A basement apartment? It seemed so . . . ordinary. But then, I guess vampires wouldn’t get much access to their food supply by hiding out in Transylvanian castles. Speaking of food supply . . . “How does, um, feeding work?” I asked Quinn. “Is there a way to find her through . . .” I made a helpless gesture, not wanting to say “who she eats.”
He shook his head. “Vampires don’t need blood every night, and we don’t often feed from the same person twice,” he informed me. “That’s exactly why you find vampires in so many college towns, because of the transient population.”
“You just go to the middle of campus and grab somebody?” I asked, incredulous.
Quinn shot me a glare. “We’re predators,” he stated. “A lion doesn’t wade into the middle of a pack of wildebeests and start slashing with its claws. You pick off the edge of the herd, isolate, and feed. Once we learn control, we can exist on very little. The . . . source . . . doesn’t even remember it happening.”
I decided I didn’t need to know more about that right now, and looked out the window. To my surprise, Quinn was driving us into a familiar student neighborhood in South Boulder. I’d spent a little time in that area of SoBo, which was where Sam and John’s first apartment had been. When he said “close to campus,” he really meant it.
“We’re not actually expecting her to be there, are we?” I asked.
Quinn shook his head. “Darcy’s not that stupid. But I’m hoping we’ll find something to point us in the right direction.”
“And if we don’t?”
“Then we’ll talk to the vampire they’re pledged to,” he said, as if that was a perfectly logical thing to say.
“Pledged?”
“Vampires still have a more or less feudal system of government,” he explained. Because it took years for new vamps to learn how to manage finances, create new identities, and control their bloodlust, they always served older vampires for a period of time before striking out on their own. “Most of the time, a new vamp serves his progenitor, the vampire who created him,” Quinn said flatly.
“Most of the time?” I asked carefully. I wanted to know more about that “I was sold” comment.
Quinn ignored the question. “When they’re done with their service, they pledge a troth,” he continued. “Aside from the physiological changes, it’s the only bit of magic we really have. A troth is like a formal binding of loyalty. We can’t break it.” He shook his head a little. “Everyone belongs to someone.”
“Like ranks,” I said. “A hierarchy of power.”
Quinn thought that over for a long moment, then nodded. “Sort of. Younger vampires have to obey not just their own dominus, but any dominus who obeys him. So it’s more like . . . a lineage of obedience.”
“So where did Victor and Darcy fall within the pecking order?”
“They both finished their service a couple of years ago, and they pledged troth to a vampire named Kirby,” Quinn explained. “And Kirby belongs to Itachi. Wait, we’re here.”
He pulled to a stop in front of a perfectly ordinary wood-frame building that had once been a single-family residence. Someone had converted it into two apartments with separate mailboxes, I saw. There was a third mailbox for a basement apartment, along with a dark staircase leading down on the side of the house.
When we got out of the car, Quinn immediately walked around to the Toyota’s back bumper, looked around a little, and popped the trunk.
Quinn’s trunk was packed. The top layer was camp blankets and collapsible chairs, the kind of thing you’d have at a picnic or an outdoor concert. He moved these aside and revealed piles of more sinister supplies, including several power tools and a lidless shoebox full of stakes. I noted with surreal detachment that the shoebox full of stakes had the Luther Shoes logo printed on its side. Quinn pulled out two wooden stakes and handed me one. It was a simple piece of hardwood, about the length of my forearm, machine-sharpened to a rounded point.
“The wooden stake thing is real, huh?” I asked, turning it over in my hand. Frankly, I would rather have had a gun.
“Sort of,” Quinn replied. “To kill a vampire, you have to cut off the head or completely destroy the heart. Theoretically you could do that with bullets, if you can get the vampire to hold still, but these”—he held up his wooden stake—“are traditional, which maybe gives them a little bit of magic. More importantly,” he added, grinning, “Itachi had them hexed by a witch in Denver. If you can get one in a vampire’s heart, the stake will do the rest. We call ’em shredders.”
“I thought magic never works against itself,” I objected.
“You’re thinking too broadly. I can’t use my magic against someone else’s magic, so I can’t turn you or a werewolf into a vampire. But a witch can hex a stake to shred what it touches, and if that’s a physical heart . . .” He shrugged. “It doesn’t matter if it’s a vampire’s.”
At the bottom of the stairs was a door that looked like solid steel. A whole line of keyholes ran up the side, each one representing a dead bolt.
Quinn leaned his weight back so he could kick in the door. Could vampires break their feet? “Quinn, wait—” I began. To my surprise, though, he struck the side of the door with the hinges. The door burst loose from its frame, although the side with all the locks held. Quinn shook his head. “Typical vampires,” he said dismissively. “They invest in a dozen hard-core deadbolts, but it doesn’t occur to them to reinforce the hinges. Come on.” He pushed on the open side of the door, which caved inward with a screech of metallic protest. Quinn turned and slipped sideways through the twelve-inch crack. I followed. The interior of the room beyond was dark, and I heard the brush of a hand on the wall as Quinn flipped the light switch.