I know where he is!” She jumped to her feet just as Brigit came surging back into the room, a leather biker bag over her shoulder.
“Brigit, I—”
“Not now.” Brigit stomped through the secret passage into the crumbling bedroom of the main house, but Lucy ran right behind her, grabbing her handbag and slinging it over her shoulder as she dropped the phone into it, her notebook still in her other hand. It was only as Brigit turned to close the panel in the wall that she realized Lucy was still behind her. “What the hell? You’re supposed to stay—”
“I think I know where he is!” Lucy said.
“Where who is?”
“Utanapishtim. I think I’ve found him.” She frowned, seeing how distracted the girl was. “God, what’s wrong with you?”
Brigit seemed to bank the fire behind her eyes. “Hundreds of vampires were burned alive in their sleep while we rested safe and sound here. That’s what’s wrong. Mortal idiocy, moral bankruptcy, murderous pigs who think thou shalt not kill only applies to their own kind, right down to species, race, creed and color. I’m surprised they don’t annihilate according to age and gender. Humans suck, and I intend to start exercising some old school justice. One of theirs for one of ours. Eye for eye, tooth for tooth. That’s right up your alley, isn’t it?”
“Straight from the Code of Hammurabi,” Lucy replied.
Brigit was surging through the house as she spoke, into the hallway, down the stairs, with Lucy rushing to keep up. They crossed what had once been the glorious foyer, raced down a long vaulted corridor, and then Brigit flung open what appeared to be a basement door, with a dark stairway vanishing beneath it. She turned back, seeming to finally realize that Lucy was still with her. But she only paused for a moment, then shrugged and kept on walking. Down the cellar stairs, across the basement. When she reached a closed door, she said, “Wait out here.”
And then there was a crash, followed by Rhiannon’s voice screaming, “Kill them, for the love of the gods!”
Brigit yanked the door open, and the stench that wafted from within the room beyond nearly knocked Lucy to her knees. She stared in paralyzed shock as what she saw inside the room delivered a second, even more debilitating, blow to her psyche.
There were…corpses…or zombies or something—half-rotted bodies—stumbling around what looked like a demolished laboratory. One of them had Rhiannon by the throat. Its flesh was falling off its bones as its bony hand clutched the beautiful vampiress. Three more of them, one no more than a bleached white skeleton that looked like a Halloween decoration, were surrounding James, yanking at his limbs, his hair, his face.
Brigit started to hum. No, she wasn’t humming, but there was a hum coming from her, and as Lucy watched, unable to speak or move more than her eyes, she saw Brigit lift both hands, palms up, fingers lightly touching her thumbs. Her eyes were glowing red, and then, as she flicked one hand open, a beam of white light with a reddish tint—flashed like a laser from her eyes. It shot from her to the creature that had Rhiannon, and the corpse exploded.
Lucy jerked away in reaction, falling on her backside on the floor as scraps of rotting meat rained down on her. Even before her stomach could heave, Brigit’s other hand flicked open and her killer gaze was blasting another corpse to bits. And then another, and an other, with pinpoint accuracy and deadly results.
Within two seconds there were no more walking corpses. No more bleached white bones, grasping… But Lucy’s mind felt as if it had been hit by one of Brigit’s beams. She stared at the mess, at the gore, at James moving slowly toward her. He was speaking, but she was still hearing that hum in her brain, or maybe that was the reverberation left behind from the explosions. She only knew she was terrified, unable to think coherently and wanting nothing more than to crawl into a hole and then pull the hole in after her.
James moved toward her, and she scrambled away across the basement floor like a panicked crab.
“It’s okay. It’s all right, Lucy, it’s all right.”
There was a long purple vein dangling from his hair. She lifted a trembling hand, pointed. “What…why…you… How?”
“It’s okay, it’s all okay.” He shot Brigit a look. “Why the hell did you bring her down here?”
“She’s figured out where to find Utanapishtim. And I’m out of