As soon as I started to tell Luna Adrienne what happened, she made a call. Master Pontalbo’s face joined the conference. “Sorry about that, but his group is in a different location,” Adrienne said. “Let’s hear this call.”
“A HUNDRED of them in the warehouse?” Leo was shaking his head. “How the hell do we get past a hundred fucking vampires?”
“A hundred newborns,” Cyprian said. “Little power or training. It changes our plans, but Vespucci is doing us a favor by gathering them in one place.”
“We’re at much greater risk of failure,” Leo said.
“Your job remains the same, Alpha. Storm the building and free the girls; we’ll keep the vampires off your back.”
We talked for another five minutes, and then I let the others go to continue their planning on their own. We had our own problems to consider.
Consuela (Mardona) Vespucci’s POV
I went over every scenario while I finished the rest of my shift at the hospital. Taking more blood hadn’t been difficult, but it wasn’t repeatable. Sooner or later, someone would discover the missing blood, and I’d get fired.
I stashed it in my new purse as I got ready to leave. I was vulnerable, and I hated that feeling. Master had picked me for my work connections, not for my fighting ability. What would happen to me after the attack? Would he figure it out? One bag of Vicki’s blood, and he’d be unstoppable.
I froze as I got to the office door.
Vicki’s blood. In a time of danger, he’d drink Vicki’s blood.
I walked back to my desk, placing a spare set of crimping pliers and spare crimps in my purse. Walking out the door, I didn’t take my usual bus. There was a store nearby that specialized in herbs, natural treatments, and unproven remedies. Walking in, I smiled at the older woman behind the desk.
Ten minutes later, I was in a cab heading for Master’s home. The place was quiet, with only a few guards upstairs. I entered the library and waited for the door to the basement to open.
“You’re early,” Paco said.
“I missed my bus getting the extra blood, and I had to take a cab here,” I said. Paco probably knew that already, as the video surveillance he monitored would have shown me getting out of the cab. “I have to drop off the supplies, then go check on our prisoner.”
“Don’t take too long there. Master may need you later.”
I shuddered to think of what he might need. “Of course.” I walked off to the storage room, verified I was alone, and opened the refrigerator drawer. Placing the bagged blood on the shelves, I opened the box where I kept the ‘special’ blood. Finding the two bags from Vicki, I grabbed my supplies from my purse.
Withdrawing a large syringe, I filled it from the bottle of bloodroot extract I’d purchased at the shop. I injected half into the first bag just below where the tube was crimped off and made sure the poison made it into the main bag. I then cut the tube just below the injection point and re-crimped it. A minute later, both bags were back in place, and the tools were back in my bag.
I had one more idea. I took the other bags of werewolf blood and placed them at the back of the refrigerator, under the most recently obtained blood. Taking some regular human blood, I used a Sharpie to match the markings I’d made of the werewolf blood. If something happened, they wouldn’t get any boost.
“I’ll be back in an hour or so,” I told Paco as I headed back up the stairs.
If I got through tonight, it would be a miracle.
***********
Sharkbait (Vicki Lawrence’s) POV
My baby was gone.
I wiped the tear from my face as I laid on the bunk, recovering from the cramp a few minutes earlier. It was the worst period of my life; the flow was heavy, and the cramping worse. I’d already soaked through two maxi-pads, and I would need more. The smell of blood was strong in the cell; the only good part was that the vampires spent little time down here now. They were watching on the surveillance system and listening in to our conversations. We couldn’t use a link with the silver collars on, so we had to whisper and take advantage of our hearing.
We’d kept the news on, and that hadn’t helped at all. Our story didn’t appear much anymore, as nothing had changed, and law enforcement found no leads. One of the commentators on Fox speculated about our fate. “It’s been almost a week since the girls disappeared, and their parents have not received a single ransom demand. Given the younger girls’ fame and beauty, I believe they were victims of an international sex slavery ring.”
“Is that common,” the interviewer asked.
“More common than we would like to think,” he said. “There are a lot of sick people in this world. For some, owning a famous and beautiful woman is a status symbol. Having the power to do anything you want to her, knowing what she was, is worth a lot of money. Strung out on drugs, abused repeatedly, and without hope? These girls are unlikely to make their twenty-first birthdays.”
“That’s a depressing outlook,” the host said.
“The people who kidnap, sell, and hold these women make sure they never see the light of day. Eventually, they are too far gone to keep, so they are killed and buried.”
“Turn that off,” I said to anyone listening.
“Where are these people….”
The news show was no longer on; Amy was flipping through the channels. “It’s Christmas Eve. There must be something else on,” she said. Changing it to Discovery Channel, she found “Air Jaws 10” showing. “Perfect,” she said as she came over to sit on the edge of my bunk. “Remember those times we’d stay up all night waiting for Santa Jaws to show up?”
I laughed; our Pack had a few traditions that were a little different than others. The entire Pack would gather at Leo’s house on Christmas Eve and stay for three days of fun and eating. Santa Jaws was Leo’s creation; the costumed shark with a red hat preferred donuts and coffee to milk and cookies, and keeping him full was important. If he was hungry, he might come downstairs and steal the treats laid out on tables for Christmas day! To prevent this, all the Pack children would sleep in the rec room in a big group.
Amy and I always picked a spot near the stairs, under the table of popcorn balls and chocolate candies. That way, we could reach up and grab candy from the table without getting out of our sleeping bags or waking the others. The two of us were tactical thinkers, even back then.
“I remember the year you pretended to sleep until Santa Jaws passed, then grabbed the candy-stuffed remora off his back,” I said with a laugh. Leo had found the two-foot-long rubber toy at one of the aquariums we visited. It was hollow and stretchy, with a suction-cup mouth that had a pinky-sized hole in it. Our first Christmas in the Pack, he’d taken hours shoving hard candies into its sucker mouth until it was full, and then he hung it from his costume. The first year, I was the one who got it from him. I tied it by its tail to my headboard, and every day I’d spend a minute milking a butterscotch or peppermint candy back out its mouth for school.
“That was epic,” she said with a smile. We woke up to Amy screaming as she hung upside down, beating Santa Jaws about his legs with the rubber remora as the costumed figure walked back to the stairs. It took all twenty of us piling on to get him to let go. “I was eating candy until March!”
We watched shark shows through dinner. The Discovery Channel was doing everything it could to help find us. They were running a crawl periodically with the tip line number. Every hour they ran a 30-second spot with our last photographs and the reward information. Finally, they were running my previous shows daily and teasing our new series relentlessly. Our disappearance was good for ratings, even if some people thought it was all a publicity stunt.
Adrienne had blown up at a reporter who suggested that yesterday. “Two innocent people DIED during this kidnapping. What kind of sick person are you to believe anyone would do this for publicity?” Adrienne could fillet and skin a bitch in seconds, and that reporter changed her tune. I thought back to Juan, our friendly SCUBA guide, who they shot before our eyes. I remembered seeing Santiago’s body along the trail, the owner of the land we were diving on. By Luna, diving and filming our reality show seemed so long ago.
We were watching “Air Jaws 12” when the door upstairs opened. I heard two sets of footsteps coming down the stairway before the gate opened, and they walked to the outside of our cell. “Have you eaten recently,” the guard asked the nurse. “The blood smell is pervasive, and I can’t have a youngling losing control.”
“I’ll be fine; I work around the smell of blood all day,” the nurse replied. “I’ll wave when I’m ready to go.”
“I’ll be watching,” he said as he locked her inside the cell with us.
Amy got up, moving to sit at the table with the other girls. They wouldn’t do anything that would stop me from getting treatment, and they knew the drill. The nurse set her medical bag down on the edge of the bed. “How are you feeling?”
“Crampy, but the nausea is gone, and I’m eating,” I said. “I’ve soaked through two maxi-pads.”
She was checking my temperature with an infrared thermometer while she talked. It beeped, and she put it back in her bag. “You’re not running a fever, which is excellent. I told you to expect the heavy bleeding last time, and I’ll leave you more pads. It’s going to be heavier than other periods because your body thought it was pregnant, even though the baby never made it to your uterus. Any sharp pains?”