by HELEN HARDT
“Jules was always the philosopher between the two of us,” Braedon said. “I was busy getting into fights. Of course, he fought alongside me when I got into it.”
“You both fit the prophecy,” I said. “No wonder Bill was so freaked out. But why would Bonneville pay any attention to an ancient prophecy?”
It went against everything I knew about her.
Of course, I could probably fill a whole warehouse with things I didn’t know about her.
“Let’s get out of here,” Dante said. “Uncle Brae, are you good to walk?”
“I’ll make it,” he said.
I followed Dante out of the small room, stepping over the heap of unconscious bodies.
“Logan!”
I’d forgotten about him. Logan still sat in the hallway a few feet from the unconscious vampires, his arms around his knees.
“Leave him,” Dante said.
“Leave him to me, you mean.” Braedon yanked him to his feet. “Now you answer, asshole. You answer for what you’ve done to me.”
“Braedon, it wasn’t him,” I said, pleading. “He’s got a mental dis—”
Braedon either didn’t hear me or wasn’t bothering to listen. With vampire hearing, it was most likely the latter.
“Dante,” I said, “please stop him.”
Dante shook his head. “I’m sorry, baby. My uncle is not a killer. He won’t do any lasting harm. But I can’t stop this. I owe it to Brae. If I come across the two goons who tortured me, I’ll give them the same. It kills me to know that I may have already come across them but didn’t do anything because I can no longer scent them.”
“That’s my fault then. The blood bond.”
“God, no! That’s not what I mean at all.”
“I don’t know about the two who tortured you, Dante, but Logan has a psychiatric disorder. He truly couldn’t—”
Dante placed two fingers over my lips. “It doesn’t matter, love.”
“But it’s not a fair fight!”
“Nor was it fair when I was tortured. I’m sorry. Braedon needs this.”
Logan’s expression was stoic, and he didn’t try to resist. He was willing to take punishment for what he’d done. When Braedon raised his fist, I turned away, burrowing my face into Dante’s shoulder.
Thud.
Thud.
Thud.
Fist meeting flesh.
No squeals or yells from Logan. He took it like a man.
“He’s had enough, Uncle Brae.” Dante’s voice was calm but commanding.
I didn’t move. Braedon would surely fight Dante on this. Logan couldn’t have been pummeled into a pulp yet.
“I’ll decide when he’s had enough.” Braedon’s voice was a low growl.
“Don’t become what she wants you to be. You’re three times his size, and you’ve punished him. Let it be enough. Please.”
Yes, please, I begged silently.
“You sound exactly like your father,” Braedon said. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think he was speaking through you.”
“I assure you it’s me,” Dante said. “I guess the apple doesn’t fall that far from the tree.”
“I’ll honor your request. It’s what Jules would want.” Braedon let go of Logan, who fell to the floor.
I raced to him to examine him, nearly tripping over one of the unconscious vampires. “Logan, I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. I deserve far more than I got.”
I both agreed and disagreed, so I said nothing. “Your nose is broken.”
“I’m sure it is,” he wheezed. “It hurts like hell.”
“Take off your lab coat. I need to make some bandages.” Within a few minutes, I’d done the best I could for him.
I turned to Dante. “Can we get him out of here? Please?”
“Erin, he’s a doctor. Patty is still down here, and we can’t depend on her.” He nodded toward Bonneville splayed on top of one of her thugs.
“Can we get them both out? Please?”
He sighed. “I don’t like to deny you, Erin, but how do you suggest we accomplish that? Didn’t Patty just have surgery? And Logan needs some rest after that beating.”
The beating you allowed to happen. But I kept that to myself. I didn’t blame Braedon. Or Dante, for that matter. Even the Claiborne thugs.
I blamed Zabrina Bonneville.
They were all victims of her.
She was the mastermind behind everything that went on down here, and damn it, if it was the last thing I did, I would stop her.
I might be a mere human woman, but I was a woman in love, a woman bonded, and I would help Dante find a way to stop her, once and for all.
Chapter Sixteen
Dante
I eyed the unconscious thugs.
Were these the men I’d fought in the arena? Those I’d pummeled and stopped short of killing? It was possible. I was masked, and so were they, so we had no way of knowing.
Or were there more male vampires here? One in particular had been huge and wide. I’d wondered how he could have gotten through the narrow tunnels to this hellish place.
In my life, I’d only seen one male that broad…and he was standing in front of me.
“Uncle Brae, had you ever been in the fighting pit before the last time, with River and me?”
“Maybe. Sometimes I think I was. It’s so fuzzy.”
I swallowed. “I’m sorry.”
“For what?” he asked.
“I think I…” I cleared my throat. “We’ve fought before, Uncle Brae. I didn’t know it was you, and you didn’t know it was me, but we’ve circled each other in that damned place. I’m sorry.”
“Are you sure?”
“Unless there’s someone else here who’s as big and broad as you are, yes, we have.”
If what Erin said was true, and Brae was morphing into something not normal, I needed to find out how to stop it. “How long have you been drinking blood from her?”
“I don’t know. Seems like forever. Since I’ve been here.”
I nodded. “The prophecy. She fed you the blood but not my dad. You were supposed to be the brawn, and he the brain.”
“Lucky him,” Braedon said dryly.
“Before we came down here, my dad felt very strongly that your time was running out. Looking at you, I can see he was right. But it wasn’t your death he was afraid of. It was some kind of metamorphosis. She’s changing you.”
“I’ve felt that for some time. I’ve been fighting as hard as I can. Seeing you and River has helped a lot. But knowing that Jules…” Braedon shook his head.
“He wouldn’t want you to mourn him,” I said. Then a horrible thought speared into me. “He left for Em. Dad! Dad, where are you?”
My father appeared this time.
Braedon nearly jumped out of his oversized muscles. “Jules!”
“Hey, Brae. You can see me now, huh?”
“Dad, what about Em? Is she okay?”
He nodded solemnly. “She’s going to be fine. Jay is with her, and Jack is taking care of her.”
“Thank God.” I heaved a sigh of relief. “What happened?”
“She miscarried the child.”
An anvil hit my gut. “Oh, no.”
“Is Jay all right?” Erin asked.
“He is. They’re both saddened by the loss, of course, and they’re mourning it. But Emilia is healthy and can have more babies.”
“The stress of being kidnapped. Of being here,” I said.
“I’m sure that didn’t help,” Erin said. “There’s no way to know. But honestly, miscarriages aren’t uncommon. They usually can’t be prevented, and most women have no issue conceiving again.”
“Most women aren’t vampires.”
“I know. But she will be fertile again.”
“In a year or more.”
“Yes, she’ll have to wait, but the most important thing is that Emilia is okay.”
“Jules, I’m so sorry,” Braedon said.
<
br /> “Em will recover.”
“No. I mean, I’m sorry about that, but Erin’s right. The most important thing is that she’s okay. What I meant was, I’m sorry that you… That you’re…”
“Dead? It’s okay. I’ll explain it all to you soon, but first we need to get all of you out of here. Especially you, Brae. Whatever she has done to you, I’m hoping Jack can reverse it. You don’t look…right.”
“His musculature is changing,” Erin said. “At first we thought she’d been giving him steroids, but now we’re not sure.”
“It could be steroids plus vampire blood,” my father said.
“Wait!” Erin said. “We can find out. Logan has access to the records in the file room. There’s a file on each of us. That will tell us what she’s done to Braedon.”
“Good thinking, baby,” I said.
“Of course,” Erin continued, “Logan may not be willing to help after—”
Logan stood on wobbly legs. “No. I’ll help. What’s going on here is wrong. I can get you to the records room.”
“We’ll hold our noses, Dad,” River said with a grimace.
“What about this mess?” River pointed to the unconscious vampires, including Bonneville.
“We could set them on fire,” I said.
“Dante…” Erin tugged on my hand.
“I know. We’re not killers. But it’s tempting. It wouldn’t work on Bonneville anyway, if what the Texts say is true. She’s turned herself into an immortal.”
“We still don’t know the weakness,” River said.
“We know she’s safe here,” I said. “She said so. Why would she be safe here? And what does here even mean?”
“Underground?” Erin said.
“Maybe. But she goes above ground all the time. At least she did before she went on her pseudo-vacation. She was at the hospital every night for her shift.”
“True.” Erin pulled the book out of her pack and opened it. “Nothing new. Crap. For a book that’s supposed to tell us what we need to know when we need to know it, it sure likes to keep us in suspense.”
“At least we figured out the prophecy,” I said, quickly relaying the information to my father. “We think that must be what Bill read that got him spooked.”
“That would make sense,” my dad agreed. “No wonder he was loath to help you when you returned, Dante. He was afraid you were the beginning of some kind of vampire apocalypse.”
“Vampyr omega,” I said. “That’s what it’s called. And that’s what Bonneville calls the genetic marker that allows a human to give birth to a vampire.”
“But if that’s the case, the prophecy is something the council as a whole doesn’t know about. Bill read the Texts despite the rules of the council not to.”
“True,” I said. “Which also means they know something else—secrets they want to keep. Something that Bill thought might help us find the missing women. That’s why the ghost of Levi Gaston showed up and threatened him when he was about to tell us that night at Napoleon House.”
“We still don’t know everything,” my father said. “But we have a good idea where this is going. Still, Bonneville is a scientist to her core. Why would she put any stock in an ancient prophecy?”
“We’ve been trying to figure that out,” I said.
“And I think I have,” Erin piped in. “One thing that’s been clear throughout this whole thing is Bonneville’s narcissism. She’s proved that time and again. She’s dropped clues here and there, like asking me to research physical characteristics and blood types, and then leaving the vodka bottle with her fingerprints on it at Emilia’s apartment. She was daring us to figure out she was behind all this. That’s classic narcissism. To be so sure of yourself that you know no one will figure it out, even when you leave them clues.”
“She underestimated you, baby.”
“She underestimated all of us,” Erin said. “Though she did steal my blood and yours, Dante. She kept you and your father and uncle here for a decade, and she enslaved Logan and others. She kidnapped women. We will stop her, but we didn’t stop her quickly enough.”
“No, we didn’t.”
I used to dream of severed human heads.
We’d gotten the women out, and we would get Braedon out once we figured out how to reverse whatever she’d done to him. But we hadn’t gotten everyone out. Not those sacrificed to feed me. Probably to feed my father and Braedon too.
And we were all still here.
There could easily be a trap we hadn’t uncovered yet.
“She clearly found out about the prophecy,” Erin continued, “and her narcissism led her to think she could make it come true through science. Everything she did to the three of you had some scientific basis. As a vampire supremacist, she’d be thrilled if the prophecy came true. And if she could be the one to be its genesis…”
“God, she’s psycho,” River said.
“True enough, cuz.” I shook my head and regarded her unconscious body. She looked so innocent right now, a trickle of blood from her lip having dried to brick brown.
But I knew better. She was not innocent. Far from it. A narcissist, yes, and also a highly intelligent one.
We’d come far, but the rest of this journey would not simple. Not in the least.
Already I knew.
I’d shown that I could control her, but I hadn’t seen the last of her tricks.
Whatever she had in store for me, I was determined to face it, even destroy it if I had to.
But first I had to make sure the others were all safe.
“Logan,” I said, “take us to the room where she keeps the records.”
Chapter Seventeen
Erin
Once Logan had logged in, I clicked on Braedon’s name and opened up his file.
“She’s been feeding you her blood,” I said, scanning as quickly as I could. “But we already knew that. And yes, you’re on a high dose of anabolic steroids plus some supplements I don’t recognize. She must not have been depending on you as a sperm donor.”
“That reminds me,” Dante said. “We need to find the cryolab and destroy whatever is in it.”
“We will, cuz,” River said.
“Or she was depending on you,” I continued, “but took enough of your sperm before she started this regimen. Remember, you were all here for ten years.”
“How can we forget?” Dante said.
“The blood bank is just down the hall from here,” River said.
“You want to go?” I said to River. “The freezer will be in the back. She’s probably keeping frozen plasma in there, and if she’s taken sperm from Dante, Braedon, and Julian, it will be there, most likely. Unless of course there’s another freezer around here. Logan?”
“That’s the only one I know of,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean much. She keeps me in the dark when she wants to.”
“I’ll go,” River said. “Dante, you need to come with me.”
“I won’t leave Erin.”
“You need to come too, Dad,” River continued. “I’m not comfortable being the one to destroy all of your…stuff.”
“You have my permission, son,” Braedon said.
“Mine too,” Julian said. “I can come with you, but you’ll have to do the destroying.”
“Just get it done, Riv,” Dante said.
“You can go,” I said to Dante. “I’ll be fine here. Your uncle is here.”
“All right, all right. Stop looking at me like that, Riv. I’ll go and help you.”
They left, and Julian’s ghost disappeared.
I continued scanning Braedon’s file. “Here it is!” I pulled up a record. “‘The mixture of female vampire blood and the steroid cocktail has resulted in changes in musculature at the cellular level. I’m increasing the dosage of both to see if these changes manifest physiologically.’ That’s dated six years ago.”
I continued scanning. “Here’s something else. ‘Exposing patient to torture seems to increase m
uscle mass at a quicker rate.’”
“Bitch,” Braedon said.
“I’m so sorry, man,” Logan whispered.
Braedon pursed his lips but said nothing.
“It wasn’t you, Logan. We all know that.”
“He doesn’t.”
“He does. It’s just hard for him to separate that out.”
Braedon stayed silent, but his giant muscles were tense. I silently begged Logan not to push it.
He didn’t, thank God.
“Can we reverse what she did to me?”
“I wish I knew. Maybe your vampire doctor can help you.” I scanned through the files, desperately looking for something to indicate how to reverse the effect on Braedon, or whether it could even be reversed. Nothing.
Of course not. She had never planned to reverse it.
“Here’s one more thing,” I said. “‘A megadose of horse steroid makes patient eager to fight. His strength and mass are still no match for the nephew, however.’”
“Dante,” he said quietly. “Perhaps the prophecy is true after all.”
“Or she forced it,” I said.
“I don’t know,” Braedon said. “Jules and I were told our whole lives how rare we were. Vampire fraternal twins are rare enough, but identical twins? No one knew of any others, not since the fourteenth century. If this prophecy was originally written centuries, even millennia, ago… And our mother had an effortless pregnancy. How often does that happen with twins? Or with a vampire mother?”
I sighed. I didn’t know what to say to him.
I was a woman of science as much as Bonneville was.
And I was starting to believe.
Chapter Eighteen
Dante
Nothing.
Just plasma products and blood products in the freezer.
“This is good news, I guess,” River said. “She didn’t take anything from any of you.”
“Or she has another freezer somewhere,” I said.
“Think, Dante. While you were here, were you ever forced to…you know.”
