Burning (Brotherhood of the Blade Trilogy #1) (17 page)

“
Me, too. Another big day tomorrow with Samantha Moon.”

“
Expect a miracle,” Mikhail said suddenly.

I paused in mid-lift, my body dripping. “Why do you say that?”

He grinned enigmatically. “Just expect one.”

Chapter Twenty-nine

In my bedchamber with the black-out curtains drawn against the daylight, I kept my eyes open, wondering if we would get some intel tomorrow on my daughter’s current location, even as darker shapes hovered over my bed and tiny lights flitted across my room and passed through the walls.

“Get out! You don’t exist,” I said aloud to the ghosts and spirits that I wanted to pretend didn’t exist.

Yes, I had seen such images all of my life—and ignored them, as well. Better to pretend they didn’t exist. Damn Samantha. Her certainty in the hauntings had seemingly galvanized the spirits into more activity.

My life is weird,
I thought.
Very, very weird.

More than anything, I felt a bleak sadness sweep over me, and my teeth chattered from the intense frigid air that moved through my room.

“Rudolph,” I suddenly said for no reason, “if that’s you, don’t haunt me, bro. Just go into the light,” I said out loud.

I suddenly found myself weeping over the loss of my wife, over the kidnapping of my daughter, over the loss of life as I once knew it, and my home. I cried for the ache of no longer being coupled to a good woman who loved me, faults and all.

Not since the day I had found my wife charred, my daughter gone, and my house burned down—when I had raged until my throat had bled from screaming—had I wept like this. Tonight, instead of raging at the vampires, I raged at ghosts in the castle.

Bam, bam, bam!
came pounding on my thick bedchamber door. Fear coiled up in me and I said in a squeaky voice, “Who is it?” I flipped on my bedside light and all of the black things in the room dissipated.

“
It’s Ambra! Stop yelling and open the door.”

Relief flooded me, and then embarrassment. I rushed to unbolt the door. She slipped through it and I bolted it again. She was wearing a gray sweat suit and fuzzy pink slippers. Her hair was in a messy ponytail, as if I had awakened her. She carried a pillow, which she threw on my side of the bed. She kicked off her slippers and put her scythe necklace and the full-size scythe on the floor next to the bed.

“Shove over. This is my preferred side of the bed.”

I was mortified. “I’m sorry I woke you.”

“Woke me? You’re waking the
dead
with all of that yelling! Woo, it’s cold in here.” She got in my bed and pulled up the covers. “Come on.”

“
Not that I’m not glad to see the bad-ass, sexy Ambra slip into my bed, but when a woman comes to my bed, I like it to be my idea.”

“
You have quite the ego for someone who was screaming at ghosts less than two minutes ago.”

Embarrassed, I turned on my side, away from her. I pushed down thoughts of Megan—my wife was dead. I wasn’t doing anything wrong, was I?

Ambra’s arm went around me and she spooned against my back. The only thing separating us was my long johns and her sweats. The soft mounds of her breasts pressed against my back. She entwined her legs with mine and snuggled into me.

“
I went through the same shit when I came here,” she said. “This place is
spooky
.”

“
You did?”

“
Yeah, but I hunkered down in my bed terrified, for months. Until I got used to the spooks here. And I cried myself sick over my husband. Oh, and I was a basket case.”

“
Really?”

“
I could tell you the blood-curdling stories, but then you’d never fall asleep. I want to make sure you have all the support you need so you don’t go mad with grief. Night, Rand.”

“
Thank you. Night, Ambra.”

She synched her breathing to mine—after that, I was watching a movie on the back of my eyelids.

It was a good thing that my back was to her.

Chapter Thirty

When I went downstairs at 5 p.m., the Brotherhood of the Blade and Sisterhood of the Scythe were assembling in the great hall.

Samantha had her laptop set up with a projector shining on the wall—her browser was opened to Google’s main page. She sipped a mug of what I assumed was more deer blood.

She looked professional in a burgundy cowl-neck sweater, black leather skirt with a demure below-the-knee hemline, and the same black suede boots she’d worn the day before. She had her hair up in a teacher-ish bun and an artifice of makeup that made it look like she wasn’t wearing any. I wondered how she did her makeup and hair since she didn’t reflect in a mirror.

I sat down with my breakfast, coffee, notebook and pens. Ambra plunked into the chair next to me with her massive plate of scrambled eggs,
cervelat
sausages, and
zopf
with jam. She had an iPad with her.

“
Bonsoir
,” she said casually, as if she had not spent the night in my bed.

“
Where were you when I woke up?”

“
Cross-country skiing.”

“
What about wolves?”

“
Corbin came with me. You should learn to ski.”

“
I prefer to exercise in the nice warm gym with satellite TV tuned into American sports.”

“
You miss the best of the Alps, the snow.” 

“
Says the ex-Olympic skier,” I replied.

She elbowed me. “Surfer boy.”

As everyone quieted down, Sam said to the group, “Rand, do you have any knowledge of your daughter’s internet activities before she got kidnapped?”

“
She’s nine years old.”

“
Did you let her play games online at any sites where she had to log in?”

“
With permission, yes.”

“
Where?”

I thought about it. Damn, for the life of me I couldn’t remember the website’s name. “Well, it had the word ‘pets’ in it.”

“Neopets?” Sam asked.

“
Yes!”

“
Anthony loves that site, too, and I let him use it if I’m sitting with him. Do you remember your daughter’s username or password?”

“
Super Kristen or Kristen the Great. Something like that.”

“
Was she good at the games?” asked Sam.

“
Yeah. She’s been playing since she was six.”

“
We’ll go to the high scores page and see if she’s been on it.”

I sat, amazed, at how Samantha Moon was going about the investigation. Clever woman. Clever vampire.

“Which game did she play the most?” asked Sam.

“
Space something.”

“
SpaceRocked?”

“
That’s it.”

Samantha clicked on the icon. “Okay, now we are at the high-scorer page for that game.”

“There she is! KristenMajesty06!” I shouted. I was almost beside myself with excitement.

Sam clicked on the name. “Look where it says ‘Last Spotted’—she was here less than one day ago.”

Could it really be true? Jesus, was that really her? I felt tears come to my eyes. I found myself standing, squeezing my hands into fists.

“
What do we do now?” I asked. “Do we call the web admin and get their IP logs? And then get the street address from that? And go get her?”

“
A busy site like that usually rolls over their log every hour. And you might have to have a U.S. court order or a subpoena to get that info.” Softer, Sam said, “We can explore other investigative threads. We’ll come back to Neopets.”

I was pacing now. “Why wouldn’t she email me, all these months? She’s on Neopets, for crissakes!”

“She’s probably highly supervised with software that blocks email sites.”

“
What’s the next step, Sam?” asked Lucas. He was sitting closest to her and had been carefully studying the screen.

Sam looked from him to me. “Does your daughter ever buy anything with credit cards? Kindle books or iTunes?”

“Kristen had a first-generation Kindle, from back in the day.”

“
Would her Kindle be something she would grab if the house was on fire?”

“
I don’t know.”

“
How do you pay for her Kindle books?”

“
I have my credit cards on autopay. My mind’s been on vampire hunting and looking for my daughter, but I never even thought to check and see if she bought Kindle books.”

“
Do you know your Amazon User ID?”

“
Yeah.”

“
Come here and log into your Amazon account.”

I went over and did so.

“Good,” said Sam. Now go to ‘Manage Your Kindle.’”

My legs almost went out from under me when I saw the long list of books and the dates of purchase since her abduction. “She’s bought a lot of books, including two Kindle books today.
The Wolves of Willoughby Chase
and
Harriet the Spy
.” I said. “It’s her!”

Sam smiled. “We’re getting closer. Her kidnappers probably monitor her internet use when she plays games, but it looks like they let her shop for books with her old Kindle. They probably don’t realize that she has internet access with it.”

The thought of Vlad the Impaler as being internet savvy nearly put me into hysterics. Then again, my emotions were running unchecked. After a moment, I got hold of myself and asked, “But what good does that do us for communicating with her? That model doesn’t have a browser.”

“
It does. It’s hidden under ‘Experimental’ on the main menu.”

“
I didn’t know that.” Hope surged through me.

Sam stood up. I could smell the gun oil on her concealed weapon, toothpaste and her vampire smell. Everybody got up from their seats and gathered around her laptop, even though the desktop image was projected on the wall.

Sam said, “We’re going to send Kristen an email to the Kindle.”

“
How do we do that?”

“
Click on ‘Personal Documents’ and look for a Kindle dot com address.”

“
Sam, are you telling me that I can send Kristen a document to her Kindle?”

“
Sure. But it has to be sent as an attachment and it will show up on her Kindle with the heading that you use for the subject email, so be careful, in case one of her captors is randomly checking her Kindle to see what books she downloads. It will also show the email address of the sender where the book author name usually shows up. Amazon protects the Kindle from spammers sending stuff to Kindle addresses, so only email addresses that you authorize can send documents to the Kindle.”

“
You know a lot about Kindles, Sam.”

“
What can I say? I love my Kindle.”

Ambra piped up. “We should create a fake email address to send from, something that looks like a book publisher, in case anyone but Kristen checks her Kindle. And then add the email address to the list of authorized emails under Manage My Kindle.”

“Good idea, Ambra. Make it so.”

Ambra got busy on her iPad. “I created a Gmail address: MiddleKidsStories.”

“Good one,” Sam said.

I added the email address to Manage My Kindle on the account. “Now what?” I asked.

“Create a Microsoft Word document with a .doc extension—an old-school file extension for Kindle—and give that document a code name, something that she would know came
only
from you.”

“
We have a dual password between us that if there was ever some emergency, that these two passwords would let each other know that it is truly us.”

“
You’re kidding.”

“
Nope. I’m paranoid.”

“
With good reason,” said Daphne, the castle’s part-time chef and member of the Sisterhood of the Scythe.

Sam asked, “Is your password to her suitable for a filename that will show up as a book title on Kindle?”

“Yes.” I typed, “Princess Daffodil” for the doc filename.

“
Perfect,” Sam said. “It looks like a story.”

“
What do I put in the body of the Word document?” I asked.