Tempted by Blood

by Laurie London

  Santiago still looked skeptical. “Are you any closer to finding out who’s masterminding things at Xtark?”

  “Not yet, but we—”

  “Hey, can you all come over here?” Cordell’s fingers were click-clacking away on his keyboard. Images were popping up on all three of his big-ass monitors.

  Jackson, Santiago and Dom gathered around his chair.

  “I think Jackson and Dom might be right. Check this out.” He pointed to a bunch of code on his screen.

  It made no sense to Jackson. He glanced at Dom and Santiago. They had on their game faces, but he’d be willing to bet they were as clueless as he was.

  “From what I can tell,” Cordell was saying, “it does appear that someone hacked into her blog and posted the article.”

  “How can you be so sure that she didn’t do it herself?” Santiago snapped.

  “Well, look. Because of the different IP addresses here and here.” He pointed to two strings of numbers. “Except for the post she did from our servers—the one about the missing people from which I’ve been cross-checking names—this latest one came from a different address than all the rest. It’s a static IP address, which means—”

  Dom held up his hand. “Layman’s terms, okay?”

  “Basically, it means that unless she made this one post using a network she’s never used before, it wasn’t her. I’m guessing someone else got access to her account.”

  Jackson’s phone vibrated. A text from Arianna. Good. She could explain what the hell was going on.

  Can you bring Crystal to my house? Plan to visit her mother tomorrow.

  He read the message twice to make sure he was seeing it correctly. What the hell happened to Krystal with a K? He tried calling her back but it went straight to voice mail.

  A dull roar filled his ears, blocking out what everyone around him was saying. Arianna would never spell Krystal’s name like that. Was this a sign from her that something was wrong? He recalled seeing an old photo from the cold war, where a hostage subtly held up his middle finger to indicate he was being held against his will.

  Was this Arianna’s way of saying she was in trouble? Or was this message meant to look like it was coming from her? Either way, something was wrong.

  Where the hell was she? He glanced at the time. She should’ve been halfway to Lily and Alfonso’s house by now. Had she gotten into trouble on the way or had it happened before she left the city? All sorts of scenarios flashed through his mind, none of them good ones. Santiago was saying something to him. It was like the guy’s lips were moving but no sound was coming out.

  “Where’s Lily?” With her tracking skills, she’d be able to find Arianna faster than Jackson could.

  “She went into the locker room a few minutes ago,” Dom said. “Why? What’s wrong?”

  “Arianna’s in trouble.”

  It took him less than a minute until he was storming through the doors of the women’s locker room, unannounced. Past the towel station, past a row of lockers where a few of the female agents gasped, and straight to the back where the showers were located. Lily was leaning toward the mirror, her hair in a towel, a pair of tweezers in her hand.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” she said, turning to face him. “You guys are not supposed—”

  “Darkbloods have Arianna and they want Krystal.”

  “But I just talked to Alfonso. Krystal left with her mom. Arianna told him it was okay.”

  “I don’t think they have her. They want her and they’re using Arianna to get to her.”

  Leaning on the edge of the sink, he could feel his pupils dilating with anger, with determination, with the burning need to get her back. She was the center of his world and now that she was gone, everything about him was off-kilter.

  Lily had a strange look on her face. She was saying something, but as before, with Santiago, he couldn’t hear her.

  He didn’t care what he had to do or where he had to go, but whoever had Arianna was going to die. That thought was the only thing keeping him on his feet right now.

  How could he have been such a fool to have missed this? Why the hell hadn’t he seen it coming? Darkbloods clearly were desperate to get Krystal. First the Night of Wilding party, then on the street, then at Arianna’s house. When all of those efforts failed, of course they’d look for Arianna in order to get to her sweetblood cousin. Just as he’d told her when that blog was posted. What a damn fool he’d been not to have watched over her better.

  But why did they want Krystal so badly? He would’ve expected DBs to have moved on by now, focusing their efforts on finding other sweetbloods when the leads ran out on this one. What was so special about the girl?

  He recalled that night on the island, when he peered into the room where all the sweetbloods were being kept. Krystal was dressed in a flowing white dress, ribbons in her dark curls.

  The woman in charge had been holding a chain around Krystal’s neck, as though the girl was her possession. She’d walked up and down the line like a drill sergeant, inspecting the other sweetbloods who were in costume while Krystal followed behind. After Guardians broke up the blood rave, the woman had escaped the island. Her cohort was captured and killed, but she got away.

  Several humans had died that night, but the rest of the captives had been saved, their memories wiped before they were returned to their lives. With Cordell’s discovery that two of the other living four sweetbloods that night had gone missing again, it could only mean one thing.

  This woman was involved. She was the one after Krystal. She must be obsessed with finding that which had been taken from her.

  “Meet me in five,” he barked to Lily as he headed to the weapons room. “And be prepared to do some scent tracking.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  ARIANNA KNEW SOMETHING was wrong before she opened her eyes. The side of her face felt as if something had exploded next to it. Her shoulder, hip and knee throbbed. She moved a few muscles and moaned. By slightly rearranging her limbs, she was relieved to discover that she didn’t feel the sharp pain of a broken bone, just lots of abrasions. Something hard was clamped around her ankle. A shackle? She didn’t dare move another muscle until she could figure out where she was.

  An acrid, bitter taste lingered on the back of her tongue. The musty-smelling air was unmoving and quiet, pressing in on her as she lay on this hard surface. Stone, maybe? Concrete? The atmosphere felt charged, as if it were holding its breath, waiting for her to fully awaken. She didn’t want to open her eyes. She had a feeling she wasn’t going to like what she saw. Besides, if someone was watching her, it’d be best to get her wits about her before they knew she was awake.

  As she lay here in the darkness, she was thankful that Krystal was far away. She would not tell them where her cousin was; she would not give her up to save herself. They would not be strapping Krystal to a metal gurney to drain her blood. Arianna hadn’t been able to do anything to save her mother twenty-two years ago, but she sure as hell could save Krystal now.

  Holding her breath to silence the sound of her breathing, she strained to hear something. A far-off tapping of metal. Rhythmic. Like a heartbeat. Then a rumbling in the distance. A motorized vehicle of some sort.

  She heard nothing nearby. Not the faint stirring of the air to indicate someone else was with her or breathing or any sounds of life. Just the ringing sound of silence between her ears. How many times had she wished to be out of a crowd of people? Now she felt completely alone and would’ve given anything to have someone nearby so that she knew that she wasn’t alone.

  Opening her eyes slightly, she looked through her lashes and surveyed her surroundings. Although the light was dim, she could tell she was in a narrow holding cell of some sort, with a wall of stone at her back and not more than two feet
above where she lay. The area was about the size of a twin bed…or a crypt.

  When we die, we die alone.

  Isn’t that what Carter had told her back in the Xtark offices before he betrayed her? She rolled to her side and looked over the edge into a long, narrow tunnel. Lanterns hung from the walls, their light biting into the darkness. Rows and rows of slots lined the walls, just like the one she was in. She estimated about twenty or thirty.

  She noticed a set of railroad tracks running through the center and wooden support beams along the top. Could she be inside a mine shaft? If so, that meant there was only one way in and one way out.

  She heard a slight stirring coming from across the way. Were there others hidden in the other slots just as she was? She strained to see and thought she sensed movement in the one directly across from her.

  “Hello?” she whispered. “Is anyone there?”

  She heard something rustle.

  “Shh,” said a voice to her left. “They’ll hear you. And if they do, they’ll send in the rats.”

  Rats? A sudden chill ran down her spine. Like a horde? A river of them running down the middle? They couldn’t get up here on the walls, could they? They’d climb in and she’d have nowhere to escape. Their hairless tails would brush up against her legs, her wrists, her neck. Oh, God, did she hear the faint shuffling of something near her feet? She yelped and scooted as far away as the shackle around her ankle would allow.

  Several others shushed her. “We haven’t seen them, but they’ve threatened that they have hundreds of them.”

  “How many people are here?” she asked.

  “I’m not sure,” one of the voices said. “Five or six, though last week there were more like ten. Once they take you away, you may or may not come back.”

  “Have they taken you before?”

  “Yes, twice.”

  “Where did they take you? What did they do?” Part of her didn’t want to know and the other part wanted to be prepared.

  “I wish I knew, but I honestly don’t remember.”

  Could these people be sweetbloods? Why else would they all be here like this? Then she thought about her Weird Wednesday comments and the report she made for Cordell. “Are any of you named Kevin, Julia, Chad or Eric?”

  “I’m Eric,” a male voice answered. “Julia was here, but they took her a few days ago and she hasn’t come back.”

  Oh, my God, Jackson was right. She hated to admit it, but she’d had her doubts that her blog was even useful, but he had assured her it was. He suddenly believed in her crazy old blog, even when she didn’t. She wished she could reach out to wherever he was right now and tell him how much she loved him. Thank him for believing in the things he knew she cared about even when she claimed they were meaningless. He seemed to know her better than she knew herself.

  Oh, Jackson. I wish I could tell you how much I love you and thank you for loving me.

  “How did you know?” Eric whispered.

  She thought about her long-standing rule not to reveal her online identity and promptly abandoned her need to keep secrets. “I run a blog that reports on weird happenings. Eric, your roommate posted that you’d gone missing after you went out for a pack of smokes.”

  “My God, that’s exactly what happened. He posted on your blog? That’s so cool. So people have been looking for me?”

  “Yes. And a classmate of Julia’s posted that she disappeared from her bedroom one night last week.”

  “That’s true,” another voice piped in. A young female voice this time. “She told me she woke up to find two people leaning over her bed. They were wearing sunglasses despite the fact that it was the middle of the night.”

  “Me and…ah… We’ve been investigating the disappearances and wondered if they were linked. I guess I have my answer now.”

  “Why us? Do you have any idea? I mean, we know that they’re vampires— God, that sounds so crazy. But why would they be keeping us here?”

  Arianna thought about feigning ignorance but decided the truth was best, so she told them they were probably sweetbloods. What she didn’t tell them was that Darkbloods had captured some of them before. The girl sniffled and that was when Arianna realized tears had dampened her cheeks, as well.

  “Julia said that the two men who came into her room kept talking about keeping her all to themselves. That apparently they’d done it before. But then the one guy reminded the other that they almost got busted the last time, so they brought her here, instead.”

  The Darkbloods’ boldness stunned her. Were they always this single-minded in their pursuit of sweetbloods? She had a feeling they were. If she remembered correctly, Julia was about the same age as Krystal.

  “Quiet,” someone said. “Here they come.”

  She strained but couldn’t hear anything except her heartbeat pounding against her eardrums. Maybe it was true that when one of your senses was deprived or gone, the other ones became stronger. How long had these people been here, anyway? Did they even know, since they may have had their memory altered?

  It took another few moments until she finally heard the noise, too. Footsteps echoed off the walls and seemed to be getting louder. How many were coming? One? Maybe two? Then she heard voices.

  “Take the one from the lower right,” a female said.

  In the low light, Arianna could just make out two dark figures stopped on the opposite side of the tracks.

  A set of keys jangled, then a man said, “Hold on. I thought we took that one yesterday.”

  “Nope. It was the one above her.”

  “I could’ve sworn— Oh, well. You’re probably right. The Mistress really should have these numbered so that we can keep track of whose turn it is next.”

  Arianna heard the sound of keys and chains this time, then someone whimpered.

  “Come on,” the man said, snapping his fingers. “We don’t have all night.”

  “Please, don’t,” a young female voice said. “I—I don’t want to go back there.”

  Arianna heard a zip then a rip.

  “Here,” the woman said. “Tape her.”

  A moment later, the young female’s whimpering became muffled.

  “I think she plans to number the holding slots when the bars get installed,” the woman said, continuing their earlier conversation without skipping a beat.

  “That will be nice for them,” he said. “They’ll be more comfortable without the leg shackles.”

  The woman laughed as they moved down to the next column. “Not that these tiny slots will ever be comfortable.”

  She heard them remove another person.

  Arianna was stunned. These two Darkbloods were talking as if their human prisoners couldn’t understand them. Much like people talking to each other about horses in a barn, dogs in a kennel, hamsters in a cage. Obviously, that was all they were to them. Pets.

  “Here, take him,” the man said. “Do they plan to work on the UV platform at the same time as these modifications?”

  “UV platform? What’s that?”

  “It’s designed to hold three or four humans at a time and expose them to real honest-to-goodness sunlight, not the fake-and-bake stuff. I mean, that works, but natural is so much better.”

  “I hear you,” the woman agreed.

  “Then, at the end of the day, after the donors have been exposed to the sun and are UV-rich, the platform is lowered. The blood will test out better and go for a higher price.”

  Arianna’s head was reeling and she was feeling light-headed. Sun platforms? UV-rich blood? Price? Were Darkbloods planning to sell the people chained up in these slots the way they were going to at the Night of Wilding party or were they planning to sell just their blood? It was all so…commercial…with humans, not as p
ets, but as commodities. She wondered if everyone was a sweetblood except for her.

  “Since UV-rich blood isn’t as plentiful up here as it is in other parts of the country,” the man was saying, “she’s doing what she can to improve the quality of what we do have. So even if they aren’t sweetbloods, there will be a higher demand for it than if it came straight from the street.”

  “It’s the same concept as force-feeding ducks for foie gras. The Mistress is taking something mediocre and turning it into something great,” the woman said.

  “And valuable.”

  JACKSON STOOD WITH THE small group of Guardians and looked over the water into the inky darkness.

  “Are you sure she’s out there?” he asked Lily, although he really didn’t need to. Arianna’s nearby presence sizzled in his veins. Once they got within several miles of her, he knew Lily’s tracking abilities hadn’t failed him.

  “Positive. It’s cloaked.”

  “Are they on a goddamn boat or what?” Santiago asked.

  “Either that or a small island,” Lily said. “There are many in the San Juan Islands. Some are no more than rocky atolls covered with fir trees.”

  Dom pulled up a map of the area on his phone. “It’s going to take several hours to get a boat up to this remote location. And without knowing what it is they’re cloaking, we can’t send Finn in with the helicopter.”

  “Too loud,” Jackson said. “For Arianna’s sake, they can’t know we’re here.”

  “Then we’ll commandeer a boat from one of the locals,” Santiago said. “Surely there are people living somewhere around here.”

  “I don’t know. Most of this is government or tribal land.”

  “Without knowing what we’re heading toward, they might hear us before we see them,” Lily warned.

  “And if that happens, Arianna and any of the sweetbloods they have could be in even more danger.” Jackson’s gut churned.

  “If they’re even alive,” said Santiago.

  Lily rolled her eyes, echoing Jackson’s thoughts. The guy could be a serious pessimist sometimes.