“Bleedin’ hell, he can fly!” Emerald exclaimed, getting out of the Mini and staring at Jared with appreciative amazement in her green eyes. She didn’t even glance at the sheriff. “Not with wings, mind you, but bloody well close.”
“What the hell are you and Nett doing, Em? I told to you stay inside and lock the damn door.” The sheriff sounded like thunder and looked like lightning about to strike.
Emerald turned and set her hands on her hips, her bracelets tinkling like a soft wind chime in the face of his storm. “And I told you that it wasn’t necessary. Now we’re all going to go inside and discuss this problem, and you’re going to listen before it’s too late.”
“Over my dead body,” Sam said. “They’re coming with me to the station now.”
“I wouldn’t be saying that if I were you, Samuel T. Sheridan. Your arse is so bloody stubborn you’d tempt a saint to murder.”
Erin thought the sheriff was going to explode. She barely resisted the urge to run and duck. The air around them was so charged that it was a wonder it wasn’t crackling with lightning.
Surprisingly, Dr. Batista, wearing her customary lab coat and hair knot, moved from the Mini and set herself between the sheriff and Emerald. “I think we ought to hear what they’ve got to say, Sam.” She turned her dark gaze to Jared, an assessing frown knitting her brow. “There are things you don’t know, and I’ve just seen something that can’t be explained by anything you or I know. If they were of danger to us, Em and I would be dead despite the pistol in my pocket. And if they were of a mind to run, they would have breezed right by you, and I’m not even sure you would have seen them pass.”
“We need to hear what they have to say before it’s too late,” Emerald said again.
Erin’s scalp began to tingle. “What do you mean?”
Emerald shook her head. “The Druids weren’t so kind, so I can’t answer that. I can say we’re all going to be somewhere we don’t want to be.”
Jared inhaled sharply. Erin glanced at him. His eyes were narrowed, and he seemed to be trying to watch the sheriff and scan the area. Erin had to ease Jared’s apprehension. “I’m going to lower my hand and hold Jared’s hand. He’s in pain, and only I can help.”
“Pain from what?” the sheriff demanded.
“Poison from a Tsara,” Erin said.
“A what?” demanded the sheriff.
Erin slipped her hand into Jared’s and plunged herself into his world with no going back. “A Tsara. Jared is a Blood Hunter from the spirit world, a Shadowman warrior for the Guardian Forces who fight Heldon’s Fallen Army of the damned. He was poisoned in battle and condemned to our world. If we can sit down and talk, I will tell you all about it and the fact that a doctor is framing me for the murders of four people. Four people from whom he drained blood to transfuse into the king of Kassim, Ashodan ben Shashur. I’m a nurse, and I worked for the Sno-Med Corporation in Manhattan. I’ll tell you everything—then, if you want to take me to the station, I’ll go. But I have one question for you. I don’t know if these four people are the only people Dr. Cinatas has killed or not. How many unexplained deaths or disappearances have there been in this area since Sno-Med moved into Arcadia?”
“Stef,” Dr. Batista gasped. “She worked there. What if she discovered something—”
“Erin will not go where I cannot protect her,” Jared said.
At that moment several black tubes landed at their feet and exploded, emitting a powder keg of blue smoke. Clouds of it encompassed Erin’s face, making the dozen or more gas-masked, black-clad men surrounding them almost seem like a dream. A dream with guns bigger than any Erin had seen outside a movie screen.
Erin’s eyes immediately watered and burned. The smoke suffocated her, and no matter which way she turned her face, it was there, burning her lungs.
“Nobody move,” a man yelled as if over a loudspeaker. “Drop the gun!”
Through the haze, Erin saw the sheriff swing around. But before he could do anything else, a bullet ripped through his arm with enough force to knock him backward and send his gun flying to the ground. The gunshot was deafening to Erin’s ears.
“Sam!” Emerald screamed, running toward the sheriff, sending dread through Erin’s heart as she waited for a bullet to plow into Emerald.
The sheriff thought so too, because he threw himself at Emerald, knocking her to the ground beneath him.
Dr. Batista fell to her knees, her lab coat pulled over her face. Erin didn’t have a chance to see if the doctor was shot or reacting to the debilitating blue gas. Jared scooped Erin up, pulling her crushingly tight against him as he sprinted toward the line of trees to escape capture. But within five steps a net blasted over them, falling like thick lead ropes, blinding Erin with its gnarling mesh. Jared struggled against the weight of the net, dragging them forward with superhuman strength, groaning with the strain.
His movement only served to bind them tighter into the net. The ropes strained, cutting sharply into Erin’s shoulder, pressing painfully into her scalp and face. The blue smoke rose higher, enveloping them in a thick, choking cloud, as if another canister of it had been shot beneath them.
Jared roared with frustration, shoving harder and harder against the net, but gaining no ground.
“No!” he screamed, falling to his knees.
Tears poured from Erin’s eyes as the gas stole her ability to see or breathe.
She knew that whoever was behind this attack had known just how to capture Jared, and had been told how he could run. Only someone with a great amount of money and resources could put together such an elaborate setup, and Erin was very afraid that person was Cinatas. She might have been able to protect Jared from the law, but when it came to Cinatas’s evil, she was beginning to think she was powerless against his far-reaching hand.
She wrapped her arms around Jared and pulled him close, even as the world slipped painfully from her grasp.
Chapter Seventeen
Awareness came slowly in a muddled haze of confusion. Erin tried to move, but couldn’t seem to lift her hand or shift her legs. She thrashed her head, fighting against the bindings, remembering a heavy rope at the fringes of her mind.
Danger.
Jared.
She opened her eyes, blinking against the bright lights of a sterile-looking lab, a white one, one very similar to the Sno-Med lab in Manhattan where she’d found the bodies, only this one was much, much bigger. Cold, an icy, bone-chilling cold surrounded her as if she were lying on a slab of ice. With heart-stopping horror she realized she was strapped to a stretcher, arms, legs, chest, and hips bound tightly down. The IV dripping told her somebody had tapped into a vein in her arm. A monitor beeped the accelerated pace of her heart and flashed her other vital signs, her rapid respiration and elevated blood pressure.
And she wasn’t alone.
She shut her eyes, feigning sleep.
“My patience in waiting for you to rejoin us is wearing thin, Morgan.” Dr. Cinatas said. “I’ve been so looking forward to just a few games before departing the area. You wouldn’t want to disappointment me.”
Erin snapped her eyes open, catching sight of the dark doctor, who looked more satanic than ever now that she knew what evil lurked behind his polished facade. The gleam in his eyes she had first seen as charismatic intensity revealed itself as feral insanity. The slight smile, a cruel twist rather than guarded affability. He had perfect grooming, his designer suit was an expensive casket for a rotting corpse.
“Your disappointment isn’t very high on my list of priorities at the moment. Where is Jared?”
“Tisk, risk,” he said, holding up a syringe, tapping it, and ejecting a drop of fluid. “My disappointment needs to be your greatest concern, Erin. Your every breath should hinge on it. I owe you an injection, Morgan. Ever read about what a man goes through before being executed? What his last moments are like? What he feels? What he thinks about? Ever wonder what those last moments of a condemned’s life are like?”
Cinat
as moved closer to the stretcher.
“Where’s Jared?” Erin asked again, trying to give Cinatas no reaction to his taunting, but the heart monitor sped to an alarming rate.
The doctor glanced at it and smiled. “Ever wonder what it would be like to die from a lethal injection? The helplessness of being strapped down as a needle of death came closer and closer? Ever wonderwhat the feel of poison would be like in your arteries and veins as it coursed its way through your body, leaving every cell screaming with pain?”
As Cinatas came at her with the needle, Erin couldn’t stop herself from fighting, no matter how futile the effort would be. Beside her, the monitor beeped her skyrocketing pulse. Cinatas laughed as he slid the needle into the port on her arm. He pushed the plunger home, and the vein in her arm screamed with pain that rushed up to her chest, freezing her lungs. Her brain fuzzed, and the heart monitor went silent.
“Erin,” Jared whispered as thoughts wavered through his consciousness like fleeting clouds. His wild run through the woods, the campfire bloodbath, his return to Erin, her touch soothing the ragged horror of what he’d become, the indescribable pleasure of her body, the danger…
“Erin!” Jared yelled. His eyes sprang open, and he sucked in air, instantly alert to everything about him. The cold dampness, the dank dark oppressiveness of being closed in, bound. He’d split the tape covering his mouth, but chains at his wrists and ankles held him strapped down. He could smell death around him, and the lung-burning scent of acrid chemicals. He could also smell blood—fresh human blood, not Chosen blood, not Erin. He could smell the sheriff, Emerald, and Dr. Batista, but not Erin. He could hear their breathing, but not Erin’s. He had to find her.
He struggled against the chains for his freedom. He was encased in a metal box that hemmed him in on all sides. He jerked on the chains with bone-fracturing force, but barely felt the solid lengths loosen beneath the full power of his strength. He fell back, chest heaving, body shuddering from the pain of his efforts, the desolate horror that he couldn’t help Erin spreading over him. It was as devastating as the Tsara poison eating away at him.
He wouldn’t accept that he couldn’t get to Erin. He howled with rage, shaking the metal of the box with the shattering volume of his cry.
Cinatas turned from the pleasure of watching Erin’s convulsions. A little of this and a little of that had made for a very interesting IV cocktail. The howl coming from the morgue next door had made the glass in the lab vibrate from the force of it. It’d taken one announcement that the lab might have been contaminated with a deadly bio-agent to clear the building of employees and security guards—a problem that would be easily declared as a mistake by his “hazard” team by morning. Besides Manolo, only Shashur, his bodyguard, and his servant were in the building. On the roof he had a gunman and pilot.
Hopefully Shashur, who languished in the penthouse under the first throes of what would soon become a raging fever, hadn’t heard the cry. Shashur was sure to recognize that howl. Few sounds could match a werewolf s. Cinatas had heard only one wolf before. Pathos’s howl could freeze the heart as effectively as the drug he’d just shoved up Morgan’s vein.
Before Cinatas could leave the lab, Manolo rushed in, as fast as his diseased body would allow. The man was a brittle skeleton of what he’d been two days ago. His scarlet cheeks were sunken, his cracked lips oozed, and his dark eyes were dull with pain and raging fever.
“Did you fail to do as directed to secure the man? If Shashur hears him, it will kill my plans!”
“Sir, I did everything exactly as you ordered. I secured them all in the morgue and set the temperatures very low.”
“Good. I’d hate for you to make another mistake. Your service these last two days has been exemplary. It was a shame I had to do what I did, but you’re a better man because of it. Stay here. You’ll be of no use to me in the morgue.” Cinatas left, giving Manolo a wide berth. Even though he thought he’d developed a strain of the hemorrhagic virus that was non-communicable, medical science did have its failings.
Cinatas moved into the morgue where he accepted and transported medical research cadavers in style to the Sno-Med facility. He had to struggle to slide the drawer open to see the beast-man. Cinatas had hoped to see the werewolf in its wereform rather than the body of a man fighting his binds.
“You are a big one,” Cinatas said, scrutinizing the man. “Even bigger than Pathos. If you can do all the things that Pathos can, then this is going to be so good. You, my friend, are going to help me gain control of the most powerful force for evil on earth. The Vladarian Order will bow to me.”
“Where is he? Where is Erin?”
“Pathos is coming, but you won’t be seeing him for a while, not until you’re ready. Three weeks won’t be enough time to assure your takeover of the Vladarian Order. Next year’s Gathering should be just right. And Erin. Well, how she is and where she is will be totally up to you. I get your cooperation, she lives. I don’t, she’ll live in excruciating pain every second that you thwart my authority and plan. And just so you believe I mean what I say, I’m going to give you a little example of what it will be like. Let me tell you just exactly what I’ll be doing to Erin when you hear her scream…”
Erin heard Jared’s howl, thinking that he was calling her back from the dead again. Only she saw no light, heard no angels, nor was she hovering on the ceiling watching herself on the stretcher. She was on the stretcher; her heart was now beating, her lungs were now breathing, and her mind was working, even if it was a bit fuzzy. What had Cinatas done to her?
She could only assume Cinatas had injected her with a drug used in the treatment of cardiac arrhythmias, one that stopped the heart for a short interval and then let it beat again. His sheer evil had her palms sweating and her body shuddering with fear. Cinatas didn’t seek to eliminate her. His goal was to torture her.
She’d heard what Cinatas had said to the man in the room with her. Didn’t the man realize what was happening to him? To her?
“He’s done something to you,” she whispered. She didn’t know how close Cinatas was. “Didn’t you hear him?”
Erin heard a shuffling of footsteps, and a man who looked like walking death came into view, his dark eyes so bloodshot that they nearly glowed red, so ill that she feared he wasn’t capable of understanding her. His body trembled badly.
“Help me,” she said. “I’m a nurse, and I can help you.”
He shook his head, his fear of Cinatas too great.
Erin sighed, her heart sinking. “You have to. I was his employee too, but I disappointed him, and now he’s going to torture me and the man that I love. Do you have family? Someone you love? He’s going to hurt them. He’s—”
“Manolo!” Cinatas’s sharp command cut through the lab as he approached.
The man turned, his body shuddering horribly, and Erin’s dread grew exponentially with the thudding beats of her heart. That she hadn’t heard Jared cry out again made her insides wrench with pain.
“Have the pilot on the roof ready to go, should I decide it’s necessary. Then rest a bit. Once I leave here, you can escort Shashur to the airport and then take your family on a vacation for a week or two while you recuperate. Maybe go down to the island and visit your parents and brothers for a few days. I’ll order the private jet to return and take you. You’ve earned it.”
“Yes, sir,” Manolo said and stumbled from the room. Erin wondered if the man would live that long.
“What did you do to him?” Erin forced herself to keep her breathing even and calm. She didn’t know how, but she was going to do her very best to disappoint Cinatas every way she could. She had to throw him from his calm, force him to make a mistake.
“A little virus in the blood can turn a person into a saint,” Cinatas said.
Erin searched her mind. “Are you playing God with Ebola?”
“Play God?” He shook his head. “I am a god. Ebola is passé, Morgan. There’s newer, more potent strains. But I can’
t have you playing my staff against me. I can’t have you casting doubt into their feeble minds. That could be very painful for them, and for you.”
Cinatas moved to her side, and the monitor betrayed the increased beating of her heart. He smiled again. “Have you ever studied acupuncture? All the little places on the body mapped out, telling you that if you stick a needle here, then this will happen there?” He brushed his finger up her neck and over her temple. She forced herself not to react, even though her skin crawled.
He slipped an alcohol packet from his pocket, opened it, and rubbed the finger he’d touched her with clean. Then he rubbed the skin between her thumb and forefinger with the pad, despite her efforts to twist her hand away from him. Pulling another syringe from his breast pocket, he popped the cap.
Erin steeled herself for what sort of drug he would try next. He stabbed the needle into the muscle of the hand he’d prepped, and the excruciating pain tore a scream from her. Her eyes teared. Her body shuddered and broke out in a cold sweat.
“That was perfect, Morgan. Not at all disappointing.” He held up a little electronic device, pushed a button, and her scream filled the room. “An hour or two of this, and your big friend will be my little lap-dog.” He laughed as if he’d said the funniest thing in the world.
“Jared?” Erin gasped, dying to pull the needle from her hand and shove it into Cinatas’s face. “Where is he? What have you done with him?”
“He’s on ice, learning how to cool his heels to my command. You’re proving extremely useful. Now to get you out of here so if he does break free, he won’t be able to find you. You’re the only thing he will bow to right now. His soul hasn’t quite crossed over yet, but it will soon. Together, we’ll be an unstoppable force.”
Snapping the brake on the stretcher, Cinatas wheeled her from the room. Erin’s mind scrambled, fighting against the pain every jarring move of her hand sent up her arm. She had to do something, say something that would stop Cinatas’s mad reign. “They are going to come for you,” she said. “The other Blood Hunters, Jared’s brethren from the spirit world. There is no place that you can hide when they do, is there?”
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