Chapter Eight

A Turn for the Worse

 

Clayton was waiting for me when I re-entered the house. He said nothing, just stood and opened his arms.

I sighed and walked into them, relaxing as I slid my hands around his waist. He’d wanted some sexy time with me before I’d walked into the graveyard, but I didn’t have to tell him it wouldn’t be happening.

He knew.

“I’m going to take a quick shower.” I leaned back in his embrace. “I have an uneasy feeling about tonight.”

He nodded. “It will be a long night.”

I kissed him and tasted something different on his lips. He was no longer the golem. He was the hunter.

“I can see it,” I said. “I can feel it, taste it…you’re different now.”

He smiled. “I’m who I was before she changed me.”

I shivered at the mention of Miriam. “I hope she stays in hell.”

He brushed his lips across mine. “And I hope,” he said, “that when she returns, we will be ready for her.”

“Dammit, Clayton,” I whispered. “No.”

His stare softened. “Go clean up, Trinity.”

My throat dry, I hurried away.

Fifteen minutes later, as I was getting dressed, the captain called.

“Some of the people those vampires killed,” he said, his voice strained. “They turned. The vampires are turning the humans they bite.”

“That’s not possible. Being turned is a process that most humans can’t live through. No human can turn in a couple of hours.”

But even as I said it, I knew I was wrong. There was something going on. Something different. I’d been feeling it all night.

Crawford heard the belief in my voice. “They’re like babies right now, these newly turned…corpses.” His voice was cold. “Go to the hospital and give them the true death. Afterward, I want you to hunt down every last one of the bloodsucking motherfuckers and cut their hearts out. Is that something you can do, Sinclair?”

“Why are you mad at me?” I bellowed.

“Because you’re in bed with the fucking vampires, aren’t you, Trinity? One, in particular? Your nonhumans are destroying us.”

“Captain…”

“Kill the turned humans, Trinity. Just…go kill them.” He hung up.

“What does this mean?” I muttered, walking into the living room. Jin stood in the middle of the room, as though waiting for me. “I need Clayton and Shane,” I told him. “Have you seen them?”

“They’re in the kitchen, where they always are. I will fetch them.”

When they joined me a couple of minutes later, I was still standing in the exact same spot, my mind whirling.

“More vampires?” Clayton asked, and there was a familiar eagerness in his voice. It was the same eagerness Shane and I felt when it was time to hunt. Time to kill.

“Sort of,” I murmured. “The humans attacked earlier tonight have turned. We have to go put them down.”

“That’s—”

“Impossible, I know.” I walked to my car, a hunter on either side of me. “Only it’s not.”

I climbed in and sat in the driver’s seat, but made no move to start the engine. Shane stood at my open door, watching me.

“Why are they doing that?” I asked. “How are they doing that?”

“Because they’re different,” Clayton said, getting into the front passenger seat. “We all feel it. Maybe the infection changed them somehow.”

“It’s a mindfuck.” Shane slid his fingers to the back of my neck and squeezed gently. “But we’ll figure it out.”

Nothing was the same. The vampires were healthy, they were eating humans once again, and the humans were turning in hours.

Finally, I started the car.

Shane peered past me at Clayton. “Watch her back.”

Clayton nodded. “Always.”

“You’re staying here?” I didn’t want to leave Shane alone. My fear for him hadn’t lessened. My worry hadn’t gone away. And I wanted him by my side.

“I want to take a drive through the city, make sure everything is quiet. Let me know when you’ve left the hospital.”

“Okay,” I said, but I was no less reluctant.

“I’ll let the others know what’s going on.”

I only nodded.

If the vampires kept attacking, they might turn half the city before the night was over. When the sun came, the humans would have a reprieve. But the night would always return.

No one had really appreciated how well the vampires had behaved before now.

Shane leaned into the open window and brushed my lips with his. “Be safe, baby hunter.”

I had to force myself away from him. “You be safe, Shane Copas.” Please. Please be safe.

And that was all I could say. I didn’t want to be a clinging, paranoid girlfriend. He’d be careful. He hadn’t made it this far without being careful.

But as I watched him grow smaller in my rearview, the knots in my stomach got just a little tighter.

“How are the other cities faring?” I asked Clayton. “It can’t just be us, right?”

“I can find out.” His face was somehow soft and hard at the same time and held all the strength and power and life he’d been denied during Miriam’s reign.

Sometimes something came out in his voice, or his eyes, or his face…something he forgot to hide, maybe. It made ice slide down my spine and turned my limbs to jelly. It caused my heart to stutter and my brain, for a brief second, to freeze.

I was pretty sure he wasn’t aware at all that his darkness was peeking out. And I was quietly thankful that Clayton Wilder was not my enemy.

He pulled his cell phone from his pocket.

“Who are you calling?” I asked.

“Jade Noel.”

Rhys had mentioned that Jade Noel was the supernatural community’s PI. Or cop. Or…something.

I’d never met her. I’d never even talked to her. She was as much a mystery to me as the vampires’ sudden ability to turn humans with a bite.

Clayton explained to her about the turning humans, and I heard her voice coming from the phone like a dozen angry, buzzing bees.

Clayton slid his phone back into his pocket. “She knew about the attack, and they’re looking into it. She didn’t know about the turning humans. She’s contacting Himself.”

I took my right hand off the wheel and waited for him to take it. “Any other cities?”

“No attacks reported.”

“It’s just us then. So why is it just us?”

He turned my hand over and rested my palm on his thigh, then shivered when I began stroking his leg.

“I wish we were home in bed,” I murmured.

I didn’t have to look at him to know he smiled. “I wish that every second I’m awake.”

It was good to laugh. To forget, if just for a minute, that the night was hurtling us toward something we both knew was going to get worse before the sun came to make it better.

A man was waiting at a back entrance of the hospital to escort us to the vampires we needed to kill. We walked down long, echoing hallways, grimly silent, both of us ignoring the curious looks he kept throwing our way.

We peered through the silver-lined window and I cringed when I saw the three people inside the room. Newly turned vampires were extremely easy to handle—they were, as Crawford had said, like babies—and that was why the humans had been able to contain them. They’d tossed them into their containment cots, then shoved them into one of the reinforced vampire holding rooms all hospitals contained.

The infant vampires lay there, mewling, starving, and nearly blind. They shrank uncertainly away from the burning silver springs beneath the thin, plastic mats upon which they lay, too weak and dazed to do more than cry.

Silver rails had been pulled up on either side of them, extra assurance that they would not somehow escape before they were killed.

Places that had no hunters simply impaled a vampire with a silver spike through his heart, then wrapped his chest with thick layers of tape before restraining his hands behind him with silver-plated cuffs. He was then buried. As far as I knew, vampires rarely escaped such a hideous trap, though at times a master or strong vampire would find them and dig them up.

If I ever caught myself indulging in self-pity, I had only to remember those poor bastards.

The two people who’d been assigned to watch the newly turned vampires stood at their bedsides, their backs to us. They were dressed in blue scrubs, and I couldn’t tell if they were nurses, housekeepers, aides, or what.

The families of the new vampires would likely be waiting for news; grieving, stunned, hurting. But as bad as it was that they’d lost someone, leaving their loved ones as vampires would have been worse.

The female vampire’s clothing had been cut off, and one of the minders—the male—was videoing her with his phone. He filmed her pain, her nakedness, her helplessness, and his female partner didn’t seem to mind in the least.

Maybe because she was busy torturing one of the males.

When had humans become so very cruel?

“If you become close with one vampire, you’ll begin to care about all of them…”

Was that it, then? A year ago, would I have watched such a scene with an uncaring eye, unconcerned with the torture of a hideous, frightening, hated vampire?

I hoped not.

“Clayton,” I said, my voice thick.

He squeezed my arm. “We’ll ease them, Trinity.”

Would we, though? A vampire feared true death above all things. True death sent them to wander eternity in a despair I could not imagine, though I’d had a taste.

Or so they claimed—and who was I to disbelieve them? They’d died, after all. They’d been there once. They did not want to return.

Maybe that was how a vampire could withstand so much physical torture. He’d been through something worse.

“Open the door,” Clayton told our escort.

The man touched his card to the keypad, and when the door clicked, he shoved it open for us. “Have fun,” he said.

Silverlight wanted to come out and play. “Not yet,” I whispered.

The two aides glanced up at us. “Time to die,” the man said, jolly. He turned his phone on us. “The vampire hunters have arrived. Now we’ll watch as they work their magic and make the dead stay dead.”

Clayton walked toward him, and the man grinned as he continued filming. “The male hunter wants the female vamp. Can’t blame you, partner. I had a little—”

Clayton punched him. Not as hard as he could have, but the phone flew from the man’s grip as he slammed into the wall. The shocked expression on his face was probably larger than the pain of his broken nose.

The woman held up her hands and backed away, her eyes wide. She dropped the object she’d been using to torture her vampire. An ink pen.

I needed an outlet for my rage, but when I strode toward her she screamed and ran. I let her go. I controlled my anger and let her go.

If I’d set Silverlight free, as I’d wanted to do, I’d have sliced the woman to ribbons before I stopped. I knew it. I felt it. I wanted to kill her. I thought I wanted to kill her. Really, I just wanted to kill the pain.

Even after the humans cleared the room I couldn’t free my sword, because the families needed the corpses of their loved ones. Silverlight would have left nothing but ash.

I yanked a stake from my belt and gave the crying, almost mindless vampires a quick, clean, true and traditional death.

I didn’t know if I did the right thing.

There was a big difference between fighting aggressive vampires and sending freshly turned…innocents to their awful afterlife.

I wanted to kill vampires.

I didn’t want to kill vampires.

All I really wanted to do was stop the suffering of the beings who lay crying in their painful beds.

Clayton stood against the wall and let me have all three of them. He must have thought it would help me feel better.

“People suck,” I whispered, afterward.

And then we walked away, leaving the dead to the humans.