Forever, page 10
Then again, he hadn’t been particularly discreet in his penetration of the lab.
Out in the hall, there were more bodies—more guards in their dark uniforms and their still-holstered weapons. They’d swarmed like flies and been just as easy to swat.
On his way down here, there had been much conversation. Now? No voices. Just the whisper of the HVAC system, an occasional electronic beeping, and dripping.
The latter was from the guards. Lot of leaking from all the bullet holes.
Blade had wanted to stab them all, leave a dozen gold daggers behind. But he’d had to get to work. So he’d used his gun.
“Such a very, truly boring hall, really,” he said as he looked up to a camera pod mounted on the ceiling. “Time for some redecorating.”
Reaching around to the base of his pack, he took out his C4 charges and went for a wander, setting them at regular intervals of fourteen feet, waist height. When he got to the vent through which he’d gained access to the facility, he shook his head.
Those fucking humans were so stupid. They knew enough to wrap the cages in steel—but it never dawned on them to defend their precious torture chamber against infiltration from the ductwork. If they had thought to fortify their heating and cooling system with mesh? He’d have died as he dematerialized down here. But no. In their arrogance, they thought only in one dimension.
Funny, it had been the same in each of the labs. Then again, humans were the same.
Ducking his hand inside his jacket, he took out his cell phone. Each charge was set to the same frequency.
Before he triggered the light show, he paused as something occurred to him. In the last six months, since that fuckup on Deer Mountain, he had found only this one last lab. There appeared to be no others. God knew he had searched for them, using the same channels he always did, yet his endeavors had yielded nothing.
Had he come to the end of his journey? There were fewer vampires after the raids of four years ago, and those who were left were likely to be very, very careful with themselves: Harder to find, harder to capture. Maybe it wasn’t that humans were getting more ethical, they were just running out of subjects.
That was, of course, the most likely explanation. And one that was going to stick.
Blade glanced at his phone and thought about what was going to happen next. Ah, the satisfaction of ruining these bastards’ toy boxes of pain. And it was always a big time. Unfortunately, the aftermath was always rather anti-climactic, although certainly climate-tic. Invariably, the human news ascribed whatever damage there was to natural causes. Forest fires set by “lightning”? Sure, most of them were Mother Nature. But not all. And then there were other explanations the press came up with: Plane crashes in the mountains, UFO sightings, space junk crashing to earth? Sure, most of them were mechanical failure, weather balloons, and meteors.
But not all.
As he called up the detonation app, and started entering the code, he resolved that it was possible he’d accomplished his goal, eradicating the torture chambers that were established to further the dominance of the human race.
Curiously, the idea his work was done was deflating.
He just had that one up on Deer Mountain left to deal with.
And then he was finished ahvenging his kin.
In the split second before he dematerialized, he detonated his chain of explosives—and courtesy of his boom-booms, he was escorted out by a violent push of air and a toxic chemical stink.
He rather felt like his life’s work was ending.
And couldn’t decide how he felt about that.
ELEVEN
IT WAS ALL a blur.
As Xhex ran down the training center’s corridor, the gray cement walls, ceiling, and floor were like the interior of a gun’s muzzle, and her body was the bullet. And like any slug of lead, she felt nothing of the experience of propulsion, neither the acceleration nor its origins in her legs nor the slamming of her heart or burning in her lungs.
But she was aware of one thing.
She smelled the blood of her mate.
With panic her fuel and dread her tailwind, she followed the scent of disaster to the clinic’s operating room—and when she arrived at the closed door, she tripped and fell, scattering her limbs on the hard floor. Before anyone could help her up, she dragged herself back to her feet and pushed her way into the—
Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep.
Just as she entered, the unforgettable sound rang out, and her eyes flipped to the monitor behind John Matthew, who lay on the operating table covered with blood. The flat line was inching across the black rectangle at the bottom, taking over from the uneven peaks and valleys that represented his cardiac rhythm—
“Code!”
Xhex reached forward, as if she could do anything, but somebody held her back as Doc Jane jumped up on the table, straddled John’s hips, and began chest compressions. At his head, Ehlena slapped a mask on his face and started bagging him.
“Pushing epinephrine,” Manny announced at the IV site.
“What happened,” Xhex mumbled. “What’s happening…”
Without warning, her knees went loose under her and she went down onto the tile—and that was when everything came into heartbreaking focus. All of John’s clothes had been cut off, and there appeared to be nothing wrong on the bottom half of him. But what did that matter when he’d been shot in the heart.
“Thirty,” Ehlena said briskly.
“John?” Xhex called out as she watched his blood stain Doc Jane’s knees. “John, stay here. Don’t go…”
She looked at the monitor again. The numbers that represented his blood pressure were shockingly low, and that line remained flat.
“Sixty,” Ehlena announced.
Is time passing? Xhex thought dimly as she clasped her hands together and brought them up to the front of her throat.
Sweat beaded Doc Jane’s forehead as she continued with the chest compressions, her straight-arm, palm-over-palm pumping, replacing by force that which should have run by electrical impulse—
“Let’s go outside.”
The male voice was familiar and close by Xhex, but the recognition didn’t come and she didn’t glance at whoever it was. As another time stamp was called out, she was convinced that if she looked away, the resuscitation attempt would stop… as if her presence, her love for the powerful fighter who lay motionless in the center of all the effort, was the engine for the lifesaving attempt.
“One thirty,” Ehlena called out as she kept bagging.
“Xhex, leave them to work—we need to wait in the corridor.”
Who was talking, she thought numbly as she focused on Ehlena’s hand as it fisted… fisted… fisted… in the same kind of reliable rhythm as the pump, pump, pump up on John’s sternum.
Abruptly, her hearing sharpened and everything got too loud: Doc Jane had on a necklace with a charm that was sliding back and forth on the links, a chiming, metal-on-metal shift releasing as it swung. The bag had a strangely dry blow-and-suck rhythm. Blood was dripping off the far end of the table, from the pool that had formed under his ribs. And then there was the alarm from the monitor, and Manny’s heavy breathing as if he were joining Doc Jane’s effort in spirit.
Likewise, someone was gasping right behind her—
“Two minutes.”
At Ehlena’s announcement, everything stopped. The chest compressions. The bagging. The movement in the whole world.
Xhex’s eyes locked on the monitor, on that flat line. On those very bad numbers.
“Come on, we need to go—”
It was that male voice again, in her ear, and then strong hands gathered her from the floor and removed her from the room even though she pushed at them, fought against them.
Manny called out, “Pushing epi—”
As the door shut on its own, she knew that that antiseptic, tiled room, with its stainless steel instruments and medical equipment, was the last place John needed to die. He should be in her arms; she should be holding him.
Rehv’s face got right into hers. “Look at me—”
“What happened?” She gripped the front of his fine silk suit. “How was he injured!”
But like the details mattered anymore? Details only counted when you could do something with them to change the outcome.
She looked around at the faces that surrounded her, ones she knew so well, ones who had brought her here from the club, who had come for her in person, a lineup she knew she never, ever wanted to see.
“How did it happen—”
“He took a bullet for me.”
The anguished intrusion brought everyone’s head around. Tohr was leaning out of the exam room next door, blood running down his face and coating his bare chest with a red sheen.
“We were in the field,” he said hoarsely. “Chasing two shadows…”
Behind him, Xhex’s mahmen, Autumn, appeared, her pale hand resting on her mate’s bloody forearm. As her terrified eyes lifted, all Xhex could think of was…
Motherfucker. They were both going to lose the love of their life tonight if John died.
Tohr was never going to get over this, especially given how much he had already been through.
The Brother wiped his face with a trembling hand. “We ran right into a drug deal going wrong. The three humans were shooting at each other—and the second they saw us, we became their targets. I was hit twice, and then John jumped in front of me. He… he took the bullet that would have gone right into my head. He just leapt up and…”
As the words were choked off, the look of anguish that came over the male’s face galvanized Xhex. Before she knew she was going to move, she shoved Rehv out of the way and launched herself at the Brother, bringing him down to her level by the shoulders as she reached for her mahmen as well.
“Tohr—”
“Oh, God,” he moaned. “He took it to save me. The bullet…”
As the fighter dropped his head onto her shoulder, Xhex dragged her mahmen in close and had a strange moment of release—not from her terror, but certainly from her sense that, however much the Brotherhood and other fighters were hurting, the magnitude of her emotions separated her from everyone else: Now there was one other person who felt this tragedy as deeply as she did—
Autumn returned her embrace, the female’s arms reaching around as much as she could of her mate and her young.
Make that two people who felt this as deeply as she did.
That single bullet, which had been so anonymous when it had left its muzzle, had somehow managed to target and wipe out an entire family.
Xhex turned her head and looked to the OR’s door. She had an impulse to read John’s grid, but she was too scared. If she sensed nothing at all? She just wasn’t ready for that. And if she did read something? What if the energy she took from him was the tipping point that sent him over the edge?
No, she thought as she squeezed her eyes shut. Better to just wait.
As if her not knowing the outcome somehow forestalled what she feared was his fate. And by extension… her own.
* * *
As Rehv stood next to Xhex and her immediate family of only two, he shifted his mink duster to the crook of his elbow—and felt a raw hunger for revenge that nearly knocked him out of his ostrich loafers. The fact that he was off his dopamine sharpened everything inside of him, from his emotions to what he intended to do with them. And playing witness to the tight knot of suffering in front of him, the grief and fear, the powerlessness? Well, didn’t it all make him a downright vicious motherfucker.
There was a good, goddamn reason symphaths were isolated from others—
Down the corridor to the left, V stepped out of the office’s glass door. As the Brother strode toward the crowd that had formed outside the OR, he brought a cloud of aggression with him, his long strides, his black-leather-clad body, the expression on his face, all proclaiming him for the menace he was.
“I’ll be right back,” Rehv murmured to Xhex, even though he doubted she heard him.
Walking off, he met V halfway and thumbed over his shoulder. “Did you get any visions about this? Did you see something about John?”
V put a hand-rolled in between his front teeth. “No. But what I’m shown isn’t the universe’s obituary section. I’m not privy to everything—in case you’re looking for some kind of good outcome because I don’t know fuck all.”
“Oh… shit.” Because that was such a useful word in a shit-uation like this.
“Look”—up came the lighter—“John’s getting the best care. And I’d be in there with them if I hadn’t had half a bottle of Goose earlier this evening—”
“He’s coded.”
V froze in mid-flick of the thumb. “Again?”
“Fucking hell. He already has?”
“Twice.” The Brother followed through on the lighting, then talked through the exhale. “In the mobile surgical unit. And I think they’re also worried about stroke.”
Every time Rehv breathed in, the scent of John’s blood magnified in his sinuses until it drowned out everything else, from the Turkish tobacco V was smoking, to the bleach-based cleaner that had been used a couple of hours before to clean the clinic’s exam rooms, to the fabric softener that had been used on the robes Autumn was wearing.
Easing back against the concrete wall, he let his mink fall to the floor. There was no going up to the Colony now. Not until he knew how bad this was going to get.
As if flatline isn’t a rock bottom? he thought to himself.
“I hate waiting,” he muttered. “I’d rather just know. Life or death. Then we can deal with the aftermath, either way.”
V shook his head. “It’s the in-between that I worry about.”
“I thought Butch was the only Catholic we had.” More Brothers arrived, Phury and Z nodding as they joined the people waiting along the corridor. “And no offense, I could do without the purgatory reference considering what’s going on. Let’s not give Fate any ideas.”
“Not what I meant. What’s worse than death is alive, but only in a breathing kind of way.” Vishous took another drag and then went over to a trash bin to ash into the basin’s stainless steel tray top. “Strokes can be particularly devastating.”
Great, something else to worry about, Rehv thought.
“By the way,” V murmured, “now is not the time, but I have the answer to your inquiry.”
“Which one,” he said absently.
“The security feed from that alley with the dead vampire with no eyes—but it can wait.”
Rehv took a hold on the male’s forearm. “No, tell me now.”
V shrugged. “Unfortunately, I got nothing. Yeah, there were cameras, but they’d been torn off their mountings. The monitoring system’s file storage only had footage from just before the killing.”
So Xhex took care of her tracks beforehand. Probably because she knew that V would get the feed.
“You did the right thing turning the body over to us,” V continued. “We were able to ID him, get in touch with his family. We kept the remains at the garage, in the morgue there.”
Rehv lifted an eyebrow. “Didn’t know you had one at that site.”
“Sad necessity.” V frowned as his diamond eyes went back to the door of the OR. There was a pause; then he spoke quick, like he wanted a distraction. “Was there a scent at the scene when you got there? We did the cleanup just before dawn, and I couldn’t track anything of significance.”
Rehv shook his head. “Nothing. Whoever did it was wearing gloves and was fucking tidy about the work. Hell, maybe they were in a hazmat suit.”
He refocused on Xhex. She was nodding at her mahmen and drawing a hand through her short dark hair while she shifted her weight back and forth, a metronome of anxiety. Getting into her grid required no concentration. The damn thing was lit up like a Christmas tree, her emotions neon bright in their superstructure, their thought balloon hovering off to the side of her body.
The defect was still there, the graph-like squares collapsing in so that some of them, many of them, were no longer three-dimensional.
And this tragedy was going to finish the job.
“So you think it’s her,” V said softly as he exhaled. “You think Xhex took out one of Basque’s illustrious patrons.”
“Maybe.”
“Okay, that’s a yes.” More silence. “But if she did, she had her reasons. You know how shit goes down at clubs better than anyone else. Problems need to be dealt with.”
If only he thought she did it to keep the peace. “Yeah.”
And now if John died? If she lost her mate, it would be a tragedy that was going to wipe out everyone, especially her. If John survived? Then she was going to get caught up in the stress of helping the male recover.
Then again, at least he’d know where she was.
On that note, no one was leaving the mountain tonight—when it came to the Brotherhood and the fighters, that was.
In the back of his mind, he pictured himself going down to Caldwell and finding the drug dealers who had gone lead shower on each other and caught a couple of vampires in the crosshairs. All he’d need was the address of that corner Tohr and John had come around. The territories in Caldie were delineated with precision and defended like the gold mines they were, so he’d just have to show up, search the memories of whoever was there—and take care of business the symphath way.
The problem? And it was a biggie: John Matthew was a Brother, and the Black Dagger Brotherhood would be the ones doing the ahvenging. It wasn’t just a matter of deference to their relationship to the victim; it was law, as in codified.
As a kindling fury nonetheless took root in Rehv’s blood, and the large muscles in his body spasmed like he was about to do something, he had to walk away from V and the others. The next thing he knew, he was in one of the vacant patient rooms. After pacing around, he went over to the hospital bed. With an exhale of disgust, he shoved his hand into the pocket of his double-breasted suit and took out a syringe and a little glass bottle with a rubber top. After he tossed his jacket onto the short stack of pillows, he unsheathed the needle, drew up a serving of self-control, and put the belly of the syringe between his front teeth. Rolling up his sleeve, he exposed the blue veins at the crook of his elbow, and he didn’t waste any time. He injected the dopamine directly into his body’s highway system.
