Tony was waiting for us when we got back to the shop.
“Hey, Nick! Come over to the lab for a minute. I’ve got something to show you.”
Tony hadn’t invited me, but I followed the two men into the small lab set up in one of the former examination rooms.
“Take a look at this,” he said, pointing to a microscope. Nick peered through it, then moved out of my way so that I could look, too.
I really don’t remember much from high school biology, and I took geology in college—I thought it would be easier than any of the other science classes. I’d been wrong. All rocks look the same to me, as the D on my college transcript proves.
So all I could tell from looking through the microscope was that I was looking at a bunch of cells. And I only knew that because I’d seen similar things in movies.
“What am I looking at?” I asked Tony.
“I think I’ve managed to isolate the substance that causes the addiction in the victims,” he said. “I found it in the saliva taken from both Elle’s and Malcolm’s wounds.”
The thought of saliva in my wounds made my shoulder itch. Vampire spit. Gross.
“How does it work?” Nick asked.
“The chemical makeup is similar to nicotine. I suspect it works in much the same way as cigarettes work to addict smokers. Actually,” Tony continued, “the presence of something like this in vampire saliva makes sense, if it actually does work like nicotine. We know that nicotine causes a short-term increase in blood pressure and heart rate, and in the flow of blood from the heart. A similar compound injected into a victim’s body might make it easier for the vamp to draw the blood out.”
“Injected through the fangs?” I asked.
“Maybe. I’d have to take a closer look at a vampire’s fangs to see if there’s any actual injection process or if the compound is simply transferred by saliva,” Tony said. “Also, this substance seems to have an anti-coagulant, similar to the one that mosquitoes inject into a wound. That would help the vampire feed as well.”
“What about the euphoric effects that Elle and Malcolm both described?” Nick asked.
“I’m going to have to run some more tests to figure that out. I’m considering a couple of possibilities right now. I suspect that the compound acts on the brain chemistry to increase dopamine and phenylethylamine levels. But that’s just a theory right now.”
“Nice work,” Nick said. “Keep at it and let us know what you find out.”
* * *
It took almost an entire week for Malcolm to heal up enough so that Tony would say he was ready to go back into Deirdre’s mansion.
We spent that week planning our raid.
In the end, we probably could have used less planning and more weapons training. But we didn’t know that then.
And for all the time we spent going over the plan again and again, it was really fairly simple. Malcolm would go back in. He would take a day or two to figure out a way to drug the servants, then he would signal us. We would go in and kill all the vampires. And then we would leave.
Voila.
There were lots of little details to work out, of course. For example, how would Malcolm sneak in the drug?
“He won’t,” said Nick in the midst of one of our many planning sessions in the common room. “We’ll hide the drug somewhere nearby—on the grounds, in a nearby mailbox, somewhere we’ll pick out beforehand. Dom and I are going to the neighborhood tomorrow to install the phone system Malcolm will access to call us once the servants are all down for the count. We’ll find a spot then.”
“How will he get away to get the poison?” I asked.
“It’s not a poison; it’s a sedative,” Tony said.
“Whatever. My point is, if he has to go outside to get it, how will he explain to the other servants where he’s going?”
“I’ll figure something out, Elle,” said Malcolm. He was sitting next to me. It was something he’d started doing lately, as if he didn’t want to get too far from me.
“I just hate leaving this much up to chance,” I said.
Malcolm didn’t answer.
* * *
John took me back up to Westchester to pick up my new weapon. It had a wickedly sharp point; it looked dangerous. The metal gleamed and the strips of dark oiled wood inset into each side of the blade made it look as if it were full of shadows.
“It’s beautiful,” I breathed, taking it from Marco Ventimiglia’s hands and holding it reverently up to the light.
“It suits you,” John said. Ventimiglia beamed proudly.
“It’s absolutely perfect, Mr. Ventimiglia,” I said. I leaned over the dusty counter and planted a kiss on his cheek. The old man actually blushed.
In the end, the week passed much more quickly than I ever would have wanted it to. Dom and Nick tapped into a phone line and left a tiny microphone on a telephone pole near Deirdre’s house so that Malcolm could contact us when it was time for us to move in. They also taped a waterproof envelope full of some sort of sedative powder to the bottom of a neighbor’s mailbox so that Malcolm wouldn’t get caught with it when Deirdre had him searched, as we were all certain she would.
Nick drilled Malcolm on what he was to do, over and over and over again. But in the end, we all knew that nothing we said could prepare Malcolm for what might actually happen inside that house.
And then, finally, on a Friday twelve days after Malcolm and I had stumbled down that long driveway and into Nick’s van, we drove him out to Long Island and dropped him off at a train station close to Deirdre’s house. It was late afternoon, and the sun slanted across the parking lot. He would get to the house hours before the sun went down.
I grabbed his hands before he got out of the van.
“Be careful,” I said.
“I will. I’ll call you as soon as everything’s ready.”
I nodded and he stepped out onto the pavement. The last I saw of him, he was hailing a cab.
* * *
Nick had rented a suite of rooms at a hotel only a few miles away from Deirdre’s so that we could move quickly once Malcolm called us.
I spent the first hour pacing back and forth in front of the sliding glass door that led to the pool. Outside, four children splashed in the turquoise water, screaming with laughter.
“Geez, Elle, sit down. He’s not going to call today,” said John. He was playing cards with Nick and Tony. Dom had a laptop out on the desk and was scrolling through a screen of incomprehensible numbers.
“We don’t know that for sure. Maybe he’ll find a way to drug everyone before the sun goes down.” I didn’t sound convincing, even to myself.
I eventually gave up pacing and threw myself into a chair. I picked up the television remote and started surfing through the channels. I went to the news channels first, hoping that bigger crises than my own would take my mind off the situation. Middle East peace talks had broken down again. The president was promising that the economy would improve. Nothing new. Nothing interesting on the other channels, either. Reruns, mostly, and one bad porn flick that I flipped past as quickly as possible. I finally settled on an old Bugs Bunny cartoon.
I dug the wooden crucifix Nick had given me to replace the one I’d left behind at Deirdre’s out of the big black purse I had dropped on the floor by the couch. I also pulled out a Swiss Army knife. I had begun sharpening the end of the crucifix so that I could use it as a stake. I worked on it now not so much because it needed more sharpening, but because I hoped that keeping my hands busy would help pass the time.
But I couldn’t quit thinking about what must be happening to Malcolm. He would have gotten to the house about the same time we had checked in at the hotel. What had he done in that time? Had the human servants let him in? Was he just wandering around that elegant drawing room, waiting for the vampires to wake up for the evening? Did the other humans there offer him food, something to drink?
I set the crucifix aside and closed up the Swiss Army knife, dropping it back into my purse. If I was going to obsess, I might as well do so fully, I decided.
Had the human servants let Malcolm walk around at all? Or had they taken him back down to that horrible room with its chains on the wall? Had they held him down, stripped him, and tightened the manacles around his wrists?
“Oh, God,” I moaned, leaning forward and putting my face in my hands.
Nick stood up from the card table. “I’m out. I think maybe it’s time to go pick up some food. Elle, why don’t you come with me?”
His cell phone rang. We all froze, staring at him. I could hear my heart thudding in my chest.
Nick looked at the screen and shook his head, then answered. We all relaxed. Or rather, the guys all relaxed. What I did was something more like wilting.
Nick moved into one of the bedrooms in the suite, murmuring into his phone. He shut the door behind him.
I stood up and walked back over to the sliding glass door. I rested my forehead against the clear, cool glass. The children were still playing in the pool, but I wasn’t watching them. I was watching the last of the sun’s rays as they faded out. I wondered what exactly constituted “night” to vampires. I knew that sunlight could harm them, but I didn’t know if they could handle reflected light. I mean, did the sunlight have to be direct? Or could they move around during these long spring twilights?
“No clue,” said Dominick when I asked aloud. “The oldest vampire stories don’t say anything about them having to actively avoid the sun. They’re just weaker in the sunlight.”
What I really wanted to know, of course, was how long it would be before Deirdre found out that Malcolm was back.
None of the guys had any answer to that, either.
“For a bunch of vampire hunters, you people don’t know much about vampires,” I said.
“We know at least as much as you do,” said Tony, but his smile took some of the sting out of his words.
“Yeah, but I just sort of fell into this. It’s not my life’s work.”
“And how do you think we all got into it?” Dom asked. “It’s not like any of us had ‘vampire killer’ as a career objective on our resumes. We just sort of fell into it, too.”
I hadn’t ever considered that. I knew how Nick had ended up in this line of work, but it had never occurred to me to question how the others had ended up working with him.
“Okay, so how did you end up here?” I asked. No one answered.
“John, you first,” I said.
“Vamps got my parents,” he said.
“Oh, God. That’s awful. I’m so sorry,” I said.
“I was five years old, and I saw it. I heard someone come in downstairs, and I hid in my closet. I heard my mother scream, and my father ran into my bedroom. He found me, then he opened a window and threw me out onto the roof of the porch outside. I saw a vampire grab him and bite him. I slid down the roof and hit the ground running. The neighbors found me in their garage the next morning.” He shook his head. “Nobody believed what I told them, but nobody ever saw my parents again, either. I finally learned to shut up about it, but I never forgot.”
“So how did you get hooked up with Nick?” I asked.
“I ended up at the same military school he’d gone to—too many foster parents had passed me around and I didn’t think I had anything to lose, so I’d just stopped caring. My last foster parents, though, they were the real deal—they weren’t willing to give up on me. So they sent me away to boot camp. At the time, I hated them for it. And by then, Nick was volunteering at the school, working with some of the boys. He still does that, sometimes. He offered me the job when I graduated. I thought he was crazy at first, but I didn’t have any place else to go, so I took it.”
“Did you all meet him at that school?” I asked. Dom and Tony shook their heads.
“No,” said Tony. “I met him for the first time when he brought a little girl into the emergency room for treatment. I was doing my rotations during med school. I was still pretty new, and I thought that she had been attacked by a dog. The little girl kept saying that a man bit her, and I thought Nick was trying to protect the owner of the dog by getting her to lie about it. Then it happened again—the same guy brought in a couple more people with the same kinds of bites—and I thought it might even be his dog. Animal control destroys dogs that attack people, so I tried to follow him home one night. I wasn’t the only one following him; he had some vampire following him, too. But Nick wasn’t the one who got caught. I was. If Nick hadn’t heard me yell, the vamp would have drained me and left me for dead.” He unbuttoned the second button of his shirt and showed me an old scar, two tiny round marks at the base of his throat.
“Nick just recruited me,” said Dom. “I answered an ad for a computer specialist.” He saved whatever he was doing on the computer and turned to face us.
“So how exactly did he explain that you were going to be part of a vampire killing team?” I asked.
“He didn’t. I was in ROTC in college, and during the interview, he tells me that had impressed him. Then he tells me that the job is mine if I want it, but he wants me to see the working conditions before I decided whether or not to take it. He’s scheduled this interview after five in the winter, so it’s already dark, right?”
I nodded.
“So we go get in his van and drive to this old warehouse in the middle of nowhere. I’m a little freaked out, but the guy doesn’t seem like a serial killer or anything, so I’m thinking, ‘well, he did say it was a brand-new company. Maybe they can’t afford anyplace better.’ We walk into the warehouse, and these four, five vamps jump in outta nowhere, showing those godawful teeth and hissing like they do.
“Nick just lays into them. Then he tosses me a stake and says ‘Go for the heart!’ So I did. And here I am. I figured that I wasn’t gonna find any cooler job than one where I got paid to play with computers and kill vampires.”
He leaned back in his chair and grinned. I had to grin, too.
Nick came out of the back bedroom. “Okay. Elle? Food? Anyone have any requests?”
* * *
The call came two days later. I thought that I had almost stopped listening for it; I had almost convinced myself that it would take at least a week before Deirdre would let Malcolm roam freely—a week that she would spend allowing her younger vampires to train on him, all the while increasing his addiction to their bites.
Still, I jumped every time Nick’s cell phone rang. Then I froze, waiting to see if Nick would tell us to load up. Each time, he would shake his head before answering the call.
This time, he didn’t shake his head. Instead he held up one finger in a “wait a minute” gesture. We all stared at him anxiously. He nodded and said, “uh-huh,” then paused and listened. I bounced on the balls of my feet, anxious to know what was being said at the other end of the line.
“Okay,” said Nick into the receiver, “we’re on our way.”
He ended the call, looked up at us, and said, “We’re on.”
I had always assumed that covert operations involved a lot of tip-toeing up to windows and peeking in. But we didn’t even bother to hide what we were doing. We just drove the van up to the front door and piled out. We were all wearing the jumpsuit uniforms Nick had brought for us, so we looked like some sort of professionals—maybe cable installers or plumbers or exterminators—but no one who might notice us would be likely to believe that it took five technicians to fix whatever the problem inside might be.
Unless that problem was a vampire infestation.
We were all carrying a variety of tools and weapons. I had the special knife Ventimiglia had made for me and a whole bunch of regular stakes hanging from a tool-belt around my waist. I also had my crucifix-stake. If it worked, I was going to make a whole bunch more of them.
John looked most like a regular technician or plumber—he had actual tools dangling from his tool-belt. Of course, he was also carrying a huge crossbow and had an open bag of wooden crossbow bolts slung across his back. That kind of ruined the image.
Dom had a black gym bag full of electronic equipment. I’d seen him pack it up, but I couldn’t have named what was inside it for the life of me. Lots of wires and electrodes and little screen displays. A computer tablet or two. A few smaller electronics.
Nick and Tony just had weapons of various sorts, ranging from crossbows to stakes. Nick even had a gun, though I wasn’t sure what he was planning to do with it. I hoped he didn’t intend to shoot any humans with it, but I was afraid that was the idea.
The entire mansion was creepy-silent when Malcolm opened the door and let us in.
“Where is everyone?” I asked.
“Passed out,” Malcolm said. “Just like we planned it.”
“No. I mean where are they? In their rooms, in the ballroom? Where?” I realized I was whispering when Malcolm answered me in his normal voice.
“Oh. Various places. Some of them are still in bed; I put the drugs in their drinks last night and this morning. I had to sneak up on the guards and inject them, though. They’re pretty much still laying around wherever they fell.”
“Where are the vampires?” Nick asked.
“Bottom basement level,” said Malcolm. “At least, I think that’s where they are. None of the humans are allowed to go down there.”
My head swam as I considered how much danger he’d been in for the last few days.
“Let’s go, then,” said Nick, hefting his crossbow to his shoulder and heading down the stairs. Dom, John, and Tony followed him. I lingered for a moment to grab Malcolm’s arm.
“How are you doing?” I asked.
“Fine. I’ll be glad when this is over.”
“Was it bad?”
He didn’t look at me. “Let’s just get through this. Then we can talk.” He followed the others down the stairs. I followed him.
It didn’t take us long to catch up. Despite Malcolm’s assurances that no one was awake, the guys were being ultra-cautious. Good for them, I thought. No one was saying it aloud, but we were all concerned about the possibility that the vampires might have gotten to Malcolm.
In fact, I’d been glad to see that he could step out into the sunlight when he let us in the door. One boyfriend had already joined Deirdre’s Night Stalker Brigade. I didn’t want to think about losing another one to the forces of darkness. Not that way.
But being able to stand in the sun didn’t necessarily mean that there weren’t other ways for Malcolm to have betrayed us. I shook my head. I couldn’t keep thinking that way.
Holding my stake knife out in front of me, I crept down the stairs, hugging my back to the wall and looking over my shoulder for anything that might attack us from behind.
We reached the basement where I’d found Malcolm the first time. The long row of hotel-room-like doors stood closed and silent, looking like some scene out of The Shining. I expected a kid on a Big Wheel to come rolling down the hall at any moment. The rest of us waited on the landing while Dom and John moved down the halls opening doors one at a time and checking the rooms.
They started with the ones closest to us. Peering through the now-open doorways, I could see that they were all empty. Some of them were cleaned and made up, just like hotel rooms. In other rooms, the beds were messy and unmade. And I mean messy in the “covered with bloodstains” kind of way.
I didn’t look into the room where Deirdre had first kept Malcolm. I didn’t want to see the chair where I sat while she and Greg took blood from me.
Dom and John came trotting back down the hall, holding their hands in a “thumbs up” sign. All the rooms were clear. I breathed out in relief. Obstacle one, clear.
With Nick again leading, we began our descent into the next basement, the one that we assumed held the sleeping vampires.
The staircase ended in a small landing with a heavy wooden door at the end of it. Locked, of course. With what looked like several deadbolts. Of course.
“This is me,” John said, moving up and pulling what looked like a key ring with a bunch of tiny metal sticks hanging off it out of his toolbelt.
“Lock picks,” Dom whispered to me. I nodded.
John fiddled with one of the locks for a minute, peering into the mechanism with a tiny flashlight he’d pulled out of his pocket. He shook his head. “Hey, Dom,” he said. We were all whispering now. “I think maybe this lock has some sort of electronic component to it. Want to check it out?”
Dom moved up and peered at the lock.
“See that?” John said, pointing at something inside the lock itself.
“Hmm. Yeah. Okay.” Dom reached into the black gym bag and pulled out some wires and a black box with a display monitor. He ran one of the wires into the lock, using one of John’s metal strips to maneuver it into place, then attached the other end of the wire to the box. The display monitor began scrolling through a series of numbers.
“Elle,” he whispered tersely.
“Yeah?”
“Could you back off a little? I’m feeling kind of crowded here.”
I realized I was standing practically on top of him. “Oh. Sorry.” I took a step back.
After a few long, silent minutes, the black box beeped.
The sound was loud in the stillness and I jumped.
“Done,” Dom said. “It was an alarm—the standard kind anyone could buy at Radio Shack. Disarmed now.” He moved aside so John could get back up to the door.
A locked door with an alarm. I frowned in concentration. Why would the vampires put an alarm on their door? To get the humans to come help them if they were in trouble, of course.
But maybe more than that. Maybe…
I started waving my hands in front of me just as John dealt with the final part of the lock.
“Wait,” I said, as he turned the knob and pushed at the door. “Wait! I think that maybe some of the vampires might be…” the door swung open as the last word came out of my mouth “…awake.”