Spellcasters (85 page)

She shook her head. “It’s been scrubbed clean.”

“I believe I’ve found something here,” Lucas said.

He was crouched in front of the equipment shelf. I expected to see another doorway behind the shelf. Instead, he gestured at the shelf itself, which he’d cleared of bottles. When I looked, I saw not a wooden shelf, but a drawer. It seemed too shallow to hold anything. Then Lucas pulled back the velvet cloth that lay over the contents—a row of surgical instruments.

“They, uh, could be veterinary tools,” Aaron said. “Some questers use animal sacrifice. It’s discouraged, but it does happen.”

I met Lucas’s gaze. “Hm and Hf.”

He gave a slow nod. “Human male and human female.”

Cassandra said nothing. When we looked over at her, she was bent over a hole in the floor, where she’d taken off a section of board. “What’s that?” I said.

She slammed the board back into place. “More ingredients. They’re … human.”

Aaron squatted beside her and reached for the loose board, but she held it fast to the floor.

“You don’t need to look, either,” she said.

“I’ve lived through Jack the Ripper, Charles Manson, and Jeffrey Dahmer. Nothing under that board is going to shock me.”

“It’s not going to make you sleep any easier, either.” She looked at us. “I’ll draw up an inventory of what’s in here, and package it if you’d like. For now, I can tell you that they were using body parts, from multiple humans, and they weren’t retrieving them from graveyards.”

Her gaze skittered toward the tub. She blinked hard and looked away.

“It smells of blood, doesn’t it?” Lucas said.

“I caught a whiff of something, and I thought it might be blood, but I can’t pick it up again.”

Aaron ducked his head into the tub. He inhaled, then shook his head. “Nothing. That’s one smell we can always pick up but I’m not—” He stopped. “Scratch that. I caught it. Very faint, but definitely human blood.”

“So that’s what the tub is for,” I said. “They put them in there to … harvest what they needed without making too big a mess.”

“Could be,” Lucas said.

I met his gaze. “But you don’t think so.”

He picked up the journal and turned to a page near the end. “There are several references this year to immersion in source material Hm and Hf.”

“Elizabeth Báthory,” Cassandra murmured.

My gut sank, as I understood what they meant.

Elizabeth Báthory was a Hungarian countess who lived in the sixteenth century. According to legend, she’d killed six hundred and fifty young women, most of them peasants, and bathed in their blood because she believed it would grant her eternal youth. After several decades of killing, Báthory was arrested, tried, convicted, and put into a room. Then the door was bricked over.

It has been argued that Elizabeth Báthory was at least part of Bram Stoker’s inspiration for Dracula, perhaps even more than the equally sadistic and better known Vlad Dracul, from whom Stoker borrowed the name. In vampire society, it was generally believed that Elizabeth Báthory had been a vampire and that she’d been seeking, not eternal youth, but her youth for eternity—in other words, an immortality quester.

It was also rumored that her experiment had succeeded, that she had found eternal life and that the story of her death had been concocted, not by human officials, but by powerful elements within the vampire community. When they’d discovered her crimes—and, yes, killing six hundred humans
was
a crime even by vampire standards—they’d masterminded her arrest and trial. Then, the vampires themselves walled her up, where she remains to this day, having outlived every vampire who knew where she was imprisoned.

In covering up the success of her immortality experiments, her captors had tried to ensure such crimes would never be repeated. Yet the story, true or not, had been passed down through generations of immortality questers. Most didn’t dare replicate Báthory’s work but, about every hundred years or so, somebody tried.

“But to bathe in blood,” I said. “That would—each time you did it, you’d need to kill how many people? Where would they bury all those—?” I stopped, remembering the strange patchwork terrain out back. I swallowed. “I think I might know.”

After uncovering the fourth body, we stopped digging. All four corpses were drained of blood, and all in the ground less than a year, which meant they weren’t Edward and Natasha’s requisite annual kills. When we looked out over the patchwork of old-growth and new-growth meadow, we knew if we kept digging we’d find many more.

After ensuring that the artist was still unconscious, we returned to the cabin and took what we could for later examination. Then we drove to Edward and Natasha’s house in the city and searched it again, now looking for hidden rooms and caches. We found nothing, which didn’t
surprise us; it was unlikely they’d go to all the trouble of secreting away their materials at the cabin, only to leave some in their house.

Throughout the searches, we’d all been pretty quiet, still shocked over what we’d found at the cabin. As Lucas drove us to the airport, though, my numbed brain finally began to churn through the facts … and found a gaping crater in the logic.

“Doesn’t it punch a big hole in our theory about his motivation for killing Cabal kids?”

Lucas slanted a look my way, telling me to continue.

“Okay, if Edward’s experiments with humans failed, then I can see him testing them out with supernaturals. But what’s he taking? Not blood, that’s for sure. Or, at least, not enough to bathe in. If he’s taking something else, like the stuff that Cassandra found—” I glanced into the backseat at her. “Was it … material that wouldn’t be missed?”

She shook her head. “Some of it is external, some internal, but everything would have been missed, if not in a visual examination, then at least in the most cursory autopsy. Perhaps he was taking something different, something small enough to be overlooked.”

“I doubt that,” Lucas said. “Joey Nast was still alive when we found him. I can’t imagine the killer had time to excise anything from his body.”

“But everything else fits,” I said. “We’re looking for a vampire killer, possibly from the Cincinnati area. Edward is a vampire from Cincinnati, with killing experience that goes well beyond feeding. According to his neighbors, he hasn’t been home in over a week. His longtime lover has left him, which might have sent him over the edge, desperate to find the key to immortality so he can win her back. Even his physical description matches what little Esus saw of him. It all fits.”

“All except that one piece,” Lucas said. “Edward appears to be our man, so I’d suggest that we consider another theory regarding his motivation.”

“Like what?” Aaron said.

“I have no idea,” Lucas said. “But I’m open to suggestions.”

We all looked at one another … and said nothing.

W
e boarded the jet. Our first stop would be Atlanta. Although tomorrow was Sunday, Aaron had to work. Well, he didn’t have to, but he’d promised a friend he’d take his shift and, since it didn’t look like we’d be hot on Edward’s trail just yet, he didn’t want to break that promise. When we had a line on Edward, Aaron wanted to come back and help out. Being a vampire meant he had a lot of unused sick days, so he didn’t expect to have any trouble getting time off his bricklaying job.

When Lucas returned from conferring with the pilot, he suggested we all try to sleep.

“It’s not the most comfortable environment,” he said. “But I doubt anyone slept much last night, and these next few hours may be our only chance tonight.”

Cassandra nodded. “You and Paige should definitely try to sleep. I’m not tired, though, so I’ll sit in the rear cabin, if you don’t mind.”

Lucas escorted Cassandra into the tiny private cabin behind ours.

“Did she sleep at all last night?” Aaron whispered to me when they were out of earshot.

I shook my head. “She says … she says she’s not sleeping much lately.”

His eyes filled with quiet grief, as if this was the answer he’d been both expecting and dreading.

“I’ll sit up with her,” he said.

As I pulled pillows and a blanket from the closet, Lucas disappeared into the crew area. He returned a few minutes later carrying two mugs of tea. He slid my “forgotten” bottle of painkillers from his pocket. I opened my mouth to argue, then caught his look, nodded, and held out my hand. He shook two into it, then sat beside me.

“How are you doing?” he asked.

“Shaken, but okay. When we heard Edward and Natasha were into dark stuff, I steeled myself for what we thought was the worst—that they were experimenting with humans. But the scale … the number of people they must have—”

I gulped my tea and sputtered as the hot liquid burned my throat. Lucas took my mug with a rush of apologies.

“No, that’s my fault,” I said. “I always tell you to make it hot. I drank it too fast.”

I took the mug from his hands. As I moved it to my side table, my hands shook so badly that tea sloshed over the side, nearly burning me again.

“Damn it,” I muttered, then managed a small smile. “Guess I’m not so okay after all.”

He squeezed my hand. “Completely understandable.”

“I know I have to be able to handle this better,” I said. “If I’m going to help you, I need to get over my squeamishness. I’m too—”

“You’re fine,” he said. “I’m not feeling too ‘okay’ myself. I can guarantee, as a, uh, partner in my endeavors, you’d likely never see anything on this scale again.”

“Partner?” I said, my smile turning genuine. “Don’t think I didn’t notice the hitch in your voice. Don’t worry. I have no plans to shoehorn myself into your life that way. I’ll be here to help when you need me, but that’s it.”

“That wasn’t—That is to say, I certainly don’t mind, if you’re interested …”

“I’m not. Well, I am, but I can’t be, right? Between the council and the new Coven, my plate’s already full.” I inhaled. “We screwed up. The council, I mean. We should have caught this.”

“You can’t keep tabs on every vampire—”

“Can’t we?” I said. “The Pack does it with werewolves, and there are more of them to police and fewer people to do it. I don’t mean we need to be breathing down every vampire’s neck, but we need to be more proactive in general. There were rumors. We should have heard them. I can’t blame Cassandra for that. It’s everyone’s responsibility. I want to change things, to start paying closer attention. But I also want to start this new Coven. I
need
to do that. It’s what I’m supposed to do.”

“Because your mother would have wanted it,” he said softly.

“Not just that. I wanted—or I thought I wanted …” I rubbed my hands over my face. “I know rebuilding the Coven is important, but some days I feel like there are other things I should be doing, things I’d
rather
be doing, and the Coven … I’m not sure it’s still my dream, or that it ever really was.”

“You’ll figure it out.”

Lucas leaned over and kissed me, a slow, gentle kiss that calmed the confusion crashing about in my head. After a few minutes, we reclined our seats, curled up together, and let the soft drone of the plane lull us to sleep. When the plane landed in Atlanta, I woke up just enough to hear Aaron and Cassandra’s whispered exchange of good-byes. A moment after the cabin door shut behind Aaron, I felt Cassandra tug the fallen blanket up over me. I sensed her standing there, watching me, but by the time I pried my eyes open, she was gone.

When I woke again, the plane had landed in Miami. I knew it had to be past dawn, but the cabin’s blackout shades made it nearly pitch black inside. I snuggled in closer to Lucas and pulled up the blanket to ward off the chill of the air-conditioning.

“Cold nose,” Lucas said with a sleepy laugh.

I tried pulling back, but he lifted my chin and kissed me.

“That’s nice and warm,” he said.

“Hmmm. Very nice.”

“We’re going to have to see my father today,” he murmured between kisses.

“Hmmm, not so nice.”

Another laugh. “Sorry.”

“No, you’re right. We need to tell him what we found … and we should thank him for the use of the jet.” I caught Lucas’s look. “You don’t still regret taking it, do you?”

He sighed. “I don’t know. I worry about how it will be interpreted. Then I worry about whether it’s a sign of backsliding. And then I worry about worrying too much, what you must think of it.” A quarter-smile. “Self-doubt is not a sexy trait in a lover.”

“Depends on the lover. You can be almost scarily self-confident, Cortez. I like being the only one who gets to peek through the chinks in the armor. If you’re still worried, though, I do know a good temporary cure.”

A crooked grin. “Distraction?”

“Um-hmmm.” I slid my hands under the blanket.

“Wait,” he said. “I still owe you for the broom closet, and believe I can be adequately distracted by reciprocating that favor.”

I grinned. “You never owe me. But I won’t argue if you insist.”

“I do.”

As he shifted forward to kiss me, a seat squeaked … only it didn’t sound like the seat we were lying on. I lifted my head to see Benicio tiptoeing for the cabin door. Lucas bolted upright and swore.

Benicio stopped, his back still to us. “My apologies. I came by for an update. I was waiting for you to wake up.”

“We’ve been awake, quite obviously awake, for a few minutes,” Lucas said.

“Yes, well …”

“You couldn’t resist eavesdropping on a private conversation,” Lucas said. “Until it threatened to become too private.”

“I—”

“We’re dressed,” I said. “You might as well come in and say your piece.”

Benicio turned, his gaze glancing off Lucas’s glare before veering to rest on the far wall. I got up and stalked past him, out the cabin door and into the serving station, where I turned on the coffeemaker. By the time I returned, I’d had enough time to cool down. I was still pissed, but there was little danger I’d “accidentally” dump Benicio’s coffee in his lap.

“I was just summing up our findings,” Lucas said as I passed out the mugs.