The Beast (Black Dagger Brotherhood #14) - J. R. Ward Page 0,91

a tall mug that was more beer stein than anything you’d put a latte in, and as he sat down again, she could tell he’d taken the time to get his head back on straight.

“You’ve seen the videos,” she said.

The man shook his head slowly. “I interviewed Julio when he got out on bail, as part of a series on the upswing of gang-related violence downtown. Most of those kinds of kids—and he was just a kid … is one, I mean—a lot of them don’t say a thing when they’re approached. And if they do talk? It’s a lot of posturing about territory, their version of an honor code, their enemies. Julio wasn’t interested in any of that. He just kept going on about…”

“A vampire.” For some reason, her heart started pounding. “That’s what he was focused on, wasn’t he.”

“Yeah.”

“You didn’t mention anything like that in your article, though.”

“God, no. I don’t want my editor to think I’m nuts—but I did go online, and I saw the videos. Spent about three days doing nothing but watching those things all night long. My wife was convinced I’d lost my mind. Seventy-two hours later, I wasn’t too sure I hadn’t.”

Jo leaned in, her elbow pushing her ’cino forward until she had to keep it from falling to the floor. “Look … what are the chances that Julio saw something? And can I just take this moment to say, I cannot believe I’m asking that at all.”

Bill shrugged and tried out his latte. As he set the tall mug back down, he shook his head some more. “I thought it was crazy at first, too. I mean, I’m into facts—that’s the reason I wanted to be a journalist even though it’s a dying field. But after I saw everything that’s been posted? It’s just … there’s an awful lot of stuff about encounters like that happening in Caldwell. If you audit similar content, even on a cursory level, across the U.S., it’s astonishing how so much of it focuses right here in the five-one-eight. Yeah, sure, you get your garden-variety crazies all over the place, like ghost hunters and whatnot. But when it comes to vampires specifically, it’s like…” He laughed and looked at her. “Sorry, I’m going off the rails.”

“No, you aren’t.”

“Feels like it.” He took another draw of his brew. “Why do you ask?”

Jo shrugged. “The night before last, a friend of mine thought he saw something. He managed to get it on video and put it up online … but what he said happened is totally impossible, and there were drugs involved on his part. He took me out to this abandoned girls’ school—”

“Brownswick?”

“Yes, that’s the one.” Jo rubbed her nose even though it didn’t itch. “He took me out there in the morning to show me the leftovers of some kind of big fight or something. There weren’t any … at least, not exactly. And I wasn’t going to waste any more time on it, but I was bored at work last night—I went online, did a little poking around—kind of what you did. And that’s how I found Julio’s stuff.”

Bill cursed. “I shouldn’t ask this…”

“Do you want to see the footage?”

“Damn it.”

As Bill went quiet, Jo sat back and let the man decide for himself. And she knew exactly how he felt. She wasn’t into the dark side or people pretending that one existed.

The trouble was, she couldn’t quite let this all go.

“Lemme see,” he muttered.

Jo got out her phone, located the video, and turned the little screen around. As he took her cell and watched Dougie’s clip, she tracked the flickering of his facial muscles.

When it was done, he handed her iPhone back. Then he checked his watch. After a moment, he asked, “You want to go for a ride over there?”

“Yes,” she said, getting to her feet. “I do.”

Mary was determined to be careful with her words.

As she waited for Rhage to arrive at Safe Place, she paced around the front living room, dodging the cozy couches and stuffed chairs, straightening a framed pencil drawing by one of the kids, pulling the curtains back from time to time even though her hellren was going to text her when he got there.

In spite of the fact that she was alone by all conventional definition, her head was crowded with nouns and verbs, adjectives, adverbs.

And yet even with a countless array of word combinations at her disposal, she remained stuck in tabula rasa land.

The trouble was that