“We have some things in the tower that might be useful.” Glenna brushed her fingers over Hoyt’s arm. “Hoyt?”
“We can’t just leave him without letting him know what we’re about.”
“You want to wake up a vampire this time of day?” Blair shrugged. “Okay. You go first.”
Cian didn’t care to be disturbed during his rest time. He figured a closed and locked bedroom door would be a clear signal to anyone that he wanted his privacy. But such things never seemed to stop his brother. So he sat now, awake in the dim light, and listened to the plan for the day.
“So, if I have this right, you woke me to tell me you’re going out, down to Kerry to poke at the caves?”
“We didn’t want you to wake, find us all gone.”
“My fondest dream.” Cian waved that lazily away. “Apparently, the good, bloody fight last night isn’t enough for the hunter.”
“It’s good strategy, going there.”
“Didn’t work out so very well, did it, the last time we went there?”
Hoyt said nothing for a moment, thinking of King, and the loss of him.
“Nor, for you or me, the time before that,” Cian added. “You ended up barely able to walk away, and I took a fucking header off a cliff. Not one of my happiest memories.”
“Those times were different altogether, and you know it. It’s daylight now, and this time she won’t know we’re coming. And being it’s daylight, you’ll have to stay behind.”
“If you think I’ll sulk about that, you’d be wrong. I’ve plenty to keep me busy. Calls and e-mails, which I’ve largely neglected these past weeks. I still have businesses that need my attention, which might as well be tended to since you’ve pulled me out of bed in the middle of the damn day. Let me add it’ll be a pure pleasure to have five noisy humans out of the house a few hours, that I can promise you.”
He rose, walked to his desk and wrote something on a notepad. “Since you’ll be out and about, I’ll need you to go here. There’s a butcher in Ennis. He’ll sell you blood. Pigs’ blood,” Cian said with a bland smile as he handed his brother the address. “I’ll ring him up, so he knows someone’s coming. Payment’s not a problem as I have an account.”
His brother’s writing hand had changed over all this time, Hoyt noted. So much had changed. “Doesn’t he wonder why…”
“If he does, he’s wise enough not to ask. And he’s no doubt pleased to pocket the extra euros. That’s the coin here now.”
“Aye, Glenna explained it to me. We’ll be back before sunset.”
“Better hope you are,” Cian warned when Hoyt left him.
Outside, Blair tossed a dozen stakes in a plastic bucket. Swords, axes, scythes were already on board. All of the fiery variety. It was going to be interesting explaining things if they got stopped, but she didn’t scout out a vampire nest without going fully loaded.
“Who wants the wheel?” she asked Glenna.
“I know the way.”
Blair checked the need to take control, climbed in the back, took the seat behind Glenna as the others joined her. “So, Hoyt, have you ever been in the caves? I don’t figure that kind of thing changes much in a few hundred years.”
“Many times. But they’re different now.”
“We’ve been in them,” Glenna explained. “Magically. Hoyt and I did a spell before we left New York. It was intense.”
“Fill me in.”
Blair listened, one part of her brain marking the route, landmarks, traffic patterns.
In any part, she saw what Glenna described. A labyrinth of tunnels, chambers blocked with thick doors, bodies stacked like so much garbage. People in cages like penned cattle. And the sounds of it—Blair could hear that in the back of her mind—the weeping, the screaming, the praying.
“Luxury vamp condo,” she murmured. “How many ways in?”
“I couldn’t say. In my time the cliffs were riddled with caves. Some small, barely big enough for a child to crawl through, others big enough for a man to stand. There were more tunnels, wider, taller than I remember.”
“So, she excavated. She’s had plenty of time to make it all homey.”