Zoe exchanged looks with her sister, who kneeled there with a blatantI told you soexpression on her face. Alyssa was about to ask if the vampires had told them what they had in store for them when a woman cleared her throat from somewhere to her left. She spun around to see two more cells on that side.
Alyssa moved over to the woman huddled close to the bars, relief coursing through her when she recognized Lindsay Carr, one of the missing girls she’d come to LA to find. Behind Lindsey, in the deeper shadows of the cell, two more women lay on the floor. Alyssa tried not to let herself hope too much, but every instinct inside her screamed they were Stacie Bryant and Georgie Sparks, the other girls who’d gone missing.
She’d found them, and they were alive!
Alive, yes, but not in the best of shape.
Lindsey looked pale and tired. Her dark hair was limp around her shoulders, her feet were bare, and her dress was dirty and torn in a few places. Worse, she seemed emotionally beaten down. A quick glance at her arms revealed bruises and several barely visible scars similar to the puncture wounds Alyssa had seen in those pictures of the dead woman from the landfill.
“Please tell me someone knows you were kidnapped.” Lindsey reached through the bars and desperately grabbed Alyssa’s hand. “That someone will come looking for you.”
Alyssa almost said no one knew and that, while she’d be missed, it might not be for a while. That wasn’t what these girls needed to hear though. “Yes, Lindsey. Someone knows I was kidnapped. And they’ll rescue us. Soon.”
Lindsey blinked at her in confusion. “You know my name?”
Behind Lindsey, one of the other girls pushed to her feet and shuffled over to them. It was Georgie Sparks. If possible, the blond looked even more beaten down than Lindsay.
“Are you a cop?” Georgie asked, her voice as hollow as the dark rings under her eyes.
“Yes,” Alyssa said. “I’m an FBI agent, and the people I work with are going to get all of us out of here.”
Hope began to shine a little brighter on the girls’ faces at her words. Seeing their expressions change was enough to make Alyssa know she’d done the right thing telling them that. She only prayed it turned out to be true—that Zane and his friends would figure out where she was and they’d be able to get all these girls to safety.
Alyssa was still in the process of trying to convince herself that surviving this situation was actually possible when she realized Stacie Bryant hadn’t moved since Alyssa had first looked in her direction. Lindsay must have seen the expression on her face because she turned to eye her friend with concern. Alyssa couldn’t make out much in the darkness other than a pair of glassy eyes staring into the distance and pale, nearly translucent skin, but it was enough to scare her.
“Stacie isn’t doing well,” Lindsey said, turning back to Alyssa. “I don’t know what the things are who kidnapped us, but they drink our blood. For some reason, they seem to be more interested in Stacie than they are in us. They feed on her more and whisper things in her ear sometimes, too. I don’t know what they say to her, but it’s making her act strange. When she looks at us, it’s like she’s not really there. She won’t even talk to us anymore. She’ll only talk to them.”
“Another three or four days and there won’t be anything left of her to recognize,” a man said from the cell beyond the one the girls were in.
They were talking about the enthralling thing Davina had told them about, Alyssa realized. When she’d described it, the whole thing had sounded almost clinical, but seeing the effects firsthand made it much more real.
“Will she get better?” Alyssa asked, pitching her voice louder so the man in the far cell would know she was talking to him. “If we get her away from them, will she recover?”
The man slowly got to his feet and shambled over to the bars. He was somewhere in his mid-to-late fifties, wearing dark dress pants, a gray shirt, and leather shoes, all of which appeared to have seen better days. Brown stains covered the edges of his rolled-up sleeves. The vampires had been feeding on this guy, too.
When he moved into the light, Alyssa blinked.Crap. It was Randy Curtis. The former chief of police looked nearly as bad as the three girls. Davina had obviously been right about what the vampire coven would think of the man’s failure in Dallas. They were treating him no better than the people they’d captured for food.
“You’re Randy Curtis,” she said flatly.
The man nodded, not surprised she recognized him—or not caring.
“What’d you do to get tossed in here with the rest of us?” she asked.
“I failed to deliver Dallas to them as the next city for them to build a coven like I was sent there to do. This is my punishment. As far as the girl, it’s possible she’ll get better. From what I understand, it’s like detoxing from the worst drug addiction ever. But it supposedly can happen. Truthfully, she’d be better off dead.”
Behind her, Lindsey and Georgie both choked back sobs.
Alyssa glared at him. She could understand why Zane and his teammates had traveled halfway across the country to hunt this bastard down. She’d just met this jerk and she wanted to kill him. “What the hell is wrong with you?”
“Nothing is wrong with me. I used to be one of them, so I know how this works,” Randy Curtis snapped. “No one is coming to rescue you because no one knows where you are. Even if they did, the entrances to the nest are guarded by what amounts to an army of highly motivated killers masquerading as guards. On the off chance, your fellow FBI agents somehow make it past the guards and the vampires and manage to reach these cells, they’d find your friend, Stacie, fighting them tooth and nail to stay. How much more difficult do you think that will make saving the rest of you, if you have to drag her kicking and screaming every inch of the way?”
Alyssa didn’t bother arguing with him. Partly because what he said was probably true and partly because Lindsey and Georgie had freaked out at the mention of vampires. Ignoring Randy Curtis, she turned her attention to the two women, reassuring them that it was going to be okay, that help was coming, and that they’d get Stacie out of here, too—vampires or no vampires.
Randy Curtis snorted at that and walked back to sit down in his dark corner.
Alyssa turned to talk to the twins when the dim lights hanging above their cells brightened. She squinted, her head throbbing even more than it had before. At the sound of heavy footsteps, she forced herself to ignore the discomfort and turn to face the approaching threat, her heart racing. A moment later, Dario walked into the room, followed by Stefan. The man’s stride was quick. Like he was someone with lots of things on his to-do list. They were accompanied by eight armed men. She wondered if the vampires were there to exact their revenge against her now that she was conscious. The thought made her shudder, though she refused to show it. She might be terrified, but she’d never let them know that.
Coming to a stop in front of Alyssa’s cell, Dario unlocked the door and stepped inside, Stefan at his heels. Alyssa took a step back automatically in a defensive stance, ready to fight for her life.
