The Undead Pool

Weres couldn’t be turned, but they could be bound. Anger mixed with fear, the icy slurry setting my heart pounding as I strode for the front door. Anger won, and I pulled my splat gun with a cold certainty I’d use deadly force if needed. David was my rock, the one person in my life who could walk into any situation and find justice with a no-holds-barred force that held no apology, no thought to the future. Heaven help the person who hurt him.

“And you think you’re a bad alpha,” Jenks said, easily pacing me.

“Rachel, wait up!” Ivy all but hissed, jogging until she caught up. With a shake, she shook the sheath from the katana.

“Go right in,” Jenks said as we got closer, the old oak door silent and unmanned. “No one is conscious.”

Asking Ivy to wait, I pulled my phone back out and hit 911. I already knew which button to hit to go to their answering machine, and as soon as I got the beep, I rushed to say, “This is Rachel Morgan. Runner number 2000106WR48. I’m at Pizza Piscary’s. It’s sunrise. There are multiple unconscious vampires and Weres needing medical assistance. Use caution as a master vampire may be awake and violent. And try not to shoot us, okay? It’s me, Ivy Tamwood, and Jenks Pixy.”

I ended the call, and Ivy moved. Grimacing, she yanked one side of the big oak doors open and lurched in. I almost ran into her when she stopped dead in her tracks.

The predawn light didn’t go very far, and I stared, hand over my nose as I tried to figure out what my still-adjusting eyes were seeing. “Holy crap,” I whispered, looking over the loungelike arrangement of couches and tables set between the still-used bar and the stone fireplace. Slack-faced people were strewn everywhere, all of them smeared in blood. Some were in skimpy evening wear, others in utilitarian uniforms. It was a free-for-all, everyone-welcome-no-one-leaves blood orgy. As Jenks had said, they still breathed, but it was obvious they were stupefied with either blood loss or blood indulgence—or both.

Where is my pack?

Ivy draped her scarf over her mouth and went in. Heart pounding and looking for something to shoot, I followed. It got worse as my eyes adjusted. Blood smeared the floor, furniture, and skin, but there were no large pools of it. People I hardly recognized wearing my dandelion tattoo looked as if they might have resisted at first, Cormel’s children in skimpy attire—not so much. All dripped blood. No one was tending the satiated or depleted, which was not the norm—if any of this could be considered normal. It smelled like stale alcohol and dead things by the side of the road.

“Where’s David?” I whispered, and Jenks hummed back from the fireplace, his trailing sparkle the only clean thing in the room.

“He’s not here,” he said, expression grim. “Downstairs, maybe? That’s where they would’ve taken Nina this close to sunrise. Everyone’s aura looks okay. No one is going to die. Today.”

David wouldn’t voluntarily leave his people like this. I tucked my splat gun away, my anger growing. All of them had taken my hurt for me, and I didn’t even know all their names. I wasn’t going to let this go, and someone was going to answer for it.

White-faced, Ivy crouched beside a big man with bulging muscles. “Dan,” she said, giving him a shake, and the man snorted, eyes fluttering. “Dan, wake up. Who did this?”

Please don’t say Nina, I thought, knowing Jenks was thinking the same thing as he sat on the banister and sifted an unhappy blue dust.

“Ivy?” The man smiled, then winced as pain etched his expression. “Don’t move me. Oh God, don’t touch me. Are they gone?”

Ivy took her hand away. With overindulgence, the undead left their victims with a very low threshold to stimulation. Even the breath of their assailant could register as unbearable pleasure, and the effect lingered for a time. “Danny. Who did this?”

“That bastard Cormel has been keeping in the basement,” Dan breathed. “It was the Free Vampires. They got him out. The Weres showed up, following them, and things got out of hand. He pulled us all into it. They tried to get him to go with them, but he wouldn’t and they finally went away. Left us as we were.” His breath came in a staggering hiccup as he tried to sit up. “My God,” he said, eyes unfocused but brilliant. “I’d die for him. He’s like liquid fire.”

Felix was here. The Free Vampires weren’t. And Nina was with Felix.

Ivy didn’t move when Dan gripped her arm, and the ragged tear in his flesh began to fill with blood. “Where is he?” he begged, his legs twisted at an odd angle. “I . . .” Confused, he looked at the vampires around him as if only now remembering. “Where is he?”

Ivy knelt, her katana within reach as she moved his hand off her and he moaned in pleasure. “Shhh,” she soothed, yanking a throw from a nearby couch and tucking it under his chin. “Go to sleep. Rest.”

“No,” he said petulantly. “I need.”

She nodded, her expression soft and caring. “I know. Go to sleep.”