The Eyes of the Sun: The Complete Trilogy

by Christina McMullen

  “For god’s sake Lucy, don’t try to put this all on me! I made it perfectly clear to you why I was upset.”

  Someday I’m going to learn that my brain has better ideas than my mouth, but this was not that day. “Because I occasionally got injured on the job? Jesus, Andre, it’s not as if you have a nice safe nine to five either! In case you forgot, we both have a pretty nifty little talent for healing.”

  “And you promised not to rely on that,” Andre growled. “I sure as hell don’t. Look, it may seem like nothing to you, but dammit, Lucy, I can’t sit back and watch you put yourself into danger. One of these days, you are going to find yourself in a situation that you can’t bounce back from, and then what? Call me selfish, but I want the woman I’m…”

  “Andre, wait.” I shook my head and finally engaged my brain. “I’m sorry. I escalated this too far and it’s not fair to either one of us. Like I said, a lot of really messed up stuff has happened that you need to get caught up on. Besides, you’re probably jet lagged and I’m not helping by jumping down your throat.”

  His expression softened, which I took as a good sign. He picked up the carryon bag he had brought in with him. “I’ll take a look over the files after I’ve cleaned up a bit.” He glanced around the room and then at me. “Did you even bring a bag?”

  “I uh, hadn’t planned for an overnighter,” I said with a blush. I could almost hear Andre’s thoughts, rash, impulsive, never thinking things through.

  He gave me a look of exasperation and pulled a clean, dry shirt out of his bag. “Do you want to borrow something to sleep in?”

  I took the shirt with a shy smile. “Thanks.”

  I wasn’t going to chance actually falling asleep, but it was a good excuse to sift quietly through my own thoughts without having to deal with the questions Andre was likely to have after reading the report. Besides, the shirt was soft, and as weak as it might have made me feel, it smelled more like Andre than the pillow I’d been crying into for four months.

  I crawled into bed and sent all of the information I had in my phone over to Andre’s email. I considered sending Evan a sarcastic text, but thought better of it. My problems were with Andre and there was no need to drag his whole family into our mess. Especially considering the fact that I spent the last four months alienating everyone I cared about to avoid doing just that.

  I fought hard against the lure of sleep, but it wasn’t easy. Between the sound of the rain, that was still coming down pretty hard, and the surprisingly comfortable bed, it was a losing proposition. Despite every effort I made to stay awake, I eventually fell asleep. Unfortunately, it wasn’t peaceful.

  My nightmares seemed to be getting progressively worse and this one was the worst yet. The dream began like all of the others; I was back in Paris, reliving the hell I went through while I was a prisoner of the ES. This time however, instead of carving me up on the operating table, the elder vampire held me over a pit that had been dug into the earth. I lashed out and tried to pull away, but my movements were slow. The elder laughed and threw me into the hole in the earth. The scene changed and I was lying on my back, unable to move. Above me, I saw a blue sky and the solemn faces of my friends. I tried to call out to them to help me, but I couldn’t speak. Nor could I move a muscle as they took up shovels and started covering me with dirt.

  “Lucy, wake up.”

  Andre’s voice broke through my dream, but it had a far off, unreal quality. I tried to call to him for help, but I was suffocating and I still couldn’t move.

  “It’s okay sweetie, you’re just having a nightmare.”

  “I can't move!” I gasped at last, half-awake yet still fighting the dream.

  “Hold still, you're making it worse.”

  I opened my eyes and blinked away the tears that blurred my vision, only to see Andre kneeling over me. I stared up at him in terrified confusion. “You're caught in the covers, Lucy,” he explained gently. I relaxed slightly and allowed him to help me to a sitting position. He put his arms around me for support and stared at me with a look of deep concern. “Are you okay?”

  “Y-yes.” My breath was still coming in shuddering gasps. “I’m…s-sorry. I don’t…it’s just…”

  “Sh,” Andre shifted to sit next to me and started rubbing my back. “Just take deep breaths.”

  I did as he said, and slowly my breathing went back to normal, but my embarrassment was growing. I hid my face in my hands and squeezed my eyes shut against the fresh wave of tears. “I’m really sorry,” I whispered. “I didn’t mean to fall asleep.”

  “What? No, Lucy.” Andre gently pried my hands away and gently turned my head so that he could look me in the eye. “I should have realized you were still having nightmares.”

  “They’re not usually this…wait a minute, what do you mean still having nightmares?” I was mortified. I knew Dara was professional enough not to say anything. Sure, she had suggested to Holly that I should come around more often, but this was different. I wondered if Holly had said something.

  “They were pretty bad right after we got back from Paris.”

  “They were?” This was news. “I don’t remember that at all.”

  “Yeah, they were,” Andre said with a sad smile. “Though not quite this bad though. At least…” he trailed off with an odd look.

  “At least what?”

  “Nothing.” He shook his head. “Why don’t you try to get some more sleep?”

  “Actually, we should probably get going.” It was after five and I wanted to be on the road by six.

  “The storm’s gotten worse. We can’t go anywhere for another couple of hours. Come here.” He pulled me back gently, so that I was lying with my back against him and his arm around me. I nearly started crying again at the memories of falling asleep so many times before in that exact position. “Rest for now. I’ll be right here and I’m not going to let anything happen to you.”

  I closed my eyes, pushed aside the uncertainty that still hung between us, and savored the moment for what it was. After four months of sleeping alone, afraid of my own dreams, it didn’t matter if I was being weak. I’d deal with the fallout later.

  Chapter 7

  The last thing I wanted to do was move from the cocoon-like comfort of Andre's embrace, but I was too much a coward to stay. The fact that I had dozed peacefully for two full hours was not lost on me. I slipped silently from the bed and peaked out the window. The rain had finally stopped and already the sun was cutting through the haze, guaranteeing nearly unbearable humidity.

  I let Andre sleep while I took a brief shower and read over the information that Evan had sent regarding the perimeter. According to Mike, it was a series of simple scanners that were years behind anything EJC’s researchers had developed. In theory, Andre should have no trouble disabling any one of them, but the whole set up was cross-linked with enough relay redundancies to be troublesome. I didn’t fully understand the science behind this type of technology, but I knew that this meant that if Andre tried to bypass one scanner, it would set off alarms within the others, and that meant drawing unwanted attention.

  The aerial survey was something I did understand, so I went to work studying the boundaries of the farm. It was a long and narrow stretch of land that, surprisingly, butted up against two protected wildlife areas. Satellite images from the internet showed this to be a solid mass of treetops over wetlands, but EJC had access to far more advanced surveillance technology.

  The images Evan sent revealed three manmade structures below the treetops. The largest appeared to be a house that was set at the northeast side of the property. About a quarter mile south of this was a long building with a flat roof. Mike’s notes indicated that this building was likely the compound where the kids lived. At the far southern corner was a smaller building, no larger than a cabin or storage shed. The entire property was riddled with wooden walkways, leading me to wonder if most of Louisiana was just one big swamp.

  “It appears we have a lot to discus
s.”

  I had been so engrossed in the satellite image that I hadn’t noticed Andre was awake, let alone fully dressed and already packed to go. I didn’t like the stony look and slight frown he wore and I wasn’t entirely sure if he meant we needed to discuss the mission or us.

  “Yes, I suppose we do,” I said, shutting down the laptop, “but on the way. We’ve got an hour and a half’s drive ahead of us.”

  Andre simply nodded his response before grabbing his bag and heading out the door. I grabbed my own gear and checked us out of the room. Andre was standing next to the cab when I got back, which confused me. I had assumed he would want to drive and he still had the keys.

  “Everything okay?”

  “Yep, just waiting for you,” he said and confused me more by walking across the parking lot.

  “Where are you going?”

  He stopped and motioned toward the diner that sat behind the gas station. “Breakfast, Lucy. I don’t even remember what my last meal was, and from the looks of you, you probably don’t either.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “You’re too thin, it’s not healthy,” Andre replied with a look of disapproval.

  I felt like I’d been slapped. Sure, Ida had been getting on me about my weight, but Ida’s passion is cooking, so she thinks everyone needs to eat more. Admittedly, some of my clothes were a little loose, but I’ve never been what anyone would consider skinny.

  “Since when do you get to dictate what my weight should be?”

  “I’m not dictating anything,” Andre replied blandly. “If you want to skip meals by all means, do what you want. But I’m starving.”

  If I had skipped a meal, it was probably because I had been depressed. I certainly wasn’t going to admit that to Andre.

  “My weight is fine,” I grumbled and followed him into the diner. When the waitress came to take our order, I pointedly asked for twice what I normally had for breakfast and vowed to finish everything.

  “So you weren’t kidding about having one hell of a day, were you?” Andre asked after the waitress had left us with our coffees.

  “No.” I took a sip of my coffee and winced. Ida had me spoiled.

  “But I don’t get why you snuck off in the middle of the night to find this place alone. What did you think you were going to do?”

  “I don’t know,” I sighed, “get a lay of the land and maybe find some weakness we can exploit? They’re kids, Andre. I know you read the report, but you weren’t there when Cynda described in detail what she saw happen to a sixteen-year-old boy. You weren’t there when she turned into some kind of a werebeast and threw Hugh.” I set aside my abysmal coffee and sighed. “I know you’re probably thinking that I’m being irrational and impulsive, but there was nothing I could do back at headquarters except wait for someone else to come up with a plan. I’m not good at waiting and being useless, Andre, especially not when the lives on the line are just kids. Besides that, it’s become personal and I want some answers.”

  “You were being irrational and impulsive,” Andre said softly, “but I can’t fault you for that this time.”

  “Really?” I was shocked by this. I had been half expecting him to use breakfast as an excuse to talk me out of going out to the farm.

  “You’re right, there was nothing you could do back at headquarters, but there are plenty of people there who can, and are, working on getting the information we need. I just wish we had a copy of the transmitter that Cynda removed. Even if I can crack the security system there’s no guarantee we can bring anyone out with us.”

  I hadn’t thought about that. My first thought was to get all of the kids off the farm before launching an attack on Bluebeard for obvious reasons. “What if we got inside undetected? Do you think you’d be able to get the information while it’s still implanted?”

  Andre mulled this over. “It’s a thought, but I don’t know if I have the equipment I would need with me. Let’s concentrate on getting data on the security system and looking for weaknesses.”

  During the drive out to the farm, I told Andre about Cynda. Well, at least how I found her. I purposefully excluded the part where I was bit before running into Lance. I tried to ask about Paris, but Andre was being unusually tight lipped on the subject. All he would tell me was that they had uncovered another ES laboratory. Considering that we had destroyed the main compound and what we had thought was all of their labs, this was a pretty big deal. Andre’s silence on the subject was more than just annoying; it was disturbing. I filed that away to ask Evan about later.

  Working for a shadow organization that is run by a legitimate research company does have advantages, I discovered. Apparently, EJC had a contract with the government for a study on invasive species in protected wetlands, which allowed us to enter the protected area that ran along the southern border of the farm. We were able to drive the truck to within a half mile of the border, which was far better than my original estimate of two miles from the nearest navigable road.

  My original worries about wandering around during the day proved to be unfounded. The vegetation was so dense that hardly any light passed through the canopy of trees overhead, even with the sun nearing high noon. I was also grateful that my vampire blood was unattractive to mosquitoes, seeing as the swampy land hummed with the sound of millions of them and several times we found ourselves passing through literal mosquito clouds.

  As a precaution, we stayed at least fifty feet outside the scanner’s range. Andre and I had both loaded the surveillance maps into our GPS. He had also loaded a scanner that would try to decrypt the security measures, while I loaded the hemographic interface that would show us any signs of life in the area and color code them to let us know what we were dealing with. I was grateful for the modifications that Andre had made, which allowed us a two mile radius, but I wasn’t prepared for what I saw when I activated the interface. Nearly all of the signatures that appeared on my screen, in the form of tiny dots, were white, signifying an anomaly that didn’t fit into the category of human, vampire, hunter, or modified vampire.

  I would have expected that all of Bluebeard’s guards would appear as yellow signatures, indicating mods, but the handful of yellow signatures I found were all in the area that I assumed was the main house. Either this meant that Bluebeard’s guards didn’t heavily monitor the area, which was directly opposite to what Cynda told me, or that the guards themselves were anomalies. Considering Cynda’s enhanced strength, that seemed likely. I mentioned this to Andre and he concurred. This was going to make it much harder for us since we couldn’t rely on the hemograph to tell us where the children were. The largest concentration of signatures appeared to be in the northeast end, near the two large structures, and thinned out the farther they were from the main building. But still, there were more than a few within a half mile of where we stood.

  “We’re just going to have to assume that every life sign is hostile,” he murmured. “Keep an eye on where they are and let me know if we’re getting too close.”

  I was about to suggest to Andre that we move north, when I noticed one solitary signal near the small structure that was close to our position. It was green, indicating human.

  “Andre, can you check your hemograph? I’m getting green about four hundred feet from us and it’s inside the parameter.”

  Andre switched screens and frowned. “I’m getting the same thing. It’s not the only one.” He pointed to an area densely populated with anomalies. I hadn’t noticed it before, but enlarging the scan of that area showed nine additional human signatures. I had a bad feeling that they weren’t there voluntarily.

  “I don’t like it. Has anyone from EJC been scheduled to come down here recently?”

  “No. I checked the logs before we came out. A team was out here last week, but they’ve all come back and the computer logged their badge access since. But there are government employees that patrol the area, not to mention people who might be hunting illegally.”

&nbs
p; I checked my own hemograph again. None of the other signatures, mod, human, or otherwise, were anywhere near that area, which seemed odd. All of the others were clustered into groups of two or more. “We should try to check this out,” I suggested. I knew we were taking a risk, but if someone had wandered into the property unaware, I didn’t want our negligence to cost them their life.

  “Okay, but understand something,” Andre said sharply. “I haven’t decoded the scanners yet. If someone wandered in there and they’re still alive, we can try to get them out, but only if we can see them. I won’t risk setting off the alarms for the possibility that what we’re seeing is a recent corpse.”

  He had a point. The hemograph read blood information, not life signs. A dead body would still register for several days provided it wasn’t killed by excessive bloodshed. I nodded and indicated that he should lead. I kept my eyes on the hemograph to make sure that no one else was headed in our direction.

  As we passed through a particularly dense area of vines, Andre put out his hand to stop me and motioned for quiet. The hemograph showed nothing in our vicinity, so I gave him a questioning look. He pointed past the vines that he had swept aside and I saw something glinting, like metal, in the sparse sunlight. As we crept closer, I noticed that it was metal, at least what was left of it. A vintage motorcycle lay on its side, half covered with vines. From the looks of it, it had been there for years.

  “Looks like one of yours,” I commented. Andre had a couple of vintage motorcycles in various states of restoration.

  “I think it was,” he muttered, bending down to yank the vines away from the license plate. He took a picture of the plate and stood up, then began snapping pictures of the bike from different angles. I was about to comment about his strange behavior, but stopped when I noticed that he had become visibly upset by something.