“And they were spread out and camouflaged in enough different ways that no correlations have been drawn between the deaths.” Sarah looked to Roland. “I wish I had been wrong.” Giving her hand a supportive squeeze, he returned his attention to planning their attack.
The hallway outside the mystery woman’s bedroom was empty when Seth appeared in it, the sheaf of papers Chris had given him clasped in one hand. A quick look inside showed him the room, too, was devoid of her presence.
No big surprise there. The poor girl still wasn’t sleeping.
Worried about her continued insomnia, he had reached out very subtly with his gifts and determined that it was no longer that she was unwilling to sleep. She couldn’t sleep. Not until she felt safe. It seemed to be some sort of subconscious defense mechanism she was helpless to extinguish.
He, David, and Darnell had all trodden carefully around her and made themselves appear as harmless as possible. He didn’t know what else he could do to reassure her.
Of course, she was a tiny thing, barely reaching five feet. It was a little hard to look harmless when one was at least a foot and a half taller than her and outweighed her by a good 100, 120 pounds.
Seth strode down the hallway and began making his way downstairs. The only sounds of life came from the great hall, which—except for the stone walls—now resembled a modern living room. Following them, he saw David standing in the shadows outside the entrance and started to call out a greeting.
David glanced up and placed a finger to his lips.
Seth instantly altered his approach, silencing his footsteps as he joined him and peered into the room.
Darnell was perched on the edge of the sofa, fingers and thumbs working a Playstation controller. On the large-screen television, Tomb Raider’s Lara Croft took a running leap from a ledge and grabbed the end of a rope that dangled over a dark, cavernous room.
The mystery woman stood beside the sofa, out of arm’s reach as she always did, eyes glued to the screen.
“See,” Darnell said with a boyish grin, “I told you she’d make it.”
Seth was shocked to see her eyes light up with what would have been a smile if her lips had moved.
“Now I’ll make her swing, jump to the next rope, swing again, and land on that ledge over there.”
Looking doubtful, she returned her attention to the screen and leaned against the arm of a recliner arranged perpendicularly to the sofa.
The pale blue V-neck T-shirt she wore clung to small breasts and left bare her prominent collarbones and arms that weren’t as skeletal now that she was eating regularly. Black and blue pajama bottoms hung on bony hips that had finally gained a bit of flesh on them. Her small feet were bare.
She was still far too thin and looked so fragile it broke Seth’s heart. And David’s. And Darnell’s.
Her face was less gaunt and had more color. It was a pretty face with full lips, a pert nose, and winged brows. Dark shadows still lingered beneath her eyes, however, a testament to her fatigue.
Bearing in mind the fact that this was her eighth day without sleep, she looked fan-freakin’-tastic.
Seth had once read about a sleep study a university had conducted to see how long a person could go without sleep. The longest any of the participants had lasted was eleven days. By only the fourth, participants’ thought processes and motor skills had become sluggish. Problems with short-term memory had arisen. They had had difficulty concentrating, become delusional, and been extremely moody, symptoms that had steadily increased in severity as the days progressed.
Not so their mystery woman. The only evidence of her lack of sleep lay in the bruising under her green eyes.
Beneath Seth’s scrutiny, those eyes widened as Lara Croft swung from one rope to another and grabbed it.
“Whew!” Darnell sent her another grin of triumph.
Seth’s breath caught when she smiled back.
Darnell went very still for a second but—to his credit—continued as though nothing special had taken place. “Once Lara gets over to the ledge, keep an eye out for medpacks. She’s running low and there should be one hidden around there somewhere.”
Damned if their guest didn’t move to sit on the very edge of the chair’s cushion and lean forward to watch Lara Croft’s progress more closely.
Seth looked at David and raised his brows. “How long has this been going on?” he asked too softly for human ears to catch.
“The whole time you’ve been gone,” he responded, equally quiet. “Darnell needed to take a break from trying to decrypt those files we snatched.”
Music indicating a discovery trilled from the television. “Cool. More flares. And a grenade launcher.”
Seth winced. “Couldn’t he have picked a less violent game?”
David shrugged. “He was already playing it when she came down to watch him.”
“Has Lara shot or been attacked by anything yet?”
“Just some bats. And it didn’t seem to alarm our girl.”
“Good. I’m not sure how much of her rescue she remembers and worry she might not react well to violence, even if it is only in a game. There was a hell of a lot of gunfire that night.”
David smiled wryly. “I’ve never been shot so many times in one night or by such high-caliber weapons. Damned things stung.” He nodded to the papers in Seth’s hand. “Speaking of bloodbaths, what happened at the meeting?”
Seth sighed, feeling infinitely weary. “Sebastien has done the impossible. Excluding the twenty-three Roland and Marcus have already managed to destroy, Sebastien has fifty-seven vampires living beneath his roof.”
David’s eyes widened. “What?”
“He’s trying to save them,” he said, feeling the same sadness Lisette had demonstrated when she had made the declaration earlier. “Making them eat food. Assigning them pedophiles to feed upon instead of innocents. But most are already straying from the path he’s chosen for them.”
“Did he turn them all himself?”
“I don’t know.”
The mystery woman suddenly leapt up and hurried over to the television to point at something on the large screen.
“What is it?” Darnell asked, making Lara backtrack a few paces. “Oh, a crevice. I didn’t even see that.” Lara jumped up, grabbed the edge, and crawled in. “All right! A medpack. Thanks.”
Smiling, she returned to her seat.
“How about that,” David murmured with a smile of his own. “I should’ve known if anyone could make her smile it would be Darnell.”
Darnell was the least intimidating of the three of them. Exceedingly tall with a lean build and medium-brown skin, he was twenty-six years old and had a naturally cheerful disposition few could resist.
Now if he could only entice her to speak, Seth thought.
David sobered. “So, let’s hear it. Tell me what you’ve learned that everyone else doesn’t know.”
“Discerning bastard,” Seth grumbled.
“No more so than you. Spill it.”
Seth hesitated. There was something the others hadn’t caught. Something he feared would have made them refuse to take Sebastien alive if they had known it. “Sebastien has a grudge against Roland. I don’t know the source of it. But he’s been trying to catch up with him for two hundred years, tracking and following him to every city he’s inhabited.”
“Roland doesn’t know why?”
“No.” Seth held up the papers. “Reordon listed many of the countries, cities, and towns Sebastien has visited, along with dates and …” He was loath to say it. “He was in Scotland the year Ewen was killed.”
David swore.
The Scottish immortal had been a favorite and had been mourned by them all.
“There were so few vampires in his region and none were banding together,” Seth continued. “We always wondered how one could have killed a Guardian of Ewen’s strength. It never occurred to us that it could have been another immortal.”