She summoned what was left of her energy and pulled, trying to get her hands free of the ropes. She tried narrowing her hand by bunching the fingers together, but she couldn’t slip out. She kept trying until her wrists were rubbed raw. The ropes weren’t budging.
She tried to move the whole chair. If she could rub the ropes around the chair against the desk, perhaps…but the chair was too heavy. She got it moved a couple inches but it took what seemed like an hour and left her utterly exhausted. Her hands and feet felt as if they were going numb; stopping her struggles eased that somewhat. Without intending to, she fell asleep.
* * * * *
The only one of them who could sleep was Brennan, who was crashed out on the couch in Kent’s office. The rest of them sat at the table, playing Hearts, waiting until dawn. Genna’s ability to dodge the Queen of Spades was unnerving. At five in the morning, there was an insistent pounding at the door.
Kent was going to answer it, but Charles put out his arm to stop him. “If their real goal is revenge against you, better for me to go.”
Kent frowned, and grabbed his sword. They couldn’t come inside without an invitation, at least. But when Charles opened the door a living human stood there, a lanky African-American who looked far too young to have any business being up at five in the morning.
“A guy asked me to give you this,” he said, holding out an envelope.
“What’d the guy look like?” asked Kent, from behind Charles. They’d probably erased any memory of it, but he thought he’d ask.
“White guy, tanned, dark hair, shorter than me. Wearing a suit. Flashing money around.”
That sounded like Mario, although it probably described a few thousand people in the D.C. area.
Charles took the envelope. “Thanks.”
The kid nodded and ran off.
They opened the envelope back at the table. The note on the notepad sheet of white paper inside was handwritten in blue ink, with the slightly-faded-in-places look of a ball point pen that hadn’t been used in a while, or one that was close to being out of ink. The signature,
Mario,
took up half the sheet.
Dearest Kent
, read the note.
We have your girl. Tomorrow evening we’ll come for you. Surrender, and we’ll take her home without out her memories of you or us. Choose to fight and the girl will be sucked dry.
“Nice guy,” said Charles. “Seems like he believes he’s a vampire, at least.”
Genna frowned. “We’ve got to bust her out of there. Kent, you can’t go along with this deal.”
Kent grimaced. “Don’t worry. I won’t.” If he trusted Mario, he’d consider the trade. If it would really end things. But there was no guarantee at all that they’d release Angela, and from what he knew of Mario, he probably planned a more sadistic revenge. He ran his fingers over the paper thoughtfully, feeling the ridges the pen had raised on the back side of the paper. He looked down at it again. It was from a note pad. Were there any marks from the page that had been on top of this one? There were, although he couldn’t make out what they said.
“Anyone know where an ordinary pencil is? All I have are automatics, and they won’t work as well.”
Charles grinned. “There’s one at every desk in the ‘classroom,’” he said.
They all walked over to the room Charles indicated. It was a small room, with four archaic school desks and a blackboard at one end. “As soon as I find a good teacher’s desk cheap, this place will be ready for business.”
Kent smiled. Punishing schoolgirls—or schoolboys—was not one his fantasies, although he understood that it appealed to a number of men and women. He took one of the pencils and ran the lead sideways across the front, the depressed area where a pen pressing on the previous sheet had indented this one staying white while the surrounding area turned gray.
It was an address. 1957 Stone Haven Place.
“Is that the place you tailed them to?” Genna asked Kent.
“Yes.”
“So it’s not much of a clue, at this point.”
“Actually, it might be,” said Charles. “It’s not a clue if you assume we see it by accident. But what if it was intentional? That the bad guys wanted to make sure Kent knew where to find her?”
“You think it’s a trap,” stated Kent.
“I think it could be.”
The two men stared at each other for a long moment, and then finally Kent spoke. “Even if it’s a trap, I think Angela’s really there. If they knew I’d followed them, there’d be no reason to put down the address. And if it was a setup and Angela wasn’t there, there would be no reason to take her to the same house as their trap.”
Charles nodded. “That’s sound.” He shook his head. “This just gets better and better, doesn’t it?” He turned and walked out of the room.
* * * * *
Kent and Brennan wore white shirts, ties, and black pants as they walked up to the door. Genna had let them off at the entrance to Stone Haven Place. In a few moments she would pull up near the house, ready to serve as a getaway car if they needed one. A bike rack hung over the license plate of her Chevy sedan, obscuring the numbers. Charles had taken his own very noticeable red Porsche and was parked near the corner, ready to sound the alarm if a police car turned onto the street.
Hopefully, though, no one would see anything amiss, just a pair of Mormon missionaries. No one wanted to make eye contact with proselytizers, and when people classified other people as part of a group they tended not to notice their individual characteristics. The worst thing about the disguise was that there was no way Kent could carry a sword. They both had guns, which would do fine for dealing with the living. The dead should be deep in torpor.
The door was locked. No big surprise. Kent pushed the button for the doorbell. If human servants lay in ambush, they weren’t answering the door; he couldn’t hear any movement from within the house. Out of his pocket came a set of lock picks. He’d picked up the skill as a dungeon monitor back in L. A., after seeing a sub get locked in manacles her Dom had lost the keys to. Brennan moved to shield his hands from view as he worked.
The locks on handcuffs were easy compared to the house lock. Fortunately, he’d done a couple houses in L.A. when he’d gone up against the vampires, and this lock wasn’t the best he’d seen. It took him two minutes to have it open. Hopefully no one was watching and thinking that was a long time for a couple of missionaries to wait for an open door. Or that seven in the morning was an odd time for missionaries to expect a receptive audience.
Kent opened the door, and they tried to walk in as if they’d been invited, closing the door behind them.
The living room was curiously bare, the only furniture an old ratty couch in the corner, and an empty television stand right across from it.
“Someone doesn’t live here anymore.” He took the pistol out of his pocket.
Brennan sniffed at the air and then did the same. “No one has lived here for a while, I’d guess. Resided, perhaps, lived, no. But there’s a smell in the air. Like acetone, but not quite.”
Kent smelled, but he couldn’t tell what Brennan was talking about. The place seemed okay to him, just empty. He ran his finger over the TV stand, and it came back clean. “No dust.”
Brennan shrugged, looking around like Kent was.
They heard a thump below. It was too noisy for a footstep.
The top of the stairs was between the kitchen and the living room. The kitchen was even odder than the downstairs; there was no oven, no refrigerator, no dishwasher, and even the cabinets had been torn out long ago, the marks on the wall that would have indicated their presence painted over. “Vampires don’t eat, I guess,” whispered Brennan.
Kent nodded. He’d seen a kitchen like this before. He’d torched the house it was in. Oh, vampires ate all right, but they needed their food to be alive and walking. Or at least breathing.
Halfway down the stairs, Brennan grabbed his shoulder. He nearly whirled, gun ready, and it made him realize how on edge he was. Charles’ notion that it was a trap had gotten to him, but in his experience vampires could be as careless as anyone else. Charles wasn’t necessarily right—but he wasn’t necessarily wrong either.
“There’s only one person down here,” said Brennan. “Over to the right.”
Angela.
“How do you know?” asked Kent.
“I just know.”
As if on cue, there was another thump. To the right, like Brennan had said. Kent took a moment to listen, but no sound followed besides the whoosh of his own breathing. And Brennan’s.
At the bottom of the stairs was a large room, with black walls and no furniture. There had been some furniture there once, though, as indentations in the vinyl tile showed. Off to the right was a closed door. Kent put his hand on the doorknob.
“Remember, Kent. This could be a trap,” Brennan whispered.
He looked at the door. It could be. But there was nothing about the door that looked anything but ordinary. “Stand back, then.”
He heard Brennan moving back up the stairs. He opened the door and looked in.
“Kent. Oh my God, Kent. Thank God.” Angela’s voice. Her eyes lit up when she saw him. There was a desk, a chest, and the chair, but Kent barely took them in. The ropes around Angela were tied tightly and they had cut into her skin at her wrists and ankles, rubbing them raw. At her wrists, the rope was stained with her blood.
He hurried to your side. “Hush, honey. It’s going to be all right.” He set the gun down on the floor, and got out his pocket knife. He sawed at the ropes around her wrists first.
Angela’s face darkened. “They have something horrible planned, Kent. I don’t know what it is, but they—”
As he lay down to get a better angle on the ropes, he noticed something odd about the chair. There was a metal plate on the bottom that looked like some kind of repair work had been done, but who would use a metal plate to repair a wooden chair? He’d gotten halfway through the rope when something buzzed behind him. He hoped that wasn’t Charles, telling him it was time to leave. He managed to get her wrists free before Brennan confirmed his fears. “Police car just pulled onto the road. We gotta move.”
If they’d been upstairs, sure, they might have gotten into Genna’s car before the police car got there. But there was no way they were doing it from the basement. And besides, Angela gave them the perfect reason to be there, if he could get the cops to believe him. That was a big if, but he still wasn’t running. “Tell Genna to move without us. Just do it.”
Brennan looked at him quizzically, but didn’t hesitate. “Go without us,” he heard Brennan say. Covering the license plate “inadvertently” with the bicycle rack was a good move if the car was only going to be spotted pulling away, but police were bound to be suspicious of such a vehicle even if it were only idling, especially in front of a house where they were looking for a couple burglars.
“What the hell are you into that those men kidnapped me, Kent?” Angela demanded. “One of the sick fuckers sucked my blood.”
“Did you drink any of theirs?” Drinking vampire blood strengthened their ability to control another person, and it was also a step on the way toward becoming a vampire oneself.
Angela looked truly repelled. “No. Of course not.”
He believed her. The people he’d talked to who’d drunk from vampires described it as an incredibly euphoric rush. They were not repelled. “Hang in there, honey. We’ll get you loose.”
“Pity you don’t have those surgical scissors you made sure we had the club,” remarked Brennan. He cut her right ankle loose while Kent severed the ropes binding her left.
Kent ignored him. They’d tied Angela’s thighs to the bottom of the chair as well, and a series of ropes around her torso bound her to the back of the chair.
Ankles loose, Brennan went to the back of her, and Kent started on the ropes around her thighs. She could only separate them a little bit, but it was enough to get his knife in and cut upward—not the recommended way, but he wasn’t going to risk cutting her.
Angela was sobbing. He glanced at her face, longing to take her in his arms. She’d had to wait so long for him, and she still didn’t know why. When she saw him watching, she managed a little smile. She had courage, to be able to pull it together after that ordeal. He’d have her in his arms soon. First, to get her loose.
The metal plate underneath her still struck him as odd. He sawed away, registering Brennan’s comment that her back was free. “One more second, Angela, then we’ll walk right out of here.”
Strange chair. Charles said there might be a trap. Angela said they had something horrible planned. Brennan had smelled acetone. He cut the last bit of rope and Angela started to stand as he put it together. He put his hands between her legs suddenly.
“Kent?” she shrieked.
He spread his palm out on the metal plate beneath her. It was resisting, as if it was on a spring and wanted to go up. Of course she couldn’t stand up with his arm like that, and he held her shoulder to stop her.
“Brennan, get your hand in from the side, hold this plate down.”
“You got it, boss.”
Angela, to give her credit, didn’t struggle. It only took a second. “Got it,” Brennan said.