Knowing that Brandon was standing on the other side of the door waiting for me was always a comfort, but as soon as I settled into my trance, I had the feeling this was going to be different, more intense.
The stars reached out to me like they always did as I felt myself fade away. It seemed like I should save the most hazardous task for last, so I pushed Holland off and honed in on the situation in Houston. All of the Vampires that had been present during the hunt were dead now, obviously, but I hoped I could get some sort of a read on what had taken place from other Vampires in the area. The chatter was mostly about how violated the Compliant Vampires were feeling, that they didn’t understand why they were being targeted when they hadn’t done anything wrong, and I had to agree with them to an extent. But some who were claiming innocence held secrets in their minds, ones no one had been able to access until I walked in. So when my sister and Aaron had declared total annihilation, vowing to wipe out every Vampire on Earth, it was hard for me to feel too sorry for most of them. All of them had something they wanted to hide, it seemed, even the mostly compliant ones.
Talk of the crocodile wasn’t exact, but listening in to various conversations, I gained enough insight to determine that Holland was able to lend her power to any Vampire any time anywhere, if she wanted to. In this particular instance, it seemed like she’d decided on a crocodile because that’s what one might expect to encounter in a big city sewer system—if one watched a lot of horror movies and tended to be afraid of practically everything. So she’d turned one of her pals into a ten foot long crocodile that was practically impossible to kill. Cool. I couldn’t wait to see what she dreamt up next.... At least now I knew that she could do whatever she wanted to, and time and distance didn’t seem to be a factor.
But signals were involved, the same sort she was using to block the ones coming from the trackers many Vampires had implanted to let us know their location. So, if she couldn’t get a signal to the Vampire in question, she wouldn’t be able to make them shift. That was good to know. I’d had lots of success blocking signals in the past. Maybe I could do it with this particular type of signal as well.
Hines was next on my list because I thought it would be quick. Turns out I was right. He was in his lab working on his concoction. “Krypton...” he was muttering to himself until he realized I was there, and then he clamped up really quickly. I had no idea what that meant, other than it being the planet Superman hailed from, but I made a note of it to let Jamie know. The fact that Hines was still working made me think he wasn’t there yet. I moved on.
Spittle. This was harder. I had to go deeper. Not only did I have to force myself through the open doorways of his mind, I had to get a location. Walking into Spittle’s brain was sort of like walking into a club where bikers hang out and everyone wants to punch everyone in the face. It was dark, hostile, and smelled really bad. He knew I was there as soon as I popped in, but he wasn’t able to force me out. Really, only Holland could do that. He did his best to not think about anything, but it didn’t work. I was able to access his memories as well as get a visual as to where he was standing.
He’d traveled a few hours away, but it was broken up over weeks, and it was hard for me to judge how far he’d gone. I saw him stopping at one location or another, usually underground, staying with other Vampires, often the others who’d been moving this direction before Holland’s plan went awry. Sometimes he pretended to be human and stayed at trashy motels. But now I saw him standing in the cellar of a large home. I got the sense it was old, and there were at least two stories worth of space above him. He tried to force me out, but I looked around and noted the dirt floor, the hand-hewn beams that held up the ceiling. Whatever this place was, it wasn’t anything built this century.
I dug further into Spittle’s memories and saw him approaching the home at night, recently. It was a white house, maybe a Queen Anne, though it was hard to tell in the dim light and from the proximity at which he’d looked at the structure. I could tell it was out in the countryside, and in the background I could hear what sounded like a fairly large body of water moving rapidly.
I glimpsed a sign from somewhere along his journey and read the words Civil War and Battle of Lexington. At first, I was confused. I know my history well enough to remember that there was a battle during the Revolutionary War in Lexington, Massachusetts, but I didn’t think he’d gone that far. I decided I had enough information to figure out where he was and planted the idea in his head that I thought he’d traveled to the East Coast. Let him get comfortable.
Numbers—I needed to know how many creatures were with him. This was harder because he didn’t want me to know. But I felt a split in his memory, a departure of some sort, and I knew he didn’t have the same amount of henchmen with him as he’d had when he left here. I felt out in the space around him and encountered at least five, maybe six, distinct trains of thought. I continued to search, trying to see if there were more or if there was a possibility any of those minds were human, but I wasn’t able to find out anything else from him, so I moved on.