“I hate to point this out,” Trevor finally said.“But regardless of what you wanted, Jenna is now in their hands, along with Esme and Isaac. We need to focus on getting them back.”
At that, both Connor and Hannah nodded.
“You mentioned earlier that the ghouls took Jenna to use as bait to lure you into a trap,” Trevor said to Hannah. “Why would they do that? More importantly, how could they have tracked her here to the club? We’re miles from the Skid Row district.”
“The Umdar clan has known my identity for years now,” she said, taking a slow, deep breath as she regarded Trevor. “They’ve been trying to catch me the entire time but have never come close. When you and Jenna ran into that ghoul in the alley a few days ago, it immediately recognized Jenna as my sister and alerted the rest of the clan. My informants inside the clan told me the patriarch decided to grab Jenna, thinking I would come out of hiding to save her. He’s obviously right.”
“Wait a second. Back up a bit,” Hale said, holding up his hand. “You’re saying that this ghoul Trevor and Jenna ran into was good enough with human facial features to recognize that Jenna is your sister after only seeing her for a few seconds? How the hell is that possible?”
“It’s not her face they recognized—it was her pheromone signature,” Hannah explained. “The Umdar have a drastically different sense of smell than humans do. The scent coming off other livingcreatures is like a DNA scan to them, with a medical history report on the side. They can tell if you’re healthy or sick, who your parents or siblings are, even if you’re angry or scared. And once one ghoul in the clan smells a person, the information is passed to the entire clan through some kind of collective psychic mind link and retained in the clan’s collective memory forever. Since they know what I smell like, they immediately realized that Jenna and you”—she looked at Connor—” are my sister and brother.”
“I can’t believe that this enhanced sense of smell and collective consciousness isn’t in any of my books,” Davina murmured, seemingly more to herself than to any of them. “Though I can see how it might have developed over time as a way to find suitable mates in their relatively closed-off society. Interbreeding could definitively be a problem for them.”
“Um, that’s all very interesting,” Trevor said, though truthfully, it wasn’t. “But it doesn’t explain how the ghouls were able to track Jenna back to the club.”
“When all of you went down in the tunnels and got into that fight with the clan, they ended up putting a scent trace on all of you,” Hannah explained. “Ghouls have scent glands on the inside of their wrists. They use them to mark the tunnels that they dig, and it gets everywhere during a fight. All ofyou were marked, and they used that trace to track Jenna here after the rest of you left to explore the Prohibition tunnels. The trace is so strong they can use it to track you anywhere in the city.”
Well, crap.How the hell had he and his pack mates not been able to smell it?
“Is there a way to get the scent off us?” Mike asked. “If we’re going back into those tunnels for a rescue attempt, we can’t be broadcasting our presence.”
Hannah nodded. “There is a way, but it’s a long process involving an oatmeal scrub mixed with a dozen different minerals and underground root vegetables. We’ll need to get started on it as soon as possible if we’re going to get you down into those tunnels in time.”
Trevor tensed. “What do you mean…in time? Is there some kind of deadline here that we don’t know about?”
Hannah let out another long sigh. “Like I said, the Umdar have already collapsed the main tunnels that connect to the surface and the outside world. That’s because they view that little sojourn of yours into their caverns the other day as a full-scale invasion. And since they couldn’t kill you—which is definitely something we need to talk about—the clan is falling back on its standard backup plan. They’re going into migration mode and moving the entire clan to a new, safer location.”
“I’m guessing the ghouls won’t be leaving their captives behind?” Davina asked with a hopeful expression.
“Definitely not,” Hannah said firmly. “When they decide to move, they’ll collapse everything, including the family caverns. Any captives who are too weak for the migration will be left behind in the caverns to be crushed. The rest, including Jenna and her friends as well as anyone else who’s fit enough, will be used to carry the clan’s possessions. Those who can’t withstand the journey won’t live very long.”
“Shit,” Connor murmured. “Any idea how long we have before this all happens and they start their migration?”
“Not long,” Hannah said, glancing at everyone scattered around the room. “They’ll probably wait for a little while to see if I’ll fall for their trap, but when it’s clear I’m not coming, they’ll move fast.”
“Then we’d better get moving,” Trevor said. “Because there’s no way in hell I’m letting Jenna get taken away by those ghouls.”
“That sounds great in theory, but have you all forgotten that we still don’t have a way to fight the ghouls?” Davina reminded them. “If you go running down into those tunnels without a weapon that works, you’re not saving anyone.”
Trevor growled in frustration but knew Davina was right.
Hannah walked around from behind the bar, pulling out the rusty, decrepit-looking knife she’d had on her hip. “I think that’s something I can help with.”
CHAPTER 21
Jenna woke up, her head throbbing so badly she thought she’d be sick at any moment. Forcing herself to take deep breaths, she lay there on the hard ground, scrunching her eyes closed and praying for the pain to go away.
That was when the memories came flooding back in.
She relived the attack in the club—the ghoul coming after both her and that poor woman, the creature choking her, the floor collapsing, Madeleine reaching for her as the blackness overwhelmed everything.
Jenna had no idea how much time passed as she replayed the disturbing memories over and over, but at some point, the nausea receded to a level she could live with, and the throbbing faded to a degree that hopefully meant her eyeballs wouldn’t fall out when she finally opened her lids.
Holding her breath, she slowly opened her eyes.
And saw absolutely nothing.
She was blind. She must have hit her head on something during the fall. Something that had taken her sight. That was why it had been pounding so much.
