Glaring, he started to push through them, trying to get to Tony’s office. “Get the fuck out of my way,” he growled as a few seemed uninterested in moving.
Harlow was about to start hurting this one particular man, Chad, who had always been a pain in the ass, when the guy was shoved aside by Tony.
His boss looked grim. “You always know how to make an entrance, Harlow,” Tony drawled, before grabbing his arm and pulling him through the crowd into his office.
He only went without a fuss because it was where he wanted to be. As the door shut, Harlow hissed, “You know there is a leak somewhere, yet you have all these fuckers here? What the hell is going on, Tony?”
“They’ve all been vetted, Harlow. You can trust them.”
“Yeah, but there is a leak. Someone told someone something. The first trap we fell into earlier this month, sure, maybe our team had been selected at random. This one, no. This one was a trap set just for us. Just for Foxx. So, go ahead, tell me again that I can fucking trust them.”
“I know there is a leak somewhere, but it is not anyone currently here. Everyone in the other room has been thoroughly vetted. They did not set up the trap. I need you to calm down, Harlow.”
“Calm down? You want me to calm down?” Harlow let out a dark chuckle. “How about I burn down every Catholic church within fifty miles until I find the fucking priests who took Foxx?! Is that calm enough for you?!”
“Holy shit, Harlow.”
“How about you tell me what the fuck is going on before I make it a done deal?”
Tony rubbed his face, as he went around his desk and took a seat with a sigh. “Sit your ass down and I’ll explain all you missed, you fucking psycho.”
Harlow stood there glaring, arms crossed.
“Fine, stand then.” Tony rolled his eyes. “So, you were right. Something was going on with that priest from the hospital. When we looked into it, we found a nasty pattern. And when the investigation expanded, we found that the pattern was not isolated. It was happening at every single hospital that accepted paranormal patients.”
Harlow snorted. “Which isn’t many. Let me guess, the pattern involves many vampire patients randomly disappearing after coming in to be treated. And oh, all these hospitals just happened to let priests roam their halls.”
“Pretty much. We found a high disappearance rate for the vampire patients who visited these hospitals.”
“How high?”
“Fifty percent.”
He stiffened. “Half? Half have gone missing and no one noticed before now?” Harlow growled. “Not one person pieced it together? So it's either incompetence, or just biased humans not caring that vampires were going missing.”
“Probably both.”
“So, spell it out for me, what have these bastards been up to? Let’s hear clearly what they’ve done.”
“It is clear that this group, these priests who call themselves The Order of the Bloodless Saints, have been infiltrating these hospitals, taking any vampire patient information they have access to, and then no doubt killing them once they are let out. Adults of all genders, races and ages, not to mention an indefensible number of pregnant individuals and children, have just disappeared without a trace. Entire families have been wiped out.”
Harlow rubbed his face. “Religious hypocrisy never ends, does it?”
“Hasn’t in all the years I’ve been alive,” Tony said with a scoff.
“Well, this is great. Just fucking great. The government gave these creatures the right to exist, and then gave hospitals the right to refuse to help them. To add on, they tried to make it as hard as possible for their own doctors to keep legally practicing, creating a shortage of places they can go to find help. Making it easy for a bunch of holier than thou serial killers to pick them off.” He clenched his fist. “This is all well and good, but they didn’t just kill Foxx, they took him. I would know if he were dead. He isn’t.”
He winced as the words came out almost defensively. But Harlow refused to believe Foxx was already dead. Why take his body if he was? The sun would destroy it if they'd left it there. While alive, the sun took time to burn them, but the body of a dead vampire would ignite quickly and burn to ash in under an hour..
“Foxx is still alive,” Tony said slowly. “If it follows the pattern we’ve learned about, he is still alive.”
“Yeah, well, based on all the blood left behind, he definitely killed a good number of them tonight. So how long will they stick to that fucking pattern of theirs?”
“I can’t answer that.”
“Then what else DO we know? And be quick about it. My patience is running thin.”
The man sighed. “What we learned from one of the priests we captured, before he killed himself—”
