Graffiti-covered walls were replaced with smooth steel as we plummeted straight down at better than twenty miles an hour. My silver net briefly lifted from the velocity, only to crash back down onto me as we came to an abrupt stop a couple minutes later. Then the door swooshed open, revealing a huge room with dozens of employee workstations, 3-D security graphics of the surrounding wildlife area as well as this complex, and helmeted guards patrolling around like Storm Troopers.
Marie Laveau’s underground meeting room had nothing on Madigan’s top secret testing facility.
“Take Specimen A1 to Cell Eight,” Madigan’s hated voice barked.
I looked around but didn’t see him, and there had been a tinny quality to his voice. Must be giving orders via intercom. Once again, I kicked myself for not killing him when I had the chance, but I’d rectify that at my next opportunity. Then I was wheeled out of what I guessed was the command center and taken down a long hallway. My armed escorts’ boots clicked in staccato rhythms on the tile floor as they guided me through two rights and a left before bringing me to the entrance of what looked like a prison hospital wing.
“Stop for scanning,” a guard said in a bored tone.
He also wore a full visor helmet, but his didn’t emit the thought-scrambling white noise that my captors’ gear did. Come to notice, neither did any of the other helmeted guards here. Must be elite technology that only the tactical units had.
Then the lasers surrounding my cart disappeared, and my entourage obediently stayed still as blue lines appeared in grid format over us. The guard looked at his computer screen, and his head snapped up.
“Something’s in the cart with her.”
“Dead vampire,” one of my escorts responded.
The words hurt so much, it took me a second to register the other guard’s response.
“No, something with a heartbeat.”
Confusion threaded through my pain. My heart had stopped beating hours ago—
With a squeak, something small and furry leapt out between the holes in the silver net. Two of my hardened guards actually jumped back while a third tried—and failed—to stomp on the critter, which outran him, then disappeared underneath a nearby door.
“Fuckin’ rat,” the guard muttered. Then his head swung my way.
“Why didn’t you kill it?” he demanded in an accusing tone.
“So it could shit in your soup,” I snapped.
Did he think I’d apologize for not being a good exterminator? Even if I hadn’t been too overwhelmed with grief to notice, why would I care if a rodent hitched a ride in the back of my kidnap wagon . . .
My eyes narrowed, but I ducked my head before the guards could catch something suspicious in my expression. That rat hadn’t just meandered onto the wrong vehicle. It had been inside the silver net, which would only be possible if it had hidden itself in Bones’s clothing during the brief interim between his death and our capture. And the odds that an animal would’ve stuck around after a firefight so intense that it killed a Master vampire were next to nothing.
“Lock the bitch up,” the guard snarled.
Those criss-crossing laser beams appeared around my cart again. I said nothing as I was wheeled through the doors of the unit and nothing still when the guard muttered about Maintenance needing to leave rat traps for that floor.
The traps wouldn’t work because this was no ordinary animal. In fact, what scurried under the door moments ago wasn’t an animal at all.
It was Denise.
Fifteen
Cells were arranged in a half circle facing the floor’s main work area, similar to how hospital rooms faced the nurses’ station in an intensive care unit. A thick wall of glass and a backup layer of lasers kept the occupants inside but left their actions visible to staff members. My cell was at the end of the curved row, which gave me a clear view into the others as I was wheeled past them. The first had an auburn-haired little girl in it, of all things, but then I passed a very familiar face.
Ever since I’d first met him, Tate had kept his brown hair in a buzz cut, a nod to his former days as a Special Forces sergeant. Now it was inches long, and the lower half of his face was shadowed by thick stubble, emphasizing his haunted expression. In the cell next to his was Juan, his mass of black hair now hanging past his shoulders while his skin looked pale even for a vampire. Dave was in the cell after his, looking equally unkempt and wan, but it was Cooper’s change in the second-to-last cell that made me gasp.
He’d lost thirty pounds at least, transforming his muscular frame into something gaunt. His normally tight haircut now resembled a seventies Afro, and his mocha skin held a sickly tinge of blue. It took me a second to realize it came from extensive bruising, with particular emphasis on his wrists, hands, and the crease inside his arms.
Needle sticks, I realized with a surge of fury. There was only one reason Madigan would bother with repeated blood draws or injections on a human. He was experimenting on Cooper.
My hands tightened on the edges of Bones’s bullet-riddled jacket. Wait for me, I silently repeated, feeling my anger grow. I have something to do before I see you again.
And with Denise here, now I had a better chance at succeeding.
Since none of my friends looked up when I passed, they must not be able to see out of their glass cells. My suspicion proved correct when one of my guards said, “Open Cell Eight” then my cart was unceremoniously pushed inside. When the glass door closed, all I saw was my own reflection underneath a pile of silver-and-razor netting.
“Didn’t you forget something?” I called out, knowing the employees had these rooms monitored for sound, too.
No response aside from the lasers on my cart disappearing. I sighed and leaned back against one of the poles, new tears slipping out as I glanced down at my husband’s body. From bones I rose and Bones I became, he’d said when he told me the story of how he chose his name after waking up as a vampire in a graveyard. That’s all he was now—bones—and the knowledge made my tears flow fast and red.
Then shock followed on the heels of pain as a click sounded in my triple sets of manacles and multiple knives stabbed me at once. When that pain began to slide through my entire body, searing my nerve endings as it went, I realized they weren’t knives.
They were needles injecting me with liquid silver.
I didn’t want to give the bastards monitoring me the satisfaction of hearing me scream, but after a few minutes, I did. Then I really didn’t want to give them the satisfaction of listening to me plead for it to stop, but after several agonizing hours of being burned from the inside out, I did that, too. No mercy came, however. Only mindlessness that led to darkness.
I woke up strapped to a table in a different room. Halogen lights dotted the ceiling with sunlike brightness, and I was so tightly restrained that my movements were limited to wiggling my toes, but to my relief, the horrific pain was gone.
“Ah, you’re awake,” a pleasant voice stated. “No doubt feeling better, too. We pulled the silver out of you by dissolving it with nitric acid, then flushing it out. It’s the only sure method when it penetrates that deeply.”
I tried to crane my head, but it was strapped down tight, too. Then I reached out with my mind. Most thoughts came through with the randomness of listening to the radio while scrolling through channels, but one person’s rang out clearly, and she was in this room.
Then a forty-something woman appeared in my limited line of sight, all but a few wisps of her ash blonde hair concealed by a medical cap. Her features were schooled into a polite mask, and her pale green gaze held the clinical detachment physicians everywhere had perfected.
Don’t bother trying mind control, she thought at me. I’m inoculated.
I tried it anyway. What did I have to lose? “Release me,” I said, putting all of my lagging power into my voice and gaze.
She d
idn’t even blink. “You only learn the hard way, don’t you?” she said out loud.
“Always,” I replied tightly. “Where’s my husband?”
A diffident shrug that landed her right after Madigan on my hit list. “The dead vampire? In the freezer.” With the rest of them, her thoughts finished.
I closed my eyes, a wave of grief crushing me beneath its weight. When I opened them, the female doctor had disappeared. I tested my restraints by applying pressure one limb at a time. Nothing. Then I tried heaving against them with everything I had, all at once.
Not even a budge. Madigan had spared no expense setting up a vampire-proof examination table.
“Now that you’ve gotten that out of your system,” the doctor’s voice said dryly, “how about some food?”
She returned to my line of sight, dangling a plasma bag with a long tube above me. I gave her fingers a brief, calculated look. Too far away to bite off. Clearly, I wasn’t her first captive.
Since I felt weaker than a baby vampire at sunrise, I caught the end of the tube between my lips and took a long sip. Then I grimaced.
“Wrong brand,” I said, spitting the tube out.
For the first time, the blonde showed a flicker of genuine emotion. Surprise. “You were drained almost dry to extract the silver in you. How can you refuse to eat based on mere blood type preference?”
She was right; I was so hungry that I ached, but for me, this wasn’t food.
“It’s not the type, it’s the source. I don’t drink human blood.”
Her forehead creased, deepening the fine lines already visible. “But you’re a vampire.”
“I’ll just call you Dr. Obvious,” I muttered.
At that, her expression cleared back into its serene clinical mask. “You’re not my first problem child. If you refuse the blood orally, it will be injected into you. Director Madigan has ordered extensive lab work once you’re rehydrated.”
I bet he had. “I’m sure Madigan told you I was a special case, but he doesn’t know as much as he thinks. Like the fact that I drink vampire blood, not human.”
I’d cracked that icily pleasant exterior again. Her eyes widened, and she parted her lips as though she were about to argue. Then she pursed them closed, nodding.
“I’ll inform the director. If he approves it, we’ll have some vampire blood brought to you.”
“Bagged like that won’t work,” I said, thinking fast. “It has to be straight from the vein of a vampire in my undead family tree, or I’ll starve, and Madigan won’t get his precious samples. Luckily for him, he has two vampires that my husband sired right here.”
I didn’t know when Denise would make her move, but if Tate or Juan were out of their cells when she did, so much the better. Now, to hope that Madigan believed my unusual diet requirements.
Dr. Obvious stared at me long enough to make the average person either squirm or blurt out a confession. I did neither. The worst thing in my life had already happened, so aside from grief and murderous rage, the rest of me was numb.
“I’ll let you know what the director says,” she finally replied. Then she disappeared from sight.
I closed my eyes against the glare of the overhead lights. I had nothing to do but wait, but soon, I’d be able to kill.
And once I was done with that, I’d be able to die.
About an hour later, several people came into the room, from the noise and sudden spate of thoughts. Again I tried to crane my neck and only succeeded in cutting the metal strap into my head deeply enough to draw blood. I didn’t have long to wait to find out who my visitors were, though. Two voices cut through the other sounds, both familiar, but only one welcome.
“Cat.”
An anguished gasp from Tate, following by Madigan’s “If this is a trick, you’ll regret it, Crawfield.”
“For the last time, it’s Russell,” I ground out.
Madigan made sure to lean over me so I could see every nuance of his smug expression before he spoke.
“Not anymore, but that’s your fault. You swore on Bones’s life that you’d come alone, and you didn’t.”
I’d heard the saying “to see red” pertaining to a sudden surge of rage, but had never experienced it before. Now I did, because it took several seconds before I looked at Madigan and saw anything except a vision of him covered in blood and dying in extreme pain. Then that faded, and I drew in a deep breath to calm myself, blowing it out slowly.
You’ll get free, and you’ll kill him, I swore. Until then, it would only help if Madigan felt smugly superior. Then he’d be more likely to make a mistake.
“Am I getting fed, or are you fine with not discovering all the new treasures in my blood?” I asked in an even tone.
Madigan moved back, snapping, “Put his wrist against her mouth,” to whichever guards had Tate.
“Can’t I get tilted upright first? Come on, I know you sprang for that feature with this extra fancy exam table.”
A self-satisfied grunt. “Certainly. No need for me to be a sore winner.”
The table I was strapped to slowly shifted into an upright position, giving me my first full view of the room. I glanced around, noting the location of the doors (two), number of guards (six), and weapons they carried (fully automatic M-4 carbines in their hands, backup semi-automatic pistols in their belts), all in less time than it took the average person to blink. Then my gaze settled on Tate.
He had the same neck-shoulder-arms manacles Madigan had restrained me with last night, with an additional set around his ankles that limited his pace to mere inches at a time. They probably had the liquid silver needles in them, too, which I had to admit, was a damn fine deterrent. Not only did it burn like having flamethrowers go off inside your body, it was one of the only things aside from death that could incapacitate a vampire. But the most upsetting thing about Tate was his gaze. If I hadn’t already resolved to free him and the others no matter what, seeing the tormented look there would have swayed me.
“Hey,” I said softly.
His mouth was set in a hard, straight line, but those dark blue eyes began to fill with colored tears.
“Oh, Cat, I’d rather never see you again than to see you here.”
I forced a smile because I couldn’t start to cry, too. Then I’d lose the spiderweb-thin control I had on my grief.
“I’m sure it’s not that bad. Madigan’s probably just misunderstood.”
Tate snorted in weary derision. “You don’t know the half of what he’s done.”
“You’re supposed to be feeding, not catching up,” Madigan said curtly. “Get to it, or he leaves.”
I tilted my head as much as I could, indicating my willingness to get started. Tate’s guards pushed him, and only his undead reflexes kept him from pitching forward with those ankle restraints. Then, with a flinty expression, he turned and wagged his hands at them.
“Unless you unstrap her or I suddenly grow three feet taller, she’ll have to feed from my neck, not my wrists.”
Madigan’s smile could’ve turned water into ice. “She stays restrained and so do you, so neck it is.”
Tate leaned in and his familiar scent overcame the odor of bleach, germicide, blood, and fear that this room stank of. When his neck brushed my mouth, hunger took over; powerful, demanding, and uncaring of how grief had shattered my will to live. Of their own accord, my fangs dug into his throat, releasing that luscious crimson liquid into my mouth.
As I swallowed, Tate’s lips grazed my ear. Then he spoke so low that none of the humans should have been able to hear him.
“If you get the chance, leave. Don’t come back for us.”
I didn’t respond. For one, my mouth was full, and for another, I couldn’t risk telling him about Denise. His neck restraint might have a microphone in addition to its other gadgets.
Then he whisp
ered something else that made my throat close off despite the conscienceless demand of my hunger.
“Is Bones really dead?”
I couldn’t speak now because if I did, it would come out in a wail of anguish. Instead, I nodded and forced myself to swallow. His blood felt like it was choking me the whole way down.
Tate’s sigh seemed to come from deep inside him. “I’m so sorry.”
I still didn’t respond. I couldn’t swallow anymore, either, and the few mouthfuls I’d consumed felt like they would come back up. Then, as if Bones’s spirit were whispering from beyond, I could almost hear him speak, and he sounded annoyed.
You want to kill the bastards, Kitten? You’ll need your strength, so quit whining and drink.
He was right. He’d almost always been right, and I’d so rarely listened. I would now, though. Mustering my resolve, I bit into Tate’s neck again, but I stared at Madigan as I swallowed.
You haven’t won. You just don’t know it yet.
Sixteen
They took Tate away after I’d drunk about a quart from him, but then brought him back after Madigan drained close to that out of me for his first rounds of tests. From Dr. Obvious’s thoughts, they were very excited over the preliminary results because my blood appeared to be compatible with ghoul DNA.
I’d wondered about that. When I was a half-breed, everyone knew I could’ve been turned into a ghoul and thus retained abilities from both species. That’s why the two races had almost gone to war because of me. Even as a full vampire, my heart still beat when I was under extreme duress, and my diet was anything but ordinary—two facts we’d kept secret so the ghoul nation would no longer consider me a cross-species threat.
If these tests were right, maybe I still was.
Speaking of war, where was Denise? It had been almost a day since she’d scurried under that doorway. She needed to hurry her furry ass up before Madigan started transmitting my blood results to other interested parties. What was she waiting for?