Blake's Pursuit (Scanguards Vampires, #11)(30)

Lilo stepped aside to the kitchen island, where it was dry, and grabbed a fresh towel, still trying to salvage the book. Behind her, Nicholas took charge of the clean-up efforts.

“It dripped on the floor, too,” he said. “Adam, get me another towel.”

His brother voiced no protest, but Lilo wasn’t paying much attention to the boys now. Her focus was on saving the pages of Hannah’s appointment book, and preserving the writing inside. Carefully, she dabbed the sides of the book with the dry towel, hoping that the orange juice hadn’t damaged it too badly. When it looked like she’d soaked up all the liquid, she set the towel aside and opened the book in the middle.

Some of the liquid had bled about an inch into the book, but hadn’t done any damage to the writing. She leafed through the book and sighed in relief, before closing it again. That’s when she saw it: the padded back cover was starting to peel away. She turned the book over and suddenly noticed a bump underneath the cover. Delicately she peeled the damaged padding away.

A gasp escaped her.

There, affixed to the hard cover of the book, hidden underneath heavy padding, sat a thin USB stick. On its shiny casing, the letter H was written with a pink Sharpie.

“Hannah,” she murmured to herself. Only Hannah could have put it there.

Nicholas was suddenly standing next to her, staring curiously at the appointment book. She met his gaze, but didn’t say anything.

After a moment of silence, he looked over his shoulder. “Hey Adam, Sebastian, how about we play some videogames?” Then he ushered the two younger boys into the living room.

When the door fell shut behind them, Lilo took a deep breath. Maybe now she’d find out what had been troubling Hannah. For her friend to hide a USB stick in her appointment book, something serious had to be going on.

She reached for the USB stick. It was a little damp, so she dried it. Remembering Adam’s comment that she could use the laptop in the kitchen, she walked to the nook and sat down in front of the computer. She jiggled the mouse, and the screen woke up.

While she inserted the stick into a USB port, all kinds of ideas as to what data she would find coursed through her head. Had Hannah come across some government corruption or witnessed a crime? Had she come into possession of important documents that had inadvertently put her in danger? Was she involved with some kind of organized crime, like the Mafia, Russian or otherwise?

Finally, a window opened, displaying the contents of the memory stick: one single file. A video. She double-clicked it, then extended the picture to full screen.

She recognized the setting immediately. It was Hannah’s apartment. The angle at which the recording was taken suggested that the camera had been sitting on the bookshelf. Almost as if she’d had a baby-cam. Or a dog-cam. Hadn’t Hannah mentioned a few months earlier that she’d wanted to keep an eye on Frankenfurter during the day while she was out working? Had she bought a hidden camera to do just that?

Well, it didn’t matter. What mattered was what the video showed. There was no audio. Nevertheless, it was evident that the two men in Hannah’s living room were arguing. One of them was Ronny—she recognized him from the picture Blake had shown her. The other one stood with his back to the camera, preventing her from seeing his face.

Why had Hannah hidden this USB stick, when all it showed was her boyfriend arguing with another man? Without sound, she couldn’t even make out what they were fighting about. Maybe a lip reader could decipher some of the things Ronny was saying, but the other man’s replies remained unknown.

With a frustrated sigh, she focused on the video again, just as Ronny moved toward the door. The other man grabbed his shoulder, turning toward the camera and jerking him back. Now she could see both men’s faces. And she recognized the other man now: it was the man who’d attacked her in Hannah’s apartment. Ronny and he knew each other!

She had to tell Blake. In her mind, this practically confirmed that Ronny and this stranger had something to do with Hannah’s disappearance.

She was about to jump up, when something on the screen drew her attention back to it. The two men glared at each other, their eyes like red beams.

“What the—” She choked on her next word. What was happening in front of her eyes wasn’t possible. No, she had to be hallucinating. She blinked, trying to clear her vision. What she was seeing was impossible, was against all laws of nature.

Ronny and the assailant were turning into creatures that couldn’t possibly exist: creatures with red glaring eyes and sharp white fangs that they flashed at each other in a show of aggression.

Vampires.

No. It couldn’t be.

She moved the progress bar back a few seconds to the point where the stranger grabbed Ronny’s shoulder and watched the entire sequence again, this time focusing on any inconsistencies in the video that might indicate that it had been manipulated. But it was seamless. These weren’t two videos that had been spliced together, no, this was one continuous recording.

Which could only mean one thing: the two men in the video were vampires. Real vampires.

Her heart beat into her throat, and her hands began to shake. This was what Hannah had been afraid of. She’d found out that her boyfriend was a vampire. And to protect his secret, he had…

“Oh God,” she murmured, slamming her hand over her mouth to stop herself from crying out, when a gasp behind her made her whirl around, sending her heartbeat into the stratosphere.