Page 20 of Even Vampires Bleed
Couldn’t have waited another minute, Elhyor, so I could break a tooth or two?
“Pierre, can you get men ready? Angie has a mission for them,” I hear Elhyor from the other side.
Pierre doesn’t turn on the speaker, and is listening through his earpiece. So, I don’t think Léandre can actually hear what Elhyor just said.
“How many and where?” Pierre asks, and I immediately hear the change in his tone.
He’s going to get all butthurt that I knew before him and that he didn’t start the preparations becauseIwas the one who told him.
“Pierre? It’s Angie. Luc should already have a list of castles to visit. Send teams of two in their shifted forms there. It’s a recon mission only. No one tries anything. They go in; they search everything; they either report or come back. But they will not engage.”
It’s funny to hear Angie give the order, because I can see a nerve tick at the corner of Pierre’s mouth. He doesn’t like that very much. Angie might have proven herself to be one of the most deadly warriors, but she’s still a bird and that must grate him a bit.
Still, he keeps an even tone when he answers her, as if it wasn’t surprising for her to be the one commanding him.
I’ll give him that. He’s good at sounding collected.
“Okay,” he says through the holo. “Any idea how long we let them search?”
“A couple days, just to be sure that we don’t miss any movement. If there are dungeons, there will be guards, too, so it’s going to be easy to spot. If there are guards, it might be a good thing if the team stays a bit longer so they can find out where the dungeons are.”
“Got it,” Pierre says before he hangs up without giving her any more time.
This man needs to learn manners.
He turns to me with a saccharine smile.
“You’re not going.”
He sounds final.
Well, Brice is my dad. He’s Elhyor’s best friend and second in command. If Pierre thinks his decision is final, we’re going to see what Elhyor thinks of that.
11
Cassiopé
It turns out that Pierre’s decision was indeed final.
But not for the reason he would have deemed right.
No.
Elhyor doesn’t think I shouldn’t go because I’m not good enough for that kind of mission.
No.
It’s actually the opposite.
I’m too important in the archive room since I read faster than anyone else to be spared on a random recon mission.
I tried to change his mind, to negotiate—I almost even tried to fake crying in front of him to let me go—but in the end, I relented. It would only prove to him that I’m not in the right state of mind to go.
And when he started explaining that it was just a lead and that, yes, we could be lucky, and it could be very well the way we discover where Michaël has hidden my dad and his team, but it could also be a dead end.
And what if it’s a dead end?
We would have lost two days we could have spent in the archives pouring over books, and it would mean two days that my dad would have to survive the torture he’s obviously going through—or twoextra days before we recover his body, but I don’t want to voice that possibility.
