Page 36 of The Accidental Detectives

There was a long pause with nothing but the silence of the room before I heard her whisper, “I don’t know… Weak. I’m so weak. She… she’s starving me.”

Alarm bells sounded in my head as what happened before I was knocked out cold came back to me in small slivers. “Starving you?”

Brenda’s laugh was bitter but depleted. “That’s one way it’s done when you want a vampire dead. Surely…surely you know that. It’s a spell… She used a spell…”

Of course. Wanda told me what Heath and Arch had shared with her, about how a vampire was expunged if you crossed the clan or darkened their doorsteps with a scandal involving a human. Starvation was only one of the ways they went about punishing you for a misdeed they perceived threatening to the strength of the clan.

And I heard it was ugly-painful, creating a hunger so desperate, so raw, it ate you from the inside out.

Shit.

We had to get out of here.

“Where are we?” I asked into the darkness, my own voice sounding groggy to my ears. “Do you know?”

Brenda didn’t answer for a few moments before she moaned. “I… I don’t know. She took me from the castle. One minute I wasalone in my room, the next…poof, I w-was here where it’s dark a-and cold.”

Cold? She could feel the cold? I didn’t know fuck all about what happened when you actually died as a vampire, but that she could feel the temperature scared the shit out of me.

“Brenda.” I tried to keep the alarm out of my voice, but she had to wake up and I had to find a way to feed her. I wasn’t sure exactly when she’d been kidnapped, but it couldn’t have been that long. “Listen to me, stay awake. Do you hear me? You have to stay awake until I can get free.”

I strained to figure out where her voice was coming from, but it was GD dark.

She laughed again, more bitter than before, while I continued to struggle to free myself. “Impossible,” she muttered.

I grunted, twisting and turning my wrists and my feet, only to feel that same hot sting crackling over my skin. “What’s impossible? Staying awake?”

“Free. Locked…the ties are locked w-with magic.”

Shit, shit, shit. “Who’s doing this? Do you know who it is?” Because I surethoughtI knew who was doing this, and when I was done with them, they’d pray for death.

Brenda huffed and shivered, a shiver I not only heard by the chatter of her teeth, but felt to my bones, settling deep in my veins like ice. “A witch. You were right. You were all right.”

Not at all helpful, but when I got my hands on this witch, she was going to fucking regret waking up today. “Do you know her, Brenda?”

Here’s the part where I fully expected her to say she did, and the admission was gonna piss me off because it was someone she’d “forgotten” to tell us about from her past.

But Brenda surprised me. “I-I don’t know who she is, but I smelled her…just like you girls said. She smells…different…”

Clenching my teeth together, I fought another fit of swearing, trying to keep my anger at bay. “Smell? You smelled her magic?”

“Yessss…” Then she gagged, a retching, gurgling sound coming from her throat.

“Listen to me, Brenda, keep your damn eyes open.Do notsleep, do you hear me? I’ll get us out of here, but do not sleep!” If she fell into a vampire coma, we were sunk. I can’t remember ever hearing about anyone who’d come back from that.

The dismal sounds she was making served to make me work harder to break free.

I couldn’t see a damn thing, even with my vampiric vision. It was all just black, but I began shifting my butt around, scooting along the hard wall I was pressed up against to see if I could bump into Brenda.

“Brenda!” I yelped. “Talk to me, andkeeptalking. I need to find you.”

When she didn’t respond, I yelled to her again. “Brenda! Wake the fuck up! Talk to me. Tell me what this witch looks like.”

Her chuckle was a dry rasp. “Beautiful. Not like you, but still beautiful.”

Inching closer to the sound of her voice, I demanded, “Describe her.”

As Brenda gave me the description in stilted words and sluggish sentences, I kept scooting around, trying to find her. While I listened to her tell me what this witch looked like, she sounded nothing like who I’d thought it was when I left Astrid’s house.

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