Dark Angel; The Chosen; Soulmate (27 page)

Rashel hesitated. She needed information from this girl, and that was going to take time—and trust. With sudden decision she unwound her scarf, one-handed, until her face was exposed. “Like I said, I'm a friend. But first just tell me: do you know what kind of people had you in that truck?”

The girl turned away. She was already shivering with cold; now she shivered harder. “They weren't people. They were… ugh.”

“Then you do know. Well, I'm one of the people that hunts down
that
kind of people.”

The girl looked from Rashel's face to the sheathed sword that rested between them. Her jaw dropped. “Oh, my God! You're Buffy the Vampire Slayer!”

“Huh? Oh.” Rashel had missed the movie. “Right. Actually, you can call me Rashel. And you're…?”

“Daphne Childs. And I live in Somerville, but I don't want to go home.”

“Well, that's fine, because I want to talk to you. Let's find a Dunkin' Donuts.”

Rashel found one outside of Boston, a safe one she knew had no Night World connections. She pulled a coat on over her black ninja outfit and lent Daphne a spare sweater from the trunk of her car. Then they went inside and ordered jelly sticks and hot chocolate.

“Now,” Rashel said. “Tell me what happened. How did you end up in that truck?”

Daphne cupped her hands around her hot chocolate. “It was all so
horrible
….”

“I know.” Rashel tried to make her voice soothing. She hadn't had much practice at it. “Try to tell me anyway. Start at the beginning.”

“Okay, well, it started at the Crypt.”

“Uh, as in
Tales from the
…? Or as in the Old Burial Ground?”

“As in the club on Prentiss Street. It's this underground club, and I mean
really
underground. I mean, nobody seems to know about it except the people who go there, and they're all our age. Sixteen or seventeen. I never see any adults, not even DJs.”

“Go on.” Rashel was listening intently. The Night People had clubs, usually carefully hidden from humans. Could Daphne have wandered into one?

“Well. It's
extremely
and seriously cool—or at least that's what I thought. They have some amazing music. I mean, it's beyond doom, it's beyond goth, it's sort of like
void
rock. Just listening to it makes you go all weird and bodiless. And the whole place is decorated like this post-apocalypse wasteland. Or maybe like the underworld….” Daphne stared off into the distance. Her eyes, a very deep cornflower blue under heavy lashes, looked wistful and almost hypnotized.

Rashel poked her and chocolate slopped onto the table. “Reminisce about it later. What kind of people were in the club? Vampires?”

“Oh, no.” Daphne looked shocked. “Just regular kids. I know some from my school. And there's lots of runaways, I guess. Street kids, you know.”

Rashel blinked. “Runaways…”

“Yeah. They're mostly very cool, except the ones who do drugs. Those are spooky.”

An illegal club full of runaway kids, some of whom would probably do anything for drugs. Rashel could feel her skin tingling.

I think I've stumbled onto something big.

“Anyway,” Daphne was going on, “I'd been going there for about three weeks, you know, whenever I could get away from home—”

“You didn't tell your parents about it,” Rashel guessed flatly.

“Are you joking? It's not a place you tell
parents
about. Anyway, my family doesn't care where I go. I've got four sisters and two brothers and my mom and my stepdad are getting divorced… they don't even notice when I'm gone.”

“Go on,” Rashel said grimly.

“Well, there was this guy.” Daphne's cornflower eyes looked wistful again. “This guy who was really gorgeous, and really mysterious, and really just—just
different
from anybody I ever met. And I thought he was maybe interested in me, because I saw him looking at me once or twice, so I sort of joined the girls who were always hanging around him. We used to talk about weird things.”

“Like?”

“Oh, like surrendering yourself to the darkness and stuff. It was like the music, you know—we were all really into death. Like what would be the most horrible way to die, what would be the most awful torture you could live through, what you look like when you're in your grave. Stuff like that.”

“For God's sake,
why
?” Rashel couldn't disguise her revulsion.

“I don't know.” All at once, Daphne looked small and sad. “I guess because most of us felt life was pretty rotten. So you kind of face things, you know, to try to get used to them. You probably don't understand,” she added, grimacing.

Rashel did understand. With a sudden shock, she understood completely. These kids were scared and depressed and
worried about the future. They had to do something to deaden the pain… even if that meant embracing pain. They escaped one darkness by going into another.

And am I any different? I mean, this obsession I've got with vampires… it's not exactly what you'd call normal and healthy. I spend my whole life dealing with death.

“I'm sorry,” she said, and her voice came out more gentle than when she'd been trying to soothe Daphne before. Awkwardly, she patted the other girl's arm once. “I shouldn't have yelled. And I do understand, actually. Please go on.”

“Well.” Daphne still looked defensive. “Some of the girls would write poetry about dying… and some of them would prick themselves with pins and lick the blood off. They said they were vampires, you know. Just pretending.” She glanced warily at Rashel.

Rashel simply nodded.

“And so I talked the same way, and did the same stuff. And this guy Quinn just seemed to love it—hey, look out!” Daphne jerked back to avoid a wave of hot chocolate. Rashel's sudden movement had knocked her cup over.

Oh, God, what is
wrong
with me? Rashel thought. She said, “Sorry,” through her teeth, grabbing for a wad of napkins.

She should have been expecting it. She
had
been expecting it; she knew that Quinn must be involved in this. But somehow the mention of his name had knocked the props from under her. She hadn't been able to control her reaction.

“So,” she said, still through her teeth, “the gorgeous mysterious guy was named Quinn.”

“Yeah.” Daphne wiped chocolate off her arm. “And I was starting to think he really liked me. He told me to come to the club last Sunday and to meet him alone in the parking lot.”

“And you did.” Oh, I am going to kill him so dead, Rashel thought.

“Sure. I dressed up…” Daphne looked down at her bedraggled outfit. “Well, this
did
look terrific once. So I met him and we went to his car. And then he told me that he'd chosen me. I was so happy I almost fainted. I thought he meant for his girlfriend. And then…” Daphne trailed off again. For the first time since she'd begun the story, she looked frightened. “Then he asked me if I really wanted to surrender to the darkness. He made it sound so romantic.”

“I bet,” Rashel said. She rested her head on her hand. She could see it all now, and it was the perfect scam. Quinn checked the girls out, discovered which would be missed and which wouldn't. He kidnapped them from the parking lot so that no one saw them, no one even connected them with the Crypt. Who would notice or care that certain girls stopped showing up? Girls would always be coming and going.

And there had been nothing in the newspaper because the daylight world didn't realize that girls were being taken. There probably wasn't even a struggle during the abduction, because these girls were
willing
to go—in the beginning.

“It must have been a shock,” Rashel said dryly, “to find out that there really
was
a darkness to surrender to.”

“Uh, yeah. Yeah, it was. But I didn't actually find that out then. I just said, sure, I wanted to. I mean, I'd have said the same thing if he asked me did I really want to watch Lawrence Welk reruns with him. He was that gorgeous. And he was looking at me in this totally
soulful
way, and I thought he was going to kiss me. And then… I fell asleep.” Daphne frowned at her paper cup.

“No, you didn't.”

“I
did
. I know it sounds crazy, but I fell asleep and when I woke up I was in this place, this little office in this warehouse. And I was on this iron cot with this pathetic lumpy mattress, and I was
chained down
. I had
chains
on my ankles, just like people in jail. And Quinn was gone, and there were two other girls chained to other cots.” Without warning, Daphne began to cry.

Rashel handed her a napkin, feeling uncomfortable. “Were the girls from the Crypt, too?”

Daphne sniffed. “I don't know. They might have been. But they wouldn't
talk
to me. They were, like, in a trance. They just lay there and stared at the ceiling.”

“But you weren't in a trance,” Rashel said thoughtfully. “Somehow you woke up from the mind control. You must be resistant like me.”

“I don't know anything about mind control. But I was so
scared I pretended to be like the other girls when this guy came to bring us food and take us to the bathroom. I just stared straight ahead like them. I thought maybe that way I would get a chance to escape.”

“
Smart
girl,” Rashel said. “And the guy—was it Quinn?”

“No. I never saw Quinn again. It was this blond guy named Ivan from the club; I called him Ivan the Terrible. And there was a girl who brought us food sometimes—I don't know her name, but I used to see her at the club, too. They were like Quinn; they each had their own little group, you know.”

At least two others besides Quinn, Rashel thought. Probably more.

“They didn't hurt us or anything, and the office was heated, and the food was okay—but I was so
scared
,” Daphne said. “I didn't understand what was going on at all. I didn't know where Quinn was, or how I'd gotten there, or what they were going to do with us.” She swallowed.

Rashel didn't understand that last either. What
were
the vampires doing with the girls in the warehouse? Obviously not killing them out of hand.

“And then last night…” Daphne's voice wobbled and she stopped to breathe. “Last night Ivan brought this new girl in. He carried her in and put her on a cot. And… and… then he bit her. He bit her on the neck. But it wasn't a game.” The cornflower-blue eyes stared into the distance, wide with remembered horror. “He
really
bit her. And blood came out
and he drank it. And when he lifted his head up I saw his teeth.” She started to hyperventilate.

“It's okay. You're safe now,” Rashel said.

“I didn't
know
! I didn't know those things were real! I thought it was all just…” Daphne shook her head. “I didn't know,” she said softly.

“Okay. I know it's a big shock. But you've been dealing with it really well. You managed to get away from the truck, didn't you? Tell me about the truck.”

“Well—that was tonight. I could tell day from night by looking at this little window high up. Ivan and the girl came and took the chains off us and made us all get in the truck. And then I was
really
scared—I didn't know where they were taking us, but I heard something about a boat. And I knew wherever it was,
I didn't want to go
.”

“I think you're right about that.”

Daphne took another breath. “So I watched the way Ivan shut the door of the truck. He was in back with us. And when he was looking the other way, I sort of jumped at the door and got it open. And then I just fell out. And then I ran—I didn't know which way to go, but I knew I had to get away from them. And then I saw you. And… I guess you saved my life.” She considered. “Uh, I don't know if I remembered to say thank you.”

Rashel made a gesture of dismissal. “No problem. You saved yourself, really.” She frowned, staring at a drop of chocolate on the plastic table without seeing it.

“Well. I
am
grateful. Whatever they were going to do to me, I think it must have been pretty awful.” A pause, then she said, “Uh, Rashel? Do
you
know what they were going to do to me?”

“Hm? Oh.” Rashel nodded slowly, looking up from the table. “Yes, I think so.”

“Well?” Daphne said.

“I think it's the slave trade.”

And, Rashel thought, I think I was right—this is something big.

The Night World slave trade had been banned a long time ago—back in medieval days, if she remembered the stories correctly. The Council apparently had decided that kidnapping humans and selling them to Night People for food or amusement was just too dangerous. But it sounded as if Quinn might be reviving it, probably without the Council's permission. How very enterprising of him.

I was right about killing him, too, Rashel thought. There's no choice now. He's as bad as I imagined—and worse.

Daphne was goggling. “They were going to make me a
slave
?” she almost yelled.

“Sh.” Rashel glanced at the man behind the doughnut
counter. “I think so. Well—a slave and a sort of perpetual food supply if you were sold to vampires. Probably just dinner if you were going to werewolves.”

Daphne's lips repeated
werewolves
silently. But Rashel was speaking again before she could ask about it.

“Look, Daphne—did you get
any
idea about where you might be going? You said they mentioned a boat. But a boat to where? What city?”

“I don't
know
. They never talked about any city. They just said the boat was ready… and something about an
auntclave
.” She pronounced it
ont-clave
. “The girl said, ‘When we get to the
aunt-clave
…'” Daphne broke off as Rashel grabbed her wrist.