by Sylvia Day
Vashti appeared at the shattered rear sliding-glass door, supporting the weight of the limping Alpha who’d shifted into human form and donned his jeans.
“What the hell just happened here?” Syre growled.
Elijah halted abruptly, causing Vash to stumble and curse. He pointed at the confused but sane minion. “That fucker bit me. As a wraith.”
“Who are you people?” the minion sobbed. “Where are my clothes?”
Vashti looked at Syre before helping Elijah to a chair. “My head is going to explode if something doesn’t make sense here really damn quick.”
“Where are Raze and Crash?” Syre asked, having taken a quick head count.
“Putting out a car fire on the street before it attracts attention.” She straightened. “Damn it. I wanted that bitch alive.”
His brow arched in silent inquiry.
“The vampress who killed Lindsay’s mother,” Elijah explained. He looked at Vash. “There’s no way her appearance wasn’t deliberately styled to mimic you.”
“No,” she agreed. “She had roots.”
“Excuse me?”
“Her hair. The roots were brown; I noticed when I ripped out a chunk of it. And I’m pretty sure her tits were silicone. They were like Princess Leia buns glued to her chest.”
Restlessness forced Syre into the pacing that was normally Vashti’s trait. The blood you sent is a breakthrough, Grace had said. I blended it with samples of wraith-tainted blood and there was a short period of reversal.
Adrian’s blood, filtered through Lindsay and transfused into Elijah, who’d been bitten.
He pointed at the sobbing man who rocked himself on the floor like a child. “This minion was a wraith?”
“When he took a bite of me, yeah,” the Alpha confirmed. “I remember that anchor tattoo. I was going to rip it off of him with my teeth.”
“I remember it, too,” Raze said, coming in from the front door. “I saw it in a framed photo in one of the houses we searched.”
“Fuckin’ A.” Vash stared at the wraiths. “These are the residents? My god…did they eat their own children?”
The minion began to scream and rip out his hair. Syre knocked him out with a fist to the temple.
“You’ve gotta big fucking problem here,” Elijah said. “That Vashti wannabe was one of yours and she was here, well aware of what the hell was going on with these wraiths. She was batshit crazy, but still. She’s been hunting humans for sport for years now. I doubt Lindsay’s mother was her first or last.”
“Syre.”
All heads turned to Lyric, who descended from the second floor. “There are a dozen wraiths upstairs who’ve gone long enough without food that they’re barely capable of blinking.”
“She was feeding them,” Vash said. “She infected them, then fed them their own children. Why?”
“There’s something else,” Lyric went on. “You’ll want to see it for yourself.”
Syre gestured for Vashti to precede him in following Lyric upstairs. They ascended quickly, picking over tarlike puddles that marked the end of wraith lives. Lyric led them to the room at the end of the hall, the master bedroom, which had been ravaged. The furniture had been tossed in the corner, opening room for the placement of a table and chairs. Writing on the wall documented the progression of the virus over a period of seventy-two hours. Handheld radios were plugged into their recharging bases. Duffel bags and a suitcase had been shoved against the closed closet doors.
“Here.” Lyric pointed at the open suitcase. Amid the pile of rumpled clothes was an employee badge.
Crouching, Syre picked up the rectangular laminated badge and stared at the all-too-familiar face in the photo. His blood turned to ice as his thumb brushed over the MITCHELL AERONAUTICS winged logo.
“What is it?” Vashti asked behind him, unable to see.
He passed her the badge over his shoulder and riffled through the rest of the contents.
“Phineas,” she said quietly. “But he’s dead.”
“Is he?”
The luggage undoubtedly belonged to Adrian’s original second-in-command, as evidenced by the personal items inside, which included two molted feathers. Syre eyed the robin’s-egg-blue color of the filaments, which so reminded him of the wings he’d once boasted. Each angel’s wings were uniquely colored, leaving no doubt that the feathers he held had once graced Phineas’s.
Elijah’s voice broke the weighted silence. “They were experiments,” he said, reading the writing on the wall. “See how they have them divided up by weight and gender, then again by these letters: A, B, and C.”
“Here.” Raze entered the room with what looked like a makeup case in one hand. He set it down on the table and released the catch, revealing a variety of vials.
“We need to get that to Grace,” Vash said.
Syre pushed to his feet. “Grace needs help.”
Vash walked to Elijah and handed him Phineas’s ID card. “Raze knows a laboratory scientist in Chicago. I bet she could help us narrow down our choices to the best in the field.”
“That’s a dead end,” Raze said vehemently. “I banged her and left. I doubt she’d be too charitable to my coming around again with my hand out. It’d be…messy.”
Syre didn’t point out that banging and leaving lovers was par for the course with Raze. Instead he said, “Go to her with your dick out. You know how to get what we need out of her.”
“There’s got to be another way,” the captain insisted. “We can put out a call to the minions. There are bound to be some who have ties we can pull.”
The strength of Raze’s protests didn’t escape his notice, but Syre chose not to delve into the reason for it now. “We don’t have time to stumble around in the dark, and a recommendation from someone you know personally and intimately is a damn sight more responsible than a fucking Google search. See to it.”
A muscle ticced in Raze’s jaw. “Yes, Commander.”
“Phineas,” Elijah said softly, his attention on the ID card. He looked up and raked the room with a narrowed, searching gaze. “What the hell was that vampress into? Mortals, vampires, Sentinels…nothing was off-limits for her.”
Syre’s arms crossed. “What are the chances that Phineas isn’t dead?”
Elijah barked out a humorless laugh. “No way. He and Adrian were like this.” He crossed his fingers, then glanced at the suitcase on the floor. “Phineas was coming back from a trip to the Navajo Lake outpost. He stopped in Hurricane, Utah, to feed his lycans and was ambushed by a nest of wraiths. Whoever the hell that Vashti-wannabe was, she must’ve had a setup there, too. And after Phineas was taken out, she grabbed his shit and bailed.”
“Perhaps. At this point we can’t rule anything out.”
“Right.” The Alpha’s gaze was hard. “Because it’s more believable that Sentinels and vampires are working together than it is for a group of minions to fall off the deep end.”
Syre conceded the point. The majority of minions succumbed to madness—mortals weren’t designed to live without their souls.
A piercing, inhuman scream shattered the moment. Everyone charged downstairs, reaching the first floor as a series of gunshots reverberated through the house.
Crash stood over the sprawled body of the wraith-turned-minion. His gun was in one hand and his other was pressed over a bloody wound on his biceps. “He went nuts and lunged for me.”
The minion who’d briefly recovered lay dead on the floor, his features reverted to the haunted, sunken look of a wraith. Even as they watched, the man disintegrated into an oil slick.
Rage burned through Syre, igniting a vicious bloodlust. It was quite clear now why Adrian had risked Lindsay the way he had—he couldn’t afford to give up even a drop of his blood, not when all evidence pointed to it being a component of a cure for the Wraith Virus.
Syre glanced at the Alpha. Lindsay was the key to Adrian, Elijah was the key to Lindsay, and Vashti was the key to Elijah. The means he required
to save his people was within his grasp, and he didn’t have any qualms about using it.
CHAPTER 18
Adrian exited his private plane first, then held out a hand to assist Lindsay down the short steps.
“Wow,” she said. “It’s definitely cooler here in Ontario.”
Soon she wouldn’t notice such things. Every day the vampirism in her blood took greater and greater hold, and every day he was relieved to find her soul pure and intact. It seemed Shadoe’s soul had indeed been enough of a sacrifice, leaving Lindsay’s unmarred by the curse of the Fallen. Although he had doubts that the Creator paid any attention to him anymore, Adrian still offered up his gratitude for the miracle of her.
With his hand at her back, he steered her toward the Mitchell Aeronautics hangar Siobhán was using as her home base. They stepped through a slender parting between the massive hangar doors, then headed to the stairs that led down into the subterranean storage areas. The eerie quiet they descended into was very much at odds with his last visit. Then, the screams of the maddened infected minions had been damn near deafening. He’d since had the rooms soundproofed to preserve the sanity of the Sentinels who worked there.
“Captain.”
He turned to face a doorway he’d just passed. “Siobhán. It’s good to see you.”
The petite brunette stepped out with a smile for Lindsay and a quick nod of greeting for him, but her eyes went immediately to the carrier in his hand. “What have you brought for me?”
“What you asked for.” He passed it over.
“Come with me,” she said, running a hand through her cropped hair, which was still damp and fresh smelling from a recent shower. As was her usual, she wore urban camouflage pants with Army-issue jungle boots and a plain black T-shirt. The hard-edged attire did little to toughen her appearance. She was tiny and appeared delicate, a ruse that had blindsided too many of her opponents to count.
He followed her and Lindsay down the hall and into a laboratory outfitted with the best equipment his considerable fortune could buy. Freezers and glass-fronted refrigeration units lined the walls, while microscopes, notepads, and laptops covered the metal tables in the center.
Siobhán cleared space on the nearest tabletop with a sweep of her hand and set the cooler down. She smiled when she opened it and read the label on the blood bag. “Wish I could’ve been there when Raguel gave this up. And you got a sample from Vashti, too! You’ll have to tell me all about that.”
“Certainly, although I expect you have information to share with me as well.” Adrian pulled out a metal stool for Lindsay and stood behind her. “Where’s everyone else?”
“The others are in the infirmary or out in the field.” The Sentinel moved to the closest refrigerator and put the two bags inside. “I wanted us to have some privacy when I talked to you about my latest discoveries.”
“Oh?”
Lindsay reached for his hand and linked her fingers with his.
Siobhán returned and leaned a hip in to the edge of the table. She was flushed and bright eyed, almost glowing. He’d never seen her look so…happy. “I ran tests using the various samples that were sent to me over the last few days. Lycan blood, for the most part, has no effect.”
“For the most part?”
“There was one sample that was anomalous. When I tested it, it caused a violent reaction. The virus became unstable very quickly. Had I been testing with a live subject, the subject would have expired.”
“What sample was this?”
“The Alpha’s.”
Lindsay’s hand tightened on his. “Elijah’s? Why?”
“I’ll have to run more tests to be certain, but I believe it’s because the virus was created with his blood or blood similar to it. I’m trying to ascertain whether Elijah has a unique genetic anomaly or if it’s common to Alphas in particular.” Siobhán crossed her arms. “Unfortunately, I can’t get a hold of Reese to get more samples.”
Adrian thought back to the last time he’d heard from Reese, the Sentinel in charge of the Alphas. The dominant lycans had been segregated from the others to prevent revolt, and they were used for assignments requiring the utmost stealth, ones in which a lone hunter was the best offense. “I haven’t spoken to him in about three months, but he checks in regularly and reports no trouble.”
“Do you scan the reports personally?”
“No, I delegate to my second.”
“So it was Phineas’s job, then Jason’s, and now Damien handles it?”
“Correct.”
She nodded. “I would suggest you speak with Reese directly, Captain. One donor wouldn’t be enough for the size of the outbreak we’re dealing with unless they synthesized the identified protein. They’d need a lot of Alpha blood to pull that off. I’m talking about countless pints of blood and a considerable length of research and development time.”
“I don’t understand,” Lindsay said. “If there are genetic markers that identify Alphas, why was Elijah placed under observation first? There shouldn’t have been any question as to what he was, if a simple blood test could prove it.”
“This is all news to me,” Adrian said quietly, while inside his thoughts were raging. How could something so vital and elementary have escaped their notice for so long? He was afraid it was impossible, which led to even darker thoughts. Lindsay had been abducted from Angels’ Point by someone with wings and delivered to Syre, who’d Changed her. From that incident, he’d known it was possible that one of his Sentinels had become a saboteur, but this…This spoke of a conspiracy of breadth and far-reaching consequence. “Have you ever been to Alaska, neshama?”
“No.”
“Well, we’ll be changing that tomorrow.”
“Captain?”
He looked at Siobhán. “Yes?”
“There’s something else.” She took a deep breath. “I’ve fallen in love with a vampire.”
As the hotel room door shut behind them, Vash tossed her bag on the bed and shot a worried glance at Elijah’s leg. “How are you healing?”
“I’m fine.” He offered her an easy, heartbreaking smile. “Good as new.”
She nodded, but worry knotted her stomach. Like most lycans, he hated flying, and his discomfort had rubbed her raw over the short flight to West Virginia. She’d barely paid attention to the town of Huntington as she drove through it on the way to their lodging. Her thoughts were firmly on the events of the day and how dependent her equanimity had become on Elijah’s well-being. Once she’d made up her mind to keep him, everything had changed. She now had something to lose, something she couldn’t bear to lose. What was building between them was too new, too rare, too precious with all its myriad possibilities. The challenges, the joys—
“Vashti.” He came to her, sliding his hands into her hair and cupping her head. “It was a broken leg. It happens.”
She caught him by the belt loops and yanked him closer. “I saw you get pulled into that room and the door shut…I panicked. I’ve never felt anything like that in my life. The sheer terror. I had to fight my way to get to you and every second felt like an hour. And when I got there and saw the gun in her hand, everything froze…I could barely think—”
“Shh…” He pressed his lips to her forehead. “It’s okay.”
“No. No, damn it, it’s not okay. I don’t want to feel like this. It’s too much.”
“Yes, it is. Scary as hell.”
“You don’t sound scared,” she accused. “You don’t act like it.”
“I fight to keep a lid on it.” His voice was low and soothing. “I knew what you are…who you are…when I took you on. If I tie you down to keep you safe, I’ll lose you. And since I can’t lose you, I’m working on dealing with it.”
That his words so closely mirrored hers was soothing, but it wasn’t an answer. It didn’t fix what was aching inside her chest. “I’m not as strong as you. I don’t want to let you out of my sight.”
He nuzzled against her and she leaned into him, h
er knees weakening with his tenderness. “Because you’ve already let someone out of your sight once and you lost him. I can imagine it’s tough to take that leap again.”
“This wasn’t supposed to happen. I’m not supposed to feel this way again. I had my shot. I had Char. It’s not supposed to happen a second time.”
Pulling back, Elijah watched her with those verdant hunter’s eyes. Cool and assessing. “What’s not supposed to happen?”
“You. This. Us.” She squeezed her eyes shut to block out the way he was looking at her. Butterflies were having a field day in her stomach. The anxiety was killing her. “Shit. Why can’t the sex be enough? Why did all this other stuff have to get in the way?”
He tilted her head back and sealed his mouth over hers. The first lick of his tongue drove her mad, goaded her to push up onto her tiptoes and capture him with soft suction. His groan rippled through her, inciting the fiercest hunger. Her desire was always smoldering, ready to combust with the slightest provocation.
Vash took his mouth with savage greed, her tongue stroking deep. Her hands shoved up beneath his shirt, seeking and finding his warm, rough satin skin. Her fingers dug into the muscles bracketing his spine, pulling him hard against her so that nothing came between them but their clothes.
His rumbling laugh vibrated against her tender breasts. “You’re definitely trying to screw me to death.”
“I want you,” she muttered, while kissing along his jaw and throat.
“Good.”
She shoved his shirt up and buried her face in the light dusting of hair on his chest, breathing in the hardworking scent of his skin. Her tongue found the flat disk of a nipple and teased it, worrying it with fluttering strokes.
“Fuck, that feels good,” he said hoarsely, lifting his arms to pull his shirt off.
Dropping to her knees, she yanked open his fly with frantic fingers.
“Hey.” He tossed his shirt aside. “What’s the rush?”
