Page 90 of Caretaker

Chapter Thirty

I would like to have crawled back into bed, but I’d already wasted too much of the day, and there were too many things yet to do. Too many people to check on.

I would like to have found out what it was like to have Angus inside me, too, but we both needed to recover a little before that happened. Having sex with Angus Stark was going to be intense. Demanding. Hot.

And both of us needed to be healed and ready for it when it happened.

I didn’t eat at the house—just got a quick, awkward shower, then climbed inside the captain’s car without a word to anyone, and went to seize the night.

Captain Crawford called as I was driving toward Miriam’s house, my mind on the ordeal ahead. I didn’t believe Clayton was dead, not really, because I knew Miriam could somehow find what she needed of him and bring him back. She could.

Maybe she wouldn’t, but I refused to consider that.

I didn’t feel the loss of him, though. I didn’t feel that he was not in the world.

I put my phone on speaker. “Captain. I’m glad to see you made it off the island.”

“How are you?” he asked. “I was told you broke your arm.”

“I’m okay. Wearing a cast, which is a pain in the ass.” I hesitated. “What’s going to happen now, Frank? For the supernaturals?”

His voice was tired. “It’s too early to know. But I’m going with the story that no supernaturals made it off that island.”

“Captain…you mean—”

“The ones who escaped are free, Trinity. Don’t worry about Angus Stark. He’s paid for his crime and then some. I learned some disturbing details about what they did to him.”

“You mean the cage fighting?”

He paused. “No. The cage fighting was the least of it. They—”

“No,” I interrupted, my voice thick. “I can’t. Not right now.”

I could almost see him nodding. “I understand.”

I took a deep breath, then blew it out and moved on to something else. “The judge and Madalyn?”

“We took them out in a helicopter. Lewis is all right. Madalyn is not. I don’t expect her to live. They took too much from her.”

“Blood?”

“Everything.”

I slapped the steering wheel with my cast, then flinched at the pain. “Has she regained consciousness?”

“No. Even if she did, I don’t think she’d be able to tell us anything.”

“They were using her as a pure blood food source for the vampires they kept there,” I said.

“Yeah.” He seemed strangely hesitant, and it was a few seconds before he spoke again. “There’s big money in blood sport, Trinity. Men came from all over. Wealthy men. How do you think Lewis Bennett got most of his money? Not from being a judge.”

“Oh my God,” I murmured. “It’s his fault Madalyn was taken.”

“Indirectly. He kept her apart from all that. Protected her. But in the end, it didn’t matter.”

“They didn’t know who she was?”

“I don’t know. The warden talked. His story was that one of his men picked up Madalyn, she told him she’d been taken by a vampire. Didn’t tell him who she was.” He paused, and I knew he didn’t believe that any more than I did. She’d have told her rescuer exactly who she was.