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By eight thirty, the Spider was on the property. Getting past the electric fence proved no problem. Once dusk hit, Medina had been able to hack back into the wi-fi and disable both the motion-detecting cameras and the power to the electric fence. The Spider had waited outside the outer ring of the ward for Melbourne to do her job.
She honestly didn’t know if it would happen. Not that Melbourne didn’t seem competent, but Crispin was alive. Alive, and inside that house, with Melbourne trying to hide from him. Yes, she had that fey invisibility, but Crispin had killed strong, prepared vampires, and Melbourne was just one human woman who didn’t even have a gun with her.
Crispin. The Spider couldn’t hear that name without the sick echo of horror she felt after she picked up the pieces of what had once been her friends. Crispin. Of all the misfortune that could have befallen them. Did Melbourne even know what she was getting into?
And then, at just before nine o’clock, the blast hit.
The Spider had been several hundred feet outside the electric fence when the blast went off and she still felt the compression wave hit her like the subwoofer of the gods. Even now the desert creatures remained silent as if awed by the otherworldly battle taking place. That blast ... Was that Crispin’s work, or Melbourne’s? God help her if it was his. But perhaps it had killed her quickly. Worse things could happen.
Hoisting her duffels, the Spider ran to the stables, just in case there was a gunman on a tower besides Kaltenbach up on the cell phone tower. The ward was down. Wolfe was in custody. The electric fence had been disabled, and the motion detectors as well. Now to rout out the last of their enemies.
The code for the door had been changed since Tom did reconnaissance, so the Spider had to smash an air vent and slip in that way, pulling in her satchel behind her. She heard the hum of the air handling units and knew almost immediately that the plan to put tear gas into the building would simply not work.
Not a chance. All those hours she’d spent looking at air handling units online and it turned out these looked nothing alike. Maybe if she’d brought a plasma cutter she could cut a hole big enough for the canister to ... Or if she had a large enough sack to ... but she hadn’t brought a sack. This was not what she had been expecting. She was supposed to remove the cover, then fire the tear gas canisters into the duct work, then close the cover and let the units suck the tear gas into the building. Then all their enemies would run out and Kaltenbach would pick them off one by one.
“Fain, the tear gas won’t work. Over.” The Spider waited for the responding crackle of the walkie-talkie, hoping that no ham radio operators were close enough to listen in to their conversation. Would he fight her on this? Would he ask why not? Would he disbelieve her? Or would he just come up with another plan?
“Spider, meet me at the back door. There’s no sound from inside the house. I think the blast may have incapacitated them. We’ll go in and find them before they recover.”
But Crispin was in there. The Spider’s mouth went dry.
Kaltenbach’s voice came on the line. “Someone just ran out the back door. I was climbing down and didn’t get a clean shot. He’s disappeared into the mine.”
“So much for easy,” the Spider muttered to herself.
The Spider took one of the tear gas launchers and an extra canister, wishing she’d brought a shotgun. The front yard was all desert landscaping, up lit saguaros placed in pleasing lines with rusted gabions forming bulwarks between them. She climbed over a low wall and into a courtyard that surrounded a tile fountain, encrusted with hard water stains and sprouting weeds from the cracks. The land sloped down in the back to a pool and a hot tub with a view of the valley below. The pool had been kept in slightly better shape than the fountain, though it looked greenish even in the moonlight.
Fain waited by the back door, gun at the ready. “Melbourne’s not answering her texts,” Fain said when the Spider met him at the back door.
“Didn’t Joe shut down the cell phone tower?”
“Ten minutes ago,” he agreed. “But the last I heard from her she was asking if we could shut the power off so she could escape.”
Through the French doors, they saw plywood and light-blocking fabric. She waited for him to give the signal to kick the door in, but instead he used his key. After all the effort they’d gone through so far, it seemed almost anticlimactic to simply be able to turn the door handle and have the door open for them. Cool sweet air poured out, smelling of vampires, fear, and bad housekeeping. Fain stepped in first and the Spider followed him.
She hadn’t known much about the house except that it was expensive even at the $1.2 million dollar “betray our son and evict the murderous squatters” discount. The basement opened into a rec room with a cozy circle of leather couches surrounding an enormous television screen and to one side a pool table. To the other side she saw a large kitchen, its counters cluttered with Solo cups and fast food detritus. Melbourne had been in here. The Spider could smell her. Melbourne had been terrified.
“She was here,” Fain said. “You search down here, and I’ll go upstairs.”
“No,” the Spider said, resisting the urge to cling to him. She had permission to be here; the disinvited sense wasn’t why this house felt haunted. She hadn’t agreed to go in the house until it was cleared. This wasn’t the plan. She’d sworn she wouldn’t go within a hundred miles of Crispin if she could help it. She didn’t consider herself a coward, but she was just one loud noise away from panicking. “Crispin is here, and I don’t have a gun. He can see the future. He knows we’re here.”
“I’m sure the blast got him,” Fain said, with the nonchalance of someone who had never seen an experienced and deadly hit squad slaughtered to a man, half of them with their skin missing. “I just hope it didn’t get Kit as well.”
“Kill Steel Fang, then we’ll find her.” What’s left of her, she thought.
Fain led the way to the second floor, up a spiraling stone staircase that could have led to the tower where an Italian princess had been locked away. Tapestries and alcoves full of giant candelabras did little to deaden the echoes. Fain opened door after door, professionally thorough and quiet, but they found no living creature. The stairs led to a gallery overlooking the great room below, then into another hallway. Melbourne’s scent was especially strong in the upstairs bathroom, and it smelled like she had been terrified. The Spider thought she caught the whiff of another vampire, someone she didn’t know. In what looked like mascara on the mirror, someone had written kill Crispin.
“Is that her handwriting?” the Spider asked.
“I think so.” Fain put his hand on something, winced in pain. He wrapped whatever it was up in a washcloth and put it in his pocket.
“A wooden stake? Surely Holzhausen’s Dayrunner knew better than to rely on folklore. Everyone knows wooden stakes don’t work,” she said.
“She’s killed with them before.”
“If they work, why did she leave it here? Who was the message for?” But the Spider thought she knew who it was for. A last-ditch plea to avenge her death. Melbourne was dead. Crispin had killed her. They might be next.
“I’m sure she’s fine,” Fain said, but he didn’t sound sure. “She just didn’t text back because Joe shut down the cell phone tower.”
The Spider touched his arm, but Fain stopped talking on his own accord. They listened. A low weeping. It sounded like a woman. Was that Melbourne? They snuck out to the gallery. It sounded like the noise was coming from the first floor. Instead of taking the back stairs from the hallway leading to the basement stairs, they descended the sweeping grand staircase with the iron balustrade and the handmade majolica risers. It seemed like the kind of stair you ought to be standing on in a wedding gown as a team of photographers arranged your train and the rose petals just so. Wolfe hadn’t been exaggerating. Compared to this beauty of a palace, the house on Pena street looked like a dime store whore. Well, it would be glorious again, once overdone Italianate came back into fashion.
The sweeping staircase gently led into a magnificent great room with what were probably exquisite windows behind all that plywood and duct tape. At their feet was an elaborate mosaic depicting wolves, with a border of grapevines leading down the hall which mirrored the open galley above it. It was harder to walk quietly in this cavernous hall with the marble pillars and niches with armless stone statues. At the far end of a hallway, lit dimly by a row of elaborate chandeliers hanging from the dim and dusty barrel vault, was a fainting couch. Next to the fainting couch was a small half-table with a laptop and a chair. Lying on the ground in front of the chair was a young man’s body, and sitting next to the body, weeping with her hands covering her face, was a woman, sobbing.
The Spider felt the hairs on the back of her neck rise, but she didn’t want to leave Fain, so she shadowed him down the hallway, looking over her shoulder at every shadowy doorway they passed. She saw the clock. Nine fifteen.
“Stephanie?” Fain said, as if he was guessing, but by the way the woman responded, he had guessed right. “Why are you crying?”
“The nightmare was real,” she said. “I woke and it was real.”
“Find out what happened,” Fain ordered the Spider, and then leaned over to look closer at the man’s body on the floor.
At the end of the hallway, a young vampire stepped out from a doorway.
“Olly olly oxen free,” he said, and unloaded a shotgun at them.