Page 124 of Blood and Buttercups

“Hi,” I say breathlessly. “Glad you’re not dead.”

“Same.” He frowns. “What were you thinking going after Ethan without me?”

“I didn’t think you’d let me go, and I couldn’t figure out how else we were going to save Olivia.”

“Piper.” Noah begins to shake his head. “I?—”

“Can you two do this later?” Cassian asks. “We have a vampire to interrogate.”

“You have Ethan?” I whisper, my eyes widening.

“Yeah,” Noah says.

“How’d you get him out of the house?”

Noah watches as Max and Carlos hurry to help Cassian unload the vampire. “We drugged him and threw him in the back.”

“Drugged him? With what?”

“A sedative. His system will process it fairly quickly. It’ll knock a vampire out for a few hours, but we’re probably running out of time.”

And he’s not wrong. The men pull Ethan from the back, and though he’s very floppy, he’s awake.

He mumbles all kinds of incoherent threats, his eyes still mostly closed.

“What if someone saw you and alerted the cops?” I ask, getting a little panicky.

“One, no one saw us. Two, Ethan is an unregistered vampire. His people aren’t going to report him as missing.”

“Okay…” I say, but I’m still nervous as Noah and I follow the men inside.

I gape a little as we step into the foyer. Ethan has antler chandeliers. Cassian has chandeliers, too, but his are crystal.

The floors are hardwood, it smells faintly of orange oil, and natural light spills in from the massive windows.

Apparently, the daylight drug is working well.

“He admitted that he killed Kevin,” I tell Noah as we walk. “Or rather, he paid a guy to kill Kevin. The same guy he hired to kill you.”

“Ah,” Noah says darkly.

“What happened with that?”

“I knocked him out, but he woke up too quickly and got away while I was looking for Colin.”

It doesn’t make me feel great that an assassin with a grudge is out there, but we have other things to worry about right now—namely, a vampire who’s growing louder and angrier by the second.

Cassian leads us down a set of stairs that go to the basement. Or, judging from the dark stone walls, limited light, and general foreboding feeling, thedungeon.

I don’t see any cells, though, and there are shelves of bottles, so it might just be a wine cellar.

“Carlos, stay with Olivia and Max,” Cassian instructs when we reach what looks like a storage room. He flicks on the light—a single fixture with two fluorescent tube lights. It looks out of place in the almost medieval space.

Along the walls, there are shelves with books, random cardboard boxes, and more bottles, but at the center, there’s nothing but a folding chair.

“Piper, you come in with Noah and me,” Cassian says.

“I don’t know that I necessarily want to be involved?—”

---