Nightshades Read online

  “If something happens to these two,” Lindy said, tilting her head at Alex and Chase, “will you be able to take it off as well?”

  Noelle nodded. “Actually, for the next two years, I’ll be the only one with the code. This is to prevent you from, um . . .” She glanced uneasily at the two male agents.

  Lindy gave her a bemused look. “Spitting in their drinks and making them give it to me?”

  “Well . . . yeah. I’ll be working in a different department, different building, and my understanding is that someone from the Chicago pod will be with you most of the time. . . .” She shrugged.

  “This system isn’t designed to be perfect,” Alex broke in. “It’s designed to communicate our guarded trust in you. I’m really hoping you’ll feel like we deserve the same respect.”

  Lindy just gave him a thoughtful look.

  At that moment Alex’s cell phone rang, and he stepped a few feet away to answer it. When he returned, there was a new energy to his step. “You’ve got your agreement,” he told Lindy. “The AG just sent it to your attorney’s office. Is it safe to assume she keeps night hours?”

  Lindy rolled her eyes at him and dug out her own phone, the metal bracelet jingling on her wrist. She shot Alex an accusatory glare. “Is this like putting a bell on a cat?”

  Noelle winced. “Sorry,” she said, looking truly apologetic. “That metal alloy is rare and difficult to work with, but I’ll start looking for a way to muffle the noise.”

  Lindy called her lawyer, and they spent the next few hours dealing with the formalities of Lindy’s deal and getting Alex, Chase, and Lindy booked on the 5 a.m. flight to Chicago. Noelle wanted to return to her hotel for a few hours of sleep before catching a later flight during the day. She wished them luck.

  Alex offered to stop by Lindy’s apartment so she could pack some things, but she demurred, saying she’d prefer that a BPI agent just stop there during daytime hours and get a suitcase and her cat. The only reasoning she gave was “so we don’t wake the neighbors.” Alex didn’t really understand, but the more he questioned it, the more distant she got, so he just shrugged and relayed the order. Lindy spent the rest of the ride scribbling out a list of items for the agent to grab.

  There was no security line at the airport, but they did lose a little time when the TSA agent had questions about Lindy’s medical alert bracelet. Alex eventually just flashed his badge and said Lindy had a rare blood disease. The TSA agent looked her up and down, shrugged, and waved them through.

  When they were finally seated on the plane, Lindy asked for the aisle seat, then reached across Alex to carefully lower the window shade. It was still dark outside, but the sun would be coming up during the three-hour flight.

  “So the sun allergy thing is real then,” Alex said conversationally. “We suspected as much, since Ambrose seems to react to sunlight, but a few agents thought he was faking it.”

  “No, it’s real.” She shrugged and amended, “Well, sort of. We are much weaker when the sun is out—generally we slow down to human speed, human everything. And if I were left in a desert all day with no shade, it would kill me by nightfall. But ducking in and out, sticking to the shadows, we can survive just fine during the day. I suspect that’s where the name came from.”

  Alex looked disappointed. “Aw, so you don’t explode into dust?”

  She laughed. “Would I have gotten on a plane with you if I did? No, you should assume that most of the vampire legends you’ve heard are bullshit. Most of them were rumors started by us, in fact.”

  Alex couldn’t help a yawn, then—a big one. He’d been awake for a long time. She smiled, and he returned it with visible embarrassment. “Sorry. Do you sleep?” he asked her. “Ambrose seems to, but our people think he might be faking.”

  “Eventually. We usually catch a couple of hours right after sunrise, just to give our muscles and skin a chance to recuperate,” she replied offhandedly. “We can go days without it, though, if we need to.”

  The plane began to fill up, and Alex was conscious of the civilians moving past them: harried mothers, cranky toddlers, older men with briefcases. He wished they hadn’t needed to fly commercial—he had about a thousand questions for this woman, but he wasn’t stupid enough to say anything that might give her away, not in front of the arriving passengers. The wall separating them from first-class was directly in front of them, and the BPI had managed to buy out the row directly behind them, where Chase was already snoring against the window. But there were still far too many people moving past.

  So he watched Lindy quietly, marveling at how human she seemed. Even after meeting Ambrose—maybe especially after meeting Ambrose—he had considered shades an Other. Not a thing, exactly—he wasn’t one of those people—but the way he’d reacted to Alex’s blood . . . it was like hanging out with a mountain gorilla.

  Lindy was a different story. She looked harmless, of course, but she also had regular human mannerisms—checking her lipstick in a compact mirror, jiggling a leg when she was impatient, even flipping through the in-flight magazine during the flight attendant’s safety speech. And she was undeniably attractive. If he’d stopped to really consider what a female shade would look like, Alex would have pictured a stereotypical badass: all muscles, dangerous glares, and leather from head to toe. Lindy, on the other hand, looked as if she spent her weekends chaperoning church camp. She twirled a strand of hair around one finger while she was reading, for Christ’s sake. He couldn’t think of her as a shade at all, just a woman.

  Which probably made her far more dangerous than Ambrose, he reminded himself, with or without the plexiglass cell.

  Chapter 7

  Agent McKenna was quiet for the first part of the flight, just giving her the occasional sideways glance. He was a fidgety man: cracking his knuckles and shifting his position, as if maybe if he just squirmed around enough he could make his body believe it was in motion. When the seatbelt sign went off and the rest of the plane settled into a low murmur, Lindy could practically see him start to salivate. “Are you ready to tell me about that brother comment?” he asked quietly.

  Lindy closed the crappy in-flight magazine and sighed, checking her watch. “Twenty whole minutes. I never thought you’d make it this long.”

  McKenna didn’t smile. “You’re going to have to trust me with this eventually,” Alex pointed out, “if you’re going to help me put him away.”

  His tone felt sanctimonious to her, and she whipped her head around to look at him. “Another trophy for Camp Vamp?” she spat.

  “If he makes it that far,” Alex said levelly. “A guy kills this many people, I can’t really see him going quietly.”

  The anger drained from Lindy as quickly as it had arrived. “No.” She closed her eyes for a moment, unable to push aside the sudden image of Hector as a smiling, golden-haired child, helping her steal buns from the kitchen maids. “He won’t.”

  She knew her tone was still guarded, and McKenna seemed to pick up on the reluctance. He glanced around for a second to make sure no one was looking at them, and then passed her a worn manila folder. “Why don’t you look this over?” he said quietly. “I showed you some photos before, but this is everything we have on the missing kids case.”

  She recognized the manipulation but nodded and accepted the file, the tracking bracelet jingling on her wrist. Glancing around to make sure no one was paying any attention to her, Lindy flipped open the file and started reading from the beginning.

  Most of the information she saw had been published in the newspapers: the names of the seven missing teens and the small towns where they’d vanished. All seven lived within about an hour’s drive from Chicago, but there was no other discernible pattern. Five of the seven were still in high school, and their experiences varied widely: a cheerleader, an overweight tuba player, a valedictorian-elect. The remaining two had graduated high school but stayed at home: Ethan Harrison had no college prospects and had kept working at his dad’s farm, and Chloe Davis,
the girl taken the night of the botched raid, had been accepted to Northwestern but deferred for a year to save up some money.

  In her head, Lindy cursed at Hector in every language she knew. When she’d read the whole thing, Lindy passed the file back to Alex.

  “Okay,” she said wearily. “What do you want to know?”

  “Let’s start with how you know it’s him,” McKenna suggested.

  She wasn’t ready to tell him about Hector finding her online, and couldn’t see how it would be helpful, anyway, so Lindy said, “I’ve suspected for a while, but I knew for sure when you showed me the photos in the car. The pile of bodies, that’s Giselle’s signature move. And Giselle works for my brother.”

  McKenna nodded approvingly, as if she’d passed a test. “Did anything in the complete file stand out?”

  “A few things.” She ticked them off on her fingers. “First, the ages. He wants teenagers because they’re easier to manipulate than adults. I’m guessing most of these kids weren’t taken, exactly—they willingly left with Giselle or Hector or one of his people, maybe without even being mesmerized.” Alex nodded. “Except for Bobbi Klay,” she went on. “A tiny percentage of humans are fairly immune to shade saliva, just as a tiny percent are incredibly susceptible to mesmerization.”

  Alex was surprised. He took out a small notebook and started scribbling. “That’s interesting. You think Bobbi Klay was one of these?”

  “I do. When they couldn’t control her they decided to cut their losses and use her as a food source.” As soon as the words were out of her mouth she realized they had come out too cold, too vampire. It showed on Alex’s face. “Sorry,” she added quickly. “I didn’t mean to be callous. I’m impressed with Bobbi, really. She was a fighter, and she deserved better.”

  He nodded, accepting the apology. “Okay, that’s good to know. What else?”

  She ticked off another finger. “Second, no one else has mentioned that Sophie Allman and Chloe Davis are cousins.”

  He shrugged. “It’s a tenuous connection: Allman’s father and Davis’s mother are estranged, and they live nearly two hours apart. The girls had only met a few times.”

  She thought that over for a moment, and asked, “Are there any other connections between the missing kids?”

  “No, why? What’s he doing with them?”

  “I don’t know for sure, but I assume he’s transmuting them.”

  Alex nodded. “Our profilers suggested as much. But to what end? Is he creating an army? Planning some big infection?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, sounding as frustrated as he felt. “You don’t get it: When I said this isn’t how we do things, I meant it.” She shook her head. “Even centuries ago, when our existence was just sort of generally accepted by the human public, taking a lot of people from the same area, this close together, was never something shades did. It was considered . . . uncouth. And too high profile. It’d be like a human hunter walking into a zoo with a rifle and shooting a buffalo, then dragging it home. If a shade wants to make a new fledgling, there are far subtler ways.”

  “Were you around back then?”

  She didn’t respond. In her long, long life, Lindy had told very few humans what she was. The ones who did find out, however, always wanted to know her age. By now she knew better than to give it.

  “Okay, fine.” Alex shifted in his seat, and to her surprise, he added, “Maybe that was a rude question. Maybe when you get to know me a little better, you’ll trust me with the answer. Fair enough?”

  She nodded.

  “Meanwhile, what else can you tell me about your brother?”

  “Hector,” she said softly. “His name is Hector.”

  McKenna gave her a brisk nod. “Thank you for that. Last name?”

  “No idea what he’s using now. It doesn’t matter, really; he won’t be mainstreaming, like I was. He’ll be way off the grid.” She gestured at the file. “My guess is he’s in a rural area outside Chicago. He’d need space and privacy to transmute the teenagers.”

  Frown. “Tell me about that process, please.”

  Lindy glanced around again, but no one was paying any attention. “Transmuting someone is very difficult,” she said in a low voice. “The process involves bleeding the person out and inserting saliva into their heart. The heart itself, not just the bloodstream. In the past, this could get very . . . messy. Nowadays it can be done with syringes.”

  “Okay.” He was scribbling notes again, so she paused for a second to let him catch up before continuing.

  “But shades of a certain age can take it a step further.” She reached out—he managed not to flinch—and touched his tie, right over his heart. “If I put my blood in there, too, I can create a connection that goes deeper even than the elder-fledgling bond. I can talk to you. In your head. And know where you are at all times, within about . . . oh, a city block.”

  His pen went still, and when he looked up there was shock all over his face. “You’re talking about telepathy.”

  She nodded. “But it’s one way only. The theory is that this ability developed so an elder could give his fledgling orders in battle.”

  “That’s . . . we didn’t know that.” His eyes went distant for a moment. “Someone could be talking to Ambrose? Or Ambrose could be talking to someone else?”

  Lindy hesitated. Did she want to reveal her connection to the captured shade? No, she didn’t want McKenna drawing any kind of similarity between her and that little worm. He must have been the one who had given McKenna Lindy’s name, which meant Hector had Lindy’s current name and had told his pet sycophant. But why would Ambrose give it to the BPI, when Hector already had people after her? Unless Ambrose had done it without Hector’s permission. That would be interesting.

  “In theory,” she said finally.

  He eyed her with sudden interest. “Does your elder send you messages?”

  The memory was like an assault: her father, with blood on his mouth and his tunic, screaming at them to run. “My elder is dead now,” she said shortly.

  “Do you have . . . um . . . fledglings?”

  “Not anymore.” Her tone made it clear that she didn’t want to discuss it any further, and McKenna was still trying to win her over—he didn’t push. She respected him for that, and it made her next decision a little easier. She pushed out a breath she didn’t need to take. “Look, Agent McKenna—”

  He gave her the quarterback grin again. “You can call me Alex.”

  Goddamn it, she didn’t mean to smile back at him. “Alex. There’s something you need to know about Hector and me, and I need you to not freak out.”

  That scared him a little, she could see, and he tried to cover it with bluster. “You’re not gonna tell me there’s a Game of Thrones–style incest thing happening there, are you?”

  Lindy snorted. She was tempted to mess with him on that, but no, this was too important. “No. Our relationship is intense, for siblings, but not sexual. But I said that the telepathy was one way only. That’s not always true. There are cases of shades with a common elder who can communicate mentally with each other, and also respond to their elder. It’s only possible with relatives, with a very close blood connection. Twins, for example.”

  Alex’s eyes widened, and she heard his pulse speed up. “You and Hector? You can talk to each other?” He probably wasn’t even aware that his hand was going to his gun.

  Gently, she put a hand on his forearm. “I can hear your pulse racing. I need you to calm down.”

  “If you’re sending him thoughts right now, and reading his—” The stark professionalism was back in his voice, and he looked ready to arrest her right there on the plane.

  “It doesn’t work like that. I . . . underwent a procedure.”

  “What procedure?”

  “Every few years, I have to have a complete transfusion.” She wrinkled her nose. “When I say complete, I mean that every drop of blood is drained from my body and replaced with someone else’s�
�blood that has no connection to my brother’s.”

  “Someone must help you with that.”

  She nodded. “But I won’t tell you who. What you need to know is that Hector can’t send me thoughts, and I can’t send him mine. But he can still sense when I’m close.”

  His hand eased off his gun as he began to relax. “How close? Will he be able to find you?”

  She shook her head. “Not exactly, no. But he’ll feel me enter his territory. He’ll know I’m around, without being able to pinpoint it exactly.”

  Alex asked a number of follow-up questions about how the location finding worked and why. She couldn’t answer him. Modern science was able to explain a lot about shades already, but there were some things that were beyond it yet—especially considering the smartest scientific minds in the world had only known about shades for a less than two years. No time at all, really. Finally, Alex got around to the obvious question. “Why did you cut yourself off from your brother?”

  She considered the question. She hadn’t lied to Alex McKenna yet, but how could she sum up more than a millennia of history between two people? It was impossible, and although she knew she would have to give Alex McKenna a better understanding of shades, she wasn’t entirely comfortable letting him in on their history. Or her place in it.

  “We had a difference of opinion,” she said at last, “about thirty years ago. Since then, he’s tried to find me, and I’ve tried to stay away from him.”

  “Will you tell me what you two fought over?”

  His voice was gentle, compassionate even, but Lindy wasn’t a fool. “Not unless it could save lives,” she stated.

  Alex scribbled a few more notes, and they sat in companionable silence for a while. Behind them, Chase Eddy let out a loud snore, and Lindy and Alex exchanged a smile.

  “He has sinus problems,” Alex said apologetically. “I keep telling him to have the surgery, but he thinks everyone will make fun of him.”

  “You guys are close, I take it.” It had been written all over their body language and even their scents—not sex, but the kind of bond that came with sharing clothes, sharing spaces, eating the same foods and drinking the same drinks.