His jaw spasmed. “What do you mean?”

I rested my head against the cool glass of the car window. “Peyton isn’t feeding on the disposables. I mean that’s what we thought, right? He would go after the homeless and the girls on the street because they’re easy targets. Food.”

“Yes.”

“But that’s not it. He’s changing them.”

I didn’t think vampires could get paler, but the new ashy pallor on Holden’s face proved me wrong. “He’s turning them?”

“He’s making some of the girls vampires and sending them back into the street.”

“But why? No vampire in their right mind would turn a prostitute. We won’t turn anyone we consider unworthy.”

“Don’t you get it?”

He looked at me out of the corner of his eye.

“He’s creating an army. They’re plague carriers, Typhoid Marys. He will use them to create more or to destroy others.”

“Oh Jesus.” The depravity of Peyton’s plan was setting in.

“He’s going to make Manhattan a vampire city. He wants to come out of the dark.”

“He wants to kill everyone.”

“And he’s starting with the lowest levels. The prostitutes will infect their johns. They’ll infect their wives or girlfriends. It will spread. If we can’t find him soon, we won’t be able to stop it.”

“But Peyton is a known rogue. One vampire alone can’t make this work.”

“He has to be working with someone. And he has to have someone in the daylight too, but I don’t remember him having a daytime servant. Only the really powerful masters can manifest that kind of control.”

“Like Sig has Ingrid.”

“But Sig is also well over a thousand years old.”

“Two,” Holden corrected.

I didn’t have the energy to absorb the magnitude of that information. “And Peyton isn’t even three hundred.”

“He wouldn’t be able to manipulate a human servant in the daytime. He could barely manage a Renfield.”

I hated the phrase Renfield. After Bram Stoker’s eponymous tome vampires had thought the name was too hilarious not to use. Much like Dracula used the poor, weak-minded Renfield, rogue vampires often enthralled someone into doing whatever they wanted over an extended period of time. They called them Renfields.

Daytime servants, on the other hand, maintained an illusion of free will, but always knew the needs and desires of their master. Furthermore, because of the bond it created with their master, the daytime servant could live for many centuries. They lacked the strength and power of a vampire but enjoyed the extended life.

Sig’s daytime servant, Ingrid, was a stunning German girl he’d met sometime in the early thirteen hundreds. She was quiet and dutiful, but I was certain time had shown her things none of us could imagine, especially at Sig’s side. I suspected, at over seven hundred years old herself, Ingrid was not a human of any small strength. I didn’t like to be alone with her. There was too much in her eyes I didn’t want to know.

Holden pulled the BMW up to the curb in front of my apartment. I had begun to shiver as the shock of the evening’s events really sank in. If Peyton was going to try taking over the city, outing vampires everywhere and waging an all-out war on humanity, he wasn’t doing it alone. And whoever was helping him had to be strong, mean and determined.

Of all the people I wanted to discuss this with right now, Sig was at the top of my list. But how could I have a casual chat with the head of the vampire council about my suspicions? Would Sig want to know what a half-breed vampire killer thought?

Holden seemed to be reading my thoughts, because he put a hand on my thigh and said, “Let me go to the council. I’ll request an audience with Sig and see if he has any thoughts about what you’ve discovered.”

I nodded solemnly. It would be better if Holden went. Perhaps it would help him curry favor and find advancement in the ranks of the other vampires if he brought them the information. I couldn’t begrudge him the desire to advance among his own kind. I knew I never would.

I opened my car door, noticing an unfamiliar but pristinely well-kept ’72 Dodge Challenger parked near my building. It was a charcoal gray color I rarely saw on cars, let alone vintage muscle cars.

I was about to ask Holden if he remembered ever seeing it before when I noticed that my living room light was on. I might not remember cars, but I definitely knew I’d turned off all my lights before leaving.

Someone was in my home and it wasn’t someone I’d invited.

Chapter Twenty-Six

“Holden.” I leaned back towards the car, but my eyes remained focused on my window, which rested on the same level as the sidewalk. My living room was the only one in the apartment that allowed natural light in, and as such also the only one that let light out.

“I see it.”

“Are we expecting anyone?”

“Keats?”

“Keaty would have called first. He knows better.”

“The wolves?”

I raised my eyes, looking away from the window when it didn’t yield the answers I needed. I hadn’t considered Lucas or Desmond, but now that Holden suggested it, it seemed like the most obvious answer.

My face flushed, and it didn’t escape Holden’s notice.

“That would make sense.”

“Do you want me to come in with you?”

If it was either of my wolves, then having Holden with me would only serve to make things all the more complicated. The uneasiness of earlier this evening was still fresh in my mind, and I doubted the boys would have forgotten it either. I was also more than a little annoyed that they would invite themselves into my home, and I didn’t want Holden with me when I made that clear to whoever was inside.

“No. It’s got to be one of them, that makes the most sense. You can go.”

“You’re sure?”

“Go and see Sig. We need to know what he thinks we should do and how we should act on it. I need to know if he still wants Peyton alive, given this new information.”

Holden scoffed, and I knew he doubted the Tribunal’s opinion would change regardless of any new details, but being allowed to kill Peyton would go miles to help ease my mind.

“Tell me as soon as you know anything. Please.”

He nodded and I closed the car door at last. In my lit apartment there was a whole other world of problems for me to deal with. I was starting to think I’d never find an end to my troubles.

It wasn’t until I was standing alone on the sidewalk, watching Holden’s car drive away, that I felt the full force of a body slam into me from behind and realized how right I was.

The blow was accompanied by snarling and snapping next to my ear that made my whole body go cold. I remembered being in the club yesterday with a man’s throat in my mouth, only then the animal noises had been coming from my throat instead of next to my head. It was a feral, distinctive sound, that of a hunter with prey only a bite away.

I was being immobilized by someone’s full weight, and they were trying to eat me.

I let out a howl that was less a horror-movie victim’s scream and more the noise of a wounded animal, but was the most natural utterance I could manage in the heat of panic. How could I have been stupid enough to let down my guard for a fraction of a second, knowing Peyton was in the city waiting for a chance to conclude our unfinished business?

“I thought you were so strong,” the mouth near my ear said.

The fact human words were coming out when the previous sounds had been so guttural was enough to snap me out of my internal chastising. As the voice and words sunk in, I put together that the speaker was young and female. Had one of Peyton’s new lackeys found me?

Using her new calmness as an opportunity to rear back, I smacked the back of my skull hard into the front of her face and knocked her off me with the suddenness of the gesture. It never ceased to amaze me how people’s cockiness could lead to their undoing. Getting to my feet as quickly as possible, I spun and crouched in a fighting stance, preparing for her next attack. I was wishing, not for the first time that week, I hadn’t been forced to go without a weapon. As much as I’d have liked to be armed, there wasn’t any place to hide a gun when you were wearing an ensemble that barely hid your lady bits.

Recognition slammed into me with the force of a hammer when I saw the face of the young woman who had attacked me.

She looked almost exactly as she had when I’d sent her running from me in Central Park with her broken heel trailing behind her, only now a stream of blood was coming from her nose where I had broken it, and she no longer seemed afraid of me. The girl Mercedes said was named Brigit knelt close to the sidewalk, primed like a lethal predator waiting for her moment.

She was as pale as she’d been that night, but it wasn’t fear making her that way. Her new pallor was visible beneath the fake bronze of her skin. She was wearing a gauzy white summer dress that looked all wrong in the chill of spring.

Brigit was dead.

I knew from what Mercedes had told me I had saved her that night. She’d left Central Park alive and made it home in one piece.

So how was it she was now a baby vampire, staring at me with the clear objective of killing me when only a couple nights ago I had saved her from the monster she had now become?

It couldn’t be a coincidence.

All of these thoughts flooded my head in a matter of milliseconds. Before I had time to voice any of my questions out loud, Brigit sprung out of her crouch and hurled herself at me a second time.

She no longer had the element of surprise, though. Now she was not a clever stalker but an inexperienced killer launching an attack against a trained and lethal opponent. She would not best me again.

I grabbed a fistful of her hair when she got close enough and used it to yank her body to the ground, where it landed with a hard, fleshy crash. I knelt on her chest, using one hand to hold her head back. With the other I held her chin so she couldn’t try to bite me.