over and around heavy crossbeams and bundles of wiring. The muscles in his arms and thighs flexed with strength I didn’t have as he shifted across the awkward, fragile obstacle course.
He braced himself on the grid beside me. “Vampires in three rooms.”
“How many?”
“I cannot see into the third room. In the others, there are rēsh. Ten,” he corrected, translating for me.
Ten vampires plus an unknown number in another room? Well, this would probably break Zora’s record for the largest nest she’d ever encountered.
“In one room,” he whispered, shifting so close his warm breath teased my ear, “there are … papers. Do you want to see this?”
“Yes,” I breathed. “Which way?”
He started cautiously across the ceiling. I crawled after him, trying to keep up but not rushing. The slightest noise could betray our presence. My muscles burned from the effort of holding my body rigid above the panels as I ducked under hanging wires and cables. The murmuring of voices from below grew louder.
Zylas crept up to a missing panel, the rectangular opening lit from below. I wobbled over to him, arms trembling. Talk about a workout. It was like nonstop planking and pushups.
As I puffed out a pained breath, I realized I couldn’t hold myself above the panels. My muscles were too tired—which left me only one option. Brow scrunching and cheeks already heating, I put an arm across Zylas. His head tilted in my direction as I pulled myself on top of him and lay across his back, letting him support us both.
He had said I wasn’t heavy. I refused to feel guilty.
Holding his shoulders, I peered into the spacious room below. Surrounded by closed doors and scattered with abandoned construction supplies, it would probably be filled with cubicles once the reno was finished. The farthest end was set up like a slumber party—rows of sleeping bags, pillows, yoga mats for mattresses, and a few extra blankets.
In a different corner, someone had laid a sheet of drywall across a double stack of twenty-gallon buckets, and loose papers and folders were arranged on top in three tidy piles.
A few feet from the makeshift table, a man and woman sat on the floor. They’d propped an old lamp, its lone bulb glowing half-heartedly, on top of a dusty piece of equipment with a yellow tank on the bottom. An air compressor? Three red jerry cans were lined up nearby, as though the tool’s owner had expected to return the next day to resume work.
The woman was peering at a monitor, set up on the floor beside a black computer with severed cords hanging off it. Claude’s computer, stolen from his townhouse.
The man threw a handful of papers into an empty bucket. “Found anything yet?”
His companion glanced up from the monitor, her brown ponytail bobbing. “Everything important is encrypted. This isn’t my area of expertise.”
“You’re a computer science major.”
“That doesn’t make me a hacker. I didn’t even get to graduate,” she added, bitter accusation layering the statement.
The other man shrugged as he skimmed another paper. “We can’t change what happened to us. Just be glad you were turned around the time Lord Vasilii arrived.”
Lord Vasilii? What kind of name was that? It sounded like a cartoon villain.
“You’re too new to know,” the man continued in a low voice, “but we used to hide in sewers all day hoping the hunters wouldn’t find us. All we could think about was blood. But in the last two months, Lord Vasilii changed all of that.”
“How?” she asked uncertainly.
“When he’s nearby … can’t you feel it? Maybe you can’t yet, but it’s like being new again. It’s like my head is clear for the first time in years. I can think about more than blood.” He tossed another page into his discard bucket. “He makes this life almost bearable.”
The woman’s shoulders drooped as though she were discomforted rather than reassured by his words.
He tilted a few papers toward her. “This looks promising.”
She hunched more. “Add it to the pile.”
Pushing to his feet, the man placed the new pages on the makeshift table. He returned to his spot and read the next document. Were those papers also from Claude’s townhouse? Or could they be from Uncle Jack’s safe?
Zylas, I thought clearly, not wanting to speak aloud with the vampires so close. I need those papers.
Shifting back from the opening, he canted his head in a silent command. I slid off him and onto the nearby crossbeam. He drew his legs up, positioning himself in a compact crouch