by J. R. Ward
There was no transparency anywhere. Even within the company, security clearances and access were parsed out like the place was the Pentagon and everyone was a spy. Hell, even the labs themselves were not titled by division names at their entrances, but rather a code of numbers that she still, four years later, didn’t completely understand.
Her own division was in the eastern corner of the complex, and she swiped her ID at the card reader by the steel door. As her clearance was accepted, there was the sound of an air lock releasing and then she was inside the front office portion of the layout.
This section looked like your bog-standard office space, cubicles with gray partitions lined up in a row, a conference table and a little break area off to one side. Her desk was over on the right and she went across and put her backpack on it. She had spent so many hours here in her chair, at her corporate computer, on her corporate phone, talking about her research, her discoveries, her clinical trials on how cancer cells could be killed by the immune system under the right conditions. Her contacts included colleagues, researchers and oncologists around the world.
She had done good work, she realized. In spite of everything that had happened with Gerry.
But she had already left, hadn’t she. As she looked around at her fellow BioMed employees’ cubicles, she saw pictures of husbands, wives, children, dogs. Knickknacks. Mementos. Dilbert science jokes. Internet memes.
There were a lot of Einstein riffs.
Her cubicle? Nothing. After Gerry’s death, she hadn’t been able to concentrate with pictures of him around, so she’d stashed them in the bottom drawer of her desk.
Taking a deep breath, she turned away and walked across the gray carpet to another set of frosted doors. Using her pass card again, she gained access to the laboratory itself, the temperature-controlled, largely sterile, stainless steel and white-tiled area full of microscopes, refrigerators, testing equipment, centrifuges.
One thing that had always been true of BioMed was that they spared little expense when it came to equipment.
For a moment, she forgot why she’d entered. Then she looked at one of the storage units of pathology slides. It was full of tumor and blood samples from patients who were the true heroes of the effort, the real ones that mattered, the pioneers braver than Sarah would ever be.
Although considering what she was up to tonight?
Well, she was certainly woman-ing up in a way she never could have foreseen.
As darkness finally fell, Murhder woke up in an unfamiliar room, although it took no time at all to recognize the modest contours of Xhex’s hunting cabin. He had slept upright in a chair in the little central room that he imagined would, were he to pull back the blackout drapes that covered every window, provide a view of the mostly frozen Hudson River, the wintered-up shores of the waterway, and Caldwell’s twinkling downtown buildings and highways on the far side.
He groaned as he sat forward, his spine having worked out some kind of intimate relationship with the back of the chair that it apparently did not want to end. Everything else on his body cracked and popped as he got to his feet, but he forgot about the aches and pains as he looked to the closed door of the bedroom.
Ingridge was in there. On the bed. Wrapped in clean white batting.
It was twenty or so degrees Fahrenheit in that part of the cabin, only the main room, bathroom, and kitchen winterized and currently heated. She would hold.
At first, he had been frustrated by how long it had taken to get transport for the remains to be taken out of the farmhouse. But then Rhage had let him borrow a cell phone, and it was then that he had done his research on the lab that Ingridge had named in her partially written letter—said Internet search performed under the guise that he was reading the New York Times online as the Brother snoozed in a corner.
Murhder had been careful to delete his website history when he returned the phone. And then the high-pitched whine of snowmobiles had cut through the meadow’s silence as surely as they ruined the mostly undisturbed snow cover.
The body had been put on a sled, and the Brothers had done Murhder the honor of allowing him to drive her the twenty miles through the woods to where a blacked-out van awaited at the side of a rural road. By the time they had gotten things settled here at the cabin, it had been too close to dawn for him to head out to the location he’d confirmed on that phone. He’d had no choice but to spend the night. Meanwhile, Xhex had not returned from wherever she had gone, and Rhage had insisted on playing surrogate host by turning on the heat in this section of the cabin and getting the water running. And making sure there was food. Drink. A burner phone with the Brother’s number in it in case Murhder needed anything.
The kindness had been unexpected and yet not a total surprise. Rhage had always been the Brother with the most voracious appetites, but he’d also had a good fellow side to him. As well as a chatty nature. As he had gotten things all set, he’d filled Murhder in with regard to all kinds of things that had happened in the last twenty years.
The fact that the male had gotten mated had been a shock, given his history with the ladies, and yet he’d seemed happy. At peace.
He even had a daughter he loved.
And that wasn’t all. The King had a queen. Z had even settled down. Vishous, too.
That Tohr’s Wellsie had been killed made Murhder’s eyes sting. That the Brother had found another mate was a miracle, a gift from the Scribe Virgin.
Who, as it turned out, had abandoned the race.
There were too many other things to count. Times had changed. The Brothers had changed.
And yet Murhder himself had stayed the same, stuck in the past, in his madness.
Shaking himself into focus, he went into the bathroom, used the facilities, and decided not to waste time on the shower. Before he headed out to the lab, he had to go down to the Rathboone house to get weapons from his stash there. Ammo, too. And this time, he was wearing a goddamned Kevlar vest when he infiltrated.
Except he didn’t want to leave this cabin. Sure as if Ingridge were alive and cognizant of being in a strange place, all alone, he felt the need to stay with her.
Reaching into the front of his shirt, he took out the shard of sacred seeing glass. As he stared into its reflective surface, he waited for the image to appear. And there it was. Ingridge as she had been before age and illness took her life, her face youthful, her hair pulled back, her eyes looking right at him in that widened surprise.
Compared to how she had been at the end, there was almost no likeness, and that struck him as tragic.
The sound of the back door creaking brought his head up.
Before he could find a makeshift weapon, Xhex stepped in out of the cold. She was in the same parka and her cheeks were bright from the frigid wind. She looked intense.
“Hey,” she said. “Sorry I bailed on you last night. And before you deny it, I know you’re going after the son, and that you know where to find him. I also need you to meet someone.”
She stepped aside.
The male that came in behind her was enormous. Clearly a Brother, although Murhder didn’t recognize the face—and that was when the unfamiliar ended. The blue stare that nailed him like a sucker punch froze him where he stood, and not just because they were hostile. There was something about the way they narrowed, the flash of aggression, the energy emanating out of them.
“I know you,” Murhder said softly.
All at once, the male started to shake, and that big body listed forward as his arms and legs jerked and his eyes rolled back as if he’d been electrocuted.
“John!” Xhex yelled as she caught her mate.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Sarah fiddled around in the office part of her division, sitting in her cubicle, ostensibly checking order forms for new slides and for the upgraded microscope they’d gotten cleared to buy the week before. What she was really doing was trying to assess in her head whether Kraiten’s presence on-site meant she should pull out. In the e
nd, she decided she could not reasonably make any statistical assessment of the probability of her success under current conditions, as her data was insufficient.
Or in layman’s terms, she was in the dark about so much, and so patently out of her depth, that “utterly clueless” would be an improvement.
At ten minutes to ten p.m., she casually went over to her backpack and took out her meal card, making sure that it showed on the security cameras. What she kept hidden was the credential badge from Gerry’s safety deposit box.
That she slipped into the pocket of her hooded sweatshirt.
One-strapping her backpack, she left her lab, striding quickly down the corridor. Gerry’s division had two levels of clearance, the only lab at the firm that did. When it had come time for his level to be increased, she could remember him commenting on how he’d had to go down to Personnel and sign a bunch of documents. He’d also been fingerprinted, drug tested, and, as he’d said, all but microchipped like a dog at the vet’s.
The cafeteria was halfway between Sarah’s lab and the Infectious Disease division, and she steamed right by it. Security changed shifts at ten, something she’d learned from previous late nights, and she wanted to do her figural breaking and entering during the handoff.
When she came up to the IDD lab, her palms were sweating and she was breathing heavily. Taking the credentials out, she felt time slow to a crawl, and a part of her was all No! Don’t do this!
Because there was going to be no going back. Her face, her infiltration, was going to be recorded, and if she were wrong, if what she’d seen on Gerry’s USB drive was incorrect or if the program had been discontinued in the past two years, she was going to be fired and prosecuted for trespassing. And she was never going to work in her chosen field again because no research program in the country wanted to volunteer for a whistle-blower who’d cried wolf.
Plus she was going to be busy pulling an Orange Is the New Black for a while.
But then she thought of those scans. Those reports. All that cancer being pumped into a human being—
Her hand moved with a decisive swipe, and the nanosecond that followed took forever.
The light turned green. The air lock hissed.
She wasted no time going through the office part of the space and the layout was exactly the same as it was for her division, which was helpful. In the rear, over on the left, was another sealed door, and she swiped again, figuring it had to be for the lab.
That lock released as well for her, and as she pushed the heavy steel wide, she stopped.
Now, things were different, the orientation of clinical workstations and equipment not what she was used to. Didn’t matter, she told herself as she entered. Walking in between the stainless steel counters and shelving, she looked into every nook and cranny, the whirring sound of the nitrogen cooling units a familiar white noise in the background.
Everything was sparkling clean, from the microscopes to the stacks of supplies to the workstations. Nothing was out of order. Nothing was unusual.
She started to think she was nuts.
But come on, what had she expected? Secret panels sliding back to reveal a clandestine lab?
God, she might well accomplish nothing except career suicide tonight.
After she went through the space three times, she focused on the isolation unit. Behind panels of heavy clear glass, she could see the suit-up anteroom as well as a decontamination area, and beyond, an air-locked chamber with hazmat markings all over it.
The pass card got her into the suit room and she put on the protective gear quickly, pulling a baggy blue isolation suit over her backpack, covering her head and neck with a hood, and latching gloves on that went up nearly to her elbows. After making sure everything was attached correctly, she entered the work area with its negative airflow, its InterVac hood stations, and . . . nothing else.
The sound of her breathing in the echo chamber of the head protection only increased her anxiety and the clear plastic panel she had to look through made her feel like she were underwater.
To hook herself up to the oxygen feed, she pulled one of the tethers away from its ceiling mount and clicked the hose to an aperture on the back of the suit. Instantly, plastic-smelling air flooded the hood, and the artificial smell of it made her gasp for breath.
Telling herself to get over it, she went around the twenty-by-twenty room.
Sarah found the keypad on the far side of the workstations, and at first, she almost overlooked it, as the thing didn’t seem tied to any portal. But then she saw the ever-so-faint seam in the wall.
It was a door.
John was used to the seizures. He’d been getting them on and off ever since he’d entered the vampire world. His first one, that he had a concrete memory of at any rate, had happened when he’d seen Beth. There had been others, of course, but the one that had occurred when he’d first met his sister, the King’s shellan, had been truly significant.
This particular shake-and-shimmy, now that he was coming out of it, rang that highly important bell again—although he couldn’t understand why.
The electrical storm in his nervous system retreated much like any thunder or snow front, the intensity diminishing, calm returning, a damage assessment the first stop on the back-to-normal road. As John’s eyes opened, he didn’t immediately record what was around him. He was too busy performing an internal check-in, and when the all-good got sounded, his vision provided him with the details of the two people leaning over him.
Xhex was a relief. The male with the long red-and-black hair? Not so much—and not just because John wanted to go for the guy’s jugular as a matter of principle: The mere sight of Murhder’s unusual hair, his gleaming peach eyes, the cut of his jaw and the heft of his shoulders, was enough to make the buzz come back, all kinds of nerve endings firing.
But John was able to beat that shit back.
Even as Murhder’s voice, which sounded strangely familiar, said, “You remind me of an old friend.”
John sat up and studied everything about the male. Then he signed, Have we met before?
Murhder’s dark brows lifted at the ASL. “I’m sorry, I don’t understand—”
Xhex, who had been staring at John as if she’d seen a ghost, seemed to shake herself back into focus.
“My hellren is mute.” She repositioned herself on her knees with a wince. “And, ah, he wants to know if you’ve met before.”
Murhder narrowed his eyes. “Sure feels like it.”
Okay . . . weird. Even though it didn’t make sense, John felt his bonded male ease off. It was rare for him to trust anybody at first blush, but this former Brother, crazy though he was rumored to be, felt like someone he could put his faith in.
But maybe that was just the seizure talking. Maybe his self-preservation sectors weren’t back on line yet.
“I wanted John to be able to . . .” Xhex said roughly. “Shit.”
John was about to ask her what was wrong, except there was so much to choose from. And on that note, he focused on the former Brother—and reminded himself that instincts about other people were all well and good, but the reality of the situation was that he didn’t actually know the guy.
I don’t want to have to kill you, he signed.
Murhder looked at Xhex. “What did he say?”
“He doesn’t want to kill you,” she muttered.
John didn’t give a crap that he was only halfway back online. If the other male had an aggressive response to that translation, in any way whatsoever, he was going to go for the fucker’s throat and chainsaw the goddamn thing with his fangs—
The smile that slowly came over Murhder’s face was a bittersweet one. “I’m really glad you feel like that.” He looked at Xhex. “You deserve nothing less and I’m happy for you. It’s been a really long . . . hard road, and you’re more than due a good life.”
John turned to his mate. Her eyes were watering as she stared across at the other male. But there was no regret in her f
ace; he had no sense that she wished she’d ended up with the former Brother.
They were more like two family members who’d survived a house fire that had destroyed everything.
John lifted his hands to sign. But then he just extended his dagger palm, offering it to the other male.
Murhder’s shake was firm. “Good. Thank you.”
Xhex cleared her throat. “Okay, enough of this. You’re not going to that site by yourself. The two of us are coming with you—and don’t waste our time trying to argue.”
John squeezed the other male’s hand, trying to communicate that he was in. Whoever that female had been, wherever her son was, if Xhex was going, John was coming with.
Murhder looked to the closed bedroom door.
“You know it’s safer this way,” Xhex said. “And you’re more likely to succeed.”
“Do the Brothers know?”
John shook his head, and mouthed, It’s just us. Promise.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Sarah stood in front of the keypad in the isolation unit, aware of seconds passing. She could try a bunch of numerical codes, but what were the chances of getting the correct one when she didn’t even know how long the sequence could be? And then she could get locked out if she got too many wrong in a row.
“Shit,” she breathed, looking around through the hazmat suit’s plastic visor.
But like they’d put a sticky note with the combination on the side of a cabinet?
If she turned around now and left, at least she had a chance of not getting into trouble. No alarms were going off, and maybe if security saw her on any of their monitors, they’d assume she had proper clearance—
Sarah looked down at the credentials. Then turned the laminated card over.
On the back, written in permanent marker, were those seven digits she’d assumed were a telephone number.