Deep Dark Secret

“Your Gabriel?”

“He’s no one’s Gabriel now.” I hit the power button on the desktop computer and waited as the fan kicked in and the familiar Windows chimes bonged. By some stroke of idiot’s luck, the computer wasn’t password protected. That also probably meant I wasn’t going to find anything juicy or useful.

Holden picked up the professor’s DayTimer and started paging through it. “What were their names?”

“Trish, Angie and Misty.”

As a full-blooded vampire, he didn’t need any light to read the contents of the book. I would have been able to make out some detail, but not with the same clarity. While he checked back through Mayhew’s old appointments, I started snooping in Outlook. It was about as titillating as I’d anticipated. There were several messages from Gabriel, but none were incriminating. The only message from any of the missing girls was one from Trish Keller asking for an extension on a term paper.

One message was flagged, and I clicked it open. The sender was listed as E. Marx.

Dear Professor Mayhew,

I’m writing as a follow-up to our discussion after last Thursday’s class. I gave a lot of consideration to your thoughts, but I don’t think I’ll be able to pick up the work at this point. I have to focus on sciences. I will stop by your office tomorrow to have you sign the withdrawal forms. Again, I’m very sorry. I hope I’ll get another opportunity to take your class before I graduate.

Sincerely,

Ellory Marx

The name didn’t mean anything to me, but the flag Mayhew had placed on it made me uneasy. I printed the email and took a final look at his inbox. When it didn’t tell me what he was up to, I turned off the computer and stood. Holden was still paging through the DayTimer, and it didn’t take superhuman night vision to know he looked concerned about something.

“What did you find?” I moved closer, careful not to touch him, and peered over his shoulder.

“He had several meetings with each of the girls, but in the last two weeks he’s met with Lucy three times out of his regular office hours. The names never overlap. He’ll meet with one girl three or four times, then moves on to the next. You’re sure Gabriel wasn’t involved with Lucy?”

I shook my head. “I enthralled him.”

Holden closed the book with a smack and tossed it back on Mayhew’s desk. “I beg your pardon?”

“You heard me.”

“When did that change?”

“About the same time I stopped taking my orders from you.”

He gave me a tight-lipped smile that had nothing to do with happiness. “Well look who’s got all the power now.”

I flashed my teeth at him. Werewolf or vampire, fangs or not, the gesture meant the same thing—Stand down. He didn’t say anything else, but I would never know if he’d planned to. Beneath our feet came a triumphant crash and a muffled scream.

But we were already in the basement.

“I’m not imagining that, right?”

“No.”

“It did come from under us, right?”

“Yes.”

“Can you…?” It seemed wrong to ask him for help when we were in the middle of a fight, but his sense of smell had always been better than mine. Holden gave new meaning to the concept of a bloodhound. Even among vampires his sense of blood, new or old, was astonishing.

“If there’s blood, I can find it.”

He was out in the hall before I could thank him. I locked Mayhew’s door and had to run to keep pace with Holden as he dashed around the corner and out of sight. I caught up with him at the end of a hallway with no exit. There was a door in front of him marked Janitorial Supply. Didn’t exactly scream secret basement of doom.

“You’re sure?”

“You want to second-guess me, or do you want to use your lock-picking skills for some good?”

I sidled up next to him and assessed the door, then took a step back and delivered a hard side kick to the wooden barrier, knocking it inwards off its hinges. The sound of crunching wood was all I could hear for a moment.

“You were saying?” I asked.

Holden tapped the broken door with one finger. It shifted and collapsed onto the ground with a thud. “Faster than picking the lock,” he admitted.

“I lost the bobby pin.”

I stepped over the door onto a concrete platform with no safety railing and followed the narrow steps down into darkness. Holden remained at the top until I’d made it safely down. Only then did he follow.

“All right, Hound of the Baskervilles. Point the way.”

His indignant look spoke volumes. “That doesn’t even make sense. If anything, the hound in Doyle’s story was a ghost. At best a were—” His lecture on the fundamentals of English literature was cut short by another piercing scream.

I didn’t need to follow his nose to pinpoint the direction the cry had come from. Holden and I bolted down the hall with superhuman speed. His quick reflexes put him well ahead of me, while I narrowly avoided running face first into several walls. Holden stopped so abruptly I collided with him, and only a strong arm around my waist kept me from falling flat on my ass.

Real smooth.

Holden helped right my balance. The scent of fresh blood was unmistakable from the open door where we stopped, but it took no time at all to recognize there was nothing alive in the room, or anything that had once been living. A small cot was pushed up against one wall and there was a basin on the floor I wasn’t keen to look in once I got a whiff of it. On the back of the door were deeply embedded claw marks and a thin coating of fresh blood.

Was it possible someone could have been kept captive in the basement of one of the most prominent universities in the country? Surely someone must have noticed this room before now. Right? The bowl on the floor and the rumpled sheets told me the unpleasant truth.

Grabbing my elbow, Holden guided me out of the room. We still needed to find the person who’d been screaming, and while they might have once been in this room, they obviously weren’t anymore. He took off at a run again, and I followed like a faithful puppy until he stopped. We both stood staring at yet another door as if it might be the actual source of the screams. We’d run so far I didn’t think we were under the English building anymore. The air down here was colder and smelled of chemicals that had nothing to do with cleaning.

Sulfur. The whole hall stank of sulfur.

I got a chill remembering my night at the museum, because I doubted anyone had left an egg-salad sandwich down here, meaning something else was responsible for the stench.

The door was basic particleboard and would have easily yielded to a kick, but it proved unnecessary when Holden twisted the knob and found it unlocked.

Inside, the rotten-egg reek was so overpowering my eyes watered. We were in a large storage room with aged brown and clear bottles cluttering the shelves and a fine coating of sawdust on the floor.

“There.” He pointed to a cupboard in the corner. I was about to question his judgment when I noticed the smear of blood on the door. How he’d been able to smell it over the stink of chemicals was beyond me.

I crouched in front of the cupboard and yanked the small door open. Wedged within was Lucy Renard, who had managed to fold herself into a tiny ball and was sobbing quietly, her tremors broken by an occasional hiccough.

“Lucy?” Reaching in, I touched her shoulder. She was dressed in pajama pants and a tank top. Her feet were bare.

When my skin grazed hers, she jerked and lifted her head. Once she got a good look at my face, she recoiled. Recognition turned to terror, and she began to scream.

The force of Lucy’s wailing knocked me backwards into Holden’s legs. I’d never met her before, yet she looked at me as if she already knew me. And had a reason to be afraid of me. Holden edged around me and hauled the girl out of the cupboard with one hand. She writhed and fought against him with more strength than I’d expected her to have, but Holden didn’t look too put off by her efforts.

Lucy continued to shriek and lashed out several kicks that nearly connected with my chest.

“Stop,” I hollered. “We’re here to help you.”

“Don’t kill me,” she cried, oblivious to what I’d said. “Please don’t kill me.”

“Lucy.” Holden caught her chin and cupped it in his large palm, turning her face so she was forced to look at him. “We were sent by your aunt. We’re here to protect you.” Usually the thrall was used to make victims believe a lie, or admit to something they otherwise wouldn’t. In this case Holden was using the vampire gift to make the girl believe what her fear wouldn’t let her accept. The truth.

She passed out, sagging in his arms like a rag doll, and he held her as if she weighed as much as one.

“What now?” he asked me.

I stared at Lucy’s inert body. Her feet were cut, and the open wounds were crammed full of filthy sawdust. She was going to scar badly and likely face serious infection if we didn’t get her to a hospital. The bottles on the shelves might contain something that would have once been helpful, like peroxide or iodine, but I didn’t trust any of the long-expired chemicals on her.

“We need to get her to a doctor. See what else is wrong that we can’t see.”

“She’s got a bad bite on her shoulder.” He lifted his fingers, exposing a patch of skin that looked to have been gnawed on by a wild animal. Not a vampire, they were too neat, and a were wouldn’t stop at one bite. Holden’s fingers were coated with blood, and his nostrils flared when he showed me the wound.

“When was the last time you fed?”

“I’m fine.”

“Holden.”

“Secret, I’m fine.” His eyes were still brown, none of the jet-black of vampire frenzy leaking into his irises. For the time being he was still more man than monster.

“Don’t push it,” I warned. “If it gets bad, tell me. Rebecca will make me issue your warrant personally if you kill this girl.”