Taken by the Others (26 page)

A handful of other vampires separated off and went down the opposite hallway. Six vampires I didn’t know, and one vampire I did–John–came with me, Chaz, Devon, and Tiny to check out the upstairs.

This club was a lot smaller than The Underground. There were two upper floors, both open to the public. Below was a basement connected to the webwork Royce’s people used to get around his businesses without chancing police, reporters, or daylight. John, knowing the layout better than the rest of us, took the lead.

The top of the stairs opened directly onto a smallish dance floor. There was different music playing here, just as obnoxious as what was pounding out of the sound system downstairs. Actually, I think it was worse, seeing as the singer couldn’t coherently scream his lyrics. Yeesh.

The creepiest thing about the place was that there were no people. Why all the cars in the lot below, but nobody manning the bars, no one dancing to the music, and not a soul reclining on any of the numerous plush couches and chairs scattered around the place? The people had to have gone somewhere. It was freaking me out that we hadn’t come across a single one yet. Where were they being held? Where was the smell of blood coming from?

My heart had worked its way from my throat back down to my chest by the third empty room. It didn’t make any sense. Everyone else looked just as grim and just as puzzled as I felt. I was starting to think this whole thing was a bust and that Max and his people must have gone through the tunnels or left by some other means, when we came upon the largest dance floor on this level.

There were bodies sprawled everywhere on the floor, many piled on top of each other. Skin pale, so pale, unnaturally so. Some of them flashed scarlet at the neck, on the wrist, or maybe the bend of an elbow, vivid against bloodless skin. Glazed eyes stared sightlessly up at the weaving spotlights on the ceiling. Images of macabre scenes, graveyards, twining bodies, and empty eyes shifted on the screen above the stage on the other side of the room, flowing to the beat of the music. It was twistedly apropos of the piles of dead sprawled atop one another, covering the dance floor like a grisly blanket.

I tried to stay detached. I tried very hard to think analytically about what I was seeing so I would not run screaming from the room. The floor wasn’t literally covered–there were twenty or so bodies here; not nearly enough to account for all the cars in the lot below. There had to be more bodies around here somewhere. Maybe there were clues here as to where Max had gone.

The closest corpse was only a few feet away from where I’d stopped–an Asian woman with hair dyed an appalling shade of purple. She was wearing a top that barely covered her breasts, and a chain ran from her belt to a studded collar around her neck. More chains extended from the collar to matching bracelets at her wrists and ankles.

The cuff on the left had been torn away, fingers limply curled up to expose the inside of her wrist. There was a bite there, two jagged tears far more visible than the neat marks on my neck. Fangs had been used to slash that otherwise flawless skin, not just to pierce. I quickly shifted my gaze to her face; those glazed brown eyes seemed to stare accusingly at me. We were too late to save her, save all these people, from the kind of death that had haunted my nightmares ever since I found out that vampires existed outside storybooks and bad horror movies.

I looked down at my feet, collecting myself before examining what was on the dance floor more closely. The shallow breaths I was taking made the smell of blood and dead meat chokingly thick on my tongue. That’s when I noticed the ground was glistening. As if in a dream or trance, I slowly knelt down to touch it.

It wasn’t the material of the floor making it shiny. It was slick with blood.

Twisting away, I staggered back to my feet. Chaz had to catch my arm and help me so I could throw up in the room behind us instead of on the bodies. He looked as green as I felt. Even the vampires looked disturbed by this much bloodshed, some of them wiping at their mouths, backing out of the room. Devon and Tiny were the only ones unfazed by the sight. In fact, they waded right into the mess, pulling gloves out of their pockets before touching anything. I noted with a detached sort of horror that each step they took kicked up droplets of blood.

They examined some of the closest remains. Devon shouted something, but I couldn’t make it out over the heavy bass of the music. John shook his head and Devon shouted again. This time I heard him.

“… got here in time! They’ve all been drained by vampires, no other injuries on any of them I can see. Why just leave all these bodies here? Why kill all these people that way, waste all this blood?”

“I don’t know. Maybe Mr. Royce will have some ideas.”

John looked frustrated and frazzled, running a hand raggedly through his short reddish-brown hair. The gesture didn’t help his image. He may have been around since the Boston Tea Party, but dressed down in jeans and a plain blue button-down shirt, he looked too much the over-earnest intern to be taken seriously as Royce’s second-in-command.

“Let’s go find him,” I said, lacing my arm through Chaz’s so I wouldn’t fall on my face. I’d disgraced myself enough by being the only person to toss my cookies. With the way my knees were shaking, I wasn’t sure my legs would hold up on the stairs yet. At that point, I would have done anything to get us as far away from this room as possible, even if Chaz had to carry me to do it.

“I’m going to stay here and check for more clues,” Tiny rumbled, barely heard against the deeper bass of the music. Devon went with him, the two crouching down to check the bodies more thoroughly. One of the vampires walked with them, an expression of severe distaste curling his lip as the hunters blithely rummaged through the macabre remains.

With me hanging on Chaz’s arm, the rest of the vampires hurried after us a trifle faster than strictly necessary. I guess even vamps aren’t always hardened to murder. Mass murder anyway. What’s a single victim here or there?

I knew Max was a Bad Guy, with a capital B, capital G. However, I hadn’t counted on him being quite this psychotic. Even after having been thrown so casually to Peter and then bitten by Max, too, I hadn’t thought he was capable of this level of violence, bloodshed, and waste.

The belt forced calm on me, clearing my head so I could focus and think. Alien thoughts threaded through my mind, calculating the whys and wherefores of this massacre.

It was out of character for vampires to do something so openly destructive, particularly an elder, who knew his survival was dependent upon blending in with and hiding from mortals. If people were too afraid, it became harder to hunt, harder to seduce, harder to make them love you and let you feed on them. This number of dead humans was guaranteed to make headlines. There would be no possible way to hide this many deaths from the authorities or the media. It would cause trouble for vampires everywhere. He must be intending to use it somehow. But how?

Chaz yanked me back from the bottom of the stairwell, one hand tugging me up against his chest, the other arm blocking the way for everyone else. Only then did I realize something was different. The music down here was off. The only song still playing came from the second floor, muffled here in the stairwell. My eardrums weren’t functioning right, still semideafened, so I wasn’t sure why he’d stopped us. After prying his fingers off my stomach, I leaned forward to peer into the main room of the first floor.

Brows lowered in a scowl, Royce was staring in the direction of the room with the chains hiding it from view, three police officers holding guns and crosses on him and the vampires crowded around him. There were far too many of them for the cops to hold, but Royce was a law-abiding vampire. He wasn’t the type to use trickery or force to avoid the police.

There was a fourth officer tossing his cookies in the corner, much like I had been a few minutes ago. The others looked green around the gills, too. I guess the rest of the bodies weren’t far away.

One of the cops was giving some rushed orders into his radio, calling in for backup and as many people as the coroner’s office could spare. The presence of law enforcement officials so close on our heels meant someone had been keeping tabs on us. This must be more of Max’s plan to screw things up as thoroughly as possible for the rest of us. What else would Max do while Royce and I were cooling our heels at the station?

Seething, I pulled back into the shadows of the stairwell. This was just great. An intelligent, calculating, completely psychotic elder leech, who was perfectly willing to murder people and turn the police against us, was succeeding at putting the blame for his crimes squarely on an innocent–well, innocent of this crime–vampire’s shoulders.

Just the kind of guy you want as an enemy.

Chapter 27

The police hadn’t spotted me yet. We had some time and we needed to get out of here to find Max before he could take advantage of Royce being tied up in legal red tape. I gestured for the others to go back up the stairs. They hesitated, but at my insistent signals to be quiet and move, they made their way back up.

I explained as briefly as I could once our voices were safely drowned out by the music. “Someone tipped off the cops! They’re holding the others downstairs. John, do you know any alternate ways out of here?”

“Yes,” he replied, more distressed than before, “but I think it would be best if we didn’t go in a big group. We might be spotted. There are a couple of alternate exits so we can split up and meet back at corporate later.” He turned to two of the other vampires, pointing toward the room where Devon, Tiny, and the other guy were examining the bodies. “Derek, Rick, can you go warn the others and get them out of here through the fire escape?”

Derek nodded and the two rushed off. John turned to another pair of the vampires. “You two take the Weres out through the lift. Go out the back door, and get the people guarding it out of here, too.”

“Wait, I’m not going without Shia,” Chaz protested.

I opened my mouth to argue, too, but John lifted a hand to cut me off. “We have wards keyed against Weres in the passage she needs to go through to escape this building. She doesn’t have the strength or constitution to jump rooftops like we can. Max must have planned for this somehow. Mr. Royce might need her help making a statement so the police don’t hold him, and I don’t want to chance her getting lost or hurt before she can do that.”

Chaz didn’t like it, his voice lowering and his eyes taking on a subtle amber glow as his anger started to get the better of him. “If something happens to her, I’m holding you personally responsible.”

“I swear on my honor I will keep her safe.” John stated curtly, meeting Chaz’s heated gaze without flinching.

Chaz turned one last, anguished look to me. I gave him a smile to let him know I’d be okay, but I don’t think it was very convincing. Chaz, Vincent, and the two vamps rushed off without another word.

That left me with John and a vamp I didn’t know. The latter turned to me, gesturing to a hallway we hadn’t checked earlier.

“This way.”

We ran like our lives depended on it. I think I surprised both of them that I kept up with their pace. With the hunter’s belt, I could run faster than this, but they were moving at a reasonable speed they thought I could manage. Some niggling sense of caution made me consider it might be better to keep the perks of the belt under wraps. I didn’t try to outdo them, just kept up.

Down a dimly lit corridor, we came to a locked door that faded into the walls. Everything, from the hinges down to the doorknob, was painted the same flat black as the wall. Guess it kept people from snooping, though John was having some technical difficulties finding the key that fit the lock. Even with the enhanced night vision vamps are graced with, trying to find the right key in this hallway had to be difficult.

Just as he unlocked the door, an officer came rushing at us from the stairwell, his hand on the butt of his gun. The music was too loud to hear what he was shouting, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t anything encouraging.

The three of us ducked inside, scrambling to get out of the way before the cop could shoot or reach us. John slammed the door behind us and stabbed at the button for a service elevator. Guess this was how the employees trucked the booze up to this level. I wasn’t tired, but I leaned against the wall while we waited, listening to the pounding of the policeman’s fist against the door when he realized it was locked.

“That was close.”

The other vamp grinned at me nervously, flashing fangs. “Yeah. Don’t worry, we’ll be out of here soon.”

Shuddering, I turned away to avoid looking into the hazel irises of the strange vamp flickering to the red of agitation. John was rubbing his face in an uneasy gesture, occasionally throwing furtive glances in my direction. Me? I was busy worrying about the consequences of running, and sorely hoped that I hadn’t left behind enough evidence for the police to figure out I’d been there. Had I left any fingerprints? Oh, shit. I’d thrown up. If they had any DNA of mine on file, they’d know.

Maybe running from the cops hadn’t been the brightest thing to do, but being trapped in a police station wouldn’t help anything. No doubt I would be stuck there for hours and lose any advantage or lead on Max if I got dragged down to the station tonight.

Where did Max flee to? Why had he set up Royce like this? It wouldn’t take that long for the police to do the DNA tests, or to take measurements of the marks on the corpses against the bite radius of Royce’s vamps to figure out they weren’t involved. There were undoubtedly security cameras in or outside the building that must have caught the real culprits on tape, too.