The Viper, page 10
“Aren’t you going to check what’s inside there?” Callum murmured.
“I trust you.”
“You don’t know me.”
Those eyes narrowed. “You’re afraid of me. You’re not going to fuck this up because you’d don’t know what I’m capable of.”
Callum blinked. A couple of times. Then he shrugged. “I also don’t like blueberries, harmonicas, or cats. Is there anything else we need to discuss?”
“You said I won’t need a weapon.” The vampire looked down at the gun. “Why.”
No reason to go into that right now, he thought. “I’m coming with you, remember?” Callum put up his palm as those strange eyes refocused on him. “And it’s not your decision.”
“I’m not saving you.”
“I wasn’t aware I’d asked you to. And you know, you’re kind of a dick, no offense. Were you like this before?”
The vampire checked the Magnum’s cylinder. Gave things a spin.
And then he pointed the hand cannon right at Callum’s frontal lobe. On the business end of the trigger, there was absolutely no expression on the male’s face, the only outward sign that there was anything unusual going on a slight twitch of the right eyebrow.
“Boom,” the vampire whispered. As if he had overheard the conversation at the fire pit.
Justlikethat, the male dematerialized out of the cave.
Callum sagged and lowered his head. As he patted around for his cigarettes, his hands shook, and he ignored that. Even when he dropped the first coffin nail he took out of the pack.
Just as he lit up, Apex barreled into the den, looking like he was prepared to break up a bar fight—or a glory hole.
“Shut up,” Callum growled. “And he just left. We’ve got to go get him. Here.”
He tossed over something that spit out bullets. Who the fuck knew what it was. Then he took a couple guns for himself and prayed that what he grabbed in the way of extra ammo fit anything either of them had.
Stalking past the vampire, he knew he should have dematerialized right away, but he couldn’t concentrate. He needed some fresh air, along with the nicotine.
And as he rounded the cave’s passageway, he thought… he was going to lock up those fucking guns as soon as he got through what was left of this night.
Assuming he made it through, that was.
What the hell had the Gray Wolf brought back.
CHAPTER TWELVE
As Kane re-formed for the third time in a row, it was into a thicket of undergrowth, the vines and bushes clawing at the someone-else’s-pants he had on as his body once again became corporeal. Breathing in through his nose, he—
“Finally.”
Setting off in a northeasterly direction, he followed the scent of concrete, rot, and vampire, and with his target identified, he moved with a deadly purpose, crushing the weeds under the boots he’d borrowed, shoving branches out of his way instead of moving around them. As he went along, he had the strangest sense of bifurcation, as if he were watching himself from a distance even though it was his own legs churning, his own heart pumping, his own eyes scanning the environment for threats.
In the back of his mind, he knew something wasn’t right. But he kept going because he couldn’t worry about—
Dearest Virgin Scribe, he hoped he ran into guards.
With the thought occurring to him, he felt his fists curl up and his shoulders flex. The urge to fight was so natural, it didn’t even dawn on him that he had never before, not once, looked for conflict in anything. Especially of the physical kind.
If only he had felt like this the night Cordelhia had died.
“Focus,” he muttered as his head whipped to the left.
There was nothing but shadows that didn’t move, the ambient light of the night sky neither highlighting nor obscuring anything.
His other attempts to get downwind of the prison camp’s new location had been an inefficiency he’d had to tolerate. He hadn’t been conscious enough to track the location as he’d been driven away from the abandoned hospital, and walking directly up the road they’d escaped on was just volunteering for a bullet to the chest. The best he could do was triangulate through this scruffy forest of—
His head jerked to the left again, his instincts firing for a second time. He had the gun tucked into the waistband of the wolven’s pants, even though there was every reason for him to have it at the ready because if he was going to fight something, he wanted it to be close, and very much in person—
The wind changed direction and that was when he caught the scents of Apex and the wolven. They were on the property, but they were not near him, and that was fine.
Better that they stayed away.
The chain-link fence appeared about thirty feet later, and instead of dematerializing through it, he took some running strides and jumped onto the links, clawing a hold into them, yanking his body up. He made no attempt to be quiet about the ascent, the metal-on-metal clanging the kind of thing that surely functioned as an alarm.
Up and over, dropping down, landing on the boots in a crouch.
Now he took out the gun. This urge to punch and kick was all well and good, but not if it got him killed before he found Nadya.
The weight of the weapon was heavy in his hand, and he glanced down. “Magnum.”
The word came out of him, even though he had never seen a gun like this before.
“Callum.”
That was the name of that male with the white hair and the blue eyes. But how did he know this? He hadn’t read the wolven’s mind. Had he heard it spoken by somebody? Or was he phasing in and out of amnesia?
Now was not the time for this.
Jogging forward, he kept low and his eyes began to move in a pattern he recognized only because he didn’t control it any more than he did his arms and legs. His body, and all its components seemed like… something that had been aimed at the camp.
As a weapon would.
It was as this thought occurred that the great, gloomy monolith appeared on the horizon like something out of an Edgar Allan Poe story, the center core anchoring two enormous wings of open loggias. The exterior was discolored from what had to be a hundred years of weathering, gray stains drooling down from the slate roof, the brick appearing wrinkled as a result of the vertical stripes. The structure was still solid, however, nothing listing or crumbling, proof that back then builders had constructed things to last. He had overheard that humans had first used it as a hospital for tuberculosis patients, the afflicted set out on the five levels of porches to take the air, the dead removed out the back via a subterranean body chute. After that era, it had housed the insane for a time, and then later, the site had been abandoned.
Assessing the front entrance, with its steps rising to a set of inset doors of considerable, if faded, majesty, he quickly moved on to the banks of windows on either side. The sashes were all down, but the occasional pane was broken, not that it mattered. All he had to do was get close, confirm the interior of one of those rooms, and dematerialize in, as long as there was no steel mesh. Or he could go off to the wings on either side. The open porches would be safe to re-form on and he could navigate downward.
Or maybe the roof was where he needed to start.
Except then what. Once he was inside, he had no idea where to go. Or where to locate Nadya.
Reaching into the banks of his memory, he tried to remember where the guard who had taken him from his bed had dragged him to. His awareness at the time had been hazy, and he had passed out, only to come to at the terminal of a long corridor. There had been guards, and Apex and the others, and—
A rustle of leaves behind him had Kane pointing the gun at the sound before he looked over his shoulder.
Apex was standing there, still in his dirty, bloodstained prison togs, the tunic and loose pants so worn and thin they were nearly transparent. As the wind blew in, the ghostly garments moved against his body, turning him into a specter, and this seemed logical. As aware as Kane was, he hadn’t scented the male. Or sensed him.
If it had been a guard, with a weapon, Kane would probably be dead.
“We go right in the front.” Apex nodded at the grand portal. “The rear is where the drugs come and go, and that’s where the guards will have to be. We took a lot of them out on the way to the exit, so the head of those males is going to have to prioritize her staffing. Besides, this whole level is blocked off. We’ll be safer.”
Between one blink and the next, Kane had an image of a tall, powerfully built female in a black uniform. He had no recollection of her face or coloring particularly, but the muscled body he could recall in detail—and he would recognize her scent anywhere.
“I want to go in the back,” Kane said as his fangs descended. “Besides, if this floor gets us nowhere, why waste the daylight.”
“Because I know a way to sneak down and where to go from there. Plus this is the only way I’m going to take you in and you need me.”
“The hell I need you.”
“I know this fucking place like the back of my hand, and you’re lost in there. Unless you got up out of that bed and had a wander no one noticed?”
As their stares clashed, Kane had to remind himself that the male before him was an ally who was being reasonable. Not an enemy. And in the back of his mind, he recognized that Apex, for once, was not the unhinged one.
“Where’s the wolven?” Kane asked as a way to derail the focus. His own focus, that was.
Apex looked around the scruffy acreage surrounding the hospital. “He’s here somewhere.”
Kane started marching for the heavy double doors, like they were an adversary he could punch. And when his arm was snagged in a hard grip, he bared his fangs, and kept right on going.
Apex’s voice was sharp. “We don’t want to kick the hornet’s nest right away. That’s not going to help.”
“I thought you liked to fight.” Kane yanked free and reached for one of the tarnished brass handles. “And that you—”
The door opened wide.
The white-haired wolven with the powerful body was on the far side, looking like he was already tired of saving the day. “Welcome back, Kotter.”
Kane blinked. “Who?”
“Guess you don’t watch a lot of TV in this place.”
“How the hell did you get in?” Kane flared his nostrils to test the interior scents that were wafting out into the night. “Don’t answer that, I don’t really care—”
“Open window.”
“Aren’t you a genius.”
Kane barged past the wolven—Callum, his brain supplied—and did a quick survey of what appeared to be a lobby. The open area had a high ceiling and many overturned chairs. A reception area was off to one side, running down a wall, and as he looked at the slots for folders, and places for mail, he could sense the orderly way things had once been run.
“This way,” Apex said as he headed for one of the corridors that radiated off the central core.
Kane made sure he was ready with the heavy gun, and even though his body was roaring for a fight, he recognized that he had to control himself. He wanted to start shooting already, to bring all the guards to him, to pick them off one by one or in pairs, until the blood flowed on the threadbare and dusty carpeting.
But Nadya was the point of this.
And what was wrong with his thinking that he had to remind himself of that?
On that note, he let Apex lead them into an unremarkable room, one that had peeling ceiling paint, and a broken chair, and a window that looked out over the back parking lot.
“How is this going to help us?” Kane demanded.
“That is a dumbwaiter.” Apex pointed at a square panel that was inset into the wall. “The shaft leads down into one of the drug workrooms. I know the layout, so no, you dematerializing to there isn’t an option. You’ll re-form in the middle of a table and die.”
“I’m not staying here.”
“You want that nurse dead? Fine, fuck around. Go right ahead—what the fuck is wrong with you.”
Kane couldn’t understand what the problem was. Then he glanced down at the space between their bodies. A hand and forearm that he vaguely recognized as his own were holding a gun out, the muzzle pressing into Apex’s abs. The safety was not engaged. There was a bullet ready to go. And his finger was tense on the trigger.
Off to the side, the wolven watched, one hand markedly down at his side. Kane didn’t need to see anything directly to know that there was a gun in that grip, one that was just as big as the Magnum the guy had lent out.
“Who are you?” Apex whispered. “This is not you.”
Kane retracted his weapon. Then he turned it around and offered it to Apex, handle first. After the male took it, he blinked and put his free hand to his head. “I don’t know… who I am anymore.”
“That I believe,” Callum said grimly.
* * *
Down in the clinic, the guard who Nadya had triaged last, whose thigh she had stitched up as her last bit of needlework, was feeding from a female who had been brought in from the outside. It was clear they were mated, the pair’s eyes clinging to each other’s as the wrist was offered and accepted. Though they didn’t touch other than the connection of mouth to vein, they didn’t have to.
The love between them was obvious.
As soon as the female had been brought in, Nadya had stepped back into the forest of the shelves, and taken cover in the midst of the dusty left-behinds. The shellan had been like the others who had come to service their males, in this case blond, but in any event, fresh from the world beyond the prison, dressed in blue jeans and a dark sweater, her body and hair washed, her throat perfumed, her face made up.
On one level, none of the mates had been remarkable, their attractiveness of no particular note. And yet to Nadya, they were extraordinary, a reminder of something she had not seen or experienced in what felt like a lifetime.
Reaching up, she touched the hooding that covered her face. Then she shied away from thoughts of her own past—and instead focused on the other reason these females were of such fascination.
She was shocked that the guards were mated. That they were capable of warmth and relationship. Of common decency.
Based on their behavior in the camp, she would have assumed them all as cold and cruel as the female who led them. But seeing them look with tear-filled eyes at the females in their lives? It exposed sides to them she didn’t expect, and couldn’t understand: When the first shellan had come in, she had been struck by an urgent need to rush forth and save the female in some way, ensure that she was not there under duress, protect her.
Yet it had all been voluntary. More than voluntary.
Feeling like a voyeur, she looked away from the couple because they should be granted privacy, and noted that many of her patients were already recovering and some were even leaving. In the last four hours—going by the watches she’d taken off the guards’ wrists—three of the males had transitioned out of the clinic. Their healing was… incredible. Then again, it had been a long time since she had been around healthy vampires, who were properly fed both in terms of good food and blood.
And she supposed the fact that two of what she had classified as the most critically injured patients had been among the first out the door meant that her treatment decisions had been appropriate and successful.
Closing her eyes, she braced a hand against a shelf ladened with laundry soap flakes, the boxes of which had faded and were coated with dust. With a groan, she stretched her back and didn’t get far with it given the way her body was—
“Come with me.”
Jerking to attention, she looked over her shoulder. A guard had marched right up to her, looming with aggression in his black uniform and all his weapons. She didn’t recognize him specifically, but there were so many kitted out in the same clothes, with the same short haircut, and the same sharp stare, that they were interchangeable.
Nadya faced the male. “I can’t leave the clinic. I have patients—”
He took her arm in a hard grip and didn’t make any accommodation for her immobility, shoving her out of the storage room until she lost her footing and fell just past the doorway. Nadya cried out as her legs went loose under her, but he didn’t stop. He just grabbed whatever he could under her robing and kept going, dragging her down the concrete corridor.
Just as had been done with Kane. At the end.
“What did I do?” she demanded. “What have I—”
He jerked her and she caught a scream of pain in her throat. He wasn’t going to tell her, anyway. The head of the guards had given a command, and he was executing it, and maybe he didn’t even know.
“Would you treat your female this way?” she grunted.
“You’re not a female to me. You’re not anything.”
Nadya gasped, even though she shouldn’t be surprised. That really was the answer, wasn’t it.
When they got to the stairs at the end of the hallway, he set her back on her feet with such roughness that pain shot up her calves and into her knees. On the ascent, she did what she could to stay upright, gathering her robing so she didn’t trip, trying to stay on her feet because the alternative was so much more agonizing. It was hard to track what floor they were on, the landings a blur as the subterranean levels were climbed.
After what seemed like an hour of hiking, she was pushed through a door, and as she got a hazy look at what was ahead, cold fear replaced all other sensory inputs.
Down at the end of a long corridor of closed doors, a towering wall seemed like the only thing in the whole world. Added as part of the build-out that had occurred before the prison camp’s population had moved to the location, it was raw and unpainted, swaths of plaster marking the seams of unpainted gray panels. But none of that mattered.
It was the stains.
Brown stains had seeped into the matte gray, felt-like surface, and though the swaths of discoloration were varied in saturation and shape, there was a pattern. They were between sets of pegs… where the prisoners being punished or controlled were chained.
