Page 27 of Peacemaker

Clayton slid his phone back into his pocket. “She knew about the attack, and they’re looking into it. She didn’t know about the turning humans. She’s contacting Himself.”

I took my right hand off the wheel and waited for him to take it. “Any other cities?”

“No attacks reported.”

“It’s just us then. So why is it just us?”

He turned my hand over and rested my palm on his thigh, then shivered when I began stroking his leg.

“I wish we were home in bed,” I murmured.

I didn’t have to look at him to know he smiled. “I wish that every second I’m awake.”

It was good to laugh. To forget, if just for a minute, that the night was hurtling us toward something we both knew was going to get worse before the sun came to make it better.

A man was waiting at a back entrance of the hospital to escort us to the vampires we needed to kill. We walked down long, echoing hallways, grimly silent, both of us ignoring the curious looks he kept throwing our way.

We peered through the silver-lined window and I cringed when I saw the three people inside the room. Newly turned vampires were extremely easy to handle—they were, as Crawford had said, like babies—and that was why the humans had been able to contain them. They’d tossed them into their containment cots, then shoved them into one of the reinforced vampire holding rooms all hospitals contained.

The infant vampires lay there, mewling, starving, and nearly blind. They shrank uncertainly away from the burning silver springs beneath the thin, plastic mats upon which they lay, too weak and dazed to do more than cry.

Silver rails had been pulled up on either side of them, extra assurance that they would not somehow escape before they were killed.

Places that had no hunters simply impaled a vampire with a silver spike through his heart, then wrapped his chest with thick layers of tape before restraining his hands behind him with silver-plated cuffs. He was then buried. As far as I knew, vampires rarely escaped such a hideous trap, though at times a master or strong vampire would find them and dig them up.

If I ever caught myself indulging in self-pity, I had only to remember those poor bastards.

The two people who’d been assigned to watch the newly turned vampires stood at their bedsides, their backs to us. They were dressed in blue scrubs, and I couldn’t tell if they were nurses, housekeepers, aides, or what.

The families of the new vampires would likely be waiting for news; grieving, stunned, hurting. But as bad as it was that they’d lost someone, leaving their loved ones as vampires would have been worse.

The female vampire’s clothing had been cut off, and one of the minders—the male—was videoing her with his phone. He filmed her pain, her nakedness, her helplessness, and his female partner didn’t seem to mind in the least.

Maybe because she was busy torturing one of the males.

When had humans become so very cruel?

“If you become close with one vampire, you’ll begin to care about all of them…”

Was that it, then? A year ago, would I have watched such a scene with an uncaring eye, unconcerned with the torture of a hideous, frightening, hated vampire?

I hoped not.

“Clayton,” I said, my voice thick.

He squeezed my arm. “We’ll ease them, Trinity.”

Would we, though? A vampire feared true death above all things. True death sent them to wander eternity in a despair I could not imagine, though I’d had a taste.

Or so they claimed—and who was I to disbelieve them? They’d died, after all. They’d been there once. They did not want to return.

Maybe that was how a vampire could withstand so much physical torture. He’d been through something worse.

“Open the door,” Clayton told our escort.

The man touched his card to the keypad, and when the door clicked, he shoved it open for us. “Have fun,” he said.

Silverlight wanted to come out and play. “Not yet,” I whispered.