“Are you saying that vampires are superstitious?” Sheridan asked.

   “People are superstitious. Why not vampires?”

   “Katie didn’t have a funeral. She went missing,” Pearson said.

   “Modern burial techniques like embalming, or organ donation, will kill a vampire before it can rise the first time. If creator vampires want their offspring to rise from the dead, they’ll take the body with them and hide it.”

   “You said if. Some vampires do not care if their—what did you call it—offspring rise?” Sheridan asked.

   “You know how some people are crazy, or mean, or just careless?”

   “Yes.”

   “Vampires can be all those things, too.”

   “What can we do for them?” Pearson asked.

   “They’re all new enough that once darkness falls they will have to feed. If this is Mrs. Brady’s first night as a vampire, she will be uncontrollable, or at least not controllable by a baby vampire like Katie, or Sinead. I don’t mean baby vampire because they’re teenagers. I mean they’re less than a month dead. Whoever made Katie should still have her with them at night and be controlling how she feeds. There were rules against shit like this before vampires were legal.”

   “In America, would you execute Katie?” Pearson asked.

   “It depends on whether she’s outright killed someone that we can prove; for all we know some of the bodies with their throats torn out are hers.”

   “I hope not,” he said.

   “Me, too, but she had to be getting her blood somewhere besides her family.”

   “Why do you say that?”

   “Because she needs to feed every night, and she hasn’t been feeding on her family long enough to have them be her only food source.”

   “How do you know that?”

   “The parents wouldn’t have come to you two weeks ago demanding more action on her disappearance if she’d already started feeding on them.”

   “She fed on Sinead.”

   “Is her family still alive and well?”

   “To our knowledge.”

   “Do they live close to here?” I asked.

   “Yes.”

   “You might want to check on Sinead’s family, then.”

   Pearson cursed as he walked out of the room, already on his phone. He was sending officers to the other home. I hoped the other family was okay. I didn’t really want this kind of moral dilemma twice in one day.

   “What can we do for them when they wake for the night?” Sheridan asked.

   “There are only three options,” I said.

   “Kill them,” Edward said.

   “Yep, that’s option one.”

   “What’s option two?” Sheridan asked.

   “Lock them in a coffin or cell with holy items all over it and contain them. Though you need to make sure that whoever guards them is religious and wearing their holy item of choice, because even baby vamps can capture you with their gaze and make you their bitch.”

   “And the third option?” she asked.

   “Do nothing and let them keep attacking people,” Edward said.

   “Okay, four options, then,” I said.

   He looked at me. “What fourth option?”

   “You get a vampire strong enough to control them.”

   “I don’t think we want to give the Brady family over to Damian’s creator,” Edward said.

   “No,” I said.

   “She’s the only master vampire in Ireland.”

   “Not anymore, she’s not,” I said.

   We looked at each other. “Shouldn’t you talk to your vampires before you volunteer them for babysitting duty?”

   “Yes, but I can’t talk to them until after dark and by that time the vampires in this room will rise, too, and it’ll be too late to ask.”

   “Catch-22,” he said.

   “Yeah,” I said.

   “I don’t understand,” Sheridan said.

   “Anita brought more than one vampire with her.”

   “Are you saying your vampires might be able to control the new ones?”

   “The three in this room maybe, but since they didn’t make them, and they aren’t related to the vampire that did make them, I’m not sure how much control they’ll have over them.”

   “Then we’re back to three options,” he said.

   “We won’t let you execute them,” Sheridan said.

   “Two options,” he said.

   “We can’t let them feed on whoever they want,” she said.

   “Option number two, it is.”

   “How strong are your holding cells and do they all have windows?” I asked.

41

   I DON’T KNOW who had Nolan’s back in the government, but whoever it was had clout, because the police gave the three sleeping vampires over to him. Pearson and Sheridan didn’t like it. In fact, we got to hear Pearson yelling on the phone that it wasn’t right, that Helena and Katie Brady and Sinead Royce were still Irish citizens and deserved better than this. He said other things, but that was the big part he kept repeating in different ways. None of it made any difference. Nolan, Brennan, and Donahue—Donnie—put the three women into body bags like the corpses they almost were and loaded one vampire per vehicle, which meant there were two vampires per, because we’d brought our own. Edward told Nolan that if he valued his expensive toys he shouldn’t lock us in the back once we were inside them. I was glad he’d said it, because it saved me having to threaten his old friend. Admittedly, it would have been Nicky or one of the other wereanimals that actually tore the door off, but I’d have given the order.

   Dev was soaked by the time we walked back down to the trucks so that when he got inside water streamed from his hair down inside his rain jacket. He was so wet that Nathaniel kissed him but asked him to sit on the other side with Kaazim and Jake. It also gave us enough room on our side to not be quite so cramped. We still had Damian in his duffel bag at our feet, but now Nolan and Edward had a body bag full of vampire at their feet, too. They’d tagged the vamps on the outside of the bags, so we knew it was Helena Brady with us.

   Nolan’s phone sounded and he looked at the screen. The lines in his face seemed to deepen as if some extra burden had been added. “What’s wrong?” I asked.