His eyes glowed amber in the dim light. They’d have to be somewhere safe soon. She had no idea how much sunlight Dante could handle. “Feral,” he said. “At least one of them.”
“That would explain how they made such a fast getaway.”
“And it begs the question…”
“Why does Jeremy have feral vampires working for him?”
“Perhaps his legitimate operatives are getting a little antsy,” he suggested. “But he could use his feral vampires with no questions asked.”
“It certainly strengthens our hypothesis.”
While Dante studied the interior of the sedan, Xandra examined the spray of blood. She’d wounded at least one of them and the rolling car had only made it worse. Not that it had stopped them from escaping, she thought with a pang of regret. With the right kind of persuasion they might have been able to tell them something useful. Her eyes focused on the backseat where one of her bullets had imbedded in the upholstery. Then she noticed something dark lying on the bottom of the roof, which in the overturned car had suddenly become the floor.
“What’s that?” she asked.
He squinted, the rising sun already making his eyes water. “Looks like a laptop case.”
Before she could warn him, he’d crawled in the window and was making his way beneath the upside-down seats to the back.
From under the engine hood, she heard a small explosion.
“Sir!” yelled one of the officers.
“Dante!”
The fire caught the gas line rapidly. Flame raced from the front of the car to the back.
The officers were already running for the nearby trees, desperate to take cover.
“Leave it,” Xandra hollered at Dante. “There’s no time.”
Trapped in the back of the car, he looked around wildly. She hauled on the back door, but couldn’t budge it.
Dante’s booted foot hit the window. Glass exploded outward. She felt the impact of his hard body, then saw only the blur of grass rushing by beneath her feet.
A sudden loud explosion deafened her. Dante fell to the ground, covering her. A wave of heat rushed over them. Her throat hurt from screaming, but she couldn’t hear herself.
When the air cleared, Dante’s body was pressed against her. “Are you okay?” she thought she asked. She still couldn’t hear, but he nodded.
He got up stiffly and offered her his hand. Xandra looked back at the car burning in a great geyser of flame. Whatever clues were in its interior were lost now. But Dante was smiling.
She glanced down at what he held in his hand. The laptop.
“No idea if it still works,” Dante said. She hugged him gratefully.
The officers were approaching from out of the trees. She looked up the embankment to where Alix’s head was barely visible above the backseat window of the SUV. At least her friend was safe.
“We’re going to call for reinforcements,” one of the officers said. “Perhaps you want to take the car and move the civilians to a new site.”
Dante nodded. “Tell the chief I’ll call him as soon as we’re safely installed in a secure location.”
Alix was still crouched in the back seat, her eyes wide with terror. “It’s okay to come out now.” The policeman assisted her from the vehicle and then reached inside to retrieve Dante’s knapsack as well. He led her over to the Jeep and then tossed the keys to Dante.
He caught them mid air. Taking Xandra’s arm, he led her and Alix back toward the jeep.
“It’s okay.” Xandra tried to sound soothing. As a bar owner, Alix was used to dealing with all kinds of disturbances, but this was too much to ask of her. It even went beyond the call of duty in Xandra’s line of work. Regret seized her. She shouldn’t have dragged her friend into it all. Silently, she prayed that the good guys would win. So Alix could go back to her life and so Xandra could finally have one. Hopefully, with Dante Rodriguez.
They drove in silence to the new safe house. This one was situated in a funkier neighborhood. A bar district in the downtown area, complete with strange characters coming and going at all hours of the night. Their presence wouldn’t be unduly noted. The safe “house” turned out to be an apartment walkup over a busy restaurant and bar. It contained two entrances, one from a narrow stairway at street level and another from a rickety fire escape out back.
The sun was rising by the time they stowed the Jeep in a city parking lot a few doors away. Dante sported dark sunglasses on the short walk from the car to the apartment. But even with his eyes protected, his mouth was drawn in a grim line as if the wan daylight caused him considerable pain. The light was making her own eyes tear. She swiped at the moisture.
Only when they’d entered the shadowed interior of the stairwell did she breathe a sigh of relief. They climbed the stairs quietly and Dante let them into a stale-smelling apartment. Two closet-sized bedrooms forked off the tiny living room. The bathroom and the galley kitchen were the only other rooms in the cramped flat. Below them, the fire escape emptied onto a back patio where a couple of night shift workers were enjoying a beer after work. The rain had cleared, leaving the morning looking promising, if a bit cool.
Dante pulled the drapes, shutting them into the darkness. He rummaged in the cupboards, coming up with a box of cereal and a can of milk. The only other provisions turned out to be a couple of stale-looking packaged dinners. “Hungry?”
Xandra shook her head.
Alix looked ready to drop on the spot.
“Why don’t you two go to bed?” he said.
Alix looked longingly at the tiny bedrooms. “Does it matter which room I take?”
Dante shook his head. “I doubt we’ll be getting much sleep.”
Xandra glanced at the laptop that he still held in his hand as if afraid to put it down. “I want to see if there’s any useful information on that thing.”
“We don’t even know if it still works. We might have to take it to our specialists to see if they can extract the information.”
Xandra took it from him and sat at the bistro table in the kitchen. “Only one way to find out.”
Alix wandered back in their direction, blinking sleepily.
“Go to bed,” Xandra told her. “We’ll call you if we find out anything earth shattering.” Nodding, her friend disappeared into the smaller of the two rooms.
Xandra examined the laptop. The case was dirty from its tumble in the car but well padded. She hoped it was padded enough. Gingerly, she pulled the computer from its case. Whoever had packed it had also included the power supply, obviously intending to do some further work. She plugged it into the outlet and pressed the power button.
The computer obliged by powering up. She let go a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding.
But then they hit a snag when the screen prompted them to enter password.
Dante swore.
“Hang on,” Xandra said. “Remember this computer belongs to the same organization I worked for most of my life. I know how they think.”
“It might be faster to take it in,” Dante said.
“And risk being seen? Faster, it might be, but also more dangerous.”
She drummed her fingers on the little table. Dante paced.
“If I had to guess, I’d say Jeremy set up the passwords. He was a real stickler for details like that. He wouldn’t trust the tech people to do their jobs.”
“Figures,” he said, cramming his large frame into the too small bistro chair.
“Now, the last time I broke into one of Jeremy’s computers, I used his password.”
“Wow,” Dante said, clearly impressed. “How’d you get his password?”
“I was watching over his shoulder one day when he was typing it in. He has no idea I know it.” She typed Jeremy’s login. The computer accepted the login but rejected the password.
“Watch it,” he warned. “You don’t want it locking up on us.”
Well, apparently Jeremy’s old password no longer worked. Pe
rhaps her snooping around in his computer had been noticed. Xandra racked her mind trying to think of what Jeremy might have chosen instead.
“Okay, let’s try ‘hybrid’.” She glanced up at him. “That’s what we’re supposed to be, isn’t it?” She typed the revised password into the field. The computer beeped and spit out the message “Invalid Password”.
“One more try and then we’ll be locked out,” Dante warned.
“Not if we restart the computer,” she said, giving it the three-finger salute.
The computer chimed again and began to reload. While she waited for the operating system to come up, an idea suddenly came to her. Jeremy had been trying to save his dead wife. That was what had started his slow slide into insanity.
“How about ‘resurrection’?”
Dante looked doubtful.
When the prompt came up again, Xandra typed in Jeremy’s logon, followed by ‘resurrection’.
The laptop chimed again. “Invalid Password,” Dante said, as if she couldn’t read it herself.
She shot him an annoyed look. “Okay…how about ‘project resurrection’?” She keyed it in. To her amazement, the laptop accepted the password.
“We’re in!” Dante moved his chair to sit beside her, crowding them both at the tiny table. “Let’s see what this thing can tell us.”
Not only had Jeremy password-protected his computers, he kept his files carefully hidden. Xandra flipped through several directories, unhiding files and folders. And still, she found nothing out of the ordinary. She managed to locate someone’s expense account receipts, carefully documented, the vacation schedule for the department as well as a bunch of routine emails about budget expenditures and employees booking off sick days.
“Damn.” Dante slammed his palm against the table.
Xandra held up a hand. “Wait, I have a feeling there’s something here. If we can just uncover it.” She scrolled down another list of directories and unhid some more files.
A folder named “Breeding Program” popped onto the screen.
“Bingo!”
Her finger hovered above the track pad. All her life she’d wanted to know the truth about what had happened to her mother. More recently, she’d been desperate to know what had been done to her, who and what she really was.
“Well?” She heard the impatience in Dante’s tone. His hand covered hers and he moved the cursor along the list of files. “We might not have all that much time here.” His thumb double-clicked the folder. It opened.
It took a moment for Xandra to recognize the flow chart on the screen. Several unfamiliar names topped the list, all marked deceased. She traced the thin line on the screen with her finger, stopping when she came to the name Salina Wheeler.
“That’s my mother!” Her heart sank at the cold-hearted words printed in black next to her mother’s name. “Deceased”. She glanced up at Dante. His face looked equally grim. “She’s been gone for a long time, but it just seems so harsh to see it written that way.”
“It’s all cruel,” he said, his jaw clenched. “What they’re doing is wrong.”
He traced the red line to the side. “Here’s my mom.”
The name read “Morena Selas”. Beside it in black print, it said, “Discharged”.
“Discharged? What does that mean?”
Dante exhaled through his teeth. “She volunteered. She thought it was a legitimate medical research project. She needed the money desperately. But she had several miscarriages, so they paid her off and let her go. What they didn’t realize was that she had already met my father and she was pregnant again. She left the country for Mexico shortly after that. They never knew for certain what happened to her. Or that I existed.”
“But they suspect?”
“Oh, they more than suspect.”
Xandra scoured the flow chart for the fate of the other test subjects and discovered an unsettling trend. “Except for your mom, all these test subjects are marked discharged or deceased.”
Dante’s finger traced the short red line that extended from her mother’s name. It ended in the words “Hybrid Female Child”. “And you.”
“Do you think they all died from the effects of the experiments?”
“That or from Jeremy’s intervention.”
A chill swept between her shoulder blades. She looked again at the dotted line. Instead of a father’s name she found only a large X.
Dante bent his head to see what had caught her attention. “It doesn’t say who your father was.”
“Or is. He might still be alive.”
“Maybe.” He didn’t sound convinced.
She tried to think of a time when Jeremy hadn’t been the father figure in her life, and couldn’t. He’d always been in the shadows, a mysterious friend of her mother’s, lurking on the periphery of her life, waiting. She’d thought of him as the father she never had. But now a host of other possibilities occurred to her. Somewhere out there might be her real father. A man who might love her if he knew he had a daughter.
Her stomach twisted from nausea and anger. Jeremy had taken legal custody of her and bided his time, depriving her of all that could have been. For what? She couldn’t help wondering. Whatever Jeremy had intended to do with her, he’d certainly had ample time. Was he waiting for the missing piece of the puzzle? Dante?
Dante’s hands tightened on her shoulders, but he mercifully left her alone with her thoughts.
She longed to give in to her pain and anger, but she couldn’t. She had to find out whatever was hidden in those files. It might be her only chance to know the truth. She’d deal with Jeremy later.
“There has to be more here.” Xandra closed the file and opened another labeled “Notes”.
Indicators point to a normal pregnancy.
“That’s me.” Xandra looked at the notes jotted down in the computer file. She read further but found nothing much of interest. Her mother had undergone many tests during the months of her pregnancy, but nothing seemed out of the ordinary. The entry ended with the footnote: Female child born on October 20 at 6:20pm, 7 lbs. 6 oz.
Dante was still perched over her shoulder, reading intently. “No baby pictures,” he remarked dryly.
“Very funny.” She turned to see his amber eyes centered on another entry further down the page.
Since she has become pregnant, Agent Salina Wheeler has strongly objected to many aspects of the program. She has forcefully disagreed with plans to distribute the serum through new channels.
“Distribution channels,” Dante scoffed. “Organized crime is more like it.”
“Wait a minute.” It took a second for Xandra’s mind to catch up to the words written on the screen. “Agent Wheeler?”
“Apparently your mom was an operative,” Dante said. “You didn’t know?”
“No!” An operative. Someone who worked with Jeremy, who’d perhaps…been romantically involved with him. Her mind acknowledged that thought reluctantly.
He was staring at her expectantly. “I never knew,” she whispered. “Men came to the apartment at odd hours of the night. My mom had rules. I was to stay in my room at all times. When I was old enough to think about it rationally, I assumed she was…a prostitute.”
“And Jeremy never told you differently?”
“No, in fact he knew what I suspected, and he encouraged me to continue thinking that.” Anger surged inside her again, pure and white-hot. She fought it down.
“What do you think the men were doing during their visits?” he asked carefully.
“I don’t know.” She held up a hand. “Wait. It says here, my mom took exception to using organized crime as a distribution network. Do you think that’s what she was doing?”
“Distributing Jeremy’s serum under the cover of being a prostitute?” he finished for her.
She nodded. “It would make sense. Prostitutes have difficult and violent lives. It wouldn’t seem so unusual for one to perish under suspicious circumstances.”
“So b
asically she had a problem with the way Jeremy was running things. And enough clout to make things difficult for him.”
“Seems like.” She thought back to the memory Clarice’s hypnosis had unearthed. Jeremy had arrived at the apartment. He and her mom had engaged in a violent argument. And a few minutes later her mom was dead. Killed by a feral vampire.
“Here’s a thought,” Dante said. “With his funding revoked, maybe it became too expensive and too dangerous for Jeremy to continue his experiments. Especially if he had test subjects to, ah, dispose of afterward. Perhaps he decided to widen his sample, put it out there in the community.”
“And my mom objected to it enough to cause a fair bit of trouble for him.”
“Or to threaten to go to the proper authorities and expose it all.”
She scrolled down through Jeremy’s notes. They consisted mostly of scientific accounts of experiments gone wrong. Science wasn’t her forte. Her finger hovered above the little X at the top of the screen, ready to close the file and peruse another, when her eyes caught a familiar name.
Agent Wheeler continues to be a barrier to the further expansion of the program. She has made repeated threats to take the child and disappear. Steps must be taken to preserve our work and sustain our recent successes.
Xandra’s mind yanked her back to the depths of that gut-wrenching memory: her mom’s body sprawled on the carpet. A dark shape hovered over her, a feral vampire feeding voraciously. And all the while Jeremy stood there watching calmly, as if he’d planned it all. Maybe he had, came the unbidden thought.
“Sonofabitch! He set her up!”
“Perhaps,” Dante said gently. “But what makes you think so?”
“That memory, the one Clarice helped me uncover. I remember my mom coming back to the apartment alone. Then Jeremy arrived and they argued. When I finally worked up the courage to leave the bedroom my mom was lying on the carpet and a feral vampire was feeding from her.”
Dante’s hands clenched on her shoulders. He pulled her back against him. Through the shirt he wore, she felt the warmth of his skin and the hard muscles of his abdomen. But he didn’t interrupt. He let her finish the thought, to face memories so painful she’d kept them buried deep for years.
Feral Passion Page 18
