by J. R. Ward
Frowning, he nodded and followed her back out into the hall. “What’s going on?”
“You see John anywhere down here?”
“No, but I’ve mostly been sitting with Nate in his room. I know that Sarah and the doctor met with your hellren a while ago, but they’ve been down the hall on the computers ever since, I think.”
“I don’t know where he is.” Xhex pushed a hand through her short hair. “After I talked to you, I went into his room and sat with him. I guess I fell asleep at some point. When I woke up about fifteen minutes ago, he was gone. I went up to the big house, figuring he would have gone there for First Meal, but no one’s seen him. I checked our bedroom and I just went through the gym and the weight room down here. He’s not anywhere.”
Murhder leaned back into the break room. “Sarah, when was the last time you saw John?”
She looked up from the phone in her hand. “It was about an hour ago, maybe longer. He said he was going to the big house, as he called it, to get a change of clothes?”
“Shit,” Xhex muttered.
“What’s going on?” Sarah asked as she walked over.
“I think he’s gone.”
Sarah was worried as she handed the phone back to John’s mate, as they called their spouses. The woman—female, rather—took it and seemed to be checking for texts. Then she typed out a message and the swooshing sound of something being sent rose up from the device.
“What condition was he in?” Xhex asked.
“He was as he’d been.” Sarah shrugged. “I mean, the infection hasn’t improved, but he didn’t seem to be in any distress—certainly not medically speaking, at any rate. He did seem—well, it’s not like I know him, but he was distracted and with good reason.”
Xhex stared at her phone as if she were waiting for a text back. When one didn’t come, she put the phone away. “He’s off rotation. They won’t let him fight.”
“So the Brothers won’t be looking for him,” Murhder added.
“No, they won’t.” Xhex turned to walk away. “No one will be looking for him.”
As the female strode off, she moved with purpose, her boots pounding across the concrete floor. It was obvious what she was planning on doing. She was going to search for him herself.
Murhder stared after her, his arms down at his sides, his fists tightened, his jaw hard.
“Go,” Sarah told him softly. “I’ll be fine here.”
“It’s okay—”
“You want to go, and she needs the help. Plus I feel totally safe. Jane is supposed to be coming down again after she eats, and we’re going back to work.”
He looked over at her. Pulled a hand through his long hair. Shifted his weight back and forth.
“Go on.” She patted his chest. “I’m not leaving—hell, I don’t even know where I am, and no one’s looking for me, either. Xhex really needs a friend right now—and I don’t blame her for being concerned.”
Murhder started to shake his head. Then he cursed, dropped a hard kiss on her mouth, and said something really fast.
Before Sarah could decode the syllables, he ran down after the female. Xhex had made it quite a distance, so that when she paused as he came up to her, there was no hearing what they said.
As the two stood together, it was clear they had known each other for a long time: There was trust between the pair of them, even as they started to argue, arms being crossed, brows going down, faster words getting traded.
And then Xhex rolled her eyes and shrugged in a classic suit-yourself kind of way.
After which the two disappeared through a glass door.
Sarah went back into the break room and helped herself to a Snickers bar, a bag of Snyder’s of Hanover pretzels, and a Coke. She ate the calories systematically, and thought about all the times she and Gerry had wolfed down bad choices between classes and seminars and stints in university labs . . .
Back during their schooling years, he had been so young and full of ideals and ideas. So had she.
Now, she was alone in a subterranean, vampire-run clinical environment.
Having had the sex of her life with another species.
Over on that sofa. Like, right. Over. There.
As she glanced at the couch they’d made love on, it was impossible not to note that one arm and part of the back made things look as if it had been in a car accident. The poor thing was bent off whatever frame held the cushions together, all cockeyed and crooked.
She checked the TV again. Wheel of Fortune was just coming on and she muted Pat and Vanna.
She couldn’t believe that there was nothing on the news or online about what they had done in Ithaca the night before. Kraiten had been yelling about criminal trespassing. His own car had been stolen, for godsakes. But maybe he had realized that getting the authorities involved would be tricky. You’d have to explain why they were needed, and experimenting on a human subject—
Nate wasn’t human, she reminded herself.
As she thought about the billions and billions of dollars that Big Pharma competed for, she had to wonder if Kraiten would want the details of his company’s secret experiments kept quiet not because of any criminal implications—did human laws even cover non-human species? Was this an ASPCA issue, for godsakes?—but because then the other for-profit research corporations would try to get their own vampires for testing.
It was a sick way of looking at it, but drug breakthroughs were worth incalculable amounts of money, and BioMed’s CEO was that greedy—
Wait. His memories had been scrubbed, hadn’t they?
She slowly turned back to the TV. What if the man didn’t even know the raid had happened? Except how would that work? Did Murhder erase Kraiten’s recollections of everything, including the secret lab? In that case, what was going to happen when the researchers in Gerry’s department showed up to work on something that the CEO didn’t believe existed?
Jeez, the implications were like an LSAT test that strained the capacity of the human mind.
Where did the memories start and stop?
She thought of Gerry’s death. And that of his boss, Dr. McCaid.
Kraiten had done many things wrong, and she had the proof. Plus the vampires were back in their own world now, safe and sound. When she returned to her side, she needed to go to the authorities with—
Once again, that blazing headache pounded through her skull on steel horseshoes, the pain eclipsing all thought about where she needed to go with that she knew. Rubbing her face, she abruptly remembered why it wasn’t a great idea to eat boatloads of sugar, salt, and caffeine on a oner once you were out of your late teens and early twenties.
“You okay?”
Sarah jumped as someone spoke up, and it was miraculous. As she opened her eyes and focused on Jane, the headache essentially disappeared.
“I brought you guys food.” The doctor put a large tray down on one of the tables. “Do you like lamb? It’s Wrath’s favorite. We’ve also got baby new potatoes broiled in the oven and boiled carrots.”
As a cloche was lifted off, and all kinds of rosemary heaven wafted around, Sarah decided she needed some real food.
“Your timing couldn’t be better,” she said as she sat down and took one of the two plates.
Jane eased into a chair and smiled. “I should have had Fritz send it down from the big house as soon as we sat at the table. We haven’t been very good hosts.”
“You’ve been great.” Sarah tucked into the dinner, starting with the potatoes which were proof that God existed as far as she was concerned. “Hey, you didn’t happen to see John while you were there?”
“No, why?”
Shifting her knife into her right hand and the fork into her left, Sarah thought about how she could answer that as she cut into the lamb.
“No reason. Wow, this is delicious—and as soon as I’m finished, I’m ready to get back to work.”
“You sure you don’t want to have a sleep? We have a room you can use. Is that
where Murhder is? Catching some z’s? I figured he’d be with you.”
Keeping her eyes down, Sarah nodded and then pointed at the crumpled wrappers, the crushed bag and the Coke can. “As for me, I’m wired.”
She also didn’t know how much more time she had. Any moment not working on John’s case seemed wasted, although realistically, she didn’t know that she was going to be able to offer him any kind of solution the medical staff hadn’t already considered.
Breakthroughs didn’t just happen; they had to be earned through sweat equity.
At least that’s what she and Gerry had always believed.
As a wave of sadness came over her, she beat back the emotion with a reminder of what he’d done in that secret lab. How could he have tortured Nate like that? In the name of making money for a man like Kraiten? It broke her heart to think the student she’d loved had turned into a man she didn’t recognize.
A man who did evil things to an innocent boy.
Refocusing on the present, she knew she needed a plan for when she got back to her real life. She was not sure it was safe to return to her house, given that she didn’t know what Kraiten remembered of the previous night. But where would she go? And how was hiding from a billionaire going to work?
Kraiten had endless resources.
She had a year’s worth of expenses saved, a small inheritance, and her 401(k).
Not really the size wallet you needed if you were going to try to disappear for the rest of your life.
Abruptly, she realized that it was more than just Kraiten she might have to evade . . . because something dawned on her as she looked across the shallow table at the doctor who’d brought her dinner: There was no way of going to the authorities without exposing all of these people and their secret way of life. After all, how could she share the experiments and the test results without providing humans with proof that another species lived among them?
As she considered the ramifications of such a revelation, she knew they would be potentially catastrophic. Given how the human race typically treated things viewed as “other”? The idea of vampires being widely known made her heart pound with panic for the species’ safety.
And in this regard, she realized, she and Kraiten were in the same place for completely different reasons. Neither of them could really bring in law enforcement, could they.
Too bad he was the one with the experience killing people, and she was just a scientist.
Where was Iron Man when you needed him.
“Penny for your thoughts?” Jane said softly.
“Do you read minds?”
The doctor shook her head. “No.”
“Oh, I forgot, you’re not one of them.” Sarah wiped her mouth as she swallowed the truth. “And as for my thoughts, I’m just wondering what I can do for John. By the way, this mint jelly is fantastic, is it homemade?”
Jane smiled a little. “As a matter of fact, it is.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
The wind was cold on John’s face as he walked up the rise and looked across the municipal park toward downtown’s forest of skyscrapers. He was right on the shore of the Hudson, by the boathouse where rowers put their sculls into the water during the warmer months. Over to his left, there was a playground with brightly colored tubes that kids could scramble through and several sets of vacant swing sets, the seats of which had snowpack-passengers that did not travel far.
Everything was blanketed in winter white, only the shallow, shuffling print-trails of squirrels having crossed the open area disturbing the pristine fall.
When the mournful wail of an ambulance sounded out on the highway, he glanced to the bridges that went over the river and saw the flashing red lights in the midst of the traffic. The emergency vehicle was heading toward him, instead of away, which made sense. The St. Francis ER was on this side of the waterway.
He wondered who was in the back. What their ailment was. Whether they were going to live.
His shoulder hurt more as the thoughts went through his mind, but he didn’t think it was because things were suddenly much worse with the wound. Or maybe they were. Who knew.
John refocused on the snow and thought back to Christmases when he’d been at the orphanage—which was an unusual place for his mind to go. Before he’d found his way to the vampire world he belonged in, he’d refused to dwell on what his childhood had been like—nothing good could come of those memories. And afterward, when he’d found his true home and people? He’d told himself none of his human past mattered anymore because he was where he belonged.
Just let it go, he’d always told himself.
Now, though, his brain insisted on digging up a golden oldie from the holiday season. He’d been placed in a Catholic orphanage—because Our Lady of Mercy was pretty much all Caldwell had for unwanted kids outside of the state-sponsored foster program—and he could remember being told all the time that he was one of the lucky ones. The chosen ones.
Nobody had ever told him who had done the choosing, and given that he’d been found in that bus station as a newborn, it wasn’t like he had any memories of being rescued. And as for the special status? He’d always had the sense that the people who worked for Our Lady said that to the kids because they themselves wanted to feel part of an elevated platform, a righteous, better-than-anything-else kind of thing.
Performance piety, he thought.
But whatever, fine, he’d been one of the chosen ones, kept out of the foster care system, saved from some terrible fate that clearly had Charles Dickens–in-the-twenty-first-century written all over it.
In reality, he’d found growing up without parents, and waiting around in a valiant hope that some couple would come and declare they wanted to adopt a scrawny kid who couldn’t talk, to be pretty grim, even if he’d had a warm place to sleep, three squares a day, and free dental.
And then there had been the Christmas season.
For reasons that, in retrospect, now totally escaped him, every December the orphans were loaded onto a bus and taken to the local mall. They weren’t allowed to sit on Santa’s lap, because the season wasn’t about all that—but they were instructed to walk around and see all the presents they would not be getting, and all the families they were not a part of, and all the normal that, through no fault of their own, they could not participate in. And this was back before online shopping, when throngs of people crowded into those shopping centers, carrying out bags and bags of Christmas morning loot into parking lot sections that were standing room only for new car arrivals.
He’d never understood the why of that trip.
Reaching up to his shoulder, he pushed at the wound and rotated the socket. The pain made him remember something else. Back when he’d been growing up, he could recall the nuns and adults at the orphanage telling the children that youth was wasted on the young.
Like the Christmas mall trip, he’d never understood why they felt compelled to point a blaming finger at something a kid couldn’t fix and didn’t get. You were the age you were, and death was just not a preoccupation for somebody who’d been on the planet for only eight years. Ten years. Fifteen years.
More to the point, if you’d already lost your mom and dad and had no one who cared for you in the world, what did anything else matter? If dying meant you lost everything, hello. John hadn’t even had clothes of his own. Books. Toys. Even the pillow he put his head on every night had “Our Lady of Mercy Orphanage” stamped on it in ink.
No possessions. No control over his destiny. Nothing ahead of him.
He might as well already be dead, he’d always thought.
As the cold wind off the river curled around his legs, the chill made the scene in front of him replace the images of the past. And for some reason, he thought about how old he was. In calendar years, he was not even thirty. For a human, that was the tail end of the transition into proper adulthood. For a vampire, it was a drop in the bucket, a blip on a centuries-and-centuries-long lifespan.
Assuming yo
u didn’t die young.
He thought about his wound and the spread of the stain in his skin.
Death had taken ahold of him. He knew this without any doubt.
So now he understood about the youth wasted on the young thing. It was hard to fully comprehend the prospect of dying, the way it consumed the mind and the soul, the way it eclipsed previously “important” preoccupations, the way it reordered your priorities . . . until you were forced to stare your grave in the eye.
Children had no capacity not just to appreciate mortality, but to see clearly that they had made a bargain at birth that, even though there was no consent, was nonetheless an enforceable agreement with a payment due.
All things that lived died.
The best that anyone who breathed could do was a skate-by into old age, dodging the slings and arrows of biological failings and accidents, until you could sit back with your aches and pains and mourn the loss of your relevancy, your generation, your place in the population pecking order.
He had never expected to die. Ironic, given that he hunted the enemy every night as his vocation.
But here he was, standing out in the open, a sitting duck for a lesser, not worried that he had no weapons, no phone, and no backup.
Then again, he’d already decided his life was a moot point. The question was, with whatever time he had left, what did he want to do?
What was important to him?
Who mattered?
Privacy in a partnership was a tricky thing.
As Xhex re-formed downwind from her mate, and stared across a snow-covered park at his back, she didn’t know what to do. He wasn’t answering her texts, he hadn’t told her he was leaving the house, and he was alone not just in fact, but on an existential level.
And no, that wasn’t extrapolation. Her symphath side knew this as fact: His grid was lit up around his core along the lines of separation and isolation.
Though his body was no more than a hundred yards away from her, he was virtually untouchable.
“You going to go talk to him?”