Blood Bound (29 page)

“It was a school for a while,” I said hopefully.

He shook his head. “Not unless it was a whorehouse. It takes one of the great sins to desecrate a church—adultery, murder—something of that nature.”

“How about a suicide?” I asked. Gabriel's sister hadn't said the suicide had taken place in the church—but she hadn't said it hadn't happened there either.

He glanced at me. “Then I think a demon would take great delight in living in a desecrated church.”

The traffic on Washington was light tonight and he goosed the little sports car across all four lanes without stopping for the stop sign.

“When this is over,” I muttered darkly, “I am never getting in a car with a vampire driving again.”

Rosalinda was right. The church was two blocks off of Washington. There were no signs around it, but it was unmistakably a church.

It was bigger than I expected, almost three times the size of the church I attended on Sundays. The old church had once had a fair sized yard, but there was little left of it but sunburnt weeds chopped almost level with the ground. The parking lot had faired little better, the blacktop had worn down until it was more rock than tar and bleached weeds poked out through branching cracks in the surface. I looked, but I couldn't see any sign of the BMW Littleton had been driving.

Andre pulled over as soon as we saw the church, parking his car across the street, in front of a two-story Victorian home that looked as though it might once have been a farm house.

“I don't see his car,” I said.

“Maybe he's already out hunting,” said Andre. “But I think you're right, he was here. This is someplace he would stay.” He closed his eyes and inhaled. It made me realize that he hadn't been breathing tonight except a couple of shallow breaths before he talked. I must be getting used to being around vampires. Ugh.

I took a deep breath myself, but there were too many scents around. Dogs, cats, cars, blacktop that had baked all day in the hot sun, and plants. I knew without looking that there was a rose garden behind the house we were standing in front of—and that someone nearby was composting. I couldn't smell werewolf, demon, or vampire—except for Andre. I hadn't realized how much I'd been counting on some sign that Adam or Samuel had been here.

“I don't smell anything.”

Andre lifted an eyebrow and I realized that under the right circumstances he was very good looking—and that I'd been right, there was something different about him, something
more
tonight.

“He's not stupid,” he said. “Only a stupid vampire leaves a trail to his doorstep.” There was a little bit of pride in his voice.

He looked at the church a moment, then starting walking across the street, leaving me to trot after him.

“Shouldn't we be practicing a little stealth?” I asked.

“If he's at home, he'll know we're here anyway,” he told me helpfully. “If he's not, then it doesn't matter.”

I stretched my senses as far as I could, and wished that the roses didn't have quite so strong a scent. I couldn't
smell
anything. I wished I was certain that Andre would fight on my side tonight.

“So if we're not trying to take him by surprise,” I asked, “why did you park across the street?”

“I paid over a hundred grand for that car,” Andre told me mildly. “And I'm moderately fond of it. I'd hate to see it destroyed in a fit of temper.”

“Why aren't you more afraid of Littleton?” I asked. I was afraid. I could smell my own fear over and above the roses, which had, oddly enough, grown stronger after we crossed the street.

Andre stepped off the road and onto the sidewalk, then came to a full stop and looked at me. “I fed deeply this evening,” he said with an odd smile. “The Mistress herself did me that honor. With the ties that already bind us, and her blood fresh within me, I can call upon her gifts and her power at my need. It will take more than a new-made vampire, even one aided by a demon, to defeat us.”

I remembered how easily Littleton had subdued Stefan and had my doubts. “Then why didn't Marsilia just come herself?” I asked.

His jaw dropped in genuine shock. “Marsilia is a lady. Women do not belong in combat.”

“So you brought me instead?”

He opened his mouth then closed it again, looking a little embarrassed by what he'd been about to say to me.

“What?” I asked, beginning to be a little amused—which was better than terrified. “Isn't it polite to tell someone she's expendable because she's not a vampire?”

At a loss, he started up the cement steps that led to the worn double doors that hadn't been painted in too many years. I followed, but stayed a step behind.

“No,” he said finally, his hand on the doorknob. “And I prefer to be polite.” He turned to look down at me. “My mistress was certain that you were the only person who would be able to find this vampire. She gets glimpses of the future sometimes. Not often, but what she does see is seldom wrong.”

“So do we all survive?” I asked.

He shook his head. “I do not know. I do understand, though, that you have taken great risk for the honor of the seethe. You are so fragile—” He reached out and rested his fingertips against my cheek. “Almost human. On my honor, I promise to do everything in my power to see that you are safe.”

His eyes caught me for a moment before I took two quick steps back, all but falling over the steps. Stefan's honor I trusted—Andre's was questionable.

Both of the front doors were locked, but neither had been designed to keep out a vampire. He put a shoulder against one of the doors and broke the frame so the door swung open freely. Apparently we weren't being subtle tonight.

I slid Zee's backpack down my arms and retrieved the stake and knife. Zee'd included the belt and sheath for the knife so at least I didn't have to run around with the knife in one hand and the stake in the other. I waited for Andre to ask me what I was doing with a knife, but he ignored me. All of his attention was on the church.

Andre stood poised outside the threshold.

“What happens if it is still holy ground?” I asked, hurriedly tying the belt.

“Then I burst into flames,” he said. “But if it was holy ground I should have felt it before this.” As he spoke, he stepped through the doorway and stood fully inside the church. “This isn't hallowed ground,” he told me, rather redundantly.

I followed him into a large foyer and then looked around. The foyer was large enough for ten or twenty people to have milled around comfortably. The flooring was linoleum tile, cracked and pitted with age. There was a wide stairway leading upward that had a rather nicely carved handrail. Beside the stairway was a pair of double doors, propped open so I could see the large, empty room beyond them that must have been the sanctuary.

The whole church was dark, but there were windows high up that let in a little illumination from the streetlights outside. A real human might have had trouble navigating, but it was light enough for Andre and me.

He stalked over to the sanctuary doors and sniffed. “Come here, walker,” he said, his voice dark and rough. “Tell me what you smell.”

I could have told him from where I stood, but I stuck my head into the sanctuary.

The ceiling soared two stories above our heads with frosted windows on both walls that glimmered silver with the dim light of the city night. The floor was hardwood, scarred where pews had once been bolted in.

The walls and some of the windows of the sanctuary had been covered with graffiti—probably done by the neighborhood kids. I just didn't see either a vampire or demon writing things like
For a Good Time Call
—or
Juan loves Penny
. There were a few gang tags, too.

At the far end from us was a raised platform. Like the rest of the room, it was stripped as well, the podium and organ or piano long gone. But someone had cobbled together a table out of cinder blocks. I didn't have to go closer to know what that table had been used for.

“Blood and death,” I said. I closed my eyes. It helped me catch the fainter scents and kept me from crying. “Ben,” I said. “Warren. Daniel. And Littleton.”

We'd found the sorcerer's lair.

“But not Stefan.” Andre stood behind me, and his voice echoed in the rafters of the room.

I couldn't read anything from his voice, but I was not comfortable with him at my back. I remembered Naomi telling me that all of the vampires lost control sometimes—and the room smelled of blood and death.

I walked past him back out to the foyer. “Not Stefan,” I agreed. “At least not in there.”

There was a hallway on the other side of the foyer with doors opening off either side. I opened the doors and found three rooms and a closet with a hot water heater and a large fuse box.

“He won't be up here,” Andre said. “There are too many windows.” He hadn't followed me, just waited in the foyer until I finished my search.

His eyes weren't glowing, which I took to be a good sign.

“There's a basement,” I told him. “I saw the windows outside.”

We found the stairs to the basement tucked neatly behind the stairway to the choir loft. He didn't seem to mind me being behind him, even with my stake, so I followed him down.

Our footsteps, quiet as they were, sounded hollow in the stairwell. The air was dry and dusty. Andre opened the door at the bottom and the scents in the air changed abruptly.

Now I smelled Stefan, Adam, and Samuel as well as Littleton—but the strongest scent of all of them was the demon. As it had at the hotel, after only a few breaths, the reek of demon drowned out everything else. The door at the bottom of the stairway had kept the scents contained.

We walked even more quietly now, though, as Andre had said, if Littleton was here, he'd have heard us come in.

The basement was darker than upstairs, and someone without preternatural sight might have had trouble seeing at all. We were in an entryway, similar to the foyer upstairs.

There were a pair of bathrooms next to the stairway; and the
MEN
sign fell off when I pushed open the first door. Streetlights filtered through glass block windows allowing me to see that the room was empty except for a broken urinal leaning crookedly against one wall.

I let the door close. Andre had checked the other restroom and was already walking past a cloakroom and into a short hallway, the duplicate of the one upstairs complete with doors.

I left him to it and started on the other side of the stairs. The first room I walked into was a generous-sized kitchen, though there were only empty spaces where a refrigerator and stove had been. The cabinets were hanging open and bare. Along the inside wall there was a folding half-door covering the top of the counter. With it open, the church members could have served food from the kitchen to the room on the other side without walking back out to the foyer.

Something scuttled behind me and I spun around, but it was only a mouse. We stared at each other for a moment before it went on its way. My heart was beating like a drum in my ears—stupid mouse.

I came out to find Andre standing in front of the double doors next to the kitchen. The door was chained shut and locked with a shiny new padlock.

He put his hand on the door and something beyond the door growled softly—a werewolf.

“He won't have left them free,” Andre said, though he made no effort to break the chain. “That door would never hold a werewolf who wanted out.”

“Andre?”
Stefan called out. “Is that you? Who's with you?”

“Stefan?” Andre whispered, frozen in place.

“Open the door.” I pushed on his shoulder urgently. Stefan was alive. If I could have ripped the doors off the hinges myself, I would have. Stefan and at least one of the wolves were still alive.

Andre took hold of the chain gingerly and pulled until one of the links broke.

I reached past him and jerked on the chain, letting it fall to the floor as I pushed one of the heavy doors open. I slipped past Andre and found myself in a gymnasium the size of the sanctuary upstairs. The small windows on one side had been covered with black paper and taped with duct tape, but there was a torchiere lamp with a dim bulb hooked up to a car battery that provided enough light to see by.

In the very center of the room, Stefan sat cross-legged inside a large dog crate, the kind you can buy at a pet store. About ten feet away there were more crates lined up next to each other. Something tight and angry eased as my eyes found a leggy red wolf, a muscular silver and black wolf, and a huge white wolf with crystalline eyes: Ben, Adam and Samuel.

Andre rushed past me and knelt in front of Stefan's cage. He touched the latch and the dim bulb flickered. Magic sometimes has an odd effect on electricity—I heard a humming noise and Andre jerked his hand back, shaking it briskly.