Chapter 494
My pondering was interrupted when Christian plunked his coffee down on the table and slid into the booth across from me. He’d ordered the smaller size. Peewee or something? As tired as he looked, I thought maybe he should’ve gone with Largo. “Rough night?” he asked, and I wondered if maybe I also looked like I could’ve used a Largo.
“You could say that.” I definitely wasn’t about to go over my argument with Brandon with this guy. I ran my hands through my hair, wanting to get on with it but not knowing where to start.
“Man, who would’ve ever thought even a week ago you’d be sneaking out in the middle of the night to see me, huh?”
I didn’t like the implications of his comment and swallowed hard before I said, “You don’t have to make it sound like that.” Like we were on a date or something. Barf.
“Like what?”
As if he didn’t know. I rolled my eyes at him and he made a face at me, like maybe he’d thought about asking me out before. My skin felt like it had a thousand ants crawling all over it. I knew he’d asked out a lot of the new recruits and had even taken Ashley to dinner once. Why I was spared was beyond me, but I wasn’t going to ask. Instead, I reminded him, “You know, we could do this via IAC.”
“Oh, relax, kid. I’m just messing with you.” He took a sip of his coffee and I watched it course through him as he did some sort of re-energizing shake. “Whatcha got for me?”
It should’ve been simple enough to answer, but I was still having trouble figuring out where to start. I didn’t want to have verbal vomit all over the table and spit everything up at once, but as my mouth opened, and I stumbled for a few seconds, that’s sort of what happened. “Uh, well, I made a list of all of the Vampires I could locate in and around the area where Holland used to live, stretching out from Budapest into the rest of Hungary and into Eastern Europe. At last count, which was a few days ago, I had only identified a couple dozen, which was far less than the missing persons reports said I should be able to find.”
“Assuming all of the people who are missing have been turned.” He took another drink of his coffee but didn’t shake this time.
“Right,” I agreed, sliding my cup forward but not picking it up again. “So I decided to use the reports to look into individual people, see if I could access them that way.”
“Brilliant.” I blushed, my eyes widening slightly. It sounded like a genuine compliment, and I wasn’t used to that, not from him anyway. “And what did you find out?”
Moving past the heat in my cheeks, I said, “I was able to locate a lot of them, and now my list is close to a hundred.”
“Vampires?”
“Yeah.” I took a drink of my caramel latte and the espresso hit my system. I felt slightly less tired and a lot more bouncy.
“In that area?” he clarified.
“Yeah.” I sounded like a broken record. “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.” His understanding was almost as much of a surprise as the compliment, but I went with it.
“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?”
I shrugged. I didn’t know how it had happened either. “They weren’t on our lists. I don’t know why we didn’t get them then.”
“Interesting.”
I waited for him to say more, to come up with a suggestion. He didn’t. So I said, “Unless they were shielded.”
“By Holland?” he clarified, taking another drink of his coffee.
“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 was mostly thinking aloud at this point, not really expecting Christian to have any clue what the answers to my questions were because why would he know? He shouldn’t have any more information than I did.
But he seemed to think he might. “I would say so, that he’s been laying low for a while. But....” He stopped suddenly, and I could see that look in his eyes again, from the other day when he’d stopped by and said some cryptic things but didn’t reveal everything to me. I needed to know what it was he was holding back. How could I help him if I was in the dark?
“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.”
His head rocked back and forth slightly, like he concurred, but that didn’t mean he was going to tell me anything. I took a sip of my coffee, no longer feeling the pulsating energy I had with the first few sips, and waited. Maybe if I didn’t look directly at him, he’d tell me what he was hiding.
“I think part of the reason he was dormant for a chunk of those years was because he wasn’t there.”
My eyebrows shot up so high, they could probably be seen from behind me. “Say what now?” I wasn’t expecting him to say that.
He sucked in a deep breath, and I could see him debating about whether or not to say more. He didn’t want to, but I needed to know what he was thinking—and why. “I’m not telling you everything I know. You can get that in your head right now.” The old Christian was back, the one I was most familiar with, the jerkface one. I tried not to glare at him as he continued. “You know that most people think when Elliott came through the portal he was the third Guardian to do so, right? Not the second.”
Despite my irritation at him, I managed to say, “Right.” Of course, I knew that. So?
“Well, we only know of two, don’t we?”
I didn’t want to think about it at the moment, but I got it out of my mouth. “Alex and Elliott.” I didn’t see how this connected to Daunator yet, but I was hoping he would at least enlighten me that much.
“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.”
