Page 38 of Forced Bonds

Sal ignored her sob story and asked, “How did you learn about the book?”

“A witch,” she sniffed, clearly lying as her eyes looked away from Sal as she spoke. “I searched all over the world for a cure and finally found a witch who told me of the book. But the book had been stolen from them. They promised me I could get the answers on how to fix Tom if I helped them get the book.”

“They seem very interested in getting the book back,” Sal mused. I really hoped he knew she was lying.

“Very,” she replied with a fervent nod. “It contains vital spells for them and potions they need. They won’t tell me much, but I know they need it. They’ve sacrificed their own to get it back.” She then frowned, looking confused. “How did you know I was the one making the rogues?”

“Because I’m protecting the book,” he replied, taking her head clean off.

“Zar!” Benji protested. “We could’ve gotten more out of her!”

“She was minutes away from entering blood rage,” Sal spat, kicking her limp body away from us. “Either the witches refused to feed her, or she’d used too much of her own blood to create the rogues, no matter what reason, she was left on the brink of going feral.”

“Seriously?” I asked, eyeing the dead vampire on the ground. “They could’ve been killed themselves if that happened.”

Sal shrugged. “I doubt they’d let her live long enough, which is why we need to hurry.”

“You think they’re on the way to kill her off?” Benji asked, looking around the room in horror.

“That, or they’re done with her and won’t return here.”

“They’ve never been here,” I informed them, knowing that with certainty. “I smell no witches or magic.”

“Neither do I,” Sal sighed. “But I do smell rogues. Let’s take care of them and return to the hotel. We need to find the witches after, but that likely won’t happen today with no leads.”

“How did you know her?” Benji asked, pointing to her corpse.

“She was working on becoming a member of my coven a few hundred years back. She got rejected because of Tom.”

“What did Tom do?” I asked, thinking there couldn’t be much a human could do to offend a vampire, or at least not much a sane human could do.

“Tom tried to seduce Altaur into transitioning him. He thought that was what Gabriella had done when she bit him but instead he woke up tied to the vampire forever. He’d never wanted her. He just wanted to become a vampire. I doubt Gabriella ever realized the truth,” Sal explained, heading for the hallway. “You might need to shift for the next part. I sense around fifty newly turned rogues.”

“Is that why she was so close to going feral? She’d turned them all today?” Benji asked, taking my clothes as I stripped.

“Perhaps,” Sal mused. “What I’m wondering is how they can keep making so many rogues without regular vampires in the mix.”

That was something I’d wondered about as well. It was a fifty-fifty chance most of the time if a vampire turned rogue or regular, and that was if we dismissed the thirty percent chance of not surviving at all. Many didn’t. Also… “How could they even get this many people here without notice?”

“Another question I would like the answer to,” Sal said, gesturing for me to get on with it. I just smirked and shifted, my black wolf taking over once again. I could smell everything with clarity and moved to walk in front, guiding us to the rogues.

“I smell mud and damp ground, a scent that feels foreign here,” I informed them, sniffing around the hallway. Yes, it was definitely damp earth, like a muddied forest ground, or similar.

“Maybe a basement?” Benji supplied, looking cute with my clothes around his neck and waist. He needed both hands to shoot and none of us had thought about bringing a backpack with us.

“Could be,” Sal said. “I mostly just smell the rogues. No humans, though, so she must’ve turned all of them.”

“But then again, those who didn’t survive, couldn’t she just feed from them?” Benji asked.

“I have a small theory,” Sal began. “Maybe she couldn’t feed at all now that Tom was turned. I can’t feed from anyone other than you two, if you were turned, I couldn’t feed anymore, at all.”

“You think she tried feeding from him after he was turned?” Benji asked.

“I think the reason for her creating so many rogues and not regular vampires, is simply because she’d fed from a rogue, Tom. That’s my only theory on how this would work otherwise. The witches wouldn’t trust her to be this hungry if they were around her unless they were sure she couldn’t feed from them.”

“That doesn’t explain why she was ready to eat me,” Benji muttered.

“Actually, it does,” I said. “You’re a bonded human so you likely smell similar to what Tom did and her response was instant. If she was so close to going feral with hunger, she might have acted on instinct alone.”