THE RENTAL CAR rumbled as we drove deeper into the town a couple of hours from our usual home base near DC. Only a few lights still beamed into the night from windows on the buildings we passed.
Blaze pointed to a street up ahead. “Turn left there. Then three streets down, take another left on Elm.”
Julius followed his directions without complaint, like he had since Blaze had first started us on this quest. Garrison stretched out his legs where he was sitting next to me in the back seat.
“Are you planning on finally telling us exactly where we’re going?” he asked in his usual snarky tone.
“We’re almost there,” Blaze said.
Garrison took a deep breath in a rare show of self-control. I’d seen how frequently he and the hacker fell into squabbling, especially during extended trips like this one. “And where is there? What are we looking at in this place?”
Blaze tore his gaze away from the map on his phone, looking first at Julius. “You’ll see an old theatre in about a mile. Park across the street.” Then he glanced back at Garrison. “A theatre,” he repeated slowly, as if Garrison wouldn’t have understood him when he said it to Julius.
Garrison narrowed his eyes. “No shit, Sherlock. Why are we going to a theatre? I’m assuming it’s not to watch a show.”
Blaze smirked at Garrison. “Finally, you figured out the important question.”
“Finally, you’re getting your head out of your ass long enough to tell your crew what you’ve been working on for four days straight.”
Julius let out a huff and laid down the law in a firm tone. “What did you find, Blaze? We should know what we’re getting into.”
“Of course,” Blaze said, a little chagrinned now that the boss had stepped in. “I just figured it’d be easier to explain when we can see the place.” He motioned vaguely to the windshield. “This theater is the site of a top-secret event tonight, one I’m convinced is connected to the Blood Hunter’s shady business activities. He might even be there.”
I sat up straighter between Garrison and Talon, who’d been sitting silently, taking the conversation in. “How did you find it? I thought you hadn’t been able to dig up any leads.”
Blaze grinned. “I realized I was looking at the problem from the wrong angle. I was focused on the Blood Hunter himself and the people he works with, but that’s exactly what he’d expect—where he’ll have taken the most steps to cover up any evidence. He doesn’t give his victims quite the same consideration.”
Talon frowned. “What victims?”
“Well, I don’t know for sure. I was just guessing based on Dess’s experience. The Blood Hunter tattooed her with his emblem to claim her as his property when he had her kidnapped. There were other women at the party who had the same tattoo. So I’m assuming at least most of them didn’t come into his clutches by choice.”
My eyebrows jumped up. “You were able to trace some of them?”
“Yep.” He waggled his phone. “I told you I managed to take some pictures of the party while we were there. I ran my image recognition search on several of the women. Most of them didn’t turn up anything, which is suspicious in itself because regular people would be out on social media and so on. But it doesn’t help us. What does help is the two I did find matches for, both of them on the dark web. Both appearing in connection to an event I determined takes place at this theater once a month.”
“They work at the event?” I asked, puzzled.
Blaze rubbed his mouth. “I don’t think it’s quite like that. I couldn’t dig up much in the way of details, but I got the impression they were more like… incentives. I don’t know exactly what goes on at these get-togethers, but it doesn’t seem good. The event’s definitely not listed anywhere official. As far as the general public knows, that theater has been shut down for years.”
Incentives. My stomach turned. The Blood Hunter obviously had no qualms about stealing people away and using them as he saw fit—look what he’d done to me. But the women at the party hadn’t looked like they’d been trained to fight.
No, their purpose had appeared to be much more risqué than that.
Julius parked down the street from the theater, and I peered through the window at the dark building that loomed on the corner ahead of us. No lights at all gleamed in its windows, and only a few cars were parked on the street closer by. But as we watched, a sleek sedan cruised by and stopped just long enough for a thin man in a fitted suit to step out and disappear around back. Then the car drove on. I supposed it’d circle back around to pick him up when the event was over.
I wet my lips. “When we first met, when I was trying to figure out what happened at the household, you told me that they were involved in human trafficking. Was that a way to get under my skin, or did you actually have evidence?”
“That was legit,” Julius said. “I also told you we always research our targets before we agree to go through with a job.”
Blaze nodded. “The Blood Hunter’s people working out of that mansion had been up to a lot of scummy stuff.”
A shudder ran down my spine. I wasn’t sure I wanted to find out what this building had in store for us, but we couldn’t ignore the situation either. I dragged in a breath. “Okay. How are we getting in there to spy on this meeting?”
Blaze pointed toward the roof. “I looked up the blueprints. There’s an attic where they used to stash old equipment, enough room for a person to move around up there but not spacious enough that it’d be used to host a gathering. You should be able to get access from there without anyone seeing you. Of course, first you have to get up there…”
I gave a heave to pull myself up to the attic’s small window, which Talon had already reached and unlocked. As he helped me in, Julius hefted himself after me. I stretched my arms, working the aches of the climb out of them.
“Maybe we shouldn’t let Blaze come up with plans like ‘scale a three-story building with nothing but your bare hands’ when he gets to sit around in the car in the meantime,” I muttered.
“He had a point that grappling hooks might have made enough noise to draw attention,” Talon said.
Julius grunted as he eased into the room, setting his feet carefully on the floor so as not to make a sound. “Not the most fun I’ve ever had in my life, necessary as it might be.” He tapped his headset. “We’re in.”
Blaze and Garrison had stayed behind to stand guard in their various ways, Blaze monitoring nearby street cams with his computer and Garrison keeping watch with his eyes, ready to create a diversion if need be. The hacker also hoped to tap into the internet and cellular networks in the area to grab data from the devices of the events’ participants. Who knew what he might be able to find out from these people?
Still, I couldn’t help envying his cushy seat in the car while we crept through the dark, dusty attic that smelled like mothballs.
Faint music and periodic warbles of a voice filtered through the floor, too muted for me to make out any words. At least it’d have drowned out any small noises we’d made during our climb.
“Let’s see,” Julius murmured. He prowled through the space, avoiding the stacks of film reels and projection equipment. When he reached a trap door in the floor, he knelt and cautiously eased it up.
The voice got louder. “I hear thirty thousand. Can I get a thirty-five? Thirty-five K, anyone? There, thirty-five thousand. How about forty?”
It was an auction, I realized. But what were they auctioning?
Julius motioned Talon and me over. We slunk down the worn ladder beneath the trap door onto the theater’s small balcony.
No one was seated up here. It didn’t look like anyone had made use of the three rows of seats around us in ages. The velvet cushions were covered with a thick coat of dust.
Below us, maybe two dozen figures were clustered in the seats at the front of the theater, right by the screen. An image was projected there, smaller than a typical movie, only taking up about a quarter of the space. But I could still make it out just fine from here, and what I saw made my gut knot.
The video playing showed a young woman sitting on a chair, surrounded by concrete walls. She looked uninjured, but her eyes were wide with terror, her limbs posed stiffly around her lingerie-clad frame. Her gaze darted over her surroundings, only occasionally glancing at the camera.
And if we’d had any doubts about the Blood Hunter’s involvement in this production, his emblem showed like a logo in one corner of the recording.
Someone in the crowd raised a small sign. “We have forty thousand!” the voice said with a slight crackle of static. It was being projected over speakers—I couldn’t see the man who was talking. He must be staying out of view while he carried out this auction.
This auction for the woman in the video. The figures below us were bidding for the right to own her. The Blood Hunter was offering her up as merchandise.
I swallowed thickly, more nausea bubbling up inside me. The bidding ended at forty thousand, and the projector screen went briefly blank as someone cued up the next offering. I peered over the railing, but I couldn’t see any sign that the women were actually here.
There was nothing we could do to save them, not right now. My hands itched to strangle every rich asshole in the gathering below, but that wouldn’t help their victims. We needed to find out more so we could protect the women from their intended fates.
Was the Blood Hunter here? In the darkness, I couldn’t see anything other than the vague shapes of the people below. The voice didn’t sound like his. It’d probably make more sense if he kept his distance from the most horrendous crimes he orchestrated. Just like he had when he’d sent me after the Maliks.
Julius gripped the railing next to me. His voice came out raw. “This is sick. Fucking disgusting.”
And it got even more horrifying. Another video flashed onto the screen, and this one brought bile to the back of my throat.
It was a child. A literal child, no more than thirteen, her immature curves clothed in lingerie just like the woman before her. Her face was frozen in a rigid mask of fright. She clutched the edges of the stool she was perched on, looking ready to faint.
“The bidding on this fine specimen, guaranteed virginal and fully obedient, starts at twenty thousand,” the announcer said. “Do I have twenty?”
Oh, God. My jaw clenched so tight my cheeks started to ache. If I got my hands on the prick listing off her selling qualities and price, I’d tear him to pieces. Julius looked as if he was considering the same thing.
“We can’t let this happen,” I hissed under my breath.
Talon grasped my shoulder. “We can’t do anything yet.”
Julius nodded, though his expression was taut with anger. “If we charge in there, all we’ll do is temporarily break up the show. The Blood Hunter will find other buyers, and he’ll know we’re on to him. We find out everything we can and let Blaze do his thing too, and then we crush the bastards like the roaches they are.”
My fingers curled into my palms, but I knew he was right. Still, as the bidding raced up to seventy-five thousand before the auction finished, the need to take action quivered through every muscle.
The people seated below me were the worst, most vile parts of humanity. Lord only knew what horrible things they’d put these girls and women through. And the Blood Hunter held these “events” every month. How many victims had he sold over the years?
The Maliks had done sickening things. I would never think of them as anything other than monsters. But watching this show, a sense of certainty gripped me like never before.
What I’d thought when I’d confronted the Blood Hunter face to face for the first time was true. He was an even bigger monster than those I’d already taken down, and we still didn’t know how to topple him.
