Shadow's Bane (Dorina Basarab 4)

She disappeared into the kitchen, after looking back at me once over her shoulder, and I opened the dining room door and slipped inside.

I tossed Ray the damned duck. “You’ve got to get out of here!”

“That’s what we’re trying to do! My boys need to feed—”

“So go!”

“Like that?” He gestured at the oily-haired, scruffy-jawed, smelly bunch who were currently congregated in the far corner of the room, staring at me. Because dhampir.

I sighed.

“They didn’t eat all day yesterday,” Ray told me. “And they’re not strong like me. They can’t go for days with no food, okay?”

And, sure enough, they had the twitchy, pasty-faced look of vamps in need of a meal.

Shit. Claire was going to love the idea of a bunch of hungry vampires around her kid. Not that they were anywhere close to losing control; they weren’t babies. But try telling her that.

Only I didn’t intend to tell her that.

I hadn’t talked to Claire yesterday because I’d planned to have them gone by now. They’d been out of it last night, trying to heal, and might as well have been the logs they’d resembled, all rolled up in their blankets, safe from the sun. Today, I’d planned to smuggle them out at first dark, only today had mostly been spent recovering.

And it wasn’t like I could just rent them a cheap hotel room. A random maid opening the drapes at the wrong time could cook them to a crisp. The only hotel safe enough was the Club, a super-expensive vamp-owned chain for traveling masters, which I couldn’t have afforded even if the local one hadn’t recently burned down.

“Look,” Ray began.

“Shhh!”

I poked my head out the door and then hopped into the hall to take a quick look upstairs. The coast was clear. But knowing this place, it wouldn’t stay that way.

I waved at Ray and mouthed, Come on!

They came on. Up the stairs on silent vamp feet and across to my room. Olga came out of hers in time to get flashed by

the lineup, who reared back against the wall, clutching their towels and looking spooked. Guess they’d been too out of it yesterday to remember her.

She looked at them; they looked at her; she looked at me.

And then slowly took a step back inside her room and shut the door.

The vamps sprinted past, towels flying, and disappeared into mine.

I stayed behind with Ray to gather up armloads of their crap and run after them. It took three trips, but we got it all. Even the goddamned duck.

I closed my door and stayed pressed against it, looking at them. There were a lot. More than I recalled. Ten, twelve, fifteen.

What the hell?

“You can use my bathroom,” I said. “To get cleaned up. Then go out the window.”

I nodded at the big windows framing the bed, and when they turned to look at them, I pulled Ray back out the door.

“Fifteen?”

“I know, okay?”

“You’re too weak to support fifteen!”

“Not when I was with Cheung. I got a boost from him, remember? But I lost that along with my head, so—”