moment to return. I quickly filled him in, minus the part about Tamara going to SangreLa.
Tears poured from her eyes as she told us how the handlers would come and get the girls. They would take them one at a time, or sometimes in pairs, to a dark, cavernous room filled with vampires.
“They let them feed from us. It hurt so bad that I wanted to die.”
“A nest,” Zack hissed. I gave him a questioning look, and he shook his head. He grabbed Tamara’s hand and must have done some vampire voodoo on her because she suddenly calmed.
“What happened then?” he asked.
“When they thought we’d had enough, the handlers would pull us from the room and feed us their blood. Some of the girls didn’t come back,” she said in a lifeless, monotone voice.
“How did you escape?” I asked.
“One time, when they were taking me back, a door opened at the end of the hallway. I thought I saw some stairs. I thought, if I could get to them then maybe I could find a way out. The day before I escaped, three new girls were brought in.” Her eyes jerked to mine, and she gasped. My stomach dropped. “I recognized one of them,” she said, and burst into tears. Zack moved to calm her, but I stopped him.
“S-s-she was a friend from college. I wanted her to go with me, b-but they’d been extra rough on her, and she was too weak. S-s-she said to find you, that you would help get the other girls out. She wanted me to tell you that s-s-she loves you.”
My heart froze. Blinding fear pulsed through my veins as I jumped to my feet and shouted, “Who told you to find me, Tamara?”
“Bailey,” she whispered. And my world came crashing down around me.
9
Amos had tried to call me. Why didn’t I answer? Because he was a sniveling weasel who I could barely tolerate. Regardless of how I felt about my brother-in-law, I should have answered his damn calls. While my sister was getting eaten alive by rabid vampires, I’d been floating in a fucking pool—so busy obsessing over count Zackula that I’d let everything else go. They had my baby sister. The thought of her in that place, with those things, made me want to cry. It also made me angry, beyond livid, furious enough to kill them all, including the vampire standing in front of me.
Zack watched me while Tamara explained how she escaped—that while the girls caused a commotion in the holding room, she managed to get down the hallway and through the door. She made it up several flights of stairs before they caught up with her, but by then it was too late. As she opened the door and the sun hit her face, the two vampires on her heels disintegrated into ash. She couldn’t tell us where she was; she just ran until someone picked her up and drove her to the police station.
Ignoring Zack’s watchful eye, I pulled my phone from my pocket and walked out the door.
I had twelve missed messages: seven from Amos, two from my former precinct, and three from Tymon—all concerning my missing sister. I called Amos first.
“Diana, where have you been? Bailey’s missing. I’ve been calling since yesterday. I even called the precinct, but they said you no longer worked there. She’s gone!” He broke into sobs. For all his faults, he did love my sister.
“I know. I’m sorry, Amos. I’m here now, and I need you to calm down so I can ask you some questions.”
“Sure, sure, go ahead,” he sniffled.
Guilt beat at me as I questioned him about the night Bailey went missing. He explained how she’d gone out with a few friends, and that he’d tried to stay awake but ended up falling asleep before she returned home. He woke the next morning to an empty bed. On discovery that she wasn’t there, he’d called her friends. Both said she’d caught a cab home around midnight. The bar they’d gone to was none other than Venom. Coincidence? I think not.
I got the girls’ numbers, then assured him that I was on it and would call the moment I knew something. I already knew something. I knew that I was going to track down Jessie fucking Patrick and do whatever it took to find out where my sister was.
Unfortunately, Bailey’s friends didn’t have any additional information. Because Bailey lived across town, she’d taken a different cab. They’d all three waited