Blood Bound

But if we waited for help, waited for the morning, I was almost certain that both Adam and Samuel would be dead.

"I know where he is," I told Andre. "Meet me at my shop."

"Marvelous. I will be there as soon as I can," he said. "I have some preparations to do first, but I won't be long."

I drove there to wait for him. I called Bran's cell phone and got a voice mail request. I took it as a sign that he would be too late to help. I told him to look in the safe in my shop and gave him the combination. Then I sat down at the computer and typed out everything pertinent about what I was doing and where I was going. I wasn't going to leave everyone wondering what happened to me the way everyone else who had gone after Littleton had.

When I finished, Andre still wasn't there, so I checked my home e-mail. My mother had sent me two e-mails, but the third was from an unfamiliar address with attached files. I was about to delete it when I saw that the subject line read

CORY LITTLETON.

Beckworth, true to his word, had gotten information about Littleton for me. His e-mail was short and to the point.

Ms. Thompson,

Here is all the information I could find. It comes from a friend of mine who is with the Chicago police and owes me some favors. Littleton disappeared from Chicago about a year ago where he was being investigated as a murder suspect. My friend told me that if I knew where this guy was, he'd appreciate hearing about it-and the FBI are looking for him as well.

Thanks again,

Beckworth

There were four pdf files and a couple of jpgs. I opened the jpgs. The first picture was a full color shot of Littleton standing on the corner of a city street. On the bottom right-hand corner the photo was date-stamped April of last year.

He was a good forty pounds heavier than when I'd last seen him. There was no way to be certain, but something about the way he was standing made me believe that he'd been human then.

I opened up the second picture. Littleton in a nightclub talking to another man. Littleton 's face was animated, as I'd never seen it in real life. The man he was talking to was turned so all I could see was his profile. But that was enough: it was Andre.

Andre pulled up just as I finished printing out a second letter to Bran. I tossed it into the safe, grabbed Zee's vampire-slaying backpack and went out to meet my fate.

Andre drove us out of my parking lot in his black BMW Z8. It suited him in the same way that Stefan's version of the Mystery Machine had suited him. It surprised me a little because Andre had never impressed me as elegant and powerful. I gave him a quick look under my lashes and realized that tonight he was both, reminding me that he was one of the six most powerful vampires in the seethe.

He'd turned a sorcerer into a vampire so that he could be the most powerful. And I was betting my life that he had lost control of the sorcerer the night Stefan and I met Littleton.

Andre was something of an enigma to me, so I was trusting Stefan's judgement, and the judgement of Stefan's menagerie that he was loyal to Marsilia and jealous of Stefan.

Daniel had been a trial, to see what Littleton could do against a new-made vampire. If matters had not worked out well, Andre could have dealt with it-Daniel was his, after all. But Littleton had proven himself, so Andre had set him up against Stefan. But if Andre were still Marsilia's man, then he would not have condoned the bloodbath at the hotel. It was too likely to have drawn attention to the vampire. But the one thing that made me believe that Littleton was not following orders that night was that Stefan survived. Andre, I thought, would have killed Stefan. Not because of Marsilia's affection-but because Stefan was always, so clearly, the better man.

So I got in a car with the vampire who'd created Littleton because I believed he wanted the sorcerer as much as I did-he couldn't afford for Littleton to continue to run free, making more and more trouble for him. And I got in that car because I knew that Andre was my only chance to keep Adam and Samuel alive.

"A church is holy ground," Andre informed me when I told him where we were going. "He can't be in a church: he's a vampire."

I rubbed my face, ignored the little voice that kept repeating "we have to find them," and tried to think. I was so tired. I'd been up, I realized, for over forty hours without sleep.

"Okay," I said. "I remember hearing vampires can't stand on holy ground." Slipped in among a dozen things that weren't true-say, for instance, the one about vampires crossing water. "But if Littleton was staying in a church, how could you explain it?"

He turned onto Third and slowed way down so we could look for likely buildings. Gabriel's sister hadn't told me which side of Washington the church was on. Since my shop was east of there, that's where we started. I pressed several buttons and finally got my window to roll down so I could sniff the air.

"All right," he said. "Maybe the demon changes the rules, but they're not supposed to be able to abide holy ground either. Or, the church could have been desecrated."

"It was a school for a while," I said hopefully.

He shook his head. "Not unless it was a whorehouse. It takes one of the great sins to desecrate a church-adultery, murder-something of that nature."

"How about a suicide?" I asked. Gabriel's sister hadn't said the suicide had taken place in the church-but she hadn't said it hadn't happened there either.

He glanced at me. "Then I think a demon would take great delight in living in a desecrated church."

The traffic on Washington was light tonight and he goosed the little sports car across all four lanes without stopping for the stop sign.

"When this is over," I muttered darkly, "I am never getting in a car with a vampire driving again."

Rosalinda was right. The church was two blocks off of Washington. There were no signs around it, but it was unmistakably a church.

It was bigger than I expected, almost three times the size of the church I attended on Sundays. The old church had once had a fair sized yard, but there was little left of it but sunburnt weeds chopped almost level with the ground. The parking lot had faired little better, the blacktop had worn down until it was more rock than tar and bleached weeds poked out through branching cracks in the surface. I looked, but I couldn't see any sign of the BMW Littleton had been driving.

Andre pulled over as soon as we saw the church, parking his car across the street, in front of a two-story Victorian home that looked as though it might once have been a farm house.

"I don't see his car," I said.

"Maybe he's already out hunting," said Andre. "But I think you're right, he was here. This is someplace he would stay." He closed his eyes and inhaled. It made me realize that he hadn't been breathing tonight except a couple of shallow breaths before he talked. I must be getting used to being around vampires. Ugh.

I took a deep breath myself, but there were too many scents around. Dogs, cats, cars, blacktop that had baked all day in the hot sun, and plants. I knew without looking that there was a rose garden behind the house we were standing in front of-and that someone nearby was composting. I couldn't smell werewolf, demon, or vampire-except for Andre. I hadn't realized how much I'd been counting on some sign that Adam or Samuel had been here.

"I don't smell anything."

Andre lifted an eyebrow and I realized that under the right circumstances he was very good looking-and that I'd been right, there was something different about him, something more tonight.

"He's not stupid," he said. "Only a stupid vampire leaves a trail to his doorstep." There was a little bit of pride in his voice.

He looked at the church a moment, then starting walking across the street, leaving me to trot after him.