“Give me your phone,” Ben said. Blinking, I handed it to him, watched him scroll through numbers, pick one, and call. “Hi, Nick Parker? Ben O’Farrell here, from the other day? Yeah. I wondered if I could ask you a couple of questions about CCTV footage. Yeah, the police are involved, or will be soon…” He walked a few steps away for privacy. I heard Nick’s answer buzzing through the speaker; he was too soft-spoken for me to make out words.
Cormac said softly, to keep the others from hearing, “Even if there is footage, you really think the cops will be able to find him?”
Of course he was right. It wasn’t that the cops couldn’t ordinarily find a kidnapping victim. They just might need help with this one and not even know it. The sooner we got that help …
Ben returned, clicking off the phone and handing it back to me.
“What’d he say?”
“He’s got some contacts with the police. He’ll find out what he can and keep us in the loop.” He shrugged, as if in apology for not being able to do more.
I made a call of my own. Fortunately, he answered right away, saving me those few seconds of anxiety.
“Caleb? It’s Kitty.”
“If this is another scheme of Ned’s—”
“It’s not Ned. Tyler’s missing. Someone’s taken him.”
“Taken him? Who? Where?”
“I don’t know—if I knew I wouldn’t need help.”
“Settle down. Is it the vampires?”
“In broad daylight? Besides, we didn’t smell any in the room. Really, it could be anyone.”
“If the vampires—their minions, I mean—took him out of some kind of revenge for last night, he could already be dead.”
I shook my head. “I have to think that he’s more valuable alive.”
“Sounds like a tracking job, then. We’ll get on it. Where was he taken from?”
I explained the situation. Caleb and his people knew the city, would have the best idea where Tyler might have been taken. They were the best people to look for him. It was hard, though, leaving it in their hands.
The next couple of hours went too quickly, or too slowly, depending. I changed my mind minute to minute. Either way, it was a blur. Police, uniformed and plainclothes detectives, and forensic technicians descended on the room in a swarm and herded us into yet another bare office for interviews. They asked us about the last time we saw Tyler, we told them, and they asked who we thought might have wanted to do Tyler harm. That was the problem—I had to explain how difficult doing him harm actually was, and that the perpetrator had to have known exactly how.
The list of suspects I gave the poor overwhelmed detective was very long and ranged from foreign militaries to anti-werewolf extremists to vampires.
“Vampires?” the detective said, unhappily. “How am I meant to look for vampires?”
“Before sunset, in a room with no windows?” I said, and she glared at me.
The police finished their interviews, took our phone numbers and contact information, asked us not to leave town, and let us go.
Then we hunted.
In the back of the hotel, at one of the service entrances, we caught Tyler’s scent, along with that human, vaguely medicinal smell from the room. They’d taken him out the door here. He was probably already unconscious. And then—nothing. The trail vanished.
“Probably loaded him into a car,” Cormac said.
“What do we do now?” I asked, looking back and forth down the small, empty side street, as if they had just turned a corner.
“The security cameras had to pick up something,” Ben said.
I paced, back and forth, over ten feet of sidewalk.
“Kitty,” Ben said, meaning to be soothing, probably. The tone annoyed me.