But that wasn’t the most immediate problem.
“Could the infection have passed in the arterial spray?”Aodhan said, softly enough that his words wouldn’t travel to the vampires who continued to watch from the shadows; those vamps would soon find themselves with nowhere to go, Aodhan having instructed a squadron to surround the area.
Elena looked again at the rusty brown that marked the trees. “Depends if enough of it got into the mouth, as well as through the mucus membranes of the eye. Low risk, since a drop won’t do it, but a risk nonetheless—the spectators and the executioners were standing damn close.” More than one had likely had an open mouth as they no doubt screamed at Sidney and cheered one another on. “I can track at least some of the people here in the last few hours, but given the way he was beaten”—she pointed out the vicious marks on the body—“it looks like it might’ve been a mob attack.”
A hardness to Aodhan’s expression she’d never before seen, splintered irises hauntingly white with reflected snow. “Find as many as you can as fast as you can.”
Having already isolated the strongest scent trail, Elena started the track, Deacon at her back. The intensity of the scent told her the vampire in question had run from the Theater probably at daybreak, his body and face covered with Sidney’s blood, a strange mélange of disinfectant and lilies entangled with the vampire’s own natural scent.
The odd thing was, he hadn’t run out onto the street, but scrambled deeper into Central Park. Where she found him ten minutes later. Covered in patches of dried, flaking blood the color of dirt, he sat rocking to and fro under the shade of an oak devoid of its leaves, its arms skeletal against the incongruously stunning starlit night.
“They killed him. They killed him. They killed him.”
Crouching beside the male, far enough away that he couldn’t lunge for her throat, Elena said, “Who killed him?” her tone nonconfrontational.
“They killed him. They killed him. They killed him.”
Elena tried again, even chancing a touch, but the vampire was trapped in some personal mental hellhole he couldn’t escape.
She and Deacon stayed with him only until he was picked up for transport to the Tower. Returning to the main site, now busy with Tower staff, Elena chose the next most promising trail. Thirty minutes later, she received a message from Illium stating a friend of Sidney’s had confessed to supplying him with food blood out of her own frozen supply. He drank a bottle from Blood-for-Less. Bottle dated within the period of the original donor-carrier.
Five hours after that, she’d tracked down three other vampires who’d watched and/or participated in Sidney’s bloody execution, but who hadn’t stuck around to experience the aftermath. One was terrified, one defiant, but it was the third who was the most problematic: he’d started to show advanced signs of the disease.
Stepping outside the bedroom where the vampire shivered so hard his teeth clattered, his mind lost in a febrile haze, she met Deacon’s eyes. “You should get back home. Sara will be waiting.” She would not risk his mind, his memories.
A piercing look. “I already know what Sara knows.”
“You have to leave before you know more,” she said, then brought up the one thing she knew would get him to back off. “Zoe needs you. Don’t get involved in immortal bullshit that could bleed onto your family.”
“You change your mind, Ellie,” he said after a long minute of silence, “just call.”
That done, she contacted Illium. “None of the idiots I’ve found are talking and we need the names of the others who were there and might be infected. Can you do your mental voodoo?” Raphael was on his way back, but still at least an hour out.
“My mental voodoo is nowhere as well developed as the Sire’s, but I have a better idea.”
Arriving at the guarded warehouse where Elena had quarantined the two apparently uninfected vampires, the infected one in another warehouse, Illium asked the vampires for the names and, when there was no answer, withdrew his sword and sliced off the left leg of the brown-haired male.
The gleam of red on steel was not what she’d been expecting, her heart slamming into her throat, but the brutal tactic delivered: the uninjured vampire broke down even as her friend clamped his hand over his stump in an attempt to stanch the pumping blood. “I’m sorry! We made a pact not to nark!” Sobbing, she began to give them names, the maimed vampire joining in when she faltered in her recollection.
It took less than an hour to track down the nine other vampires who’d scattered, including—ironically—a number who’d been fans of Sidney’s work. One more was discovered curled up in bed, the disease ravaging her cells, the other eight terrified out of their minds.