"That easy?"

She smiled. "Of course."

Meghan gave her a dubious look. "Is there something going on I should be aware of?"

"Justin met my parents." Elyssa's lips trembled as she tried to smile. "Things didn't go so well."

"I can imagine," Meghan said. "After the Thunder Rock disaster, your father probably hates spawn as much as I do—present company excluded, of course, Justin."

Elyssa's gaze sharpened. "You know something about Thunder Rock? As far as I know, he's never told anyone what really happened there, aside from the Synod. And he's the only one who survived."

"I don't know the details," Meghan said, "but your father and I once had a discussion about spawn when I joined the Templars."

"Was this after your own father's death?" I asked.

She nodded. "It was one of the reasons I joined. To fight evil."

"What did he tell you?" Elyssa asked, curiosity blazing in her features.

"Only that he felt he and I were kindred spirits since we had both suffered evil at the hands of spawn. Beyond those few words, he didn't go into specifics. If he had, I'd tell you. He did say he'd detailed everything in his journal and wanted me to write down my own story in great detail so he could present a case against the spawn at some point in the future."

Elyssa snorted. "As if the Conclave could do anything about them."

"Typical," I said, my chin tight. "Spawn I don't even know tick off your dad and now he hates all of us."

Meghan's lips flatlined. "I'm afraid my story is just one of many. Believe me, after my father's death I looked for other stories like mine, and there are a lot of them."

My stomach growled again and I suddenly didn't feel like discussing the shortcomings of my relatives. "I think it's time to feed." I looked at Smith. "I'm going to talk to him and find out how to contact Underborn. Then we can go."

I strolled to the room with the metallic circle embedded in the floor and watched for a moment as Smith ran a program on his tablet. Red words flashed on the screen and I figured it didn't mean anything good.

"Part of the tracker is blocked," Smith said, "but not all of it. I think it's using a backup frequency."

Shelton grunted. "Makes sense. I'll run the scanner again since we have the first one locked down. Maybe we can identify it."

"Hanging in there?" I asked Dad.

A bored expression weighed down his face. "Barely." He looked back at Elyssa as she shoved stuff into a knapsack. "You two going somewhere?"

"I need to top off the old tank, if you know what I mean."

"You and me both." His eyes settled longingly on the exit.

I glanced at Smith. "I need to ask you something."

"Fire away."

"Umm, it's kinda personal, about your sister."

His forehead scrunched with confusion. "Why don't we step outside, then?"

Dad and Shelton had confused looks as well.

"It's not what you're thinking," I said.

"Hey, I don't blame you, man," Shelton said. "She's kinda hot. I'd be all over that."

"Hey now, that's my sis—ah dammit," Smith said. "Why do I get so protective? Not like there's anything left to be protective of."

Shelton barked out a laugh. "She's still your sister. Guess you'd be even worse of a brother if you didn't stick up for her."

"Yeah, yeah, TP." Smith shook his head.

He led me to the exit, uttering a word or two, and waiting for the stairs to form. Then we walked up to the ground floor where the resident mattress greeted us with its moldy aroma and a cheerful array of colorful stains. Elyssa came up a second later.

"What do you really want?" Smith said. "Obviously, you have no interest in my sister."

"I think she may be coming around," I said, then cleared my throat nervously. "We, uh, had a little conversation after I woke up. She apologized about her bad behavior—the kidnapping and attempted murder stuff."

He looked unimpressed. "She's come back before with the contrite apologies, tears, all that jazz, only to circle right back around into a worse situation. I don't think this time will be any different."

"Not with that attitude," Elyssa said. "Act like a big brother and maybe things will work out. Drop the conspiracy obsessions."

"I can't," he said. "I have to find out what happened."

"You're hooked on solving a mystery, and she's hooked on whatever fills the void where your attention should be," Elyssa said.

Smith grinned. "You must be related to Dr. Phil."

I laughed.

Elyssa glared at the two of us and we shut up.

"By the way," Smith said, pulling out his tablet. "I found out some even worse stuff about those killing spells you gave me to analyze."

I had almost forgotten about the wretched things. Almost forgotten my mom apparently wanted to murder a lot of people. "How can mass murder be worse?"

"I wrote spell analyzing routines that deciphered several runes. My tablet isn't very fast so I uploaded some of the spells to my server. It has a more robust version of Arc OS running on it."

"Is that like the magic version of Windows?"

"Exactly. It's just a computer operating system which uses science and arcane elements together."

"I can't believe you guys created your own operating system. Can you play video games on it?"

"All right, geeks," Elyssa said in a weary tone. "Enough with the nerd talk. What's up with the spell?"

"Ah, yeah," Smith said, the smile vanishing from his face. "What you have is a group of spells, each one dedicated to a particular use. You remember how I told you these spells are made for killing en masse?"

I nodded.

He pulled up a spell on his table. "This one could wipe out every vampire in a hundred-mile radius."

Chapter 23

"One little spell can wipe out thousands of supers just like that?" I was aghast at the possibilities.

"It's not just a 'little' spell," Smith said. "In fact, to pull this off you'd need massive amounts of power and exceptional skills to focus it properly. At its lowest level, you could kill vampires in your immediate vicinity. If you chained together with several exceptional sorcerers and an arcane generator on a ley line, you could nuke every vampire within a thousand miles."

"Holy crap." I tried to wrap my head around the sort of power he was talking about, but I still didn't have much of a frame of reference or the time to dig into too many specifics. "Shelton showed me how you can use computers for complex spells. What's to stop just anyone from executing this spell and running it?"

"Unless they know exactly how to focus it and possess the willpower to back it, either nothing would happen, or they'd burn out." Smith zoomed in on one of the runes. "These custom runes are like nothing I've ever seen. They're so intricate and dense it must have taken years just to craft each one."

"Sounds like you're impressed," I said. "You do realize your sister would be killed if anyone cast this spell, right?" I glanced at Elyssa. "Would it hurt dhampyrs?"

He shook his head. "I'm not sure. It might kill dhampyrs or it might simply clear the vampire genes out of their system and leave behind only their human side."

"This spell could make me normal?" Elyssa said, her eyes sparking with interest.

"Define normal," Smith said.

"Don't even think about it," I told her. "I love you just the way you are." She smiled, but I could sense the lingering doubt.

"What does this rune mean?" I asked, pointing to the one he'd zoomed in on. It looked like a swirling ladder carved with tiny inscriptions, almost like DNA.

"You've got to understand—a lot of what's in here is over my head. Whoever made this understands the fundamentals of what makes a vampire a vampire. A vampire is made partly from the focus and will of a master vampire, a virus in the bloodstream, and magical energy. These bind together and change the individual person, morphing them from a standard human, to a being with different digestive needs, denser muscles, and much thicker blood to support such a system."

"Sounds like you understand it pretty well," I said.

He winced. "Part of my dismal attempts to see if I could reverse Felicia's transformation without killing her."

"I assume you didn't figure it out?"

Uncertainty flashed across his face. "I don't know what I figured out. I needed to test my theories, but couldn't bring myself to kidnap a vampire. I didn't want to kill anyone." He looked down at the rune. "This single rune has all the scientific and MDNA—i.e. magical DNA—of a vampire spelled out." He scrolled over to another rune, this one in the eerie shape of a reddish skull with a stake through the temple. "This is the killing rune. It unravels one tiny part of the force binding the MDNA together, causing a backlash, killing the subject."

"What enables it to kill on such a wide scale?" I asked.

"That would be a factor of energy, focus, and will—same with any spell. But the human body can only funnel so much energy before it burns out."

"What if someone grabbed hold of a huge radar dish or power pole and did it?"

He laughed so hard it took him a minute to answer. "Oh, man, you come up with some funny ideas." He took a breath and forced away his grin. "It doesn't work that way. Even if you're using an arcane generator to power a staff, your body has to be able to handle the feedback and power flow in order to drive it through your focus."

"The focus being the staff?"

"Right. Focus, power, and will, are the three fundamentals of sorcery."