“Assuming all of the people who are missing have been turned,” Christian offered, taking another sip of his coffee.
“Right. So I decided to use the reports to look into individual people, see if I could access them that way.”
“Brilliant. And what did you find out?”
The compliment brought a bit of a blush to her cheeks, but she moved past it, not wanting to let him know she’d taken it that way. “I was able to locate a lot of them, and now my list is close to a hundred.”
“Vampires?”
“Yeah.”
“In that area?”
“Yeah,” she nodded wholeheartedly before taking another swig. “So... I went back and watched as many of their memories of being turned as I could, something I’d like to finish but ran out of time.”
“Well, that’s a lot of turning,” Christian reminded her.
“Exactly. Anyway, most of them were turned by the same five or six Vampires, all of them older and no strangers to turning anyone. That includes the couple I mentioned the other day. As old as they are, we probably should’ve hit them in the raids.”
“But we missed them?”
“They weren’t on our lists. I don’t know why.”
“Interesting.”
“Unless they were shielded,” Cassidy offered.
“By Holland?”
She shook her head. “No, I’m thinking Daunator had them concealed for some reason, though I don’t know why. If he wanted to get involved back then, why wouldn’t he have? Why would he wait until after Holland was gone to wake up? He’s been dormant for hundreds of years, hasn’t he?”
“I would say so. But....” Christian abruptly stopped talking and looked down at the table, and Cassidy knew this related to the part of the story he’d been leery of telling her before.
“Christian, whatever it is, you need to tell me. If we have secrets from each other, we’re not going to be as effective as we would be if we didn’t.”
He nodded but didn’t answer her yet. Cassidy waited, took a sip of her drink, tried to be patient, and hoped he couldn’t tell she was bouncing her knee up and down under the table.
“I think part of the reason he was dormant for a chunk of those years was because he wasn’t here.”
“Say what now?” Her eyebrows were so high on her head, she probably looked like she could audition for some version of The Real Housewives.
He took another lengthy breath. “I’m not telling you everything I know; you can get that in your head right now.” His tone changed enough to alarm her, but Cassidy nodded. “You know that most people think when Elliott came through the portal he was the third Guardian to do so, right? Not the second.”
“Right....”
“Well, we only know of two, don’t we?”
“Alex and Elliott.” She was waiting to see what this had to do with Daunator.
“And if there was a third, then that means, if everyone is right about something evil coming through, too, there had to be another demonic Vampire.”
Cassidy tipped her head sideways, contemplating why that had never occurred to her before. “Because Dracula came through with Alex, Holland came through with Elliott....”
“And Carter came through when your grandma went the other direction. So who came through with that third Guardian?”
“Good question. It would also be nice to know who the third Guardian is. He had to be before Alex, right? Because Aaron Burr went looking for someone to help him and found an ancient Guardian who knew about the portal. So he must be the one who came through it.”
Christian was shaking his head. “Not necessarily. There are ways of knowing that information without having gone through the portal one’s self. There are plenty of Vampire books in the archives that talk about the Blue Moon Portal if a person knows where to look and how to read ancient texts.”
“Like Scottish Gaelic?” She felt herself getting angry about the Blood Moon Portal again and tried her best to let it go.
“Exactamundo.” If he caught the tension in her voice, it didn’t faze him. “Vampires knew about the Blue Moon Portal well before any of us ever did.”
“But why? They didn’t use it to travel, did they?”
“I don’t know because I can’t read anything older than eighteenth century English, but I do recognize the words for the portal. Anyway, back on the current topic, I think Daunator may have come through when that other Guardian came through.”
“Before Dracula, then? Because Schmitz said he was terrorizing the region during the Middle Ages.”
“I think Daunator was a bad ass before he became demonic and has probably been terrorizing since he was a little Vampire baby running around in diapers.”
Cassidy laughed, picturing some version of the emperor from Star Wars wearing a long black robe and Pampers, chasing villagers down winding lanes through thick forests. “As if he wasn’t an old dude when he was changed.”
“I don’t know what he was. But my hunch is that he was a bad ass before, and when he came back, he was an even badder ass. But unlike Holland, he was smart enough to bide his time. Ever since then, I think he’s been waiting. Feeding when he needs to but being cautious and building up his power.”
“Do you think that’s possible? Like, it’s not a battery that gets charged to a certain capacity and then it’s full, but it could actually be collected beyond a specific capacity?”
“I don’t see why not. Maybe he never runs out of power, like Jamie.”
The thought of a Vampire as powerful as Daunator was reported to be, out there somewhere, waiting for them, one that couldn’t ever lose his power, made Cassidy physically shudder. “And you think you’re going to stop him on your own?”
“I hope so. But I don’t know. It just depends. On a lot of shit.”
“How are you not afraid to try?” She took another drink, glad it was still hot because the scalding in her throat warmed her up a little on the inside.
“I can’t be.”
She shook her head. “That doesn’t make any sense. Of course you can be. How could you not be?”
“Okay, so maybe I am. But just because I’m scared, that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t do it.”
“So you are scared then?”
“I don’t think I said that.”
“I think you did....”
“Anyway... if I get the right information from you, then, yeah, I’ll do it.”
“And what do you need that I haven’t given you?”
“Can you get me the names and visuals for those Vampires you said were turning the others? Last known locations, etc.”
“I already have that.” She sent him a spreadsheet she’d created through her IAC, one with images from the minds of the victims she’d pieced together. “That’s the best I could do using what little camera footage I could pick up on in the areas where they were turned. I went through their minds and our databases and ID’d some of them, as you can see. But I don’t have them all. The main one is that blonde woman. She’s turned the most.”
“Honey,” Christian read, nodding. “She seems like a gem. Actually, I have something to show you, too. But go ahead. Anything else?”
“No, only she used to be a, uh....”
“Hooker?”
“How’d you know that? Did I write it on the spreadsheet?”
“No, just a lucky guess from the name. And the way she’s dressed. And from what I need to show you.”
“So show me.”
A crooked grin spread across his face as he sent her a lengthy IAC video. “You’ll wanna watch that later. Anything else?”
Irritated that she couldn’t watch it right then, Cass asked, “What else do you need?”
“Nothing for now. Just let me know if you find out anything else, okay?”
“All right.” Part of her was relieved that the conversation was almost over. “When are you leaving if you’re going to go?”
“Don’t know. Soon.”
In the back of her mind, Cassidy considered telling him not to go, that it was stupid, that he’d end up dead. But she didn’t. “Are you sure there isn’t someone else you can get to help you?”
“No, there is. And I will. But not with the Daunator part, just with the others.” He finished off his coffee and set the hollow cup back on the table. Cassidy had a feeling he wasn’t going to fill her in. “Thanks for your help, Cass.”
“Sure.” Her eyes rose with him as he stood up and carried his cup to the trash can, not even saying goodbye, which shouldn’t have surprised her too much because he was weird like that.
Cassidy took another drink of her coffee and turned the video on, wondering how long she’d have before Hannah checked on her. It was almost midnight, past her curfew, and she needed to get to her apartment but didn’t seem to be moving.
She recognized Honey right away. The other woman, the one chasing her to the rooftop, seemed familiar, but it took Cassidy a moment to put a name with her face. It wasn’t until she’d set about kicking the asses of a half-dozen other Vampires that Cassidy realized who it was. “Eliza,” she muttered, so caught up in the video she didn’t realize she was also being watched.
