Chapter 25
After dropping Sam off at
his office, Todd drove to the Oasis Hotel to confront Judy, Gregg, and Ryan. He
was determined to find out why the human vampires hadn’t bothered to
attend Diane’s party this year and why they’d conveniently disappeared every
time there was trouble in town.
The hotel seemed to be
deserted. People must have heard about the strange events in town and decided
to keep away. If things didn’t return to normal soon, then the hotel wouldn’t be
the only business closing its doors. He was afraid that he’d be living in a
ghost town before everything could be resolved.
He located the three human
vampires, sitting huddled together at the bar, whispering animatedly to each other. This did
not look promising. He interrupted their little meeting. “I was afraid that
something might have happened to you. None of you have ever missed a meeting before. A lot of important things have gone down that you needed to hear,” Todd said as he approached them.
“We’re sorry. Since the
number of tragic incidents in town has increased so dramatically over the past week, we’ve become
more afraid and much more careful,” said Gregg.
Gregg had never before
admitted to being sorry for anything he’d ever done in the past. This sudden
change in behavior had Todd concerned. He answered carefully, not wanting to antagonize
them any further. “If you were worried about your safety, you could have
approached me about your fears, as you’ve done in the past.”
“We didn’t know who to
trust any longer, so we decided to lay low,” Judy said. Todd knew that Judy had
just admitted that they’d even begun to doubt his own loyalty. This made him angry—considering the number of times that he’d saved
their measly lives. Sam wouldn’t be too happy about this turn of events either.
“What have we missed at the party?” Ryan asked.
“Wolf joined the meeting
of the elders as usual, but this
time I confronted him about his personal involvement with End House.
We discovered that he sat on the Board of Directors of the company that owned
the house. He admitted that he’d been the one who’d created The Dead. There
were other clues that led us to believe that Wolf was the one responsible for
all the disappearances and deaths in town.”
“What clues?” asked Judy.
“In the past, the gruesome
events at End House usually involved shape-shifting and illusions, which had led us early on to
suspect demons as the culprits, and not humans. However, after the party, we
searched the house and found computer controls and monitors in the attic,
leading us to believe that humans might be involved. This just added to our
confusion.
“Now we believe that the
computers were most probably designed to throw us off the scent of the real
perpetrators. They wanted us to believe that the whole game was being
orchestrated by humans, while in reality it was actually vampire-driven. Only
vampires—utilizing their own special powers—could have laid out such elaborate
traps in the basement. Humans can’t make water appear and disappear on a whim,
or have dangerous cages and saws materialize and vanish in an empty basement.
“There were clues in the
house pointing to Wolf as their leader. Wolves were portrayed all through End House: in all the
paintings on the walls and in the elaborate, engraved design on the ceiling of
the library. Wolf, being such a vain creature, hadn’t been able to stop himself
from leaving a stamp of his own on the house. We still don’t know how long he’d
been terrorizing and killing humans, since End House has a very long and sordid
history.”
Todd didn’t bother to
inform them about Hayden and his indecision over which side to be on.
“You’ve always been our
true leader, boss.” Todd suspected that Gregg’s statement was most probably
made from fear. Now that Wolf’s role had been uncovered, anyone who’d sided with
him in the past would also be under suspicion. Todd still couldn’t figure out
whose side they were really on, so he accepted Gregg’s declaration of support
with just as much honesty as it had been given.
Todd left the three
sitting at the hotel’s bar while he returned to town. He didn’t want to leave
Linda alone for too long: she and her friends had a habit of getting into too much trouble on their own.
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