“Lex?” Whoops. Simon had been talking to me.
“Sorry, what?”
“I asked if you thought there were multiple shooters. Shouldn’t she have been able to dodge after the first dart? The poison can’t work that fast.”
I shook my head. “Dart guns are single-shot weapons. There’s no way someone would have time to reload, which means two weapons firing simultaneously.” Being careful of the bandage, I held out my hands in front of me to demonstrate. “Two shooters is possible, but I’d put my money on one shooter with a sidearm-style tranquilizer gun in each hand. It would be the easiest way to make sure the shots were simultaneous.”
Simon frowned. “If I’m remembering right, those darts don’t hold all that much liquid, though. Would that amount of belladonna really put Maven down?”
“Those weren’t the only shots,” Lily said suddenly, staring at Maven’s linen top. All three of us looked at her. “Look.” With her free hand, she pulled down the neckline, stopping just above the vampire’s breasts. I leaned forward and saw an angry red puncture wound, the size of a really big needle, right over Maven’s heart. I’d completely missed it, having stopped searching after I found the shots in her back.
“Jesus,” Simon breathed. “They shot her twice in the back to incapacitate her, then put a syringe straight into her heart.”
“That’s really cold,” Lily said, awed.
I just stared. It was cold. It was also brilliant.
“What are you guys going to do?” Simon asked, looking between Quinn and me.
I met Quinn’s gaze. His color wasn’t all the way back, but his eyes were alert. He tapped Simon on the shoulder and nodded to indicate that Simon could stop the IV. Taking the tube out of his mouth, Quinn said flatly, “Right now, we have to get her the hell out of here. And we need to get rid of all this blood.”
“Are we sure it’s safe to move her?” Lily said.
Quinn leaned forward, getting his face right down next to Maven’s skin, and inhaled deeply. The Pellars and I exchanged a glance, but none of us had any idea what he was doing. After a couple more sniffs, he sat up with a little nod. “When I first found her, she reeked of decay,” he explained. “She was right on the edge. I don’t smell any now. I think it’s okay to move her, but she won’t be out of the woods until we can get her heart to start beating again.”
“Oh! I took Nellie’s advice,” I said, remembering suddenly.
“You went back to see Nellie?” Lily said, at the same time that Simon asked, “What was it?”
“She said we had to drain some of the poisoned blood out first, letting the vampire’s blood pressure drop. Then give them untainted blood. We thought she was messing with us, but—” I pointed to the mark on Maven’s arm. It should have been completely healed by then, but it looked like a fresh scar. “When Quinn’s blood wasn’t working, I tried it.”
“So now what?” Lily asked.
“We’re supposed to give it twenty-four hours,” I said. “That will, um, redistribute the poison in her current blood supply. Then we do the same thing again.”
“None of us are going to be able to donate much in twenty-four hours,” Simon pointed out.
“Especially you, Lex,” Lily added. “You still need to go to the hospital. At least for fluids.”
“Relax,” I told her. “I can’t die, remember?”
She didn’t look comforted. “Maybe not, but if your blood pressure drops off the scale, you can’t function, either.”
Quinn frowned at me, but all he said was, “I’ll talk to my blood bag contacts to see if it’s possible to get a large supply without drawing attention.”
“Which brings us to the immediate problem of where to keep her,” I said, looking at Quinn. “Where are you keeping the other two infected vampires?”
He shook his head. “One of our warehouses in Denver, but we can’t take her there. People know about it, and we don’t know who we can trust.”
“What about one of the, um, portable vampire storage units?” I asked, referring to the empty, clean septic tanks that Maven had stashed all over the state for emergencies.
“Too many of us know where they are.”
Duh, Lex. “Right.”
Quinn looked at Simon. “Say, dumbass . . . how many people know about your new lab?”
Chapter 13
Quinn had parked down the street, so Lily, who was the cleanest of all of us, went to his car and backed it into the parking lot, blocking the alley. Quinn popped the trunk and pulled out plastic tarps. He had a lot of them for . . . well, I won’t say situations like this, because none of us had heard of anyone attacking Maven and surviving, but it was his job to deal with the bodies. Mine, too.
Lily put a tarp down in the Jeep’s vampire storage compartment and draped the extras on the seats. Quinn put Maven in the storage compartment, and then he matter-of-factly stripped down to his boxers and wrapped his bloody clothes and shoes in another tarp. Lily didn’t wolf whistle when he undressed, which told me a lot about how freaked out we all were. Maven was down. We were dealing with it, but mostly on autopilot, because . . . God, Maven was down.
Quinn rummaged around in the very bottom of the trunk, which was basically his own version of Mary Poppins’s bag, and eventually came out with a garden hose, the kind you could get at any home improvement store. He hooked it up to a spigot on the back of the building, which I’d never even noticed, and began rinsing away the blood, trying to move it in the direction of the nearest sewer grate. I wanted to offer to help, but I was having a little trouble sitting upright at the moment.