by J. R. Ward
But there was no photograph, no name, no rank.
Sarah tilted the box forward to make sure she hadn’t missed anything on the far end. Then she stuck her hand into the cramped space, feeling around.
Nothing.
She sat back in the chair. As she stared at the blank wall ahead of her, she realized that she’d once again expected a letter from him. Something sincere and heartfelt, along the lines of a last missive that helped her put everything into a good place.
Re-closing the box, she put the credentials into her purse.
As she stood up, she hesitated.
Then she got the USB drive and the credentials back out, and stuffed both of them in her sports bra.
Good thing she was relatively flat-chested. Plenty of room in there.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Longest, lousiest day of his life, Murhder thought a couple hours later.
Okay, fine, so maybe only the first part of that was true. But shit.
As he limped around Darius’s drawing room on his bum leg, he was surprised he hadn’t worn a path in the nap of the rug, his footfalls making a wear pattern that wound in and around the antique furniture.
God, it was difficult being so frustrated with something that didn’t care about his emotional state.
And no, he wasn’t talking about Vishous.
The issue was the sun. That enormous, glowing death ball did not give two shits about how pent-up he was. The sonofabitch was just meandering its way from east to west, and the fact that it had been snowing since about eleven in the morning didn’t help. Vampires were incompatible with daylight in all its forms, and even for somebody as loosely held together as he was, there was no risking even tangential exposure.
At least it was winter in Upstate New York. That grandfather clock had announced it was three in the afternoon a while ago, and darkness would start falling at about four thirty.
If it had been July? He’d have gone insane—
More insane, that was.
One more hour and he was free. Maybe he could get away with leaving in forty-five minutes.
Entering the empty waiting room, he stopped by the desk. Vishous, that supercilious shithead, had done in a number of hours what Murhder had failed to do in twenty years—and the answer had been medical records.
Murhder reached out and turned each of the three letters around so they faced him. He knew them by heart. The handwriting in the first two was painfully imprecise, the words scripted with a shaky pen. The final one was all in the symbols of the Old Language, and they were likewise drawn by a frail hand.
There was also a single piece of paper on the blotter by the computer, and Murhder picked it up. Nothing precise here. Just a bunch of dates scribbled on a timeline. Creating the chronology had been the only piece of teamwork he and V had performed.
Murhder had provided the start date, the night that he had gone back to the second facility, looking for the pregnant female. Working from there, they had traced the events the letters detailed, she being moved to another location, as she had given birth to her son, the years the two had spent together, her escape when the scientists had been transferring her away from her young.
Separated from her son, she had tried desperately to find him, searching every night for the hidden lab. With few resources and no money, she had never gotten very far, and she had another thing working against her: The final letter noted that she was in poor health.
And that was how V had found her. Havers, the race’s healer, had long kept records on his patients, and recently, the files had been transcribed into a database the King had access to. The search function had been complicated and inefficient, especially as they had no idea what she might have had to see the healer about. Because she had given birth, however, Vishous had started with that and managed to identify a pool of females who had come in with issues common to those who had at some point been on the birthbed. From those patients, he had further isolated those who had been born of a son.
Case by case, the Brother had looked for details that might match what Murhder knew and what the female had revealed, tacitly or through implication, in the letters. It had been a long shot more likely to yield frustration than an answer. But then V had found a patient presenting with a vaginal prolapse from a birth ten years before. Follow-up care had been provided to her at her home.
Which was in the same town the letters had been mailed from.
Reading deeper into the records, Vishous had discovered that the female was unmated. The son was not with her. And she had extensive internal abnormalities associated with surgeries not performed by Havers.
As well as a prominent display of PTSD around medical intervention, about which she would not expound on.
It had to be her. It was the only explanation.
And Murhder was going to be knocking on her door approximately two seconds after nightfall.
“You realize you can’t go alone. If you’re allowed to go at all.”
Murhder looked up from the letters. Phury had come to stand in the archway, and his yellow eyes were apologetic as he stated what he apparently thought should have been obvious.
“No, I’ll take it from here,” Murhder said. “This is private.”
The Brother shook his head, his long blond-, gold-, and brown-streaked hair moving on his shoulders. “Not anymore—”
“A bunch of Brothers shows up at her door with me, and you’re just going to scare the shit out of her. She’s had enough of that, trust me. Besides, she asked for my help. Not the Brotherhood’s or the King’s.”
It was easier for him to keep his voice down when arguing with Phury. The two of them had always gotten along because how could you not? The guy had been chasing after his twin Z since he’d rescued the male from the hell of being a blood slave. There had been nothing to be in conflict with, because Phury had always had total decency running through his veins.
“I’m not going to hurt her,” Murhder muttered. “For godsakes, what kind of monster do you think I am?”
Bad question to put out there, he thought to himself.
“It’s not just her we’re worried about,” Phury hedged. “Your history with this kind of thing is not the best.”
How politic, Murhder thought.
“Listen,” he said to the Brother. “Would you have wanted anyone else to go in to save your twin when he was a blood slave? Would you have trusted anybody but yourself to do what had to be done to get him to safety and make things right?”
Phury’s frown was deep enough to shadow his eyes. “I’m not getting personal here. And neither should you.”
“This is my wrong to right, Phury. You’ve got to understand that. I failed the female. I left her behind, in the belly of the beast. I haven’t been able to live with myself since I made that decision. It’s been killing me. I have to do this.”
“It’s official business now. If you’d wanted it to stay otherwise, you shouldn’t have come here.”
“What choice did I have?”
“That’s not the point. It’s where we all are now. We’ll keep you posted—”
“Wait a minute—are you suggesting I’m not even going?”
When there was only silence, Murhder felt a rage ride up on him that was so great, he was liable to tear Darius’s fucking house down.
“Fuck that.”
Before the Brother could stop him, he grabbed the letters, lunged around the guy and went right for the front door. Even though it wasn’t fully dark out. Even though he was just going to toast up. Even though—
His hand was almost on the old-fashioned, fist-sized knob, when a thick arm locked around his throat and hauled him back with such power, he popped off his feet and went flying. As he landed face-up on a very nice Oriental, his back reminded him that it was the second time in the last twenty-four hours that he’d hit the ground hard. But he didn’t give a shit.
He pushed Phury off him and, in spite of his injured leg, went right back for the—
Brothers everywhere: Vishous in front of the door, looking like a brick wall except with daggers in both hands. Rhage racing in with a bagel shoved in his mouth and a pair of guns out. Phury back on his feet and ready to attack again. And then there was the one he didn’t know, who seemed like he was hoping things got stupid so he could hit something.
As Murhder faced off at them all, he knew, if he played his cards right, he could commit suicide right here and now. With a couple of well-timed aggressions, he could force them to kill him, and there was a cowardly relief in the idea of that option.
He was tired. So tired of his broken head. And what had happened in that lab. And what he had done afterward. He was bone-achingly exhausted with where he had ended up, kicked out of not just the Brotherhood, but the lives of the males who had been his family.
When he’d disassociated from reality, the loss of them all had been but a passing blip on his radar, way off to the side. Now, he felt his outsider status like an open grave calling his name.
He’d had pride, once. Just as he’d been sane for a good portion of his life. But both were commodities that had proved to be expendable.
He didn’t bother to hide his suffering as he opened his mouth and spoke in a hoarse rush. “Please, I promise I won’t go off the rails again. Just let me go to her.” He reached into his shirt, which made them all jump. Taking out the piece of sacred seeing glass, he showed them his talisman. “I’ve seen her face. It’s been shown to me. For twenty-five years.”
As some of those expressions softened, he jumped on the opening. “Look, my life is over. Do you think I don’t know that? Even if I do right by her, even if I find her son, I’m not going to make it, but at least my eternity will be less like the hell of my mortal nights. I beg of you, please, let me take care of her.”
Abruptly, through a magic he could not understand, the seeing glass warmed between his fingers. Looking down with a frown, he realized the shard had started to glow—and there she was, the face he had seen for so many years, staring back at him.
Shoving the image outward, his hand shook as he tried to get them to see what he did. And they must have caught it because slowly their weapons lowered.
Then suddenly, he knew what the solution was.
“Xhex,” he breathed. “If you don’t want me to go alone, let Xhex come with me. The female will be comforted by her presence, especially when she says she’s a survivor, too.”
After a moment, he added dryly, “And we all know that Xhex can take care of any kind of business that comes her way. You can trust her to make sure I stay in line.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Sarah did not make it back to her house until just after three in the afternoon. Under the assumption she was being tailed, she had followed the routine that her Saturday’s had taken on. Pick up dry cleaning. Go to vegetable market. Go to butcher’s. Go to supermarket. The fact that it was snowing had slowed things down, and she would have worked out, but not with what she was carrying inside her sports bra. As she went through the motions, she wondered if the fact that she wasn’t going to a gym, but was dressed in running tights, Brooks, and a parka, counted against her.
Except she had to be overthinking that one. Half of America was in Lululemon 24/7.
As she parked in her driveway, she checked out her street. No deceptively non-event cars parked in the vicinity. So she probably had been watched.
It took her three trips to get all her bags into the house, the snow squeaking under the treads of her running shoes, the flakes falling from the sky getting into her eyes as the cold wind swirled around. After locking up her car and locking herself inside, she went into the kitchen, waded through the bags and put stuff away. Her grocery purchasing inefficiency had never registered before, but now she saw her three different stops as an adaptive behavior to waste otherwise empty hours.
On the weekends, the less time she had to stare at the walls of her little house, the better.
Of course, now that the FBI seemed interested in her, she had something to focus on. Not exactly the distraction she had been looking for, however.
On that note . . .
Setting her security alarm, Sarah went down into her basement. Other than the washer and dryer and the water heater, there wasn’t much, just a couple of boxes of her university papers and some leftover dorm room stuff that hadn’t gone well with her and Gerry’s this-is-real-life furniture upstairs.
The old laptop she was looking for was in a Rubbermaid tub next to the futon she’d used for all four years of college and her postgraduate work. “Old” was a misnomer for the Dell. She’d bought the thing only about five years ago, and it was fully functioning—“obsolete” was a better term given the speed of technology’s changes.
Sitting on the futon, she plugged the charger in and opened the laptop. Boot up didn’t take long and she entered her password.
As she inserted the USB drive she’d taken from the safety deposit box, she was aware of her heart pounding, and her eyes flipped up and surveyed the basement. Nope, still no windows. And no one was creeping down the cellar stairs. Or staring over her shoulder.
The drive’s directory was not password protected, which was a surprise. Then again, Gerry had stored the thing in a safety deposit box only he could get into. Scrolling down the list of files, she found dozens of differently titled entries and a variety of programs used, all of the latter standard for medical research, from Excel spreadsheets to Word documents to images.
What was the same in every single entry? They had all been added the day before Gerry’s death.
Sarah closed her eyes and thought about the last of his signatures on the safety deposit box envelope.
Then she refocused. One by one, she went down the list of files. The identifying numbers and combinations of letters seemed to follow the same system she and everyone else used at BioMed to identify research protocols. Accordingly, there was nothing that gave away any hint of the subject matter if you were a layperson—or a professional one unaffiliated with the project, for that matter.
Three hundred and seventy-two files.
When she came to the final listing, she rubbed the pain behind her sternum. Once again, she had expected something with her name on it, a sign that he had left this drive not just for anyone, but for her to find. Instead, it looked like he had copied these for himself.
As she prepared to start opening things, her scientific brain insisted on finding order, and when there wasn’t an obvious one in the directory, she started at the top.
Lab results. From a complete blood panel.
Except . . . the patient in question had readings that made no sense. Values for liver function were completely off. Thyroid. White and red blood cell counts made no sense. Plasma was . . . she’d never even seen a reading like this. Iron was so high the patient should have been dead.
She read the values twice and then tried to get a bead on where the rundown had come from. No patient name. No ordering physician name. No laboratory or hospital logo, not even a BioMed one. All there was was an eight-digit reference number, which she guessed identified the patient, and a date, which was about six months before Gerry died.
The next file included images from a CAT scan series of the upper torso—
“What the . . . hell . . . is this?”
The heart appeared to be six-chambered, not four-. And yet the ribs, lungs, stomach, liver, and other internal organs and spine were recognizably human.
It was conceivable that a patient, somewhere on the planet, could have a mutated heart like that. The surprise was why Gerry, as an infectious disease researcher, would have the files pertaining to a case like that.
Would have stolen the files to a case like that.
Sarah frowned and went back to the CBC results. The eight-digit reference number on that report . . . yup, it matched the one on the CAT scan series.
In quick succession, she opened the next six files. All medical results. But then came the sev
enth, and by the time she was finished reading that one, she had to sit back and take some deep breaths. When that didn’t help, she put the laptop aside and rubbed her eyes.
She literally couldn’t breathe right.
Those medical results? All normal screening tests on a male patient with totally abnormal readings. Urinalysis. Cardiac catheterization. Stress test with echocardiogram, where she watched that six-chamber heart beat.
But the seventh file was so disturbing, she’d had to read the document three times. At first, it appeared to be a fairly standard report on a patient, with a review of the test results that seemed to be the ones she’d just opened. Then words like “major histocompatibility profile assessment” and “immunosuppression protocol” jumped out, and she recognized the names of anti-rejection drugs that helped transplant patients’ bodies accept the new organs they’d been given.
All of which were topics well familiar to her and close to her field of work.
And just as she’d wondered why Gerry hadn’t mentioned all this work to her, given the synergies with her own efforts, she read the following line: “Intravenous administration of the ALL cells occurred at 15:35.”
There was only one thing that ALL stood for in Sarah’s world.
Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia.
If she was reading this right, and she was hard-pressed to come up with an alternative interpretation, someone at BioMed had injected a human patient with cancer cells after they deliberately depressed his immune system.
They were torturing someone under the guise of medical advancement.
As John Matthew came out of the hidden door under the Black Dagger Brotherhood mansion’s grand staircase, he smelled First Meal being prepared off in the kitchen wing—and attempted to ground himself in the familiar.
