Chapter 32

Jo hadn’t been paying any attention to her IAC visuals until his voice demanded she did so. Through his eyes, she could see a dark chamber that appeared to be deep in the cave. Dozens of people were chained to the walls, most of them by just one arm, their bodies slumped on the floor. Some of them appeared to be dead already; others might still be drawing shallow breaths. As Leo’s eyes traced over the scene, she realized what she was looking at. “Reserve de sange,” she said aloud.
“Reserve de sange?” Zane echoed. “Really? I’ve never actually seen that in person before. Have you?”
“No,” Jo admitted. “But I’ve heard my parents talk about it many times. Poor bastards. There won’t be anything we can do to save them. They’ve all been fed off of so many times, the best we can do is put them out of their misery.”
“But what keeps them from changing?” Zane asked.
Jo decided to leave the vault for now, though she’d certainly be back, and she headed over toward Leo’s position. “No one knows. And none of our attempts to heal them have ever been successful either. Even though Jamie figured out how to turn some of the other forms of mutants back into people, like Shadow Creepers, he could never quite solve this riddle.”
Zane was following along behind her. “Thousands of years of fighting these bloodsucking bastards, and we still don’t have all the answers.”
“Pretty much,” Jo agreed. “My dad said, for the first hundred years of his life, nothing changed. Everything was predictable. There were rules, and nature insisted that they be followed. Then… titanium bullets were discovered, and everything seemed to go to pot.”
“Yeah, it had to be quite a shock to discover that there truly was a way for a Hunter to kill another Hunter.”
“And for a Guardian to kill a Hunter,” Jo added. “That was something that had never happened up until the day my dad shot and killed that female Hunter who had helped ambush the team at Sierraville.”
“Is that the place where Elliott was killed?” Zane asked.
Jo wasn’t sure on all of the details, but she knew that much. “Yes.” She’d already told him some of this but repeated it now. “The Hunter who shot him was named Cowboy Sam. My dad shot a Hunter named Camilla. She’d shot… Jamie, I think. But then, Christian had gotten shot that night, too. Maybe it was him. I’m not sure. It’s been a long time since I’ve heard that story, and it wasn’t one either of my parents liked to talk about.” She could hear voices ahead of her and knew they were almost to the part of the cave where Leo had found the humans being kept to feed the Vampires.
“I can’t imagine Elliott likes to talk about it much either,” Zane added.
“Yeah. Actually, I don’t know. Whenever he tells the story, he always focuses on how brave he was to put himself between Sam and Meagan. It’s kind of funny actually. He says, in a lot of ways, that was the best day of his life, and he never should’ve let my mom talk him into coming back through the Blue Moon Portal, that everything was downhill from there.”
Zane was chuckling. “He can’t mean that. Didn’t he get back together with his wife and have Mandy after he came back from the dead?”
“Yes,” Jo confirmed. “But if he hadn’t come back, he’d have missed out on all of this shit. My mom used to talk about what it was like on the other side. She died for a few minutes before Cadon and I were born, and she always said it was the most perfect place anyone could imagine.” Thinking about how her mom might be there now, in that perfect place, Jo felt herself growing emotional and had to put all of those thoughts aside to concentrate on the task at hand.
Luckily, they had found the holding cell. It did look like a dungeon of sorts, a locked, barred door keeping it separate from the rest of the cave. The stench of body odor, piss, feces, and blood was overwhelming. Jo felt bile rising in the back of her throat but fought it down. She’d smelled worse--but not by much.
“How many of them are alive?” she asked Leo as she came into the dark, damp space.
“So far… four,” he said, gesturing at a woman and three men slumped against the wall. All of them had been unchained, but not a single one of them was moving. The woman’s eyes were wide, her mouth drooping open, dried blood darkening her neck, all the way down her collar as if she’d been left to drip or bleed out after the Vampires had finished their feedings. “There are a lot of bodies, though.”
They were all dressed in a way that suggested they were from local villages. Their clothing reminded Jo of the people she’d seen in the tavern when she’d met Ryker.
“What are we going to do with them?” Ping asked, gesturing at the people who were still breathing, though the question could’ve applied to the others, the stack at the back of the room.
“We can’t do anything to help them,” Jo reminded her team, a few others of which had made their way into the room. “We’ll need to make the bodies available for their families to collect. Maybe this will serve as a warning to the others that pacts aren’t being honored.”
“Unless all of these people came from villages that didn’t have pacts,” Mila said, coming through the door. “Mikali has our two candidates in custody, whenever you’re ready.”
Jo raised an eyebrow, not understanding what she was talking about at first. Then she remembered she was supposed to get some information from these spiky-toothed bastards. “All right. Thanks.” Jo took a deep breath and looked back at the four live reserve de sange. As the leader, she felt compelled to put them out of their misery herself, but the thought of pulling out her gun and shooting four innocent humans made the bile make a reappearance.
Mila was studying them. “These the only survivors?” she asked Leo.
“I think so,” he said from back in the darkness where he was still sorting bodies.
Jo was just about to ask Mila what she thought they should do when the Guardian fired off four quick shots, the nanoseconds between the first and last bang not even enough time for the last of them to realize what he had coming.
“What the hell are you doing?” Ping shouted. “They’re not Vampires!”
“Not yet,” Mila said with a shrug as she holstered her Glock. “But they would be if we left them alone.”
“You don't know that!” he shouted back.
“I do know that,” Mila retorted, not raising her voice. She turned to look Ping in the face, a vacant look in her eyes. “I know a lot more than you do, kid.”
“It’s all right, Ping,” Jo reassured him, even though she couldn’t blame him for being upset. “If she hadn’t done it, I would have. Now, come on. You can help me with my interrogation.” She pulled on his arm, and he came along, reluctantly. She didn’t know exactly how she planned to put him to use, but it was just as well he get away from Mila.
Jo snaked her way through the labyrinth, looking for Mikali and the two Vampires he had under his command, praying her plan to get one of them to talk would work. They had a lot of unanswered questions, and while none of the bloodsuckers would likely tell them how reserve de sange worked, maybe one of them could confirm if the redheaded woman really was Holland and where she might be.