This was another room, clinical as the first but larger and lined with a variety of strange-looking electronic equipment in every size and variety. Testing equipment, recording equipment, some ominous stainless steel instruments laid out on a cloth on a long metal console below a video screen. It looked less like an interrogation room in a police station and more like Herr Frankenstein’s lab.
Her memory was cloudy at best. She assumed she’d been injected with something because the vein in her left inner arm burned and there was a heaviness in her limbs she’d never experienced before. Vaguely, she remembered a struggle, remembered breaking someone’s jaw with a vicious kick to the head and disabling two others with well-targeted groin shots before she was overpowered by half a dozen more men armed with fists and billy clubs. That was all she remembered, until now.
Édoard chuckled, an evil sound, and she glanced up at him. He stared back at her with the kind of expression usually seen on the faces of new parents and lottery winners. He looked ebullient. Exultant.
In that moment, she was more afraid than she’d ever been in her life.
“What are you going to do to me?” she demanded, masking her fear beneath an icy tone. He didn’t answer, but his smile grew wider.
Just then, without warning, the room went black.
“What the…”
Édoard muttered an oath under his breath and moved to the door. With a turn of the knob, he yanked it open and walked a few steps into the dark corridor.
“Jean-Luc!” he shouted. It echoed off the bare stone walls, fading into silence. “Henri!”
Nothing. The hallway was silent as a graveyard. Though why he expected an answer at all was a mystery; the building was vast, and if they were anywhere close to the original interrogation room she’d been in, they were deep in the very bowels of it. At this hour—she sensed it was close to dawn, as she always did, even far below ground—it would likely be almost deserted.
There came a low rumble that shivered the walls, and then with a grudging fzzzttt the emergency lights that lined either side of the hallway flickered on. They weren’t steady, though, and a few were burned out so the hallway was drenched in an eerie, flickering half-light that was extremely creepy. Inside the room, all the ominous electrical equipment had fallen dead.
“There we go,” said a satisfied Édoard, walking back into the shadowed room. “Just a little hiccup. Not enough to keep us from our work, eh, kitty?” She watched as he prowled to her, smiling, and then positioned himself behind her wheelchair. With a little bump, he released the brakes and the chair started to slide forward over the floor. “Or at least, not for long. Agent Doe, lead the way,” he said to the doctor, who wasted no time pulling the door wide open so the three of them could pass through.
And then, the instant they were in the hallway, she felt it.
Correction: him. She felt him, and the air went to fire.
Demetrius.
Burning heat and electric intensity and a crackling current of danger; she’d know him anywhere. He’d finally found her.
And now, as he had in every nightmare she’d had over the past three years, as Silas had warned her over and over again, he’d try to kill her.
Every cell in her body exploded into high, shrieking alert.
“Get me out of here!” she screamed, thrashing against the bindings at her wrists and ankles. Her heart pounded, her blood raced, every muscle clenched. She had to get out, she had to get away, now, now, now, now, NOW—
“Oh, that’s right, you’re afraid of the dark, aren’t you?” said a very calm Édoard, sarcasm dripping from his voice. He didn’t miss a step, just kept pushing the wheelchair at a leisurely pace down the spooky hall as she continued to buck wildly. One of the wheels hadn’t been oiled and made a high-pitched squeal with each revolution that echoed off the cold stone walls and fractured to a million tiny smaller squeals, a chorus of horrible, nonhuman screams that all seemed to say, “You’re going to die! You’re going to die!”
She fought harder. Even though she was still weak and a little foggy from whatever they’d injected her with, one of the ankle straps popped its metal binding with a tinny squeal and broke free.
Behind her, Édoard cursed and snapped, “Tranq, Doe!”
But before the doctor could react, a thunderous BOOM shook the building to its foundations. An entire section of the plain stone wall at the far end of the cavernous hallway ahead of them exploded inward in a monstrous spray of brick and dust that carried with it a shockwave of heated air that knocked the wheelchair on its side with Eliana in it and both Édoard and the doctor off their feet.
Her head bounced against the floor.
Fireworks erupted in her vision.
She heard screaming, smelled smoke and scorched fabric, felt the ground shake as another thundering boom rattled the building, but the sound seemed to travel to her ears slowly, distorted as if from far away or underwater. In fact, everything had slowed to a crawl. She lifted her head, blinking through a murky haze of dust, and saw the doctor a few feet away, crumpled on the floor with a widening pool of liquid crimson on the white stone beneath his head. He was twitching grotesquely, mouth open in a silent scream. One eye was open, too, but from the other protruded a bent shard of metal. His broken glasses dangled from one ear.
Édoard shouted something from behind her that she couldn’t make out because there was another deafening explosion, somewhere close but out of sight. With a grinding groan, a large chunk of ceiling collapsed into a pile of rubble on the floor not ten feet away and sent another choking blast of dust into her face. Her ears rang. She coughed and sputtered, struggling against her restraints, trying to push the wheelchair nearer to the wall with her one free foot. A tangle of black electrical conduit hung down from the gaping hole in the ceiling and, with a zapping crackle, began to spark and twist like a nest of angry snakes.
The emergency lights in the hallway flickered out and then came right back on, stuttering intermittently as if they might go out completely at any moment. A siren began to whine.
And through it all, the pulse of Demetrius beat like a drum against her skin, stronger every second.
Get up! she screamed silently to herself. Get out of here or die!
She didn’t want to die. So with strength lent by fury and fear, Eliana snapped the binding around her right wrist.
Panting, she fell on the other wrist restraint and tried with trembling fingers to work open the clasp. She managed it just as a terrifying shock of electricity hit her, and she knew with sudden cold certainty that Demetrius wasn’t alone. There were six—she stiffened—no, eight more Ikati with him.
She struggled to sit up sideways and worked the ankle strap open, bent almost in half at the waist, holding herself up with one elbow. Dust coated her nose and eyelashes, making it hard to breathe and see. The strap gave, and she scrambled out of the toppled wheelchair on her hands and knees, scraping her palms and kneecaps on sharp chunks of brick debris that littered the floor. She turned and saw Édoard, disoriented, staggering toward her with his hands out. He was saying something, she knew because his mouth was moving, but her ears rang so badly all she heard was a painful, high-pitched buzz that made her eyes water.
She glanced behind him, and her heart stopped dead in her chest.
There at the end of the long corridor stood a hulking dark figure, impossibly huge, face in shadow, silhouetted by a wash of weak yellow light from the emergency lamps behind him. Booted feet spread wide, hands flexed open at his sides, enormous, muscled frame almost entirely blocking the open doorway to the connecting corridor from which he’d emerged. Though wreathed in shadow and smoke, terrifying details emerged.
Shaved head. A glint of silver in one eyebrow. Black, black eyes out of which stared an even blacker soul.
Her scream was an animal that clawed its way out of her, tearing her throat, alive. On instinct, she skipped back a step, and her heel caught on a chunk of stone. She fell in slow motion, still scre
aming, hands flailing, and landed on her rear end with a teeth-jarring jolt that knocked the breath from her lungs.
Time and motion, slowed to a crawl only moments before, suddenly sped up, and everything seemed to happen at once.
Édoard, seeing her back away but thinking it was from him, lunged forward with an oddly animalistic snarl. Before he could lay a finger on her, he was wrenched aside from behind and flung against the wall with such force he actually bounced off it and landed, sprawling and limp, facedown on the floor where he slid until stopped by the opposite wall.
Demetrius looked down at her with such savage fury in his expression it froze her in place like a mouse staring into the jaws of a snake. He crouched as if to spring, but then his head snapped up, his eyes focused on something behind her, and a hair-raising growl rumbled through his chest.
Faster than her eyes could track, he shot past her in a black blur. She rolled to her stomach and lifted herself up on her elbows in time to see shadowy figures emerge through the settling dust at the far end of the hallway, past the snarled electrical conduit and rubble from the destroyed wall.
His team.
In one lithe, lightning-fast move, she sprang to her feet, turned, and sprinted in the opposite direction toward the open door, thinking only of escape, her blood scorching like liquid fire in her veins and her vision narrowed to the rectangle of light at the end of the hallway.
In the seconds that followed, she heard just below the whine of the alarm and the ringing in her ears the distinctive muffled pop of a semiautomatic handgun fitted with a silencer. Then another. A bullet whizzed past her head with an acrid whiff of gunpowder and ricocheted off the stone wall with a piercing twang and a puff of smoke. She feinted left, then right, desperately trying to make herself an uncertain target, but another bullet flew past, then another, and before she could twist away again one of them found the tender flesh of her hip.
Eliana crashed screaming to her knees. There was a different noise behind her now, a horrible garbled snarling, vicious and wild, like a hungry predator tearing into a meal, but she didn’t turn and look and didn’t give herself the option of staying still. She struggled to her feet again, pain shooting in furious sparks down her entire leg, and limped, one leg dragging, forward.
Just as she reached the end of the hallway, something heavy hit her from behind.
She staggered, but didn’t fall because she was caught.
And held.
And turned around by a pair of huge, strangling tight hands wrapped around her arms.
Eliana stared up into Demetrius’s eyes. Black and wild, they burned down at her with the lucid incandescence of rage, and she knew this was the end. She braced herself for it, stiffening, ready for the snap of her neck or a knife through her ribs or a gun barrel shoved into her mouth.
And then a thought flashed through her mind, horrifying in its treacherous clarity:
I remember exactly how you taste.
Then the man who murdered her father leaned in close and growled, “Gotcha!”
As he’d been doing for the past hour, Leander stood, unmoving and silent, gazing out the tall, lead-paned windows of the East Library. Flanked by heavy silk drapes drawn back with tasseled ties, they offered a spectacular view of the rolling green expanse of lawn, the groomed rosemary hedges, the plashing marble fountain of Triton in the middle of the manicured gardens. Far beyond the boundaries of Sommerley Manor the dark line of the forest began, rolling hills dense with hardwoods and fir that went on for miles. It was beautiful today, warm and sunny, the air scented softly with the beds of lavender and garden roses planted beneath the windows. The sky above was a perfect, cloudless blue; the white falcon stood out against it like a swiftly moving star.
She was still high, but getting closer. Impatience cramped his stomach. He checked his watch.
Ten minutes. Perhaps twenty.
Unless she changed her mind, that is. His lips lifted to a wry smile. There was always the possibility she would change her mind. He clasped his hands behind his back and looked up again, subsiding back into himself with the patience of one accustomed to waiting.
From behind him a terse voice said, “We have a problem.”
Leander turned. His younger brother, Christian, stood at the open door. Second in authority only to him—the Alpha of the English colony and the head of the Council of Alphas—Christian was both brother and trusted confidant. He knew all the secrets, sat in on all the meetings, offered opinions and got things done. Over the past three years, he’d been an invaluable asset to the tribe as they struggled to adjust to the staggering shocks of discovering a new colony of their kin in Rome, discovering the leader of their ancient enemy, the Expurgari, was in fact one of their own kind, and finally discovering he’d been killed, but not before his two children had escaped with a group of rebels. Which is why most of the tribe had been moved to the colony in Brazil. It was the only colony the Expurgari still had not discovered.
Only a few were left at Sommerley. Jenna—I’m never hiding again, Leander—would not be moved.
Christian was known as a fixer of broken things. A problem solver. So his opening line was more than a little worrying. And so was his posture: taut as a bowstring, wound tight enough to snap.
“A problem?” repeated Leander. “Which is?”
Christian dragged a hand through his dark hair. An unconscious habit, Leander knew, and one that meant he was trying to choose his words carefully.
“Christian,” Leander prompted quietly, an imperative.
“The daughter—the missing princess of the Roman colony—she’s been taken!” he blurted.
The relief that poured through Leander was sweet and surprisingly intense. He hadn’t realized until just then how much he’d been dreading this moment, when someone would come and tell him that one of the rebel children of the dead leader of the Expurgari had done something terrible, wiped out an entire colony, murdered the women and children in their sleep. He wasn’t a religious man, but he almost crossed himself.
“Thank God.”
He walked to the polished cherry sideboard and took up one of the heavy glasses displayed on a silver tray with cut crystal decanters filled with amber and gold liquids. He removed the round stopper and was about to pour himself a generous measure of scotch when Christian said, “No, Leander—she wasn’t taken by us.”
Leander froze. The decanter became a sudden dead weight in his hand.
Carefully, he set it back on the silver tray along with the glass. He turned back to Christian and stared at him. Same dark hair. Same piercing green eyes. Same dusky coloring all the Ikati of his colony shared.
All the Ikati except one, that is. Jenna, his Queen, was pale as alabaster.
His first thought—always—was of her. Her safety was the only thing that mattered.
She wasn’t taken by us.
“You have exactly five seconds, Christian, to tell me what the hell you’re talking about.”
Christian moved from the door into the ivory and gilt opulence of the library. Radiating strain, he came and stood at the end of the sideboard. Even his voice was strained when he said, “Someone else was there. The Hunt found her at the police station, but someone else got there first, set off explosives as a diversion, went in and got her out. Whoever it was killed one of the assassins. Almost killed the rest. But he got away…with the princess.”
“Explosives,” Leander said slowly. A terrible thought crossed his mind, but he pushed it away. It couldn’t be. That would mean treason. That would mean war.
Christian shifted his weight from one foot to the other. He put his hands on his hips, looked down at the Turkish rug, then back up at Leander. “Keshav said it was one of us. A male. Big. Shaved head. Tattoos.”
Keshav—recruited from the Bhaktapur colony in Nepal—was leader of The Hunt, and if he said it was an Ikati male that attacked them, it was. And here came that thought again, pushing back when he tried to ignore it. “Black eyes?”
Christian nodded.
“Shit,” hissed Leander.
Christian blinked, shocked. Leander never swore. He hardly ever even raised his voice. He didn’t need to. When he said jump, the universal response was: How high?
“Phone,” Leander demanded, hand out.
Christian pulled one from a pocket and handed it over without a word. Leander punched in a number he’d memorized long ago and raised it to his ear. He hated the damn things, never carried one himself, but cell phones were a necessity, especially now.
All kinds of things Leander hated had recently become necessities.
He stalked back to the windows, raised his gaze to the sky, and found the falcon still high above the forest, making wide, lazy turns. He didn’t take his eyes from her as the line was answered and a deep, male voice drawled in lightly accented English, “Your highness! How unexpected. This must be a dire emergency if you’re calling during teatime.”
Leander’s jaw went so tight it popped. “Celian,” he said through his clenched teeth, “I’ve told you not to call me that.”
Celian chuckled, raising Leander’s hackles even higher. “Spoken like a true dictator. Call yourself Alpha or president or whatever you like, Leander, but if you’re the only one who gets a vote, you’re still a dictator.”
Goading him, as always. Celian had very different ideas about how best to rule his colony, ideas that included words like democracy and consensus and the ever-popular freedom.
Bad ideas. Ideas that could get them all killed. Or worse. He only tolerated it for the time being because there were bigger—badder—fish to fry.
“And you’re a fool,” said Leander very quietly, “if you think for one moment I won’t wipe you and your ‘democracy’ off the face of this earth if you do anything to jeopardize the rest of us. Do not test me, Celian. I’m in no mood.”
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