The Wolf, page 7
CHAPTER NINE
Here was the thing with people who were—as Butch O’Neal, native of South Boston, always put it—wicked frickin’ jumpy. Unless you wanted a fight, it was in everybody’s best interests to give ’em a heads-up, especially if you were coming at them from behind.
Down in a tunnel that had all the air freshening of a rock pit, Rhage lifted his hands as the Jackal wheeled around in front of him.
“Just me,” he told the guy, “your half-brother. Don’t get crazy.”
The other vampire was looking rough in his running shorts and his too-thin-for-the-time-of-year t-shirt, kind of like a zombie who had decided to go on a health kick. And for an instant, Rhage went back a hundred years and change, and saw the male when their paths had first crossed—at that annoying aristocrat’s place.
Back then, the Jackal had been hired by Darius to create plans for a place for the Black Dagger Brotherhood to live together, and the Jackal, as an architect, had been willing and able to do the deal with a pencil and a ruler. He’d dressed the part, too, looking distinguished and smart in a tailored suit in the style of the times, his waistcoat anchored by a gold pocket watch and chain, the collar of his buttoned-down shirt rounded, the lapels of his fine jacket notched at the top.
And now here he was in Nike Lycra. The hair and the face were the same, of course—no, that wasn’t right. In the glow from his phone’s little pin light, he was much, much older, his eyes ancient even though he wasn’t even close to middle age.
“What are you doing here?” the male asked hoarsely.
“We got the place rigged.” Rhage motioned around, even though that camera light didn’t carry far—so, yeah, not a lot to see. “You tripped the security system when you lifted the hatch.”
The Jackal frowned. “But I’ve been here before.”
“We know.”
“You do?”
“Yup, you want the dates? I got ’em on my phone.” Rhage debated flashing his Samsung, but the guy seemed to have enough going on at the moment. “Or you can just take my word for it.”
“So why did you come here tonight? Are you here to tell me I need to leave? Like I’m trespassing?”
“Nah.” Rhage pshaw’d with his dagger hand. “I’m not playing mall cop here.”
“Mall cop?”
“Kevin James as Paul Blart? Never mind.” Rhage reached into his leather jacket and took out a Tootsie Roll. “Oh—crap.”
“What?” The Jackal looked around. “What’s—”
“Orange. I hate orange.” He unwrapped the lollipop and grimaced. “You want to hop on this train? I’ll give you a good one?”
The Jackal blinked, as if a discussion about candy was nothing he could assimilate given what was crowding his brain.
“Why are you here?” he demanded.
Rhage shrugged. “The intervals between you coming underground are getting shorter and shorter. I’m not an expert in anything—well, other than killing and ice cream, and who’da thought those two would ever go together. But it’s clear you’re going through it, and I guess I figured a little check-in wasn’t a bad idea.”
“I don’t know why I am so drawn to this place.”
“I believe that. So where’re you headed? Back to your cell?”
“Ah… yes. No. I don’t know. I didn’t really have a plan.”
“Lead on.” Rhage debated crunching with his molars and decided against the tongue flood of citrus. Sometimes it was better to just draw the shit out. “And yeah, I’m coming, too. Sorry.”
The other male stared at him, and then glanced at the black daggers that were holstered, handles down, on Rhage’s chest.
“I should go home instead.”
“Yeah, that’s probably true,” Rhage agreed. “But some times the past isn’t going to let your head have the wheel. And fighting that kind of stuff is pretty pointless.”
The Jackal looked off down the tunnel, and as his eyes moved around even though there was, again, nothing much to see, it was like he was walking in his mind, going left, going right, sticking to a straightaway.
After a moment, the male said, “They were… my family, in a way. Not by choice, but we were together with the suffering. Lucan, Mayhem—even Apex, sick fuck that he was. I feel like I’ve got unfinished business. I’m out—and they need to be out, too.”
“We’re going to find them. I was working on it tonight, matter of fact—”
“Kane died for us. For me and Nyx. We were tied up in the Hive, about to be tortured to death… and he pulled that collar off his neck, knowing it was going to explode. Without him doing that…” The Jackal rubbed his eyes. “He told me that true love was worth sacrificing for, and then he took that fucking collar off. The blast blew him to smithereens, but it collapsed the ceiling, and those poles we were tied to fell. The only reason we were able to get out was because of him.”
Rhage thought of his Mary. And how he’d kept his curse to keep her alive. “True love is a sword worth falling on. He made a heroic choice.”
“And he died because of it.”
“That’s the way it goes. Some choices are irrevocable—and are you saying you wish he hadn’t done what he did?”
“I don’t know.”
“Yeah, you do. You just feel bad that you survived.”
“I don’t have a fucking clue how I feel.” The Jackal turned to face the tunnel’s black void. “Why the hell did he do that. And what happened to the other three. I know he died, but what about… fuck. Maybe you’re right. Maybe that’s what’s eating me alive. I’m on the outside, I got a mate, I got a family. What have they got? Nothing. Hell, I don’t even know if they’re alive—but if they are? I won the lottery, and nothing changed for them. They’re still imprisoned.”
“Survivor’s guilt is a bitch.” Rhage thought of Phury, and everything the guy had done for his ruined twin, Z. “I know people who were almost destroyed by it.”
The Jackal’s eyes shifted over. “You told me I could help find the prison camp.”
“I did, and I meant it.” Well, up to the point where the guy might get himself killed. The pen was actually not as mighty as the sword when you were in the field. “The choice to help is yours, but it’s not going to be a cake walk. There are serious risks to the mission, and we’ll only be able to protect you to a point.”
“I have a lot to lose,” came the soft murmur. “Nyx is… everything to me, and I have my son to think of—and that’s why I don’t get it. I mean, Kane’s dead. Apex is a sociopath. Mayhem actually likes being in prison—don’t get me started on that. And Lucan has always handled himself. He doesn’t need me. So what the fuck is my problem. I have true love, I have everything I could want… and I’m stuck here. Still in this prison, even as I walk around a free male up above.”
Rhage locked his molars on the Tootsie Roll and bit down hard, breaking through to the chocolate center. As he started chewing, the familiar pull on his teeth as the center grabbed back distracted him from how much he didn’t like orange added to anything.
Before he could respond, the Jackal threw up his hands. “I mean, goddamn… my female is right now in our mated home, doing the dishes that we ate our First Meal on—and I lied to her about where I was going and what I was doing. Just like I have the other dozen times I’ve come here. What the fuck is wrong with me?”
Rhage extracted the empty white stick from his mouth. “Well, at least part of it is simple.”
“Oh, yeah? Which part.”
“They’re your brothers,” Rhage said in a grim voice. “And you need to save them because when you do, you save yourself. That’s why you keep coming back here, even though you have a female of worth at home. You need to save your brothers… to save yourself.”
The Jackal rubbed his head like it hurt. “But they aren’t my blood.”
“Blood is not required for that job description. Trust me.”
* * *
Back at the sanatorium, Lucan was walking through the tiled corridors of the south wing’s fifth floor. As he killed time, he read the graffiti spray painted on the walls. It was remarkably unoriginal and the kind of thing, like the unconfusing layout of the hospital, that had been easy to memorize. A few trips through and he had the fonts, the colors, the map of it all down cold: Names in block letters. Couples in hearted algebra equations that ended in “4EVA.” The occasional satanic bullshit just for effect. Oh, and a line or two from Edgar Allan Poe—which he only knew because they were marked “—Edgar Allan Poe.”
The storms of earlier in the night had washed through, and the moonlight that pierced the open porch and flowed into the patient rooms gave him more than enough to read the human missives by. As he went along, the fallen plaster crunching under his boots, the hoots of owls a distant radio station of fauna-tunes, he decided that the illumination was like sunlight at the end of the day, the beams long and slanted as they crossed the corridor in a regular pattern.
Four a.m., he decided. It was probably close to four given the lunar position in the sky full of stars.
Soon enough, he’d have to go down underground with the others, and that was why he always came up here before the dawn locked him away. The wolf in him needed to breathe, had to be free—and this was the best he could do to honor that side of his bloodline.
So that it didn’t consume him.
But maybe it had already.
Trying not to think about the madness, he refocused on his promenade. There was one particular patient room that he felt drawn to, even though he couldn’t say that it was any different from any of the others. It had become a talisman of sorts, though, and as he approached it, he tracked the numbers on the doors: 511. 513. 515—
517.
It was a bad-luck number, violating all his rules. He liked even numbers, with his favorites being 2 and 4.
But 517 it was.
As he paused in the doorway, it was as if there were someone inside and he was waiting to be invited in. Which was fucking nuts. And yet as he threw a leg over the threshold, he felt like apologizing for intruding.
Just like all the spaces on the floor, the room was about ten feet square, and the set of rusty bedsprings strung between their rusty head- and footboards took up most of what open area there was. The only other furniture a small table and a stool. Both had been upside down, and about two weeks ago, he’d righted them and arranged the pair so that if there had been somebody in the room, they could have written a letter home. Or maybe read a letter from their loved ones.
And then he’d moved the empty, decaying bed support so that if someone had been lying on a mattress on the setup, they could have looked out of the flap doors and through the porch’s open-air arches, to the sky.
Fucking sap that he was. But there had been suffering here. Great, unimaginable suffering and sorrow, humans dying long, protracted deaths, surrounded by others doing the same. He’d never been a big fan of the other species, but something about this place, about the sheer magnitude of the numbers of those who had died here, gave him a shot of sympathy.
He knew what it was like to be doomed by something outside of your control.
Stepping past the table and stool, he pushed his way out onto the porch. The loggia was fairly shallow, but long as the entire wing, and as he went to the rail and looked out over the sanatorium’s hill of skeletal trees and dead grass, he imagined the humans who had lain here, knowing they had something incurable in their bodies, aware that people just like them were disappearing from the rooms beside their own—and not because they were being cured and leaving healthy.
They had been prisoners here, isolated from the general population, through no fault of their own.
As he leaned over the drop, he glanced down the building’s elevation. From this vantage point, the enormity of the structure really struck him. Although not that tall off the ground, with its enormous, embracing wings, it seemed to stretch as far as the eye could see, like an ocean.
And yet for all the floors, and all the porches, there was nobody else staring out like he was.
No one but him, and maybe Mayhem and Apex, ever came up here. The prison camp’s operation was underground, in the vast subterranean rabbit warren of spaces in the basement levels.
The sanatorium was literally the perfect location for a bunch of solar-avoiding vampires running a drug-processing business. Much better than that happy-hands-at-home system of tunnels they’d been in before. Not that the move had gone well. About two hundred prisoners had died soon after arrival, something about the new environment being the last domino to fall in their miserable existence, their strained hearts and bad lungs giving out.
Good thing they had the chute for the bodies here.
Just like when the place had treated humans with a terminal disease, the dead had been sent down a thousand-foot-long shaft that bottomed out at the base of the rise the building sat on. But unlike when those humans had been removed, the vampire bodies didn’t need to be carted away on the railroad tracks down there. All that was required was a little sunlight, and then the ash was so fine, it blew away like snow in a subzero wind.
“It’s a beautiful night,” he said to all the nobody around him.
And that was when he thought of the woman. Rio.
The wolf in him was called to her, sure as if she knew his soul’s name and spoke it in a pitch only he could hear… sure as if she saw deeply into him and forgave him for his sins, his bad breeding, his worse choices since he’d been imprisoned here.
But humans did not read minds. They did not even know that vampires actually existed—and some of those with fangs and a hankering for blood had mated, willingly or not, with wolven. To create sons who were accepted nowhere.
And who ultimately were double-crossed and sent to prison camps run by evil aristocrats, and then, worse, criminal homegrown madmen.
“Fuck,” he muttered.
That female was just a tool to be used in this game he was getting increasingly disinterested in playing. Nothing more.
What the hell was wrong with him.
Turning away from the vista of bare tree limbs and dead leaves on the ground, he pictured what the porch would have been like some ninety years ago, the beds plugged into docking stations as if they were rowboats in danger of drifting off on the current of the wind.
He’d seen the pictures, down in the records room in the basement. He’d read the logs of the dead—or at least flipped through them.
He felt as helpless as those haunted patients had in those old black-and-white photographs, nothing to look forward to, no choices to be had, no future to speak of.
Sick of himself, sick of the place, sick of… everything, Lucan took himself back inside. As always, before he could leave the floor, he had to look at the patient room directly across the way. 518.
Unlike the treatment spaces in the front of the building, these back rooms had no access to any porch, just a single window. Same beds, though. No tables or stools, however.
During his perusals of the records room, he’d learned that the back side was where the people who were going to die were moved to. No reason to try the therapy of the air, anymore. Had they known what the shift across the hall meant?
They had to have known.
Just like he’d known when his cousins had come to him with that look in their eyes… he’d known they were going to kill him and he had been ready for the fight.
Except instead, they’d framed him for the murder of a vampire so they could get him permanently out of the way without having any blood on their hands.
Cowards. They’d always been cowards.
Lucan walked off to the stairs that ran down the terminal of the wing. After he pulled open the creaky fire door, he jogged the descent, dodging the debris in the stairwell, the empty, faded beer cans, melted candles, and dingy red balls that the humans thought the ghosts of the children would move cluttering the way.
With every step, he thought of that human woman in the alley.
How could she be involved in such a horrible business?
And no, he wasn’t being sexist.
Even an asshole like him wouldn’t have a damn thing to do with drugging if he’d had a choice.
But maybe she didn’t, either. Maybe she was just like him. Trapped.
She was playing a dangerous game, though. It was one thing to be on the supply side, like he was. Distribution on the streets was how people got killed, and she was in the thick of it.
Then again, she’d walked away from being hit by a car like she was Wonder Woman.
Clearly, she was immortal.
CHAPTER TEN
Rio came awake with a gasp and a jerk that brought her head up. Before she could focus on where she was, a quick physical inventory commanded her full attention: She had a screaming pain in the back of her skull, a gag was in her mouth, and she couldn’t move her arms or her legs—
She was in a chair. She was tied to a straight-backed chair with her hands behind her and her ankles locked in place.
And there was water falling in front of her.
Water? Wait… was that a fountain?
As she blinked to get her eyes to work properly, the inconceivable became improbable… which then transitioned into the yes-that’s-actual: It appeared that there was, in fact, a white marble fountain about five feet in front of all her going-nowhere, and the details were getting clearer by the moment. From its wide basin to the stylized, carved carp in the center that was standing on its tail and arcing water out of its mouth, the fixture seemed like the kind of thing that belonged in a castle or museum.
What do you know, the rest of the room was just as fancy, great lengths of lemon-yellow silk pulled shut over what she guessed were tall, thin windows, the floor a black-and-white chessboard of marble squares, the walls covered with painted murals of pastoral scenes.
But what did the decor matter. Whether she was in a Versailles-wannabe or a trap house, she needed to get out of here.
Pulling at her hands, straining to kick her legs free, she got a catalogue of all kinds of pain. She had a sharpshooter in her neck, like her head had been slumped mostly to the left, and her shoulders were screaming, as were the tops of her thighs. Everything below the knee was numb on both sides, and it was a toss-up whether that was good or bad. Probably bad, because she was going to have to make a run for it and she knew if she couldn’t feel her feet, that wasn’t going to go well.
