A Valley of Darkness (A Shade of Vampire #52)(5)

Another nurse came in, with fresh bandages and a cup of Mara blood. She pulled Minah’s covers aside, then checked her temperature again. We all kept our eyes on the Iman girl as she frowned and struggled to remember.

“One… One of the screws on a hinge was loose,” Minah continued. “I pushed it out, and… I managed to get out. I was trying to get out of the gorge when something cut my leg. It slashed my back… It growled, and I saw its red eyes… It was a daemon… More were coming… I was in so much pain. I started running and screaming… Then… Then I saw you…”

She looked at Hansa, tears streaming down her cheeks.

“‘Daemon’?” The succubus repeated the foreign name. “What is a daemon?”

“Were they the creatures we couldn’t see? Is that what you call them here?” I asked.

She started crying, her chest shuddering with each sob. The nurse gently touched her face.

“It’s okay, darling,” the Exiled Mara whispered. “You’re safe… It will be okay.”

Minah nodded once, then closed her eyes and went limp against her pillows.

“Minah.” Hansa raised her voice. “Minah!”

The nurse checked her pulse again, then looked up at us.

“She’s okay. She just passed out again,” she said.

“What are daemons?” Hansa didn’t have time or patience to spare. Neither did we, for that matter.

“I… I don’t know.” The nurse shrugged, genuinely confused. “I’ve never heard that name before.”

“So, none of you have ever seen these creatures before?” I asked incredulously.

“I swear, we have never laid eyes on a… daemon before,” the nurse insisted as she changed Minah’s bandages, dripping Mara blood over the still-open cuts on the girl’s legs before covering them with clean strips of white fabric. “This girl doesn’t look familiar either. Who knows what creatures exist in the Imen’s folklore? Maybe she referred to her attackers by some old wives’ tale name… We’ve never heard the term before, I’m sure of it.”

Hansa grunted, then walked over to one of the windows, one hand resting on her hip. She ran the other through her long, curly black hair.

“When do you think she’ll wake up again?” she asked, her gaze fixed on the view outside.

“I honestly don’t know… It could be within the hour or later tonight,” the nurse replied. “She’s lost a lot of blood, and her biology is inherently inferior to ours. It takes much longer for the Imen to recover, even if we pump them full of healing blood and potions. We’ll keep monitoring her, of course.”

The nurse then covered Minah with the bedclothes again, took the used bandages, and left the room. Hansa stared at the door as it closed behind her, her lips pursed.

“Does anybody else have this nagging feeling that Minah mentioned daemons as if the nurse might actually know what they were?” she murmured, then glanced at the Iman girl.

“What are you trying to say?” Harper asked.

“I can’t be the only one here.” Hansa raised an eyebrow.

“No, I got the same feeling,” Jax said.

“Me too.” Heron raised a hand. “I didn’t think to check out the nurse’s eyes while she was next to Minah. She might’ve mind-bent her back to sleep, but I won’t be able to tell until Minah wakes up again.”

“Whoa, that’s a bit extreme,” Hansa replied, then scoffed, as if fighting a battle between two sides in her mind. “Or maybe not. Maybe they are hiding something. Maybe they do know what the daemons are…”

“I wouldn’t put it past them, especially not with how ‘protective’ Caspian has been. His ominous warnings could also easily be interpreted as veiled threats,” Harper mused.

“But they called us here because they need our help.” I frowned, not sure what to believe at this point.

“Not denying that,” Harper said. “Not at all. I’m just thinking that they might know more about what’s going on than they’re telling us. Maybe it’s something they’re ashamed of, for example.”

“It’s easy to make assumptions,” Hansa interrupted. “But we need accurate assessments. We need to investigate this further.”

“Okay, so where do we start?” I asked.

“We could look into the Mara Lords,” Harper said, the corner of her mouth twitching. “I’d be happy to find out more about them. They bug me. House Kifo, in particular. Caspian. He’s hiding something. I’m willing to bet my motorcycle on it.”

That statement made me gasp. Harper’s cruiser was her baby. She’d spent a couple of months on the California coastline, and had come back with a custom-made motorcycle, a beautiful model she loved taking out for a ride once a week. If she was confident enough to put the bike up in a wager, it meant she was onto something.

“Fine,” Jax replied. “Then Harper can go to the city library and start digging through their family registries and archives.”

“Wait… That’s not what I meant.” Harper looked befuddled. “I wasn’t talking about research.”

“I know, you were talking about snooping on them, and that’s not a good idea,” Jax shot back. “You’re doing research. You’re not going to spy on Caspian and get yourself in trouble. I’m sure you’ll find all the information you need in those archives.”