Jo had a few messages from Hattie, the tech guru, that indicated she was able to pull some information off of the laptop they’d taken from the cave, but none of them were specific. “Hattie,” Jo said over the IAC. “What do you have for me?”“Well, I don’t have a lot of specific information, but I was able to find out that the IP address from the email. It’s actually from a town near where you guys intercepted that load of potential reserva de sange.”Jo’s breath caught in her throat as she remembered the car that had gone past them while they were standing by the side of the road. She had had the distinct feeling that that car was important, that whoever was in it had something to do with the Red Queen. “Do you have anything at all from Bulgaria?”“I do,” Hattie said, getting Jo’s pulse

The trip to Belogradchik was a long one. Lucas, Adrian, and their associates took their own vehicle, and since Elliott insisted on driving theirs, Jo sat in the back this time. Waking up with a bit of drool at the corner of her mouth, finding out she’d made herself comfortable on Zane’s shoulder was slightly embarrassing, but not as bad as it would’ve been if she’d been sitting by Scott and fallen asleep on his shoulder, but he was sitting in the passenger seat in front of her, thank goodness. She didn’t even remember unbuckling her seatbelt and scooting this close to Zane, but here she was.She wiped her mouth, gave Zane a wide-eyed apologetic look, which he brushed off, and looked out the window to see it was dark and snowing. Hard. “Where are we?”“Middle of a snowstorm,” Elliott said quickly. “If you’da been awake earlier, you’da seen the middle of a different s

“Jo?”The feeling of someone tapping her boot had her struggling to get her eyes open, but they were not being cooperative. When she finally managed to pry them open, it was dark outside again. But the snow had stopped.It was Elliott who had been attempting to wake her for who knows how long. She imagined it couldn’t have been too long because the kicking of her boot was still relatively gentle. She looked around and noted she was the only one still under the wind shield. How long had she been sitting there? How long had she been asleep?He offered her his hand and pulled her to standing. “Not that long,” he said, in answer to her last two questions that she hadn’t asked, she supposed. Most Vampires did need to sleep some, but all of Lucas’s friends were wide awake, as if they hadn’t been up all night. Even if all of them had been asleep in the vehicle on the way here--l

With Lucas’s help, it wasn’t difficult to find a house for the team to occupy, instead of trying to fit into a cramped hotel room. After the scouting mission was complete. Lucas called in even more Souled Vampires to assist them, so the extra space was even more useful.It took some of her teammates nearly a full day to arrive from the caves they’d been deployed to. Lucas left a few of his colleagues near Skyrty Palac to keep an eye on the situation. While they reported some cars coming in the day after the expedition, no one left, as far as they could tell. Jo was worried about tunnels they couldn’t see, and about portals, but she knew there was nothing they could do about that. If Holland stayed put until they had a chance to move in, there was a possibility they might actually have her this time.She didn’t let herself get too excited. It wasn’t as if things usually worked out for her the first tim

Most attacks came under cover of night, which didn’t make a whole lot of sense to Jo when she stopped to think about it since Vampires could see almost as well in the dark as they could in the light, but since most of them did sleep at least a few hours per day, it would make sense to try to catch the majority of them while they were snoozing. In this case, there were plenty of Vampires standing guard to detect them the moment they attempted to breach the wall in front of the palace or come down the mountainside.Hopefully, no one had detected their infiltration through the chimney, and they would be able to get inside of the palace before the attack began on the outside so that they’d have a fighting chance of locating Holland and taking her prisoner before she could escape. Jo had several pairs of the specially made silver handcuffs hanging from her belt that were meant to keep Vampires from escaping, though she had no idea if they would wo