Crimson Death (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter 25)

"Are they coherent enough to answer questions?" I asked.

"I believe so. Giacomo is talking to them now with some of Nolan's people helping guard the little vampires. The daughter and mother are asking about the rest of the family. Did they rise as vampires, too?"

"Oh, shit," I said softly, but with real feeling. "I'll call you back." I yelled for Nolan. "Who's watching the vampire victims from earlier today?"

"They're at the hospital," he said.

"What hospital?"

"What's wrong?" Edward asked.

"The others woke savage until they'd fed. Where are the rest of their families?"

Nolan cursed under his breath and was already on his cell phone and moving toward the cars. We all divided up between the two cars, but I kept Nathaniel and Damian with me, though maybe putting all three of us in one car wasn't my best idea, not if the Wicked Bitch wanted to take all of us, but the thought of being separated from them, especially Nathaniel, made my throat tight. I still remembered all the panic I hadn't let myself feel when Roarke told us that the plan was to kidnap him, because the Bitch wanted all my pretty men, but especially Nathaniel. Good idea, bad idea, I kept him with me, and Damian stayed with both of us. We weren't alone, by any means, but it was still like triple baiting one car. I tried not to think of it that way as Donnie kicked the van into high gear and screeched out after Nolan's car.

I prayed that we'd get there before any of them injured, or killed, someone at the hospital. Magda had said that once they fed, the Irish vampires were lucid. How terrible would it be to wake up to yourself covered in someone else's blood, maybe sitting beside the body? I prayed not just to get there in time to save the victims, but to save the new vampires from truly becoming monsters.

58

BY THE TIME we got to the hospital, it was all over but the crying. I'd executed more vampires than anyone else, and killed more than I could actually keep track of some days, but I'd never had to sit across a table from one who was crying hysterically because she was covered in her victim's blood. If I hadn't seen the delicate fangs as the grandmother wailed her distress, I wouldn't have known she wasn't human. The newly dead either looked almost alive and became less human as time went on or they were more inhuman at the beginning of their existence and learned how to be more human as time went on; it all depended on the bloodline they descended from. Whatever vampire was creating these was unlike any bloodline I'd ever seen.

Except for the hospital gown covered in fresh blood and the fact that her hands were restrained behind her, Mrs. Edna Brady looked like what she had been: a seventy-something grandmother who had been a regular churchgoer and the matriarch of a loving family. She'd managed to wipe most of the blood off her face before she'd been restrained. There was one smear in her short white hair that nothing but a shower was going to get rid of. I knew that from experience. Once you got blood in your hair . . . I looked at her and didn't know where to start. I hunted vampires. I didn't hold their hands and explain to them how to be the best bloodsucker they could be.

Lucky for both of us, Damian and Jake were with me. "Edna," Damian said in a soothing voice. "Edna, can you hear me?"

She continued to wail, and I mean wail; terms like crying and hysterics didn't cover it. Edward and Nolan were dealing with Edna's son, who had also risen as a vampire. Kaazim was helping them out. The father had been utterly calm. In fact, he didn't remember how he got so much blood on him or why he was in the hospital. Amnesia for the first few nights is a blessing apparently, because we were staring at the impact of remembering everything.

Nathaniel was in the hallway outside the room they'd given us. Dev and Nicky were permanently attached to him by my orders. Ethan and Domino along with Donnie had gone to the hotel to pick up Fortune and Echo. Echo would go in and try to talk vampire to vampire with the male vamp Edward and Nolan were trying to question.

I was so ready to trade vampires with Edward. I was sympathetic, but I just simply didn't know what to do with Edna Brady. I don't know if she couldn't hear us or if she just didn't care. Damian had been gentle, patient, and charming, and nothing had stopped the awful screaming or taken one shade of panic out of her eyes. I was starting to get a headache just from the noise.

I finally screamed her name at her. At first I didn't think she heard me, but her eyes started to focus as if she finally saw us and the room we were in rather than being trapped in that moment when she'd come to herself, cradling the unconscious body of her first victim.

"Edna! Edna! Edddnaaaa!" I screamed at her, and the wailing slowed. She blinked and looked at us again. She was in there; behind all the noise and terror, she was still in there. That was good, I thought.

"Edna, can you hear me?"

She blinked at me. She looked scared and confused, but at least she stopped wailing.

Damian tried. "Edna, can you hear us?"

"Nod if you can hear us?" I asked, and she nodded. Yay, progress! "Do you know where you are, Edna?"

"Hospital," she said in a voice that sounded raw from screaming.

"That's good, Edna," Damian said. "Do you remember why you're in the hospital?"

She seemed to think really seriously and finally said, "My granddaughter disappeared. . . . She came home. She wasn't dead."

I let the whole definition of life and death go for now. "Something like that, yes."

"Voices, shining eyes, they promised me something. They promised me . . . I looked in the mirror and I looked the same. I thought I'd be young again, but I looked just the same. It didn't work the way they said it would."

"What was supposed to happen, Edna?" Damian asked.

"Vampires are young and beautiful. I thought I would be twenty again, or thirty, but there was a mirror in my room, and I looked as old as ever. I hadn't changed, and then a doctor came in happy that I was awake, and . . ." Horror filled her eyes up one memory at a time. "Oh, my God, I tore open her arm. I drank her blood!" She started to retch as if she was going to throw up.

"It's okay, Edna. It's okay," I said, though that was a lie, such a lie.

"Is the doctor all right?"

"She's in surgery," I said.

"Did I tear her arm almost off? I wouldn't do that. I would never hurt someone like that, but I remember the blood and . . . and voices promising me . . . I'd be young again."

"I'm sorry, Edna," Damian said.

She stared at him. "You're young and beautiful. You both are. That's the way it's supposed to be. That's why you give up everything, to be young forever."

I started to explain to her that vampires are the age they die at forever. That they don't grow older, but they don't become younger either. But Damian stopped me from explaining it to her. He whispered, "Later. Give her some time."

"Where's Frankie?"

"Your son?"

"My husband. Where's Frankie?"

I looked at Damian, because Frankie hadn't made it. He'd had a bad heart for years, and the doctors theorized that the shock of being drained of blood, or maybe seeing his granddaughter as a vampire, had been too much for him. Who the hell knew? If you had a bad ticker, how the hell would you ever survive the horrorfest that had befallen this family?

The youngest daughter hadn't made it either. Her throat had been so small that the fangs had pierced too much and

collapsed her windpipe. She'd suffocated before she could bleed out, so no vampirism for her.

"Who did this to you, Edna?" I asked, and my voice was gentler than it had been. It was all just so awful.

"Who did the voices belong to," Damian asked, "the ones that promised you eternal youth? Who told you that?"

"He did."

"Who is he?" I asked.

"He came with Katie. She brought him home. He found her when she was lost and he brought her back to us."

"What was his name, this Good Samaritan?" I asked.

She smiled at me. "Yes, he was a Good Samaritan. He found Katie and brought her back to us. He told us that we could all be together forever and never grow old, never die. I remember his eyes . . ." She frowned. "Or I don't remember his eyes. I don't know if I remember what color his eyes were, but they were like stars."

We questioned her for a while longer, but all we learned was that the man had short, dark hair, maybe black, maybe brown. He was Caucasian. He was young, but since she was in her early seventies, that could have meant anything from teens to fifties. His eyes had glowed like stars, which could have meant they were paler colored, gray, or pale blue, or it could just have meant that she remembered them glowing, but not the color.

Edna's son, Katie's father, remembered even less. His memory seemed to stop with Katie at the door. She'd come home. She wasn't dead. That's where he stopped. It was more merciful than what Edna remembered.

In the hallway Nolan asked, "Will they remember more as time passes?"

"Yes," Damian said.

"Yes," Echo said.

"Why do neither of you sound happy about that?" I asked.

"Would you want to remember any of this?" Echo asked.

I looked into her lovely blue eyes, and said, "Hell, no."

"Some people don't ever remember their first night," Fortune said. "Maybe they won't either."

"Edna Brady already remembers most of it."

"The man doesn't."

"The best chance we have of finding the vampire that is doing this is to start with the teenage girls. One of them was the first victim. She'll remember the most about the one that created her," Echo said.

"They found Sinead Royce's family," Superintendent Pearson said. He'd come in late and mostly just monitored us. He didn't want to see either of the victims in person. He was having a lot of trouble coping with them as vampires when he'd seen them alive and looking for their daughter just days ago.