Blood Bound

"Shouldn't we be practicing a little stealth?" I asked.

"If he's at home, he'll know we're here anyway," he told me helpfully. "If he's not, then it doesn't matter."

I stretched my senses as far as I could, and wished that the roses didn't have quite so strong a scent. I couldn't smell anything. I wished I was certain that Andre would fight on my side tonight.

"So if we're not trying to take him by surprise," I asked, "why did you park across the street?"

"I paid over a hundred grand for that car," Andre told me mildly. "And I'm moderately fond of it. I'd hate to see it destroyed in a fit of temper."

"Why aren't you more afraid of Littleton?" I asked. I was afraid. I could smell my own fear over and above the roses, which had, oddly enough, grown stronger after we crossed the street.

Andre stepped off the road and onto the sidewalk, then came to a full stop and looked at me. "I fed deeply this evening," he said with an odd smile. "The Mistress herself did me that honor. With the ties that already bind us, and her blood fresh within me, I can call upon her gifts and her power at my need. It will take more than a new-made vampire, even one aided by a demon, to defeat us."

I remembered how easily Littleton had subdued Stefan and had my doubts. "Then why didn't Marsilia just come herself?" I asked.

His jaw dropped in genuine shock. " Marsilia is a lady. Women do not belong in combat."

"So you brought me instead?"

He opened his mouth then closed it again, looking a little embarrassed by what he'd been about to say to me.

"What?" I asked, begi

At a loss, he started up the cement steps that led to the worn double doors that hadn't been painted in too many years. I followed, but stayed a step behind.

"No," he said finally, his hand on the doorknob. "And I prefer to be polite." He turned to look down at me. "My mistress was certain that you were the only person who would be able to find this vampire. She gets glimpses of the future sometimes. Not often, but what she does see is seldom wrong."

"So do we all survive?" I asked.

He shook his head. "I do not know. I do understand, though, that you have taken great risk for the honor of the seethe. You are so fragile-" He reached out and rested his fingertips against my cheek. "Almost human. On my honor, I promise to do everything in my power to see that you are safe."

His eyes caught me for a moment before I took two quick steps back, all but falling over the steps. Stefan's honor I trusted-Andre's was questionable.

Both of the front doors were locked, but neither had been designed to keep out a vampire. He put a shoulder against one of the doors and broke the frame so the door swung open freely. Apparently we weren't being subtle tonight.

I slid Zee's backpack down my arms and retrieved the stake and knife. Zee'd included the belt and sheath for the knife so at least I didn't have to run around with the knife in one hand and the stake in the other. I waited for Andre to ask me what I was doing with a knife, but he ignored me. All of his attention was on the church.

Andre stood poised outside the threshold.

"What happens if it is still holy ground?" I asked, hurriedly tying the belt.

"Then I burst into flames," he said. "But if it was holy ground I should have felt it before this." As he spoke, he stepped through the doorway and stood fully inside the church. "This isn't hallowed ground," he told me, rather redundantly.

I followed him into a large foyer and then looked around. The foyer was large enough for ten or twenty people to have milled around comfortably. The flooring was linoleum tile, cracked and pitted with age. There was a wide stairway leading upward that had a rather nicely carved handrail. Beside the stairway was a pair of double doors, propped open so I could see the large, empty room beyond them that must have been the sanctuary.

The whole church was dark, but there were windows high up that let in a little illumination from the streetlights outside. A real human might have had trouble navigating, but it was light enough for Andre and me.

He stalked over to the sanctuary doors and sniffed. "Come here, walker," he said, his voice dark and rough. "Tell me what you smell."

I could have told him from where I stood, but I stuck my head into the sanctuary.

The ceiling soared two stories above our heads with frosted windows on both walls that glimmered silver with the dim light of the city night. The floor was hardwood, scarred where pews had once been bolted in.

The walls and some of the windows of the sanctuary had been covered with graffiti-probably done by the neighborhood kids. I just didn't see either a vampire or demon writing things like For a Good Time Call — or Juan loves Pe

At the far end from us was a raised platform. Like the rest of the room, it was stripped as well, the podium and organ or piano long gone. But someone had cobbled together a table out of cinder blocks. I didn't have to go closer to know what that table had been used for.

"Blood and death," I said. I closed my eyes. It helped me catch the fainter scents and kept me from crying. "Ben," I said. " Warren. Daniel. And Littleton."

We'd found the sorcerer's lair.

"But not Stefan." Andre stood behind me, and his voice echoed in the rafters of the room.

I couldn't read anything from his voice, but I was not comfortable with him at my back. I remembered Naomi telling me that all of the vampires lost control sometimes-and the room smelled of blood and death.

I walked past him back out to the foyer. "Not Stefan," I agreed. "At least not in there."

There was a hallway on the other side of the foyer with doors opening off either side. I opened the doors and found three rooms and a closet with a hot water heater and a large fuse box.

"He won't be up here," Andre said. "There are too many windows." He hadn't followed me, just waited in the foyer until I finished my search.

His eyes weren't glowing, which I took to be a good sign.

"There's a basement," I told him. "I saw the windows outside."

We found the stairs to the basement tucked neatly behind the stairway to the choir loft. He didn't seem to mind me being behind him, even with my stake, so I followed him down.

Our footsteps, quiet as they were, sounded hollow in the stairwell. The air was dry and dusty. Andre opened the door at the bottom and the scents in the air changed abruptly.

Now I smelled Stefan, Adam, and Samuel as well as Littleton — but the strongest scent of all of them was the demon. As it had at the hotel, after only a few breaths, the reek of demon drowned out everything else. The door at the bottom of the stairway had kept the scents contained.

We walked even more quietly now, though, as Andre had said, if Littleton was here, he'd have heard us come in.

The basement was darker than upstairs, and someone without preternatural sight might have had trouble seeing at all. We were in an entryway, similar to the foyer upstairs.

There were a pair of bathrooms next to the stairway; and the men sign fell off when I pushed open the first door. Streetlights filtered through glass block windows allowing me to see that the room was empty except for a broken urinal leaning crookedly against one wall.

I let the door close. Andre had checked the other restroom and was already walking past a cloakroom and into a short hallway, the duplicate of the one upstairs complete with doors.

I left him to it and started on the other side of the stairs. The first room I walked into was a generous-sized kitchen, though there were only empty spaces where a refrigerator and stove had been. The cabinets were hanging open and bare. Along the inside wall there was a folding half-door covering the top of the counter. With it open, the church members could have served food from the kitchen to the room on the other side without walking back out to the foyer.