by Lara Adrian
She had to know what Kade had been doing.
Alex’s feet slowed as she reached the place where the carnage had begun. Her vision swam as she stared down at the bloodied aftermath of a vicious attack. A vampire attack—worse than any savagery she’d witnessed before. Another human being, another innocent person, brutalized by the monstrous killers of her nightmares.
By Kade, though she never would have believed it had she not seen him with her own eyes.
Alex couldn’t move. God, she could barely feel a thing as she stood there, numb with shock and a horror so profound she couldn’t even summon the breath to scream.
Kade felt the oddest sensation in his chest as he and the other warriors pushed farther into the corridor of the mine’s shaft. He crept forward in the dark, weapon held at the ready, trying to dismiss the chill feeling that was knotting up tight behind his sternum.
Jesus, had he taken a chest hit in the earlier fracas?
Surreptitiously, he felt around for a wound or the stickiness of spilling blood but found nothing. Nothing but the phantom ache that seemed to want to suck a lot of the air out of his lungs. He shook it off, struggling to keep his attention on the pitch-black cavern that stretched out ahead of him and the other warriors.
The alarm sirens continued to wail from behind them; nothing but quiet awaited in the depths of the mine shaft. Then—the most minute scuff of a footstep came from somewhere deep within the shadows. Kade heard it, and he was certain all the rest of the warriors had, too.
Tegan held up his hand to halt their progress in the passageway. “Looks like the damn place is empty,” he said, fishing for Dragos’s lieutenant as he cast the line into the murky abyss ahead. “Hand me some of that C-4. Let’s blow this mother—”
“Wait.” The detached voice was begrudging and arrogant, an airless grunt of sound in the dark. “Just … wait, please.”
“Show yourself,” Tegan ordered. “Walk out nice and slow, asshole. If you’re armed, you’ll be eating lead before you take the first step.”
“I do not have a weapon,” the voice growled back in reply. “I am a civilian.”
Tegan scoffed. “Not today. Show yourself.”
Dragos’s associate came out of the darkness as instructed, but only barely. Dressed in tailored gray pants and a black cashmere sweater, he looked to be more of a boardroom strategist than a military tactician. Then again, from what the Order had seen in the past of Dragos’s handpicked associates, he seemed to recruit his lieutenants based on pedigree and aptitude for corruption more than anything else.
Hands held up in surrender, Dragos’s man hung back near the shadows of the mine shaft. He moved with slow deliberation, his carefully cultured expression not quite able to mask his fear as his eyes took stock of the five Breed warriors holding him in their killing sights.
“Who are you?” Tegan demanded. “What’s your name?”
He said nothing, but his gaze seemed to slide almost in-discernibly to his side.
“Is there anyone else left inside?” Tegan asked. “Where is the Ancient? Where is Dragos?”
The male took a hesitant step forward. “I would need some kind of assurances from the Order,” he hedged. And there went that quick, telling dart of his eyes again. “I would require sanctuar—”
A gunshot exploded out of the darkness, cutting short his words as it blew away a sizable chunk of the vampire’s head.
“Assassin,” Hunter snarled at the same sharp instant, but his warning was eclipsed by more gunfire blasting out of the shadows.
Dragos’s lieutenant—the vampire who might have given the Order their best lead on their enemy—was collapsed on the floor in a pulpy, boneless heap. Kade and the four other warriors opened fire on the black maw of the mine shaft, peppering the area with rounds as they dodged the gunfire coming back at them.
“Take cover!” Tegan shouted as the incoming bullets showed no sign of stopping.
Kade and Brock dived into the nearest chamber in the corridor of the shaft, Tegan right behind them. Chase and Hunter took posts farther up on the other side of the passageway, returning fire on the relentless hail of bullets that ripped out of the darkness.
“Brock,” Tegan said, his fangs gleaming in the darkness. “Throw some boom down the corridor. We’ll shoot it from here and set it off.”
Brock put down his gun and grabbed a pack of C-4 from his satchel. Working quickly, he stuffed a blasting cap and a small detonator into the pale cake. When it was done, he gave Tegan a nod. “Gotta hit this shit pretty square. If we miss the embedded detonator, we get no spark.”
Kade caught the warrior’s dark gaze. “No spark, no boom.”
“Right.”
“Toss it,” Tegan said.
Brock moved to the opening of the door. He threw the C-4 in a high arc, and as it disappeared into the shadows of the mine shaft, the three of them opened fire. It was hard to tell if they’d hit the cake, until a spark cracked brightly in the darkness. Then the material exploded with a shuddering blast.
A billowing cloud of smoke and pulverized rubble pushed forward like a tsunami, blowing bits of concrete and choking dust into the room where Kade, Brock, and Tegan had taken cover.
And then, charging through the blinding wave of debris, came the Gen One assassin.
He was nothing more than a blur of motion and momentum, all of it crashing forward like a cannonball. Tegan leapt out to intercept him, and soon both Gen One males were engulfed in a deadly fight. The darkness and the churning cloud of debris swallowed them up as the struggle intensified, weapons clanging against the stone floor, fists crunching against flesh and bone.
The sudden, pungent scent of blood rose up from the confusion of movement.
A roar of fury—Tegan’s low bellow of rage … then silence.
Someone found a light switch and flicked it on. Fluorescent tubes lit the corridor in a hazy fog of bluish-white light.
And there was Tegan, his thigh bloodied from a deep wound, his serrated titanium knife slipped between the assassin’s thick neck and the black polymer collar that ringed it. “Slowly, now,” he cautioned Dragos’s homegrown killer. “Stand up very carefully.”
The bald Gen One growled, his eyes flashing pure hatred. “Fuck you.”
“Get up,” Tegan commanded. “Careful. It’s real easy to lose your head in a situation like this.”
Grudgingly, radiating menace, the assassin rose to his feet. With Kade and the others holding their weapons on the vampire, Tegan slowly walked him into the nearby chamber. The room’s function was familiar enough to Kade since he and the Order had encountered a similar one when they’d raided Dragos’s headquarters in Connecticut just a few weeks ago. It was a holding cell, the cylindrical cage at its center, with its electronic restraints and computerized control panel designed for the containment of one particular captive.
“Where is the Ancient?” Tegan demanded as he guided the assassin over to the heavy-duty restraints that had been built to hold the otherworlder. Tegan glanced at Kade and Brock. “Lock this son of a bitch down.”
They each took a hand and slapped the shackles around the Gen One’s wrists. While they secured his arms, Chase walked over and fitted two more cuffs around his ankles.
“Where is the Ancient?” Tegan asked once more, his words tightly clipped. “Okay, how about this. Where’s Dragos? He’s obviously diversifying his operation now, moving his pieces around instead of keeping them all together in one place. So, he moves the Ancient into cold storage up here, but what about the rest of it? Where is he hiding now? Where are the Breedmates he’s holding prisoner?”
“He won’t know.” Hunter’s deep voice cut through the din of the alarms outside and the tension mounting inside the Ancient’s containment chamber. “Dragos tells us nothing. As his Hunters, we serve. That is all.”
Tegan snarled, looking like he wanted to snap the assassin’s collar then and there. Keeping one hand on the blade that pressed against the UV collar, he put his other hand
on the assassin’s brow and pushed the big head backward. “Motherfucker. He knows something.”
The assassin’s mouth curved with private amusement.
“Start talking, you lab-spawned piece of shit, or you go up in smoke right here and now.”
The assassin’s gaze was glacial. “We are all about to go up in smoke,” he hissed through his teeth and fangs.
Kade glanced at the control panel on the opposite wall, only just that second realizing that there was a digital timer counting down on a five-minute clock. On top of the gnawing cold that was still chewing away at his chest, now a sick sense of déjà-vu gripped him as he watched what had to be the mine’s self-destruct mechanism ticking off seconds. “Shit. He’s already dropped the switch. This whole place is gonna blow.”
Tegan growled, low and deadly, as he withdrew the knife from under the assassin’s chin and left him standing in the Ancient’s holding cell. Kade and the others stepped back as he strode over to the control panel and punched the button that operated the ultraviolet light bars. The vertical beams of light went live, circling the Gen One assassin inside and imprisoning him more securely than any amount of metal could.
“Let’s get out of here,” Tegan said, stalking out the door. The rest of the warriors fell in behind him, Kade and Brock at the rear.
Brock paused to give the captive assassin a broad smile. “Don’t go anywhere now, you hear?”
Ordinarily, Kade would have gotten a good chuckle out of his partner’s grim humor, but it was damned hard to appreciate anything when his heart was hammering like he’d just run a hundred miles and his veins were lighting up with the same odd chill that had made a home in his chest.
He ran with the rest of the group, out of the mine’s building and into the main yard of the site, which looked like a war zone. The alarm sirens howled the loudest outside, screaming into the night. The snow was coming down at a furious pace now, blanketing the field of dead Minions and dropping visibility to next to nil.
“We need to adios these bodies, make sure there’s nothing left to identify once this place blows,” Tegan said. “Come on, let’s drag them inside one of the outbuildings and send them off with the rest of that C-4.”
“On it,” Brock said.
Kade joined the rest of the warriors as they worked to clear the yard before the self-destruct clock wound down to zero. It was getting hard for him to breathe now, his blood throbbing with alarm sirens of its own, awareness seeping through the wash of adrenaline and battle focus that had swamped his senses for much of the combat at the mine.
As he and his brethren dragged the last of the Minion dead into place, and the first rumblings of the coming explosion began to shake the ground, the cause of his internal distress hit him broadside.
Alex.
Holy hell.
Something had happened. She was upset, shaken. Something had terrified her … horrified her. And he felt her trauma like his own now, because he had taken her blood into his body, and it was that blood bond that had been clamoring in his own veins.
Her name was a plea—a prayer—as the ground beneath him gave a mighty shudder, and the mining company blew sky high behind him.
CHAPTER
Twenty-five
Okay, Alex. Now, hold on here. Slow down, all right?” Zach Tucker carefully closed the door of the shed in back of his house and looked at Alex in stunned disbelief. She couldn’t really blame him. No one in their right mind would believe what she’d just told him—not unless they’d seen it with their own eyes. “You’re telling me you just found another dead body in the bush, and you think it was … a vampire attack?”
“I know it was, Zach.” Her heart ached to say the words, but the image of Kade, and the image of the hunter’s savaged body he’d left behind, tore at her with icy talons. “Oh, God, Zach. I know you don’t believe me, but it’s true.”
He frowned, staring at her for a long moment. “Why don’t you come inside? It’s freezing out here, and you’re shaking like a leaf.”
Not from the cold of the outdoors, but from the confusion and horror of discovering that Kade had betrayed her. He’d sworn he was different from the monsters of her nightmares, and she had believed him. She would have believed everything he’d told her, if she hadn’t seen the blood-soaked proof of his deception for herself just a short while ago.
“Come on,” Zach said, wrapping his arm around her shoulders and guiding her away from the shed, toward his house. Luna got up to follow, keeping pace at Alex’s heels, but before the wolf dog could make it into the house, Zach closed the door in her face. “Sit down, Alex. Let’s take this slowly now, all right? Help me make sense of what you think you saw.”
Numbly complying, she sank down onto the sofa in his living room. He took a seat beside her. “I don’t think I saw anything, Zach. I did see it. It’s real, everything I told you. Vampires do exist.”
“Listen to yourself. This isn’t like you, Alex. You’ve been acting strangely ever since the attack on the Tomses. Ever since that guy—Kade—showed up in Harmony.” Zach’s eyes narrowed on her. “Has he been giving you drugs? Is that what his business is in Harmony? Because if some asshole thinks he can come into my town and start dealing—”
“No!” Alex shook her head. “God, is that what you think? That I’m telling you all of this because I’m high or something?”
“I had to ask,” he said, still watching her with an intensity that unsettled her. “I’m sorry, Alex, but all of this sounds a little … well, crazy.”
She exhaled a sharp breath. “I know what it sounds like. I don’t want to believe it any more than you do. But it’s the truth. I’ve known it was the truth since I was nine years old.”
“What do you mean?”
“Vampires, Zach. They’re real. Years ago, they killed my mom and my little brother.”
“You always said it was a drunk driver.”
She slowly shook her head. “It wasn’t. I saw the attack with my own eyes. It was the worst thing I’ve ever witnessed. And I didn’t need to see the attack on Pop Toms and his family to know that the same evil killed them, too. I should have said something then. Maybe I could have stopped what happened to them, or to Lanny Ham and Big Dave.”
Zach’s frown deepened to a questioning scowl. “You’re saying it was vampires that attacked them in that cave?”
“One vampire,” she corrected. “The same one that probably killed the Toms family. It’s stronger than other vampires, Zach. It’s one of the fathers of the entire vampire race. And it’s not … from this world.”
Zach leaned back and barked out a loud guffaw of laughter. “Oh, Christ, Alex! What the fuck are you on right now? You look sober enough, but you must be completely stoned to sit there with a straight face and expect me to believe this shit. Alien vampires, that’s what you’re talking about?”
“I know it’s hard to imagine something like that could exist, but I’m telling you, it does. Vampires exist, and they call themselves the Breed.” She stopped short of naming Kade in their number, not quite ready to betray him, even though he seemed to have had no difficulty when it came to her.
Zach stood up and threw out his hands at her. “Go home. Sleep it off.”
“Listen to me,” she cried, desperate that he not dismiss her as wasted or crazy. She could see that she was losing this battle, she was afraid that her failure to convince him now might cost other lives before long. “Zach, please! We have to warn people. You have to believe me.”
“No, I don’t, Alex.” He whirled around to face her, something brutal in his expression. “I’m not even sure I can believe anything you’ve said today, including your claim of another dead body in the woods. I don’t have time for this kind of bullshit right now, okay? I have my own problems I’m dealing with! Folks are already worked up over everything that’s going on around here lately. I’ve got troopers arriving tomorrow, and the last thing I need is you adding to my headaches with a lot of crazy talk about bloo
dthirsty, killer aliens running loose in the bush!”
Alex looked away from him, unable to hold the sharp fury in his gaze.
She’d never seen him so angry. So … unglued. He was in a state of near panic himself, and it didn’t seem due to anything she’d told him. As she turned her head, she noticed a folded wad of cash on the coffee table and a cell phone that looked vaguely familiar. She stared at both items, a peculiar inkling of suspicion worming its way up her spine.
“Isn’t that Skeeter Arnold’s cell phone?”
Zach seemed caught off guard by the question. “Huh? Oh. Yeah, I confiscated it off the little bastard this morning.”
He picked up the roll of twenty-dollar bills without offering an explanation and stuffed it into his pocket, his eyes on her the whole time. Alex’s blood slowed in her veins, oddly chilled. “I haven’t seen Skeeter around all day. When did you see him?”
Zach shrugged. “I guess it wasn’t long before you got here. I figure the Staties are going to want that phone for their investigation, seeing how he used it to record that video of the Toms settlement.”
The explanation made sense to her.
And yet …
“How long ago was it that you saw him?”
“About an hour ago,” he replied, his answer clipped. “What does it matter to you, Alex?”
She knew why he sounded defensive, even without having to reach out and confirm it with her gift for divining the truth with her touch. Zach was lying to her. Skeeter was dead hours before now—dead at Kade’s hands, after Skeeter had finished off Big Dave.
Why would Zach lie about seeing him?
As the question sifted through her mind, she thought about the cash Zach had tucked away, and the cell phone he couldn’t have gotten when he said he had … and the fact that although most of Harmony and the communities roughly a hundred miles out knew that Skeeter had connections in bootlegging and drug-dealing, Zach had never found sufficient evidence to arrest him. Maybe Zach hadn’t been looking hard enough.
Or maybe Zach had no desire to remove Skeeter Arnold from his line of work.