“They’re not back yet,” Grant said.
Shit. “Should we go look for them? Have you gotten any word back from them?”
Now Tina was sitting up, frowning, worried. “Jeffrey—”
I scrambled up, no longer bone tired. An adrenaline-fueled second wind pushed me. “We have to go look for them.”
Nodding at Conrad, Grant said, “Tina, can you look after him?”
“I want to go, I want to help find him—”
“Someone has to stay here,” Grant said. “If we lose the lodge to the hunters, we’ve lost everything.”
She nodded and sat, clasping her hands. Her hair was limp, in need of a wash, pushed behind her ears. Her shirt and jeans were streaked with dirt and blood—Conrad’s blood was all over both of us. Dark circles shadowed her eyes. I wondered if I looked that wrung out.
“We’ll find him,” I said, trying to sound hopeful. Had to stay hopeful.
Grant and I went outside. At the edge of the porch, I tipped my nose up and tested the air. I smelled the forest, the outdoors, like I always did, but I wanted to smell people. Vampires. Their cold, undead blood should have stood out among all this life.
“Find anything?” Grant asked me.
“Not yet.” I stepped forward, all my senses firing.
I heard running. Not caring about stealth, someone crashed through the trees toward us.
“Someone’s coming. Jeffrey,” I said as he broke out of the trees and joined us in the clearing.
“Thank God,” he said, gasping to catch his breath. He was sweat soaked. No telling how long he’d been running. “They’ve trapped Gemma, we need you.”
Jeffrey led us back the way he’d come, about a mile through the woods around the lodge, to the edge of the meadow. He explained on the way, as well as he could around the hard breathing. We were all running on adrenaline by this point.
“We found the blind, a camouflaged tent full of equipment and weapons. We broke up as much of it as we could, scattered the ammunition, hid the weapons in the underbrush. There were silver bullets, silver arrows, stakes, crosses, bottles of what we think were h
oly water. And a cage. No sign of Cabe or Provost.
“We were on our way back to the lodge when something—it was like an explosion. Too loud for a gunshot. It—it was a harpoon. I can’t think of how else to describe it. It was automated. Anastasia said there wasn’t anybody around, she would have sensed them if they were. But it got Gemma. It was a harpoon on a line and it dragged her into this… this cage.” He was half jogging, half limping now, holding his side. His face twisted in pain. He’d better not have a heart attack on us.
He said, “They could have just staked her, but they didn’t. They waited, and they triggered this… this thing. This trap.”
We arrived and saw what he meant. Gemma was trapped in a cage, just tall enough to stand up in, just wide enough to grip both sides with her hands. Sheltered out of sight by a tree, it was portable, maybe set here only in the last day or so the way the grass under it was recently crushed. Steel and heavy, it would hold lions. A winch welded to the back had reeled in Gemma, who struggled against a harpoon sticking out of her right shoulder. The whole thing could have been automated, set on a trigger, operated by remote—we’d seen that the hunters had cameras and monitors set up. They could have moved their base since Grant interrogated Valenti. But as Jeffrey had said, they could have staked her just as easily as trapping her with harmless—to her—steel. This trap had a different purpose.
The cage was at the edge of the open meadow, and sunrise had begun. A band of full sunlight crept toward us across the grass.
Anastasia was talking Gemma down. Gemma herself gritted her teeth and threw herself against the barbed spike in her shoulder.
“Gemma, darling, stay calm. Don’t struggle. Don’t thrash.”
The younger vampire closed her eyes and settled, nodding in agreement.
Anastasia reached through the cage and held the spike, where it protruded from her back. “We’ll work it out of you. Carefully, now.”
Gemma eased herself forward, leaning against the spike, rolling her shoulder a little, struggling against the barb. Anastasia braced it still. I heard the wet, meaty sound of ripping flesh.
Vampires felt pain. I’d seen them get hurt. But they didn’t bleed much, and they didn’t need to breathe unless they were speaking. Gemma slid herself off that hook and didn’t make a sound. When she was free, she fell forward, and Anastasia dropped the spike, where it dangled off the winch.
Anastasia glared at Grant. “Every magician is also an escape artist, yes? You can pick the lock?” She pointed to the door of the cage.
Grant was already kneeling before the lock, working on it with a couple of thin metal tools, his lock picks.