Page 17 of Bishop's Flight
“Did he mention where she said she was from?”
“Overseas.” Pete grimaced. “He said she was a model for car shows, which is why I thought she wasn’t real. He said she traveled to a lot of shows because her dad owned the company or something.”
“Pete! How old was this girl?” Joy Anthony looked horrified. “Lucas is fifteen and so are you!”
“She wasn’t that much older.” He shrugged. “Like seventeen or something.”
Mrs. Anthony looked at Brigid, who shook her head silently. The woman took a deep breath and gripped her son’s hand. “Pete, tell Ms. Connor everything you know.”
Pete slumped in his seat again. “She said her name was Angel.”
Six
“Angel?” Carwyn scoffed. “Leave it to teenage boys to buy that one.”
“Hey, Angel is an actual name in America.” Lee piped up from across the room. “Especially in the southwest. It’s pretty common in Spanish.”
“This girl told Lucas she was born in Japan.”
“Okay, so that’s probably fake.”
Carwyn was staring at the picture. Heart-shaped face. Wide blue eyes with a bit of an angle. The young woman was a blend of East and West if he’d ever seen one. “I’d bet Central Asian, which is probably how Zasha recruited her. They were based in Siberia for centuries.”
“Do ya think she’s one of ours?”
Carwyn shook his head. “I don’t think so. Zasha knows Lucas grew up around vampires; he’d be suspicious of a vampire in ways he wouldn’t suspect a girl he saw as a teenager.”
“Agreed. I think she’s in thrall to Zasha somehow, and he used her to lure Lucas away.”
“Agnes said he disappeared from school.”
Lee asked, “How did his guards lose him?”
“The oldest trick in the book,” Carwyn said. “He snuck out a bathroom window.”
Lee muttered, “It’s a classic ’cause it works.” He stood. “Okay, I’m going to be useless in another ten minutes. Leave me a task list for the morning and I’ll get it done, but right now I gotta go pass out.”
“Thank you, Lee.” Carwyn walked across the room and sat next to Brigid, who was staring at the screens where Lee had frozen them.
“The idiocy of teenage boys,” Brigid muttered. “Did he think the guards were there to make him look cool?”
“I’m sure he thought his mothers were overprotective.” Carwyn stared at the girl’s picture. “His bad luck that a predator was waiting.”
But was the predator Zasha, Angel, or both?
It was their first night looking, but the clock was ticking in Carwyn’s brain like a persistent drumbeat. Lucas’s disappearance was in the front of his mind, and Agnes’s warning about Rose was lurking at the back.
Carwyn glanced at Brigid. “What are our next steps?”
“If the girl is human, she’ll have a trail. Uncovering it might narrow down where Lucas is being kept.” She was paging through a folder with all the screenshots of Angel that Lee had printed out from the casino footage. “It’s gonna be somewhere close enough that they’ve access to local papers but far enough away that they can’t sense him.” She glanced at Carwyn. “They’re earth vampires, both of them?”
“Correct.”
“If you were looking for a kid, how would you look?”
Carwyn put himself in Agnes and Rose’s shoes. “I’d do what they’ve done. Tunnel and search with my amnis. Look for clues in the human world. Try to pick up on their scent and energy.”
“But in a city like Las Vegas, with all this concrete and building, he could be anywhere.”
