by Lara Adrian
The vampire lifted his shoulders and made a half-assed attempt to look confused. “What’s to tell? I dabble in a variety of ventures.”
“Yeah, I noticed. Nice little venture you’ve got going down in the basement of this shithole. How long have you been trafficking women?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Now, see, making me repeat myself is not a smart thing to do.” Kade crouched low and motioned to the pair of pit bulls to come up alongside him. They sat at his feet like squat gargoyles, staring at their former master and obediently awaiting Kade’s command simply because that’s what he wanted them to do. “I’ll bet if I told these dogs to rip your throat out, I wouldn’t have to ask them twice. What do you think? Should we find out?”
Homeboy swallowed hard. “I-I haven’t been doing it for very long. A couple months short of a year, I guess. Started out with drugs and whores, then I started getting certain … requests.” He fidgeted with one of the many gold rings that gleamed on his fingers. “You know, requests for services of a more permanent nature.”
“And your clients?” Kade prompted as he rose to his full six-foot-four height. “Who are they?”
“Humans, primarily. I really don’t keep good records.”
“But you do provide these services”—he hissed the word through his fangs—“to members of the Breed, as well.”
It wasn’t a question, and Homeboy knew it. He gave another shrug, the collar of his fox coat brushing against his diamond-studded earlobe. “I deal in a cash business, simple supply and demand. Breed or human, the money is all the same.”
“And business is good,” Kade guessed.
“I’m getting by. Why is the Order so interested in what I’m doing, anyway? You looking for a piece of the action?” he hedged, his smile little more than a slimy split of his lips. “I could cut Lucan in, if that’s what this is about. I am a businessman, after all.”
“You are scum,” Kade said, incensed but not surprised that a bottom-feeder like this would think that he or any of his brethren were for sale. “And if I told Lucan you said that, he would shred you open from chin to balls. You know what? Fuck that. I’ll save him the trouble—”
“Wait!” Homeboy held up his hands. “Wait. Tell me what you want to know.”
“Okay. Let’s start with this. How many of the women you’ve locked up in that basement and sold were Breedmates?”
A sickening silence lengthened while the vampire considered how best to answer. Even this worthless offal had to know that those rare females bearing the Breedmate birthmark were revered, precious to all of the Breed. To bring harm to a Breedmate was to bring harm to the entire vampire race, for there were no other females on the planet who could carry Breed young in their womb. To knowingly collect a profit from a Breedmate’s pain, or to benefit in any way from her death, was about the most heinous thing one of Kade’s kind could do.
He watched the other vampire as he would an insect trapped under glass, and in fact, he valued this Breed male’s life even less.
“How many, you disgusting fuck? More than one? A dozen? Twenty?” He had to work to bite back his snarl. “Did you sell them unknowingly, or did you make an even bigger profit off their suffering? Answer the goddamn question!”
With Kade’s outburst, the pair of pit bulls rose up onto their feet, their compact muscles taut and straining, both of them growling with menace. The dogs were as attuned to Kade’s anger as he was to them. He held the dogs back with only the barest thread of self-control, knowing that if the vampire cowering in front of him had any information of value, he was duty-bound to wring it out of him.
Then he could kill him with a clear conscience.
“Who have you been selling Breedmates to? Answer the fucking question. I’m not going to wait all night for you to cough up the truth.”
“I-I don’t know,” he stammered. “That is the truth. I don’t know.”
“But you admit that’s what you’ve been doing.” God, he wanted to waste this piece of shit. “Tell me who you’ve been trafficking to, before I rip your ugly head off.”
“I swear—I don’t know who wanted them!”
Kade wasn’t about to let it go at that. “Was it more than one individual who came to you for the females? What about the name Dragos—ring any bells with you?”
Kade watched with narrowed eyes, waiting for the vampire to take the bait. But the name Kade cast out to him went unacknowledged. Anyone having dealt with the Breed elder known as Dragos—a villain whose evil had only recently been discovered through the efforts of the Order—would surely register some amount of reaction at the mention of his name.
Homeboy, however, was oblivious. He exhaled a sigh and gave a weak shake of his head. “I only dealt with one guy. He wasn’t Breed. Wasn’t actually human, either. Not by the time I met him, anyway.”
“A Minion, then?”
The news didn’t exactly put Kade at ease. Though the creation of Minions went against Breed law, not to mention basic morality, only the most powerful of the Breed could create the human mind slaves. Drained nearly to the point of death, Minions were loyal to their Master alone. Dragos was second-generation Breed and held himself above any law, Breed or otherwise. It wasn’t a question of whether Dragos kept Minions, but rather how many, and how deeply embedded into human society did they go.
“Would you know this Minion if you saw him again?”
The animal carcass wrapped around the vampire’s neck lifted once more with another shrug of his shoulders. “I don’t know. Maybe. He hasn’t been around for a long time now. Stopped doing business with him about three, maybe four months ago. For a while there, he was one of my regulars, then nothing out of him again.”
“You must have been so disappointed,” Kade drawled. “Describe him to me. What did the Minion look like?”
“Tell you the truth, I never got a good look at the guy. Never really tried, either. I could tell he was Minion, and the dude paid in large bills. Nothing more I needed to know about him.”
Kade’s veins tightened with animosity and a barely restrained rage to hear the ambivalence in his words. He had killed for lesser offenses than this—far less—and the urge to tear apart this worthless excuse of a male was fierce. “So, what you’re saying is you repeatedly sold him innocent females who were too drugged up to defend them-selves, with zero regard for what he was doing with them or where they might end up. No questions asked. That about it?”
“I guess you could say I run my business on the basis of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell.’”
“Yeah, you could say that,” Kade agreed. “Or I could say that you run your business like an ass-licking coward and you deserve to die a slow and painful death.”
Worry spiked in an acrid stink as the vampire held Kade’s stare. “Now, let’s just wait a minute. Let me think for a second, all right? Maybe I can remember something. Maybe there is some way I can help—”
“I doubt it.” Kade scrutinized him, seeing from the look of scrambling panic on his face that he wasn’t going to get anything more useful out of this conversation.
Besides that, he was tired of looking at the asshole.
He reached down to lift the dogs’ chins in his palms, glancing into the intense brown eyes of one, then the other. The silent command was acknowledged with a faint twitch of sinew. The pit bulls jumped up onto the desk and sat in front of their former master, their eyes unblinking, sharp-toothed maws open and dripping saliva.
“Good boys,” Kade said. He pivoted to leave.
“Wait, so … that’s it?” Homeboy asked hesitantly from around the pair of slavering gargoyles that were now perched before him. “I wanna be sure we’re cool for now. I mean, I told you everything I know. That’s all you want from me, right?”
“Not exactly,” Kade said without looking back at the skin trader. He put his hand on the doorknob. “There is one more thing I want.”
As he walked out of the office
and closed the door, he heard the pair of pit bulls launch into their attack. Kade paused there, closing his eyes and letting himself enjoy the violence of the moment through his talent’s visceral connection to the animals. He felt every breaking crunch of bone, every tear of the skin trader’s flesh as the dogs ripped into him. Inside the room, the vampire screamed and wailed, his pain a pleasant punctuation to the music and moaning still carrying on in the other part of the building.
Brock came striding up the hallway as Kade was stepping around the corpse of the driver.
“You take care of the females?” he asked as he and his patrol partner met up halfway.
“I scrubbed the memories of their whole captivity and sent them home,” Brock said. The big male spared only the briefest glance at the body before arching a brow at Kade. “How about you? Did you manage to get anything out of Homeboy?”
“Turns out he wasn’t actually much of a dog person,” Kade said around the continued shrieks coming from the direction of the office.
Brock’s mouth quirked at the corner. “So I hear. Anything else?”
“Yeah, unfortunately. Asshole’s been trafficking Breedmates, just as our intel suggested. His client was a Minion, but he didn’t know anything more than that. Never saw the mind slave up close and couldn’t describe him at all.”
“Shit,” Brock said, running a big hand over the top of his head. “So I guess Homeboy was a dead end, huh?”
Kade cocked his head as the last of the howls cut short behind him. “He is now.”
Brock exhaled a rueful chuckle. “Let’s get this place cleaned up and shut down. Got a text from Gideon, asking us to call in when we can. Something about a situation up north.”
“Up north, as in upstate?”
“No, man. Farther north than that.” Brock met his gaze and held it for longer than was comfortable. “Something’s evidently gone down in Alaska. He didn’t say what exactly, just said that Lucan wants you to report in to headquarters ASAP.”
CHAPTER
Three
Kade understood even before he and Brock arrived at the Order’s compound that the news he was about to get couldn’t be good. As the founder and leader of the warriors, not to mention a first-generation Breed somewhere in the vicinity of nine hundred years old, Lucan was hardly an alarmist by nature. So the fact that he saw fit to call Kade in specifically was a major clue that whatever the so-called situation was in Alaska, it was something seriously fucked up.
Speculation swirled in Kade’s gut, one disturbing scenario after another, awful things that were far too easy for him to imagine and burned like bitter bile in the back of his throat. He kept his dread to himself as he and Brock parked the Rover in the fleet garage behind the heavily secured estate at ground level, then took the hangar’s elevator down some three hundred feet to the subterranean nerve center of the Order’s operations.
“You cool, my man?” Brock asked as he and Kade stepped out of the elevator and into the white marble corridor that connected the labyrinthine compound’s many chambers like a central artery. “You know if this had anything to do with your kin back home, Lucan would have said so. I’m sure that whatever went down, everything’s good with your family. No worries, yeah?”
“Yeah. No worries,” Kade replied, but his mouth was on automatic pilot.
He’d left his family’s settlement in Alaska roughly a year ago to join the Order in Boston. It had been an abrupt departure, one spurred by the urgent summons he’d received from Nikolai, a warrior of the Order whom Kade had met decades past when his travels had taken him from Alaska’s frozen tundra to that of Niko’s Siberian homeland.
There were things Kade had left unfinished in Alaska. Things that haunted him still—worse, for the time and distance that had kept him away all these long months.
If anything had happened and he hadn’t been there to step in …
Kade pushed the thought from his head as he and Brock turned down one of the corridors that would lead them to the tech lab.
Lucan, the dark-haired Gen One, was waiting there in the compound’s glass-walled war room with Gideon, the blond, deceptively disheveled-looking resident genius who ran the Order’s extensive collection of technology. The pair stood together in front of a flat-screen monitor. Lucan raked his fingers over his sternly set jaw just as the lab’s transparent doors whisked open to permit Kade and Brock inside.
“How did the lead work out tonight in Roxbury?” he asked when the two warriors had entered the room.
Kade gave a brief rundown of what they found out from the skin trader, which wasn’t much. But as Kade spoke, he couldn’t keep his attention from drifting to the monitor behind Lucan. When the big male started to pace in that way he always did when he was either pissed off or deep in thought, Kade got his first good look at the image filling the computer screen.
It wasn’t pretty.
A blurry photo—or maybe it was a freeze-framed video image—splashed garish red and white across the monitor. Blood and snow. A brutal killing in the frozen wilds of Alaska. Kade knew it instinctively, and the knowledge cut through him like the edge of a blade.
“What happened?” he asked, his voice so wooden it sounded apathetic, wholly undisturbed.
“Nasty bit of video showed up on the Internet today,” Lucan said. “From what we can tell, this was captured by a cell phone camera a couple of days ago and uploaded from a Fairbanks ISP to a website that caters to crime-scene gawkers and other sick bastards who get off on viewing the dead.”
He gave a look to Gideon and with a click of the computer mouse, the frozen image onscreen came to vivid life. Over the excitable breathing and crunching footsteps of the person holding the camera, Kade watched as the crudely shot video showed the scene of what must have been a very brutal slaying.
A bloodied body lay dead on a snow-covered, gore-stained patch of land. The lens’s focus was shaky, but the operator managed to zoom in tight on the victim’s wounds. Shredded clothing and skin. A number of unmistakable tears and punctures that could only have been made by some very sharp teeth.
Or fangs.
“Jesus,” Kade muttered, struck by the savagery of the killing—the totality of it—as the video played past the four-minute mark and moved on to document no less than three more dead in the snow and ice.
“This looks like the work of Rogues,” Brock said, his deep voice as grim as his expression.
It was a sorry but unavoidable fact of life that there were members of the Breed population who could not—or simply would not—control their thirst for blood. While the majority of the vampire nation abided by laws and reasonable good sense, there were others who gave in to their hungers with no thought for the consequences. Those of the Breed who fed too much, or too frequently, soon found themselves addicted, lost to Bloodlust, the disease of the Rogues. Once a vampire tipped that scale, there was little hope for him to turn himself around.
Bloodlust was almost always a one-way ticket to madness … and death. If not by edict of the Order, then by the disease itself, which made even the most careful Breed male reckless. All a Rogue knew was his thirst. He would kill indiscriminately, take any risk, in the attempt to quench it. He would even slaughter an entire village if the opportunity was there.
“Whoever did this needs to be put down fast,” Brock added. “Son of a bitch needs to be put down hard.”
Lucan nodded his agreement. “The sooner, the better. That’s why I called you in, Kade. The situation up there could get out of hand pretty quick, not only if we’ve got a Rogue problem to contend with, but also because human law enforcement has gotten wind of the killings. Gideon tracked an Alaska State Police dispatch call out of a little interior town called Harmony. Fortunately, there’s fewer than a hundred people living there, but it only takes one hysterical mouth screaming the word ‘vampire’ to turn this whole thing into an even bigger disaster.”
“Shit,” Kade muttered. “Do we know who shot the video?”
&nbs
p; “Hard to say right now,” Lucan said. “Gideon’s looking into it. We do know for sure there’s a trooper posted in the town—he’s the one who alerted the Fairbanks dispatch to the killings. Obviously, time is critical here. We need to know who’s responsible for the slayings, and we need to make sure no one up there gets anywhere close to the truth about what exactly took place out there in the bush.”
Kade listened, his veins still jangling with the brutality of what he had just seen on the monitor. In his peripheral vision was the final frame, paused on the screen, a blurred image of a young human’s blood-spattered face, his open, unseeing brown eyes clouded from the cold, ice crystals clinging to his dark eyelashes. He was just a kid, for crissake. Probably barely out of his teens, if that.
It wasn’t the first time Kade had seen the aftermath of a bloody slaughter in the Alaskan bush. When he’d left home all those months ago, he’d sure as hell hoped he’d never see that kind of carnage again.
“We’re spread thin here with our current operations, but we can’t afford to let the situation up north go unchecked,” Lucan said. “I need to send someone who knows the terrain and the people, and who has connections in the Breed population up there.”
Kade held Lucan’s stare, knowing he could hardly refuse the assignment, even if Alaska was the last place he wanted to be. When he’d left there last year to join the Order, he’d done so with the hope that he might never return.
He wanted to forget the place where he’d been born. The wild place that had called to him like a possessive, destructive lover every moment since he’d left.
“What do you say, my man?” Lucan asked as Kade’s silence grew long.
He didn’t see where he had any choice. He owed it to Lucan and the Order to take care of this unexpected, unpleasant business. No matter where it led him.
Even if the search for a vampire with an uncontrollable itch to kill ended up leading Kade home to a ten-thousand-acre stretch of land in the Alaskan interior. Home, to his family’s own backyard.
