"I try not to lie, Caroline, but if you have information that'll help us here, you need to tell me." I took a drink of my own soda and tried to appear casual, forced my body not to tense up, not to show how much I wanted to simply scream at her until she told me whatever it was. Short of torture, you can't make people talk, not really. Caroline wanted to tell me her secrets. I just had to be calm and let her do it. If I was overeager or abusive, she'd either fold and tell all, or clam up and let us rot. You never knew which way it would go, so you try patience first. You can always browbeat them later.
"I've been the human liaison for this halfway house for three months now. The guardian who oversaw the younger ones was Giles. He was strong and powerful, but he was trapped in his coffin until true darkness. Then two nights ago he woke in the middle of the day. The first time for him. The one on the stairs has to be one of the younger vampires."
She looked at me, brown eyes wide. She leaned into me, lowering her soft voice even further. I had to lean into her just to catch her voice, close enough that my hair brushed her shoulder.
"None of the younger ones has been dead two years. Do you understand what that means?"
"It means that they shouldn't have risen during daylight hours. It means that the one on the stairs should have been burnt to ashes."
"Exactly," she said. She sounded relieved to finally find someone who understood.
"Was this early waking restricted to your halfway house?"
She shook her head, whispering now. We had our heads together like first-graders talking in class. I was close enough to see the fine red lines in her eyes. Caroline had been losing sleep over something. "Every house and all the churches were suddenly having vampires rise early. The hunger seemed worse on the young ones." Her hand went to her neck and the messy wound. "They were harder to control, even by the guardians."
"Anyone have any theories as to why this was happening?" I asked.
"Malcolm thought someone was interfering with them."
I had several candidates for who might be interfering with the vamps, but we weren't here to get my answers. We were here to get Caroline's answers. "He have any ideas about who?"
"You know about our illustrious visitors?" she asked, voice even lower, as if she were afraid to say the last.
"If you mean the Vampire Council, I've met them."
She jerked back from me then, shocked. "Met them," she said. "But Malcolm has not met them yet."
I shrugged. "They paid their... respects to the Master of the City first."
"Malcolm said they would contact us when they were ready. He saw their coming as a sign that the rest of vampirekind was ready to embrace the true faith."
I wasn't about to sit there and tell her why the council had really come to town. If the Church didn't know, they didn't need to know. "I don't think the council thinks much about religion, Caroline."
"Why else would they come?"
I shrugged. "The council has its reasons." See, not a lie, cryptic as hell, but not a lie.
She seemed to accept the statement. Maybe she was used to cryptic bullshit. "Why would the council want to hurt us?"
"Maybe they don't see it as hurting."
"If the firemen go down in there to save the young ones and they wake without a guardian..." She drew her knees to her chest, hugging her legs. "They'll rise like revenants, mindless beasts, until they've fed. People could be dead before they come to themselves."
I touched her shoulder. "You're scared of them, aren't you?" I'd never met a human church member who was scared of vampires, especially not one that was donating blood as a human liaison.
She lowered the neckline of her tank top until I could see the tops of her small br**sts. There was a bite mark on the pale flesh of one breast that looked more like a dog bite than one made by a vampire. The flesh had bruised badly, as if the vamp had been pulled off her almost as soon as he'd started sucking.
"Giles had to pull him off of me. He had to restrain him. Looking into his face, I knew that if Giles hadn't been there, he'd have killed me. Not to bring me over or embrace me, but just because I was food." She let her top slide back over the wound, hugging herself tight, shivering in the hot July sunshine.
"How long have you been with the Church, Caroline?"
"Two years."
"And this is the first time you've been scared?"
She nodded.
"They've been very careful around you, then."