Vampire in Crisis (27 page)

“An attack? A delivery system? Supplies?”

“Ugh.” Ian hated to think of anything from the Council having to do with the whole blood farm mess. Then he remembered the international members they’d rescued at the hospital. “Or meetings.”

One of the men snorted. “Why would they keep track of those? It’s not like they would be attending any if they were here to sabotage us.”

“Unless,” the man who’d unlocked the door spoke up, “unless he’s planning to attend the meetings in another way. Those European delegates had been snatched from somewhere.”

“We need to check these times against any possible options, but let’s start with the concept of meetings. We’ve had more than enough of our delegates kidnapped. Enough is enough.”

The speaker glanced around the empty room. “Let’s get the lab techs in here to go over the room and make sure we didn’t miss something else. I’ll take this over to the Council and see if we can match the times and dates up.”

He walked to the door, waited until the others all trooped outside, and as Ian walked through the door, he gave him a rough slap. “Good job, Ian. We’ll take it from here.”

The door was relocked before the four men turned and walked back the way they came –a straight line of silence.

Feeling left out and not liking it, Ian raced to catch up. It had been his idea. He wanted to help bring these assholes down. Maybe they’d let him stay involved. He’d do anything he could to take these bastards out before they came after him and his friends again.

*

Jared sat beside
Wendy in the vamp Council Hall. Just being here made his teeth ache, he was clenching them so hard. He was waiting for Taz and trying not to fall asleep. His people were all asleep at this hour, but he wasn’t with his people. Keeping his head low, he glanced around the quiet dark room. It looked the same as most offices he’d been in. Except for the windows. The curtains were open and the moonlight shone in – not that there was much. More clouds and darkness than light. Just the way the vamps liked it, he presumed. Once the Council had realized Jared was in the Hall, Wendy had been designated as his babysitter and he’d been given orders to not leave her side.

He had no plans to.

This was one scary place.

But Wendy was super nice.

And she was looking for the ambulance that had taken Tobias away. He could get on board with that.

“Got it!” she crowed beside him. “It did have a GPS installed on it.”

He pivoted. “What? What has a GPS?”

“That old ambulance. At least I think it’s that old one.” She pounded the keys some more. “I found a couple of old ambulances that were retired and sold out of the hospital system. Three, actually. The serial numbers look like they were altered at the point of sale and were duplicates of ambulances in the system but out of service as they supposedly needed repairs. However, I found old documents that have different serial numbers, and those numbers are no longer in the system.” She turned a triumphant smile on him. “Now I can track them.”

“Wow, that’s awesome hunting.” He leaned forward, watching as Wendy clicked through screens and entered a password then a serial number. And damn if a crazy ass map didn’t show up on the screen with a zillion colored lines crossing and intersecting the map.

“What are all of those?” he asked, trying to find a legend to explain what he was seeing.

“Let me change the filters.” She clicked a drop down box and changed numbers on the screen. After she entered the new data, the map cleared to just one single squiggly line.

“What did you do?”

“I changed the GPS to show the ambulance’s tracks for just today.” She sat back, her gaze narrowed with concentration. “If we can see what this ambulance was doing all day, we should be able to figure out why.”

“Can you put the street names on the map?” He’d been trying to figure out where the tracks led, but there’d been no names or numbers.

“Sure.” She clicked a couple more keys and sure enough, now he could see the street names.

“Scroll in.”

She did.

He leaned forward and gasped then jabbed his finger at the monitor. “That ambulance was at the home where I watched Tobias being removed.”

“Really? Are you sure?” She clicked on something then tapped a few more buttons. “I’m just printing off this screen.” She got up and walked over to the printer while Jared studied the screen some more. Then he saw something else. “Wendy, this may not be the right ambulance we’re looking for.”

“Oh? Why’s that?”

“It was at the real hospital twice today.” He tapped the screen. “That would be totally normal.”

Taz walked into the room right that minute. “Sorry, Jared, what did you say about the hospital?”

Wendy and Jared quickly explained. Taz held out his hand for the printed sheet and pursed his lips as he studied the map. “Interesting. You’re right, Jared, it was at the hospital twice today, but any of the normal ambulances would likely have done more trips than two each.” He tilted his head and stared off in space. Placing the paper down, he added, “Sometimes they can only get a couple of trips in. Wendy, can you get a time of day for each of these stops? I could then double check the patients that were admitted, transferred, or released during that time frame.”

“Sure.”

Fascinated, Jared stayed in the background as Taz logged into his administrator account at the hospital and checked the times over. When they both sat silent, staring at the screen, Jared burst out with, “Well?”

He moved to stand in front of them. “Is it the one we are looking for?”

Taz and Wendy looked at each other, then at Jared.

With big grins on their faces, they both said, “Yes, it looks like it.”

T
essa slipped onto
the hallway of the second floor where Motre had holed up with the last group – and found it empty. Good. Or not. She had no idea where things were on the war front. It felt like she’d been out of the loop a little too much. Damn Deanna and her machinations. But Tessa was fine now, and that’s what counted.

She walked faster and turned a corner. There was a group of men ahead. Their energy was all glossy blue and green. She smiled at them. “Any vamps I need to look at?”

They all straightened and shook their heads. “It doesn’t look like it.”

“Is that Tessa?”

A huge voice boomed out of the room.

Motre. She laughed delightedly. “Hey, stranger.”

“Stranger?” He grinned. “Only because you’re so damn slow getting here.”

Tessa winced. She could well imagine. She’d been fighting her own problems. “Sorry. I was a little busy.”

He nodded, already greeting the men with her. “Hey, Serus. Glad to see you in fighting form as usual. Hi, Cody, still on guard duty, I see.”

Tessa tuned out the men as she turned to stare at the room full, and she meant full, of vamps. Some were in better shape than the others. But she noted with relief that there was no blackness coming off of any of them. That was indeed good news.

She spun around. “So are we ready to leave then?”

Motre nodded. “We tried to do that not too long ago but hit a fighting party, forcing us back. So—” He shrugged. “We backed off. But I’d say my group is raring to give it another try.”

One young man slouched against a wall in the back piped up insolently, “Except that we were waiting for reinforcements. They are hardly reinforcements. A woman, an old man, and a kid. Like what the hell, Motre? We need an army.”

Serus, his hackles visibly rising, opened his mouth when Tessa jumped in first. “I don’t doubt
you
do,” she said with emphasis. “We, however, don’t. You’re free to stand back and wait for another group to rescue you.” Her gaze swept past the others. “Any of you can.” She shrugged. “But your best bet is with us. Don’t believe us? No problem.” She gave him a feral smile. “Feel free to stay.”

Motre jumped in front of her as she spun, ready to stalk back out of the room.

“So we have a plan?” he asked, eagerness in his voice.

She nodded. “We do.”

“Glad to hear it,” Serus muttered. “Cause if we don’t, how about I just throw men out the window in a heap and when it’s big enough, those left still standing can climb out.”

Tessa laughed. “Wouldn’t that be fun? No, we’re going to go down the stairs just like you did before.”

Motre studied her. “And what’s going to be different about this attempt versus the last attempt?” He glanced back at the group listening in and lowered his voice, adding, “Some of them are pretty weak. The last battle wasn’t pretty.”

The others crowded around to hear her answer. She smiled. “You’ll see.”

And she left.

Cody hurried to catch up. “Um, Tessa, could you let me in on this plan of yours, please?”

Serus, from behind, called forward. “I want to know what’s up your sleeve too, young lady.”

“Especially since nothing has changed out there,” Motre said.

“Sure it has,” she said cheerfully. “I’m back in fighting form and could use a good dustup.” At her words, she chuckled. “Speaking of which, where’s Goran?”

She spun around to look at Motre. “I thought he’d come here with David to help out.”

“Nope, no sign of them here.” Motre glanced back at the mess of young injured and weak vamps mixed among those that had recovered. “Sure could use them though.”

She nodded. “Dad?”

“I’m asking him – so far he’s not answering.”

“He went after Bart, didn’t he?” She spun to look at her father. “You knew?”

“Sure. It wasn’t a secret.” He shrugged. “That guy is a loose cannon.”

She thought about it and realized that it was a good idea. At least this way someone was going to run down the canister. So that worked. She still hadn’t looked at the camera shots either. “We were going to go to the security room and check the video feed of what happened here.”

“Don’t bother,” Motre said, “We took them down a long time ago.”

She glanced at him in surprise. “Oh, so much for that idea. I’d hoped they’d tell us who was still on the enemy’s side.”

“Everyone who’s not here,” he snapped. “At least that’s how we’re going to handle them.”

Tessa stopped and glanced back at the men following. She couldn’t see any of the foreign delegates. “Did all the men and dignitaries get out safely?”

“Everyone is out except what you see here. We were only a little ways behind the last group, but it was just enough for them to move into position.” Motre shrugged. “In theory, they should have well-shored up defenses by now making them dangerous as hell, but I’ve seen you do some pretty interesting things these few weeks. If you say we can go this way and handle whatever is out there, then I’m willing to follow you.”

She laughed. “Smart choice.”

“What choice?” muttered someone behind her. “Kill or be killed. What happened to my nice university life?”

“I’d say you got caught up in the blood farm roundup.” Cody snorted. “You’re not the only one. Lots of guys here did, too.”

Motre spoke to Serus behind her. “Do you think they have another place to hide out if we can get this place cleared?”

Serus growled. “They do. We’re still seeing way too many of them for them to be hurting for men or supplies, and that means they have places to go to restock. Grab reinforcements.”

“How do we find and kill all those bastards?” the same kid piped up. “I’d kinda like to go back to school.”

“We’re working on it,” Cody said. “The more places like this one that we can clean out, the more we can hurt them in a big way. You guys were all the next batch of recruits. Count yourself lucky that you’re not further in their process to becoming enhanced.”

To Motre, she asked. “Are you sure this is the last group?”

He nodded. “Yes. We’ve gone from the top down. We did a sweep on the lower floors earlier but didn’t find much.”

She nodded. That confirmed their findings, except that there were always rooms on these floors where people could hide. She knew Goran and David were down in the lower floors and if they were, then there would be others. “What about the nursing staff? Anyone see any of them?”

“No, we haven’t seen any staff here.”