Page 72 of Midnight Coven

Soon there was nothing at all apart from orange streetlamps at regular intervals and the occasional service stop, presumably for chauffeurs, delivery drivers, gardeners, and other hired hands. Nick guessed most of the actual residents of these places flew to their homes, landing on private airport runways or rooftop helipads.

That, or they rode in the back of armored luxury vehicles.

It took maybe ten more minutes to get to the perimeter gate.

Morley slowed as they reached a few lines of slow-blinking yellow bars, letting them know they would need to stop at the gate.

Here, they were still on a public road.

Nick knew once they passed through the security station, they’d be on the private road all of the residents maintained.

Luckily, the guards must have gotten the memo from Acharya.

Their IDs were enough to get them access, but they still had to go through all the security protocols required by the private company prior to access. Protocols at the gate included having their police car scanned for bombs, image captures of the two of them, Nick and Morley submitting to retinal scans, full-body and face scans, and having blood and hair samples taken from both of them.

That was after the chip and barcode scans verifying they were who they claimed.

Nick additionally had to provide them with a small amount of venom and a fang imprint, which struck him as pretty damned invasive, especially since his venom count was still replenishing after nearly all of it had been extracted in San Francisco.

Nick knew he would never have any idea what they did with that information, much less with the bio-samples they stole.

He wondered how the killer got out here.

If Nick had to guess, the Stranger had come in through the front door.

Gardening truck, perhaps. He could have hidden in the back of a loaded up landscaping vehicle, perhaps in a scan-proof box with organics to make it look like there were nothing but dead-metal tools inside. Or maybe he’d bitten one of the servants who worked here, ridden in with them in a similar way, perhaps when they returned from a weekend pass.

It’s what Nick would have done.

He would have piggybacked with someone who belonged there.

Luckily for predatory vampires, trace amounts of vampire venom in human blood didn’t show up in most lab tests. Certainly not in anything they could conduct in a hurry at a security station in the field, no matter how high-tech.

Not yet, anyway.

Morley turned to look at Nick as he pulled out of the security gate. “You think something happened here already. Don’t you?”

Nick hesitated.

Then he nodded reluctantly, frowning.

“Yes.”

“Why? Why do you think that?”

Nick thought about that. Again, he considered telling Morley what he’d seen while he’d been unconscious in the I.S.F. lab. But they were still in a police car. Every word Nick and Morely were saying was still being recorded by the NYPD and racial authority.

“I don’t know.” He exhaled. “A hunch. Combined with logic maybe. This guy seems pretty single-minded. If he let the babysitter go, he’s obviously targeting this family in particular. It seems unlikely he would stop with the ones who happened to be in town for a dinner. I mean… it’s only a hunch. But my guess is, he’d want to finish the job.”

“Wouldn’t he wait, then?” Morley said, frowning slightly. “Until we weren’t all over this? I don’t know. Until he was hungry?”

Nick grunted. There was no amusement in it.

“I don’t know. Like I said… it’s a hunch. I think those first killings were probably a message. An announcement maybe.”

When Nick took his eyes off the high walls on either side of the narrow, two-lane road, he found Morley staring at him.

“What do you think?” Nick asked. “Does my hunch feel off to you?”

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