader hasn’t covered all the bases?” the woman chimes in again.
“You’re a fool to think you’ll get any information out of any of
us.”

“
For your sake, you better
hope that isn’t true,” Ian says, his eyes flashing in
anger.

Once more, I turn to the man who is
cowering. It’s clear, he wants no part in this. But he also can’t
fight the Debt he’s been weighted with. I squat in front of him
once more, placing a hand on his shoulder.

His eyes flick up to mine, and the conflict
there is so apparent. This is a man in pain. A slave. A
prisoner.

“
Who created you?” I ask
him quietly.

And it’s as if my question has set off a
bomb.

The woman instantly thrusts herself
backward, shoving Trinity’s stake deep into her chest. The man Anna
holds does the exact same thing, impaling himself.

And the man I kneel in front of suddenly
lunges at me, his fangs bared. Smith cuts him clean through the
chest in an instant, and the man slumps forward onto me, dead.

I shove him off of me, scrambling back a few
steps, coated in blood, horror filling me.

It all happened so fast. Over in just two or
three seconds. Every single one of them, dead. “What the hell just
happened?” I breathe, my voice coming out in kind of a shriek.

“
You’re okay,” Ian says,
more to himself than to me as he checks me over for injury. I’m
fine—just covered in another vampire’s blood.

“
They must have been
commanded to kill themselves the second someone asked about the
leader’s identity,” Anna comments. She removes her stake from the
man’s chest, wiping the blood off on his shirt.

“
Shit,” Samuel says. He
looks a little pale. “That was our one and only lead. And they’re
all dead!”

“
Cool it, buster,” Danny
says. “There might still be clues in here. We’ll find something
useful.”

“
If nothing else, should be
stuff on that laptop,” Trinity says, nodding her chin in its
direction where it sits on the table.

“
Okay,” Anna says, taking
control of the situation. “Trinity, I want you to take that laptop
to Lexington right now. We’ve made our move, let’s keep the
momentum going. Danny, I want you watching the perimeter. Who knows
who’s out there watching us? The rest of you, I want searching this
crap can for any clues.”

And search we do. In every cupboard, before
removing the cupboards from the walls, making sure there’s nothing
stashed behind. We throw them outside to get them out of the way.
We go through the bedroom, ripping open every pillow and blanket.
Samuel pulls up the carpet. Smith cuts open the couch, ripping out
every bit of stuffing and every single spring. Ian starts ripping
apart the walls, searching every square inch of the place for a
single clue.

The trailer is well lived in. It’s old,
rundown. Dirty. I’m guessing one of the three used to live here
before being turned.

But we don’t find a single clue left. No
evidence, no indicators of the larger picture.

“
I don’t think they were
here for long,” I say. “I’d guess only a few days, even. And I
think it was only the three of them staying here. There’s not
enough space, and it’s not…dirty enough for a bunch of people
staying here.”

“
I’m guessing they’re
moving their members frequently,” Anna says, nodding in agreement.
“Never staying in one place for more than a few days, turning
people as they go and taking over their homes.”

“
They have probably never
kept everyone in one place, this whole time,” Ian says as he tosses
one of the bodies to the foot of the front steps. “Makes it harder
to find them, keeps their entire army from being taken
out.”

“
While we sit in two
mansions looking like sitting ducks,” Samuel huffs in frustration
as he swings a booted foot at the remaining man.

“
Look, at least this is
something,” I say, placing a calming hand on his arm. “We’ve had
nothing up until this point. Lexington will find something we can
use. If we have to keep disabling them, one tiny cell at a time,
we’ll do it. They’ve taken ten months to get to this point. We’ll
run faster than they can walk.”

He looks at me, and the frustration is still
there in his eyes. But he nods, and I see the fight calm in
him.

“
It doesn’t look like we’re
going to find anything.” I observe the mess we’ve made.

“
There’s nothing here,”
Anna agrees with the shake of her head.

“
Let’s get back to the
house then,” I say, jumping from the trailer, over the body, and
landing on the grass. “No use sitting out here exposed.”

Danny circles back around to us, giving the
all clear. And before we walk away, he flicks a lighter toward the
leaking propane tank, and the whole thing goes up in a ball of
flames.

ANOTHER WAY YOU TAKE DOWN a House?

You turn the town where it’s established
against it.

Another rock is thrown, shattering a window
in the library. The window coverings still block out the sunlight,
but the sound of shattering glass is unmistakable.

“
You swear this wasn’t
you?” Luke says again as he looks around a window covering,
swearing under his breath.

“
I promise, Luke, this
wasn’t us,” I say, adrenaline surging in my blood. The angry shouts
are scattered around the house, growing more intense.

“
I kept an eye on everyone
at the Institute,” Lillian confirms. “Besides Trinity and Samuel,
the other six were with me the entire night.”

“
We were tracking the
Bitten down,” I repeat. “And then we went home. Everyone was
accounted for. I swear Luke, this was not any of us. This is the
army’s second move.”

He looks back at me, glaring hard. This
keeps happening, over and over. The tactics between me and an
enemy, with Silent Bend caught in the crosshairs and him having to
be the mediator in the middle.

“
Okay,” he says with a curt
nod. “I’m going to take care of this immediate situation, but just
know, this might not ever be repaired. They killed Elijah for damn
near the same thing.”

“
Further proving the
point,” Ian says in panic. “That’s exactly what they’re trying to
do. Get Alivia burned at the stake!”

The blood has run cold in my veins. It’s
true. They killed my uncle once for nearly this very thing.

Luke swears under his breath again and
stalks toward the front door. He opens it, letting in a blaze of
brilliant sunlight that every one of us shy into the shadows from.
But I can’t look away. I have to see how this plays out.

Luke walks to the edge of the front steps.
Out on the lawn, I see a dozen people. With rocks in their hands.
Guns. Lengths of rope. And death in their eyes. But none of them
are looking at Luke.

He pulls his side arm from its holster and
fires one shot into the air.

Which immediately grows silent. And, every
eye turns to Luke as they all freeze.

“
Every single one of you is
trespassing,” he bellows, commanding their attention as the Sheriff
of Silent Bend. “I know you think you know what’s going on, but
this is not what it looks like. You’ll leave, immediately, and I
promise you, you will be given answers.”

I see an opportunity. A dangerous one. But
one I don’t think I can afford to miss.

I stand from where I’m crouched, taking one
small step toward that door at a time.

“
Liv, what are you doing?”
Ian asks in a panic. He lunges forward to grab me, but I’m fully in
the light of the doorway, and he shies back away from
it.

And my vision is swimming, my eyes water.
Searing agony shoots through my brain and I nearly throw up. But I
force myself to push through the pain, just for a few moments. I
walk out onto the front porch, with no sunshades, in the full light
of the morning.

I can hardly see the people around me
through the blinding light. Only blurry movements tell me their
positions, as well as my enhanced hearing.

“
You all deserve answers,”
I say, talking faster than I probably should, but I need to get
back into the dark. “I promise to give them. Blunt and honest. I
call a meeting at Town Hall tonight, eight o’clock. Tell anyone you
think should hear.”

Without another word, I dart back into the
House, leaning against a wall, my chest heaving as I press through
the searing pain and temporary blindness the sun has caused me.

Ian is immediately at my side, checking me
over, even though there’s no injury to find.

“
You all heard—and saw—the
woman,” Luke says, his own shock apparent in his voice. “You’re not
going to find your answers, or justice, this way. Show up at Town
Hall tonight and you’ll hear the truth. I catch a single one of you
on either Conrath property, you’ll be arrested and you won’t get
that one phone call.”

I strain my ears, listening for their
retreat. They don’t, immediately. They converse, in shock and
disbelief. My name is repeated over and over.