The next few minutes were fairly disgusting, as Quinn had to shove a plastic baggie into the vampire’s chest to cover the hole in the lung. I was all for sharing work, but I decided that in this case my best contribution would be holding the flashlight.
Quinn’s hands were still actually in the vamp’s chest, holding the baggie in position, when I asked again, “What’s your name?”
“Kraig,” he breathed, still avoiding my eyes. “With a K.”
I blinked. That’s what he wanted to use his breath on? “Who sent you after me, Kraig?”
Without moving his arm, he lifted a shaky finger and pointed it toward the back of the car. “Ford.”
Quinn and I exchanged a look. So the vampire who’d hung back in the shadows had been the head vampire in Denver. “Is he your dominus?”
“Yes. Yes.” His answers were coming fast, as if to show how cooperative he could be.
“How did you find us?”
“Followed the big Jeep,” he wheezed. “Figured you’d visit the bloodbags.”
Quinn shot him a disgusted look. Kraig was referring to human people. “Why did Ford want you to come after us?” I demanded.
“Don’t know.”
“What did he want with her?” Quinn asked, jerking his head toward me.
“Don’t know.”
I moved closer, crouching down next to him. The injured vampire still wouldn’t meet my eyes. “You get a choice now, Kraig,” I said softly. “Do you want me to press you, so I can see if you’re lying, or would you rather we just killed you?”
He agreed to be pressed.
When he finally looked at me, I honed in my focus and called up a connection between us. As soon as I felt it lock into place, I asked him all the same questions again. Unfortunately, Kraig had been telling the truth about not knowing anything. Ford was his dominus—his lord, for lack of a better term—and Ford had said they were to take me alive. That was all Kraig needed to know. He had no idea what Ford was planning to do with me after they took me. He was just a grunt.
I wasn’t sure what to do with him after that. The domini-villani relationship is complicated. It’s difficult, if not downright impossible, for a lower vampire to resist an order from a dominus, so it was hard to entirely blame Kraig for the attack. I decided to just ask him. “Tell me if you had a choice about capturing me,” I commanded.
He paused, examining the question. Vampires can’t lie when I press them, but sometimes they need to consider before they can answer. “I could have resisted,” he said finally. “I did not.”
Quinn stepped away to report all of this to Maven. I held on to my control over Kraig, though I couldn’t really ask him any more questions while his lungs were still healing.
In the end, with Maven’s blessing, I pressed him to go to Boulder on foot and throw himself on Maven’s mercy. I also said he couldn’t feed on the way, which would make the trip very painful.
When Kraig had completely disappeared into the darkness, Quinn and I set about cleaning up the mess from the crash. Compared to dealing with thousands of pounds of giant reptile, it really wasn’t that difficult. We buried the vampires’ remains a few hundred yards away, called the police, and told them Quinn had driven the Jeep and I’d driven the pickup. Quinn pressed them into buying the story, and we called in Quinn’s favorite towing company to tow both cars. It was scary how good I was getting at this.
Chapter 6
The tow truck dropped off the Jeep at the same body shop where Maven had commissioned the custom work, and I made a mental note to call them the next morning to arrange service. When we finally got back to Magic Beans, only a couple of hours before dawn, there was no sign of Kraig-with-a-K. When we got back to her office, though, Maven was clearly pissed—but not nearly as upset as she’d been about the belladonna poisoning. An attempted betrayal was something she was used to.
“So,” I said, because I needed to make sure I understood what was happening. “We’re thinking Ford was going to make a move against you, and he decided to get rid of Quinn and me first?” It wasn’t a terrible plan—Quinn was deeply loyal and Maven’s best troubleshooter, and I could press vampires.
She sat in her office chair, her small hands steepled in her lap. “Something like that,” she said at last. “I don’t understand where the belladonna comes in, though.”
“Maybe he’s the supplier,” Quinn suggested. “When you showed signs of interfering with his business, he tried to take you out.”
“But then why poison his own people?” I argued.
A different kind of man might have been upset that his girlfriend was contradicting him in front of the boss, but Quinn just shrugged and said, “Because they found out what he was doing, and they needed to be silenced so he could usurp Maven.”
“That must be it,” Maven said, but her face was still troubled.
I told Maven what Nellie had said about belladonna, and with a sour look she agreed that the whole “flushing with blood” plan was probably Nellie messing with us. I didn’t mention what Nellie had told me about Maven’s obsession with the herbs. It didn’t seem like a great idea to antagonize her when she was already angry.
She sent us home after that, and I was more than a little relieved to leave her presence. Since there were less than two hours until sunrise, Quinn decided to head back to his apartment. He squeezed my hand. “Are we still on for tomorrow night?” he said, his voice low.