Maybe Erie had been protecting her, protecting the deal being made. Had the driver of the Charger been trying to kill her in retaliation?
Rio stretched an arm out and put her fingertips to the inside of Erie’s still-warm wrist. Feeling around . . . no, there was no pulse. Making the sign of the cross, she straightened—and left the area so that she could call in the shooting details to HQ from greater safety.
That she was walking with just a limp was better than she could have hoped for.
Good thing, too, as she wasn’t done with her to-do list yet tonight.
Lucan re-formed at right about the place he’d scared off those two boys with their ghost-hunting equipment. Lifting his face to the rain, he let the light drops fingertip his forehead and cheeks. On the backs of his eyelids, he saw that human female getting hit fair-and-square by the car. Then pictured her rising to her feet afterward, brushing herself off, and giving him the what-for.
She’d had a strong face, her features bold, her lips full, her dark eyes big under declarative brows. Her skin had lost all its color as she forced her weight onto what had taken the impact, but she had refused to give in to the pain.
He couldn’t decide whether the grit was sexy or stupid.
Well . . . he supposed it was stupid, but he found it sexy.
Wiping the rain through his hair, he leveled his head and stared straight ahead. If she didn’t call him sometime during the rest of tonight or tomorrow during the day, he was going to go out to the streets and find her.
And then what? the malest part of him demanded.
“None of your business,” he muttered.
You want her.
“Yeah, to get the Executioner off my back.”
Aware that he was arguing with himself, he started for his new home—and by “home,” he meant involuntary servitude with a roof over his head. “Prison camp” had been the old term, when they’d been underground at the old site they’d abandoned. This was the new world order, no more cells, though still underground, those tracking collars ever present.
Funny, how you could control people when, with one press of a remote, their brains were vaporized. There also weren’t a lot of options for most of the vampires being held.
He was one of the few without a collar. But he needed to be able to dematerialize back and forth to Caldwell to make this deal, and there was no ghosting around when you had a band of steel around your throat.
And the Executioner wasn’t worried about him bolting. The fucker had leverage over him, the kind of thing that was just as good as an explosive necklace. But it wasn’t going to last much longer so he was biding his time. With one death, he was free—and he was of half a mind to take care of the Grim Reaper’s work himself. It would be a mercy killing at this point, anyway, two liberations for the price of a single slit throat.
Cheap, all things considering.
Up ahead, the old human hospital building loomed like something out of a John Carpenter movie where everyone but the virtuous girl who didn’t have sex with her boyfriend died in creative, bloody ways.
God, he missed the eighties. Then again, the last time he’d been able to watch a TV or listen to a radio had been right before he’d been thrown into the prison camp. So, yeah, he was current as of the spring of 1983. And maybe he didn’t miss the era; he missed . . . life and the simple freedoms he had taken for granted.
Lucan stopped at the worn stone steps of the sanatorium’s entrance. The central core of the building was a tower of closed windows, the floors rising up like a blocky spear, the tip of which was a tower topped with a lightning rod. On either side of this torso, there were two five-story wings of open porches, each extending at a wide angle to catch the prevailing breeze for failing lungs.
The place had been built to treat the human tuberculosis patients who suffered such cruel, suffocating deaths through the 1800s and into the twentieth century. Back then, the treatment for the bacterial infestation was fresh air, and as much of it as you could stand, no matter the season. Well, that and hacking pieces of your lungs out, or cod-liver oil, or inhaling hemlock.
Until streptomycin and other drugs came to the rescue in the late forties.
Why did he know all that about those rats without tails and their coughs? He liked his trivia, even if it was about shit that didn’t affect vampires. Or vampire-wolven half-breeds.
The New York Times crossword puzzle had been his favorite.
Looking down the south wing, he measured the open porches that ran all the way to the far end. The patient rooms were behind the loggias, the rusted frames of the old hospital beds cluttering the tight spaces, all kinds of debris down the hallways and graffiti marking the stained and rotting walls. The north wing was the same, as was the administrative core that anchored the structure.