my eyes flipped back to the door. I corrected instantly, but his glare had moved on. I wondered if he'd noticed my slip. Or had he seen me at al, here beside Fred?
"We have an enemy," Riley announced. He let that sink in for a moment. I could tel the idea was shocking to several of the vampires in the basement. The enemy was Raoul - or if you were with Raoul, the enemy was Kristie. The enemy was here, because the whole world was here. The thought that there were other forces out there strong enough to affect us was new for most. Would have been new to me, too, yesterday.
"A few of you might be smart enough to have realized that if we exist, so do other vampires. Other vampires who are older, smarter... more talented. Other vampires who want our blood!"
Raoul hissed, and then several of his fol owers echoed him in support.
"That's right," Riley said, seeming intent on egging them on.
"Seattle was once theirs, but they moved on a long time ago. Now they know about us, and they are jealous of the easy blood they used to have here. They know it belongs to us now, but they want to take it back. They are coming after what they want. One by one, they'l hunt us down! We'l burn while they feast!"
"Never," Kristie growled. Some of hers and some of Raoul's growled, too.
"We don't have a lot of choices," Riley told us. "If we wait for them to show up here, they wil have the advantage. This is their turf, after al . And they don't want to face us head-on, because we outnumber them and we are stronger than they are. They want to catch us separated; they want to take advantage of our biggest weakness. Are any of you smart enough to know what that is?" He pointed at the ashes at his feet - now smeared into the carpet and unrecognizable as a former vampire - and waited.
No one moved.
Riley made a disgusted sound. "Unity!" he shouted. "We don't have it! What kind of a threat can we pose when we won't stop kil ing each other?" He kicked the dust, sending up a smal black cloud. "Can you imagine them laughing at us? They think taking the city from us wil be easy. That we're weak with stupidity! That we'l just hand them our blood."
Half the vampires in the room snarled in protest now.
"Can you work together, or do we al die?"
"We can take them, boss," Raoul growled.
Riley scowled at him. "Not if you can't control yourself! Not if you can't cooperate with every single person in this room. Anyone you take out" - his toe nudged the ashes again - "might be the one who could have kept you alive. Every one of your coven that you kil is like handing our enemies a gift. Here, you're saying, take me down! "
Kristie and Raoul exchanged a glance as if they were seeing each other for the first time. Others did the same. The word coven was not unfamiliar, but none of us had applied it to our group before. We were a coven.
"Let me tel you about our enemies," Riley said, and al eyes locked on his face. "They are a much older coven than we are. They've been around for hundreds of years, and they've survived that long for a reason. They are crafty and they are skil ed and they are coming to retake Seattle with confidence - because they've heard the only ones they'l have to fight for it are a bunch of disorganized children who wil do half their work for them!"
More growls, but some were less angry than they were wary. A few of the quieter vampires, the ones Riley would have cal ed tamer, looked skittish.
Riley noticed that, too. "This is how they see us, but that's because they can't see us together. Together, we can crush them. If they could see al of us, side by side, fighting together, they would be terrified. And that's how they're going to see us. Because we're not going to wait for them to show up here and start picking us off. We're going to ambush them. In four days."
Four days? I guessed our creator didn't want to cut it too close to the deadline. I looked at the closed door again. Where was Diego?
Others reacted to the deadline with surprise, some with fear.
"It's the last thing