Page 73 of Immortal By Morning
“Yes, but she had been an accessory after the fact, and she had willingly consumed her blood.”
Abril nodded in understanding, and thought being an accessory to a crime was punishable in human law too.
“Mortal law,” Lucian growled irritably. “We are human too. And while immortals have our own set of laws, and you mortals have yours, still, we are all human.”
“Okay, mortal laws,” she said with exasperation, and then pointed out, “You know, if you didn’t go around reading people’s minds, you’d be less likely to hear things that piss you off.”
When Lucian glowered at her, Crispin spoke up distracting him.
“Anyway, worried about retribution if the ‘vampire’ was found, she broke in to try to get the bones out and injured you when you woke up and started to scream.”
“Hey!” Abril turned on Diane. “You didn’thaveto hurt me. Why the hell didn’t you just take control of me?”
“She did not know she could,” Crispin said when Diane just sneered at her. “She assumed you were one of us too.”
Abril nodded in understanding and then said, “I’m guessing when that first attempt didn’t work out for her, she tried again when she saw you guys out digging up the bones in the tent and that’s why my memory is all buggered up during the time you guys were outside and why Lilith is—” Pausing, she turned accusingly on the woman. “What did you do to Lilith?”
“I sprinkled some animal tranquilizer on raw meat and gave it to her when she heard me and came to investigate,” Diane said abruptly, and assured her, “I would never hurt a dog. I’m not a monster.”
Abril looked briefly relieved and then eyed the woman with a sort of bewildered and horrified expression. Crispin supposed she was wondering over the fact that the woman thought that killing and torturing humans but not dogs meant she wasn’t a monster.
He himself had seen too much in his three thousand years to be surprised by anything people, mortal or immortal, said or did.
“Why was I outside when the men came back in?” Abril asked finally. “What happened that ended up with me standing witless on the edge of Gina’s property barefoot and without a coat?”
“You kept coming out of the kitchen,” Diane complained. “I wiped your memory and sent you back the first two times, but the men came in before I could do it the last time. I had to take control of you and cart you out of the house to the woods at the back of the property to get the couple of minutes I needed to do it again.”
Crispin swallowed the rage he was feeling toward the woman, speared his uncle with a look and said, “Someone else will have to take over from here,because—What the hell happened?” he snapped with sudden frustration. “I can see from her mind that Diane saw you all take off in the van leaving Abril and me here alone. She decided there would be no better time for it, and approached the house. She stopped outside the sliding glass doors of Abril’s office, which was the only room in the house where there was a light on. When she heard the movie playing...” Abril bit her lip at this news, worrying that Diane might have heard more than the movie playing, and wouldn’t that be embarrassing if it was true? But before she could get too distressed at the thought, Crispin continued, “So, she decided it would be safe to get in, get the skeletons out of the indoor garden, and get out.”
He paused briefly, raising his eyebrows at first Cassius and then Lucian and asked, “Where did you go? And why the hell would you not tell me you were leaving us here alone so that I could be on alert?”
“We only drove around to the end of the crescent, and we did not warn you because it was a last-minute plan type of thing,” Cassius said soothingly, and explained, “Lucian had sent me to Gina’s office to watch the side yard, but when I got there, I noticed that the lock on her sliding glass door had been tampered with and would no longer engage. I reported that to Lucian. He suspected that was due to the intruder of course, and she probably planned to enter that way. But he also worried that with so many of us here, she might hesitate. He thought that our leaving would embolden her. So, we all piled into the van, making a lot of racket in the driveway as we did in the hopes that she would notice, then we drove around the curve to the end of the crescent, parked on the grassy verge,and came back on foot through the woods behind the houses.
“She was entering Gina’s office through the sliding glass door when we reached the tree line at the back of the yard. Lucian wanted to let her get to the indoor garden before we tackled her. It is a wide-open area that we could surround her in, and he thought that would make it harder for her to escape. He sent me and Decker to follow her through Gina’s door so she could not flee back that way if she sensed anything was afoot, while he and Roberts, Bricker, and Anders were to enter through various doors around the house, so that we were coming from all directions and she would have no avenue of escape.”
“That might have worked,” Crispin acknowledged reluctantly.
“Yes, except it did not,” Cassius pointed out. “Decker and I had just entered Gina’s office when we heard Abril scream and the slam of a door closing. We rushed out into the hall. Diane saw us and turned to run toward the kitchen to escape us, but Bricker was coming that way, and then you opened Abril’s door. She lunged toward you, and we jumped her, and...” He shrugged. “Here we are.”
Silence fell over the room and Abril turned to look at Diane Foley again. The woman had been pretty much expressionless throughout the telling of her life and misdeeds, although anger had flashed out once or twice. There had not been even a hint of guilt or regret shown.
Some part of Abril felt bad for the woman. Diane had suffered a terrible tragedy in the loss of her son, and on top of that had been paralyzed herself. Thenshe had lost her husband too in a plan he’d instigated and that they’d hoped would give them back at least part of the life they’d enjoyed before that accident. That was worthy of pity.
But the feeling was immediately erased in the face of everything that had followed. The woman had killed twelve mortals in the first week after she’d been turned. No. Actually, she’d killed thirteen that first week if you included the husband. And while she hadn’t killed the unknown immortal, she’d been a party to it. Diane certainly would have known from the start that the “vampire” would have to be killed. While it had probably been self-defense in the end, Abril suspected the plan all along had been to murder the woman once they’d used her to change Diane. Surely, they hadn’t thought they’d be able to let the vampire live after using her like that? They must have known that the immortal wouldn’t have taken that lying down, and that the vampire would have killed them both for it if they didn’t kill her first.
No, Abril thought. She had to have realized it would end in the immortal’s death. On top of that there were all the deaths that had happened since at the hands of this woman; she couldn’t even guess how many the woman had killed over the last twenty years. Not kind, merciful deaths either. Dianewasa monster. She probably would have killed Abril too during that first break-in if the men hadn’t come running. Abril supposed she should be grateful that Diane had only knocked her out during that encounter, and taken control of her afterward when she had interrupted her digging in the garden.
She did find it odd though that Diane had no problem killing people, yet had merely drugged Lilith. She could have easily snapped the Labrador’s neck or something.
Letting her breath out on a small puff of air, she glanced to Lucian and asked, “What happens now?”
Lucian opened his mouth, and then paused as the driveway alarm sounded. Standing, he walked over and peered out the window, a satisfied smile flashing briefly across his face before he said, “Our backup has arrived.”
Thirty
Abril glanced up from her computer monitor to her office door when a soft knock sounded.
“Come in,” she called and waited to see who it would be. So far she’d had visits from Crispin’s aunt Eshe, who was married to his uncle Armand Argeneau, his cousin Nick’s wife, Jo, and a brief one with his aunt Basha... or was Basha a cousin too? Abril couldn’t remember. It was hard to keep everything straight when you suddenly had your boyfriend’s family unexpectedly thrust at you.
