Warrior Mate

by L. J. Red

  The garage opened out into a long, empty room, with dusty markings where machinery had stood. High metal walkways surrounded them, and Brigit’s skin crawled. It was a perfect place for an ambush.

  “Fall back,” she called. Too late. Gunfire rained down on them, screams echoing as people were hit. The cop in front of her went down and, moving fast, Brigit dragged them to safety under an overhang.

  They needed to get up there, pick off the shooters. She caught sight of Rune across from her and the bond between them burst into life. I’ll cover you, take the stairs, she thought, sending the intent to him as clear as she could make it. He nodded and waited a second for her to aim, then launched himself upwards. Brigit fired over and over again, her heart in her mouth, forcing the hunters back as Rune cut through them like a demon, like the night itself given claws and fangs until the gunfire turned to screams, the screams to moans, and then finally… silence. Just the drip, drip of blood echoing quietly through the room.

  Brigit wasted no time. She sprinted up the stairs only to find Rune standing there, unharmed, his fingertips red with blood.

  “The next room,” he said, his voice raw, and Brigit turned to where she could hear the echo of gunfire.

  “Let’s go.”

  Room by room, piece by piece, they swept the factory, moving in unison, finally finding the partnership they’d been circling for so long. This was what a soulmate should be. This was what Brigit wanted, and now that she’d tasted it she’d never let it go. She’d make Rune understand if she had to spend her whole life trying. This was worth it.

  The hunters in the factory didn’t stand a chance. Rune and Brigit cut through them, leaving only silence in their wake.

  Was it too easy? There weren’t enough hunters here and where were the weapons they’d been developing? Where had the machinery gone? More importantly, where were the hostages?

  Finally reaching the heart of the factory, that question was answered. Brigit and Rune shoved open two double doors and found themselves in a makeshift lab. Walking through, she realized this was where they made the powders. More than that, they were kitted out like the medical room at the Sanctuary: reinforced tables, thick metal restraints. What for?

  This was where they got their samples for the black market. She saw vials, blood samples, and surgery kits. Chemicals and lines and lines of the canisters they used for the powder. Some of them were full, too many were empty. They’d cleared out. That was why it was easy, that was why the machinery was missing. Whoever had tipped them off about the raid had given them enough time to clear all their illegal shit out.

  The other side of the lab, the fighting grew thick. From the room at the end of the corridor, the hostages were shouting out, but before they could reach them the corridor narrowed into a choke point, and the hunters were pinning them down. Brigit and Rune tried to get through, the bond heavy and humming between them, but it was no good. The hallway was flooded with light, no shadows for the vampires to use.

  Brigit caught sight of Jacob crouching in a doorway halfway down the corridor. If they could provide cover fire, he could get to the room where the hostages were being kept. She turned to Rune but she didn’t even need to speak, his eyes full of agreement. As one they turned, Rune taking out the gun he’d been issued for the first time, and together they opened fire as Jacob unfolded from his crouch and sprinted toward the room at the end of the corridor.

  Chapter 30

  Jacob ran so fast his feet barely touched the ground. The door at the end of the corridor loomed, three hunters at the door. Jacob leaped striking one of the hunters across the face with his claws and opening him up, blood drenching his knuckles. Jacob shoved the guard with his shoulder into his fellows before they could fix their aim on him. He took out another hunter with a sharp jab to the wrist, breaking his grip on his gun, then an open-handed strike to the face, crushing his nose and sending him to the ground. Then with a roundhouse kick, he smacked the other against the wall so hard he heard the man’s bones snap.

  He trusted Rune and the human woman to take the rest of them out. He’d seen how they moved together, in sync like Dana and Lucian. He knew what that meant. They could handle it. His job was to get to the kidnapped hostages.

  Jacob slammed into the door. It smashed open, the lock breaking under his strength, and the door smacked into the guard behind it. He heard a crunch as it impacted into his face. Jacob stormed into the room. The hostages were huddled together in the center, looking weak and tired from months of starvation and torture. But what hit him like a punch to the gut was the sudden realization that the hunters who lined the room were the only ones with heartbeats. There were four hunters and they all had their guns trained on the hostages. The vampire hostages.

  It wasn’t Jacob the hunters were planning to kill, it was the hostages themselves. In the middle of the room, her arms around one of the younger hostages, was a young woman with brown hair and thin wrists. The moment he met her brown eyes a bolt of sensation shot right through his body and grabbed hold of his spine. It was like he had been blind up until that moment, but now he could see. Deep in his chest his heart constricted painfully, then beat fiercely. For the first time in centuries, his blood flowed. He had no time to deal with the revelation. The hunters in the room raised their weapons. They were going to hurt her. They were going to shoot her. He couldn’t let that happen.

  Moving faster than he had ever moved in his life, Jacob sped around the room, leaving the floor and sprinting along the walls like a whirlwind. He swiped one gun from a hunter and flung it at the second, smacking it into his arms so that his shot went wide, shuddering into the wall. The hostages screamed; the sound seemed to stretch. Jacob smacked into the second, ripped the gun out of his hands, and kicked the man into the wall, where he fell in a twitching heap. He spun, aimed, and fired at the third. The hunter’s head exploded in red as Jacob dropped the gun, spun again, and leaped onto the last, bearing him to the ground and ripping his throat out with his teeth before he could scream.

  Jacob flipped back onto his feet and turned to face the first hunter. The man had pulled out a handgun and he fired as Jacob ran at him. Jacob ignored the impacts of the wooden bullets in his chest. Uncaring of the danger, he threw himself forward. The wooden bullets burned through him, hurting more than usual, some new weapon. He didn’t care. He was in a killing rage and he slammed into the final hunter and tore him apart with his bare hands, blood flying everywhere.

  Jacob staggered upright, his chest heaving. The door swung open and Jacob turned, full of rage, but it wasn’t another hunter. Instead, it was Dana and, at her shoulder, Lucian. Jacob struggled to constrain the wave of violence he had unleashed. He spun back to face the hostages. To face the woman. The one who’s safety was the only thing he cared about.

  His breath came short. He couldn’t contain his rage. The thought that the hunters could have killed her, it destroyed him. He didn’t understand what was happening to him. His emotions, for so long held in check, were rampaging, out of control.

  He needed to find a way to channel this energy or he was going to snap and unleash it on everyone here, friend and foe alike.

  “Sparrow!” Dana cried, and the woman, the one who his eyes had been fastened on the whole time, tore her gaze from him and turned to face Dana.

  “Sparrow,” he whispered. The name was music to his ears.

  Dana pulled up short and Jacob saw her realize that she was a vampire, that all of them in the room were vampires. “They turned you,” she said. Jacob read pity in her gaze, and then she straightened and kept walking, and embraced the young woman tightly.

  Chapter 31

  Rune finally understood. Moving through the factory with Brigit by his side had felt right. He had appreciated her skills when they had raided the black-market shop, but this was different. The bond between them was open wide and he reveled in it. She wasn’t just his soulmate. She was fit to be one of the Shadows, and it didn’t matter that she was human. He d
idn’t care whether or not she turned. She was already part of the Shadows in his mind. Turning made no difference. He couldn’t understand why he had ever thought differently. It wasn’t being a vampire that bound them together, it was the soulmate bond itself. A resonance between souls the entire Bloodline shared, he could feel it extending out through the building to Lucian, to Dana, to Jacob, and right there, solid behind his ribs, between him and Brigit.

  He followed her into the back room. Jacob was leaning against the far wall, his eyes uncharacteristically wide, Lucian opposite him, Dana in the middle, surrounded by the hostages. Sparrow, the woman who had been taken that first night, was there, leaning into Dana’s side. Relief rippled through the bond from Brigit.

  “They turned us,” Sparrow said, and he felt her relief turn to shock, to horror, as Brigit took in the faces of the kidnapped. Fangs against their lips. A room full of vampires. This wasn’t what they’d expected. “They turned us against our will. They didn’t give us a choice. They wanted to use us to test their weapons.”

  “How?” Dana asked. “Who did they use to turn you? Who would do this to their own fledglings?”

  Rune felt a sinking feeling and he knew who it was before she said it. “The pale vampire with the white hair and bloodless face; the crazy one.”

  “Roman,” Dana snarled, raising her head to meet Lucian’s gaze, a deep well of anger shared between them.

  Rune looked at the hostages, the terror and exhaustion on their faces. The pain they must have been put through, tortured for weeks.

  Vampirism had always been a gift to him. He’d wanted it, asked for it. The chance to protect his people, and later, when his people were long gone, the chance to protect innocents. To be a Shadow, part of a brotherhood of warriors greater than him alone. But now he saw vampirism was not always a gift. It could be forced on you, unwanted. That was what happened here. He took in the shell-shocked stares of the kidnapped victims. They’d been turned into vampires, not because they wanted it, not as a gift, but as a curse. Forced upon them so they could be guinea pigs in HUNTs fucked-up experiments and tools for Roman’s mad power games.

  He stood, reeling as the room turned into a flurry of activity, Dana and Brigit rounding up the kidnapped vampires, shepherding them to the trucks so they could be taken to the Sanctuary for treatment. Ambulances were called, and there was a lot of shouting as the police demanded to take the injured to the hospital, at least until they saw they were vampires and realized they didn’t have the tools to look after them, not like the Sanctuary did.

  Rune tried to talk to Brigit, but there wasn’t a free moment.

  “After,” she said, pausing outside the truck that held the captured hunters. “I need to speak to you too. I know we have a lot to speak about. I need to apologize—”

  “You don’t,” he interrupted, but a paramedic came up between them before he could say more.

  “I have to go,” she said, climbing into the truck. “Find me after,” she said, and then the doors were pulled shut and the truck drove away. Rune was frustrated and walked back to the main compound where the remaining HUNT personnel were being cuffed to go back to the precinct. Further inside, the little that remained of the anti-vampire weapons was being loaded up. He stared at them with narrow eyes. Where was the rest of it? Where was the machinery? Where had HUNT relocated to? There was enough space here for hundreds of boxes, and all the time it was right here in Chicago, under the Shadow’s noses. Jacob had been right. HUNT was a threat.

  Chapter 32

  “Who are you protecting?” Brigit leaned over the desk and stared at the hunter sitting across from her.

  “Don’t answer that,” the public defender said, hiding a yawn behind his hand.

  “We got everyone,” she said, ignoring him and focusing on the hunter. “We found everything. The powders, the cells where you kept the hostages. They’re talking, you know. All the torture you put them through. We know about it all. Your buddies don’t care about you; they’re singing like birds. The ones that aren’t in the hospital… or the morgue,” she said coldly, leaning forward. She was angry enough that she didn’t feel remorse at the thought of the body bags that had been carried out of the factory. It wasn’t because of the firefight; she’d been in firefights and mourned the dead before. No, it was because of the torture they’d inflicted on the innocent hostages they’d dragged of the street. It wasn’t enough that the poor bastards had been turned against their will. The torture they had inflicted upon the hostages was so grim that she’d lost any sympathy she might have had for the hunters. They all needed to be locked up. If only this bastard would say something.

  “Listen, Mr.…” She flipped open the ID they’d found on him. “Eric Hanson, no one is coming to save you, but if you tell us what we want to know we might be willing to go easy on you.”

  “You can’t get me on anything,” Hanson finally said, staring up at her with wild eyes, his stringy hair hanging down around his cheeks. “I haven’t done anything to any humans.”

  “What do you call those hostages?”

  “Dead bodies.”

  Brigit stared at him in disgust. She was too angry to continue. This was getting nowhere. She stalked out, slamming the door behind her.

  “Any luck?” Dana said once she got out. The cells in the precinct were so full they’d had to send the rest of the hunters to neighboring precincts, but Dana and Brigit had brought the suspected ringleaders here in the hope they could crack them. No damn luck.

  “If we can’t manage anything else, I want this bastard for fucking corpse mutilation.”

  Dana looked at her in confusion.

  Brigit rolled her eyes. “He thinks it’s not a crime to hurt vampires, to hurt dead people.” Dana blanched and Brigit realized she could have phrased that better. “Sorry,” she said abashedly.

  “No,” Dana said, staring grimly at the closed door to the interrogation room. “If that’s all we can get on them, then we’ll use that.” She focused on Brigit. “But he said nothing about Cleaver, about how they got tipped off? Or where the others went? Or the machinery—”

  Brigit cut her off. “Nothing on any of it. Fucking useless.”

  “Damn it.” Dana kicked at a wastepaper basket, firing it across the room. “We know Cleaver is a part of it,” Dana snarled, “and the money has got to be coming in from somewhere. He’s going to set up the same damn thing in Brightbrook.” She stared up at the ceiling and swore long and fluently.

  Brigit stared. “Feel better?” she asked when Dana finally stopped.

  “No.”

  “One piece of good news; we found the asshole who tried to set fire to the Millers’ shop.”

  “Oh?” Dana turned to look at her, eyes wide with surprise.

  “Yup.” Brigit grinned. “ID’d him off the video they gave us.”

  “I will take that win,” Dana said.

  There was a kerfuffle at the door and a bunch of suits walked in with briefcases. “Fuck,” Brigit said. “Lawyers.”

  The front one, a tall man with a shock of bottle-blond hair and a wide, unsettling smile, walked rapidly toward them. “Fuck lawyers indeed. I’m here to defend my client, Mr. Hanson,” he said, a very slight pause between saying the name, as if it was new to him.

  “He’s already got a lawyer.”

  “You can tell the public defender his services are no longer required.”

  “Who paid you?” Brigit said. “‘Cause it certainly wasn’t these fuckers.”

  The man smiled wider. “I do hope you’re not insulting my client, Detective… McReeve,” he said, again with the tiny pause as if he were reading from a cue sheet inside his head. The hunters had lawyered up way too fast. And these guys in their slick suits were way too expensive to be lawyers for some low-level grunts.

  But there was nothing she could do, even with the captain standing right there and Special Agent Morrell looking like he’d spent the night sleeping standing up in his suit. As they watched, the
lawyers divided and conquered and took each of the HUNT members aside. Any that had been even slightly willing to talk closed up tight.

  Brigit and Dana retreated to the back office. Franklin was holed up with Morrell somewhere, and who even knew where Novak had crawled off to. Rune was probably back at the Sanctuary by now, and the room was quiet with just the two of them. Brigit walked slowly up to the board and took down Sparrow’s picture, holding it in her hands.

  “We got her back,” Dana said, coming up beside her.

  “How’s she doing?”

  “She’s back at the Sanctuary with the others, last I heard. Dr. Patil said she was going to induce a coma to help the worst affected recover, but she’s wary on account of what happened with Aaron.”

  “Right,” Brigit said. She sighed. “It doesn’t feel like a win.”

  “You should get some rest,” Dana said. “It’s been a really long day and these guys aren’t going anywhere, even with their lawyers.”

  “I’m too wired. I want to finish the first round of interviews first. You can talk to that fucker,” she said, pointing at the room with Hanson in it. “I’ll take one of the others.”

  “Alright,” Dana said, “but after that your shift ends and you go home, got it? You need sleep,” she said, pointing at her. “That’s an order from your team leader.”

  “Team this,” Brigit said, sticking out her tongue.

  Dana laughed but the sound faded quickly as she steeled herself for a moment before entering the interrogation room.

  Brigit knew Dana was right. Exhaustion pressed down upon her, but there was one thing she needed to do before she left for the night. She needed to find Rune. She’d expected him to turn up at the precinct by now, but maybe he had headed straight to the Sanctuary to check on the rescued vampires.

  As soon as she was done with interviews, she was gonna find him and they were going to have that talk.