Mine, page 5
Symphath. That was what his kind were called.
With a grunt, Daniel pushed himself up on the pillows, and as he swept his hand over his head, it was a familiar gesture that reminded her of when he’d had such thick, beautiful hair.
“I would do it if I could—”
“Do what.” She crossed her arms over her chest. “You already said there’ll be no evidence at Gus’s—”
“—so Blade is where we have to go. My former boss is—”
“Totally untrustworthy. You said that yourself—”
“I tried calling him.” He nodded at the door as if he weren’t hearing her at all. “When you walked the medical types out and talked to them in the hall. He didn’t answer—maybe he killed that number.”
She thought about being in that cave up on the mountain, where Blade had been recovering after he’d been shot. The memory of Daniel walking in on them was not a good one.
“Lydia, if we want to help Gus, we need him.”
“Even if I could find that male, what makes you think he’ll help us—”
“He’s in love with you. He’ll do anything you ask him to.” As she opened her mouth, Daniel put his palm up and continued in a bleak tone. “I’m still sorry I was such an asshole when I saw the two of you together. I was wrong. Utterly wrong. And as for how dangerous he is, I know you can take care of yourself, especially up there with all those wolves protecting you. If there was another way… but we need everything we’ve got right now.”
Daniel’s defeat was in the lines of his face, the grooves at the sides of his mouth making him seem closer to eighty than twenty.
“I would do it myself, Lydia. If I could.”
“If C.P. Phalen’s squadron of guards can’t find anything, what makes you think Blade can?”
“I have a lead. I found it when I back-doored into the FBG server after that guard was killed on the front lawn here. Maybe it isn’t anything, but Blade will know. The bastard knows more than even I do about the hidden labs in this country—and who the fuck else would take someone like Gus.”
FBG. The Federal Bureau of Genetics. A supposed covert arm of the U.S. government tasked with protecting and defending the integrity of the human genome. Daniel’s former “employer.” Which in actuality had just been a front so Blade could go around bombing the underground labs that were just like C.P. Phalen’s.
Daniel had lied to her when he had first come into her life. But she had lied to him, too. And yes, two wrongs didn’t make a right, however they’d both had their reasons.
Lydia went over to the tall windows that overlooked the field that went all the way back to a forest line. Underneath her skin, the wolf in her stalked its cage of DNA, ready to run. Demanding freedom.
Daniel’s mission had been to destroy C.P. Phalen’s secret facility, but instead of getting to that goal, he had become a patient in it—and, for a time, the first person intended to test Vita-12b. But after so many conventional treatments had failed? Who needed another medication gauntlet, especially one that had never been in a human before.
Gus St. Claire had understood that, even better than Lydia had. The man had devoted his life’s work to trying to help patients like Daniel, as well as family members and loved ones like her, who were suffering alongside.
There was nothing she wouldn’t do for him.
“If there was something, anything else,” Daniel muttered, “I’d be pursuing it. Especially because Gus may already be dead. But that man believed in miracles, and there are times you have to engineer your own.”
Lydia looked over her shoulder. Her man seemed so frail as he lay there, his heavy-lidded eyes bloodshot, those too-bright cheeks now making her worried he had a fever—except surely all those medical degrees in white coats had checked that?
Had she seen them take his temperature?
God, she was tired of playing nurse.
On that note, if she left Daniel to go on some wild-goose chase, and he had an acute event—which they had been warned could happen at any moment either because of all the treatments he’d had or because of the fucking cancer—she would never forgive herself.
But if she didn’t go up the mountain and try to find Blade, she’d feel responsible for Gus’s death. Or at least complicit in it. And she would never forgive herself.
As she teetered, she heard Gus’s voice:
Call me anytime, my phone is always on.
The words came to her through the dualities of her exhaustion and panic—she couldn’t count the number of times he’d said that to them. And he’d meant it, too. The other thing that he’d always said?
Why didn’t you call me if you were this worried?
He had always put his patients first—
The coughing spell started as they all did, a little throat-clear that Daniel tried to hide. But like the most recent ones, the spasms in his lungs were a deadly locomotive that refused to be slowed down or derailed.
The hacking brought him up off the pillows, his hands punching into the mattress as he jacked himself forward and bent his knees to triangulate into a pose that gave his poor lungs the best chance to inhale fully. Desperate to breathe, his mouth opened wide and his eyes bulged as sweat broke out across his chest and forehead, his flush an ugly purple as he desperately attempted to haul oxygen in.
She grabbed a towel on the way to him, yanking it off the top of the bureau. Idiotically, she noted it was still damp from when they’d showered together earlier—
Too late. The blood speckles, bright as ink, marked up the covers underneath him.
As he grabbed the terrycloth, she lunged for the bedside table, knocking bottles of pills onto the floor as she went for the inhaler. Shoving it into his open mouth, she pushed hard on the cylinder, but he couldn’t breathe anything in—
“Work with me,” she said. “Calm yourself—work with me—”
Lydia had no idea what she was saying. No clue whether the medicine was getting into his bronchial tubes. No prayer left to offer up to anything or anybody. With tears spearing into her eyes, and her own chest turning into a block of ice-cold terror, she couldn’t do this anymore. She couldn’t live like this for one more day, one more night. She couldn’t bear to hear the staccato, snare drum beat of the cough—
The tide began to turn subtly, a little more air getting down and carrying the spray into Daniel’s throat. Then the coughing took a pause of a second. Then two. Then three… seconds.
“One more,” she said over the wheezing as she punched the top of the cylinder again. Even though she’d been told to only give him a single dose in a rescue situation.
Like anything had gotten into him, though?
When Daniel finally sagged in relief, his head dropping between his knobby knees, her own legs went out from under her and she sank down onto the floor at his bedside. With shaking hands, he moved the towel away from his lips.
There was so much red on it, the thing looked like it had been died.
Dyed, she corrected.
“I’m calling the doctors back to us,” she said as she reached for the phone. “Right now—”
Daniel grabbed her arm. Desperate eyes locked on her own. “Find Blade. Help Gus. It’s what he would do for you and me.”
SIX
The Black Dagger Brotherhood Mansion
Caldwell, New York
AS A CELL phone went off like a car alarm two feet from her head, Xhex, mated of the Black Dagger Brother John Matthew, had two thoughts: One, she was actually sleeping—and this was good news. Number two? If the fucker who was reaching out and trying to touch her was a telemarketer, she was going to reach through her fucking Samsung and let her fingers walk all over them.
Throwing her hand out into the darkness, her speed was better than her grab-accuracy, and instead of palming the Samsung, the thing went eight ball in the corner pocket.
Except she didn’t sleep next to a pool table, so it shot off into thin air.
“Sonofa—”
Beside her, her mate came alive, jumping out of the bed and landing buck naked in an attack crouch. In his dagger hand? A black, finely honed blade capable of gutting anything that lived and breathed. In the other, a nine millimeter, the laser sight of which was trained on the door that opened out into the hall. Then into the dim marble confines of the bathroom. Then at the panels of their walk-in closet.
“It’s okay,” she said as she stretched out her arm. “I just knocked the phone off trying to answer it.”
As if the Samsung didn’t want any of that smoke, it rang again to remind everybody why it was in the room—and the electronic bell was enough to get John off the boil. That black dagger slowly lowered as Xhex reached down to find…
In the dim light from the bathroom, her mate’s naked body was illuminated with a lover’s touch, his broad shoulders and tight pecs, his ribbed abs and winged hips, his heavy thighs and strong calves thrown into relief with shadows cast by the contours of his power and strength—
The third ring cattle-prodded her back into focus. Cursing, she promptly over-extended herself, slipped off the side of the mattress, and dropped from the waist-high antique bed frame. As gravity got greedy and snatched her in a hard hold, she tried to catch herself before she face-planted—
The electrical cord to the lamp somehow got tangled in her carpet fend-off, and she managed to pull the heavy crystal block and its hot-air-balloon-sized shade onto herself. Fortunately, the top half was what hit her top half, so things were cushioned. Unfortunately, her hips and legs followed.
It was like being in a car crash without the bumpers and the airbags.
As John willed the overhead fixture on, there was a blazing light, sure as if the Scribe Virgin were still around and had decided to check on all the commotion.
“Fuck…” Blinded, Xhex covered her eyes with the crook of her elbow. Which was easy to do considering she’d nearly knocked herself out with the damned thing. “And who the hell is calling us at this hour?”
It had to be, what, three in the afternoon? Fine and dandy if you were a human, an absolute ungodly interruption when you were a vampire.
As the fourth ring registered, and John Matthew came around the base of the bed, she pushed a hand under the inlaid three-drawer stand—and finally, her phone was ready to be found. Snagging the thing, she answered it on the way to her ear.
“What.” If this was some asshole talking about buying a piece of property she didn’t own, a car warranty she didn’t have, or school loans that she—“You better start talking or I will reverse-search this bitch and find you—”
The female voice was instantly recognizable. But the torrent of words that came through the connection was nearly indecipherable.
“Whoa, whoa—slow down. What…?”
Shoving herself up, Xhex leaned back against the horizontal rail of the bed frame. As John Matthew knelt beside her, she switched to speaker.
“You need to slow down,” she said to the phone. “What’s going on?”
In a tinny tone, Lydia Susi announced: “I need to get in touch with your brother.”
Xhex closed her eyes. The wolven might as well have asked to hold a grenade with the pin out in her palm.
“Mind if I ask why?” Or, more bluntly: Are you fucking insane?
The story rolled out as most drama did: A good guy in a bad situation with no better options. Except throwing Blade into anything other than a bonfire was guaranteed to make things go totally tits up.
“Lydia, I don’t know what to tell you.” Well, she had a list of dumb-idea expletives. But what was that thing—is it useful, is it kind? “Other than you need to look for another solution.”
As she tossed out the advice, she glanced at her hellren. When John Matthew motioned back and forth between them, she shook her head.
No way did they need to volunteer for the complications.
“Gus is our doctor.” The female cleared her throat. “But more than that, he’s a good man. He doesn’t deserve to be hurt or—worse. Please. Can you ask your brother to meet me up on the mountain?”
Xhex closed her eyes. “You don’t want to do this.”
“I agree. But none of us want to be in this situation, and the only thing that’s worse is sitting around, doing nothing.”
“I can respect that, but why would you think Blade can do—”
“He was Daniel’s boss. They used to work together, and Daniel has a lead that Blade may know what to do with.”
Xhex cursed under her breath. Fucking Blade. Of course shit was more entangled than she’d known.
“What exactly did Daniel used to do?” she asked grimly.
“He worked for what he thought was a clandestine arm of the U.S. government.”
And why hasn’t this come up before? Xhex wondered. But at least that was one question she could answer: Because her brother was a lying, manipulative, dangerous sack of shit. That was why. God only knew what he had done with a bunch of humans like Daniel Joseph at his disposal. The only thing she could be sure of was that it probably made money and definitely wasn’t a crocheting circle with an Etsy shop attached.
“Look,” she said, “it’s not my business to tell you what to do—”
“So please have him meet me—”
“—but my brother is no savior you want.”
“—up at the summit tonight.”
The two of them talked over each other, but ended at the same time, like a pair of dancers pirouetting around separately to harmonizing chords.
“You’re not safe around him.” Xhex did nothing to hide her don’t-be-a-dumbass tone. “And yeah, I know you’re a wolven, and I don’t doubt you’re deadly when you want to be, but he’s deadly all the time.”
“I’m not afraid of him.”
“You should be.”
“So is this a no?” the female demanded. “Are you telling me you won’t reach out to him?”
Xhex looked at her hellren’s chest and focused on the star-shaped pattern that marked his pec. The symbol of the Black Dagger Brotherhood was embedded in his flesh, the marking that was given to each Brother during induction somehow something he had been born with.
“Hello?” the wolven prompted. “Have you hung up on me?”
Xhex pictured her brother, from his gleaming black eyes to his coldly beautiful face to the black hair that was so like her own—
Her past rushed up at her, just like the floor had, and the impact was as pleasant as the rug burn on her shoulder: Instantly, she was back over twenty years before, bound and gagged, being dragged into a van up at the symphath colony. She hadn’t known where she was going to end up, but she’d been certain of three things: She was being punished. She was not going to survive this.
And her brother had been the one to lure her back to the Colony and turn her in to her family.
Blade’s face was the last thing she’d seen before the bag was put over her head, and there had been no emotion on it whatsoever. As if she’d been lower than a stranger. As if she had been a dog to be put down.
After that? Off to the lab she had gone. Where she’d been experimented on by humans… tortured, really—
“No,” she blurted roughly.
“No, you haven’t hung up?” the wolven said.
“No, I’m not going to get in touch with my brother on your behalf.”
The wolven expelled a frustrated breath. “You could be sentencing a good man to die. Or letting his murderer go free.”
Absently, Xhex realized her free hand was shaking, so she tucked it under her hip. “But I’m definitely keeping a good female alive. My conscience is clear, believe me.”
“I don’t need you protecting me.”
Xhex shook her head slowly. “You have no idea what you’re dealing with or what you’re suggesting. Even if Blade helps you, it will cost you your life. You do not want to be in debt to a symphath like him.”
“Please—”
“No, I’m sorry—that’s my final answer. I’m ending this call now.”
As she cut the connection, she put the cell facedown on the carpet. “Fuck.”
Next to her, John Matthew tucked his dagger under his arm. Then he signed, You’re doing the right thing.
“Yeah. I know am. It just feels wrong.”
A vibration of stress rode up the column of her throat and made her clench her teeth. But instead of screaming the energy out, she wrapped her arms around her naked torso. For a split second, she was cold… but then the heat of deep-seated fury started to warm her blood.
Boiled it.
“God, I fucking hate my brother,” she heard herself say.
SEVEN
Deer Mountain
Walters, New York
UPON THE FALL of night, after the velvet darkness claimed the whole of the sky and the snow clouds departed to reveal a pinprick pattern of stars, the lone male emerged upon the summit of the mountain called Deer and came to stand at the keyhole view of the valley below. With the keen eyes of his vampire kin, he regarded the undulations of the topography, the acreage so vast, it deserved a poetic appreciation of its breadth and beauty.
Pity he was mostly a symphath. Things of beauty were wasted upon entities such as himself. After all, what leverage could one bring with a vista that merely pleased the eye?
Outside of a real estate transaction.
On that note, his calculating stare focused on the hotel site that had been carved out of the mountain across the valley. Lights twinkled in its many-roomed sprawl, a sign that the establishment was nearing an opening date—or mayhap it was already servicing its intended demographic of wealthy spa-goers looking to be one with nature in a completely climate-controlled environment that included on-demand facials as well as feather beds and Michelin-star-ranked food.
Frankly, he would rather camp with no gear. In frigid January. Out with the wolves.
Or… one wolf in particular.
Wolven, rather.
As melancholy washed over him anew, he erased the human-made eyesore with his ailing mind and imagined what the sunset might have looked like as the storm clouds of the afternoon began their departure unto the east, just as the last rays of daylight illumination funneled into the western juncture of evergreens on the far side of the silver sliver of lake. Thanks to his half-breed pretransition youth, he could paint quite clearly the gathering intensity of peach and pink as the sun died, a flare of vibrant red tickling the undersides of the clouds, a last gasp before darkness claimed the heavens.
