by Dale Mayer
With wild eyes, Ian spun around looking for the exits. "I have to get out of here."
"We all do," Jewel groaned. "Please, can we go home now?"
Goran and Serus exchanged grim looks.
An awkward silence fell. Jewel groaned. "Now what?"
It was Tessa who answered. "While you were out, a group of human soldiers came in ready to kill us all, but as most of us were passed out...they thought we were already dead." Sadness crept into her voice. "They are hunting the vampires who did this, but..."
"But they aren't too fussy as to who they kill in the process," David filled in.
"And my brother and his friends are here," Tessa added gently.
"So wait, now you're saying that we have to worry about asshole vamps and asshole humans?" Ian snapped. "I wasn't kidding when I said I wanted to go home. If I get drugged again, I'm likely to turn on you all."
"I think this last time, you had sedatives, considering how deep you were sleeping. There didn't appear to be any mind control elements at all."
Tessa nodded in agreement. "Also, they'd have to be doing some kind of neural interference in some way for the mind control to work. The sound system here is broken, and you didn't have anything attached to your brain..." she grinned. "Except ears and that weird ear cuff thing you're wearing."
His hands slapped to his right ear and the metal piece that hung there haphazardly. Whatever it was came loose. He ripped it off and flung it across the room. The others laughed.
"I don't wear earrings," he said violently. Ian's gaze turned even more wild-eyed. His gaze went from one person to the other as he tried to focus.
David said, "Where the hell did you get it then?"
"And what is it?" Tessa walked over to where the metal piece had landed and picked it up gingerly. "Trackers? Then she remembered.
"One of the dying vamps said I had one." She slapped a hand over her right arm. The pain had long disappeared under the onslaught of new injuries and with the strain of what they'd been through, she'd completely forgotten."I actually wondered if I'd had something injected under my skin."
"What?" roared Serus, striding over to her. "Why didn't you say so?"
She frowned. "Actually I thought I already did." She gave a headshake. "But who can remember if I did or who I told? I haven't exactly had a shortage of things to think about."
He jerked her arm around to look for himself. He ran his thumb over the upper flesh of her arm. "There's a mark here."
"Yes. It's been there since I woke up in the SUV."
He nodded, but there was no laughing answer on his face. "And I'm betting that there is something else inside of here as well." His thumb stopped moving to press deep.
"Hey, that hurts." She pulled her arm free and rubbed the spot gently.
"That's because either that's where you were shot with a needle and the area is still tender, or something was implanted and it's still bothering you. Like a tracking device."
David and Ian stomped over. The tech boys, as she thought of them.
"Get away." She shot them a warning glance. "Besides, if I was tagged like an animal, then you might have been as well."
Immediately, Ian started slapping at his arms as if looking for an implant.
David rolled his eyes. "Not likely, sis. You were left behind for a reason. Remember they wanted to see what you could do?"
She did remember, but she also wanted to forget. Glaring down at the red mark made by her father's thumb, she hated to think that something foreign was inside her. If there was something, she wanted it out. Staring at her skin, she realized there was something.
She could see a disturbance in the energy field. A blackness that didn't belong. And how was she going to get it out? She glanced down at her fingers and slowly extended the long nail of her right index finger. Taking a deep breath, she closed her eyes long enough to tell herself to get at it and then plunged the nail into her own arm.
"Shit."
"What the hell are you doing?" roared David, who jumped forward and grabbed her. "You don't have to do that."
"Yes, I do. I don't want any of their damn hardware learning anything about me. Do you hear me?" She jutted her chin in his direction for emphasis. Then she turned back to what she was doing.
It was deep.
Rather than digging her whole hand in, she ordered her nail to extend deeper into her flesh.
She barely held back a cry as a tremor of pain rippled throughout her system.
You don't have to do this now, you know. We could have found a doctor to take it out of you.
She almost smiled at Cody's comforting voice.
I had to do it fast. I'm such a baby when it comes to pain.
A tiny ripple of amusement slipped into her mind, followed by his voice. So you stab yourself instead of waiting for drugs to stop the pain?
No drugs, she said fiercely. Ever.
Silence.
Then a quiet understanding sigh. Fine. Your way then. Just please don't do any more damage than necessary. Your body is already weak.
Weak, yes, but not done yet. I do feel better because of the food. And who knows, maybe having this foreign thing in my system has been slowing my healing down. God only knows what kind of information it's been telling those assholes.
As we don't know for sure that there is anything there, I doubt we will ever be able to say.
It's there, she snapped. I can see it.
You can see what? he asked cautiously.
I can see the change in the energy. There's a thick black blob like a spot in the energy of my arm. I just need to... she gasped.
What? Are you all right? What did you do?
He was suddenly in front of her, peering down at her bloody arm.
She swallowed twice and pushed up under the black spot. Waves of greasy pain hit her stomach.
Please don't let me be sick, she prayed silently.
Take a deep breath. It will help. If you bend over, it will help too. He smiled. But you'll have to take your finger out of your damn arm first.
His attempt at humor fell flat and they both watched as a blood-covered silver dot rose slowly as she pushed it up through the skin, ripping and tearing as it went.
And then it was out.
She gasped with relief. "I don't know what it is or what it does… I'm just glad it's out."
David picked up the micro-sized unit from Cody's hand and lifted it into the faint light to see it better.
Jared walked forward.
And Tessa realized she'd forgotten about him.
His eyes were huge. And he was staring at her arm and her bloody finger.
She flushed and stared down at her feet. God, how she must look. So primitive. An animal ripping her own arm open.
Good thing he hadn't seen her when she had been ripping out the throats of the enemy.
It made her all the more aware of their differences. Before he'd arrived, she'd felt mostly normal within her vampire group. Accepted for who she was and could revel in it. Now she felt...odd. Different, as if something major had just shifted.
It made her feel uncomfortable in her skin. Again. And she didn't like it.
But it had changed something inside her. As if this had to happen for her to see her true self. Without all the doubts that had plagued her growing up. She might be different from the vamps around her, but she was as much one of them as David or Seth.
She'd tried to fit into the human world and she had...for a time. She could have made a home for herself there quite happily. But she'd have been hiding from her own true self.
Now there was no going back. No more hiding.
She could be friends with the humans. But she could no longer fool herself... she could no longer pretend to be one of them.
She was and always would be a vamp. Of mixed genetics. Of throwback genetics, or whatever they wanted to call it, but she was completely a vampire.
Finally.
*.*.*
Jared struggled with what he'd just seen. The ease of what she'd done. Although it had hurt her, she'd done it anyway. He couldn't imagine the Tessa from school doing something so cold-blooded. As much as he understood the necessity, that she'd actually done it bothered him. He wasn't used to girls cutting things out of their bodies like that. It was an emergency scenario, but still...
"Do you think we have trackers?" Jewel asked fearfully. She'd regained her feet and stood with David's arm supporting her.
Tessa glanced over at her, one hand clasped over her wound. She shook her head. "Not that I can see."
"See?" Jared asked, giving a quick glance over Jewel. "How can you see something so small?"
There was an awkward silence. Tessa stared at him. Her green eyes were cool and assessing. Jared wondered what he'd missed. He remembered some joking about Tessa's abilities at odd times, but he hadn't realized there were actual skills involved. He'd heard her say she could see the black spot but he'd assumed she meant like a sliver. Although as Ian held the small metal dot in his hands, Jared realized it wasn't black at all. It was silver. So what had been the blackness she was talking about?
He turned and narrowed his gaze at her. "Tessa? What am I missing?"
She wrinkled her nose, then shrugged and relaxed. "I see energy. Peoples' energy. The energy they leave behind when they walk. The energy around their body. In this case, the energy of something foreign in my body." She gave a second self-conscious shrug. "It's no big deal."
Jared didn't know what to say. It was a big deal. He just wasn't sure what it all meant. Except that it was yet another difference between them. He glanced around at the other vamps. The elders were speaking off to one side, David and Jewel were watching him, and Cody and Ian were studying the weird metal device. "Can you all do that? Is that a vampire thing?"
David shook his head. "That is completely a Tessa thing. We're just normal boring old vampires."
"Who'd like to go back to living their boring old lives," muttered Jewel.
David tucked her up closer. "Soon."
Tessa spoke up. "As much as I want to leave, I don't like these soldiers running around here when we don't know where Seth is or why he's here."
Jared shrugged. "Neither Seth nor his friends said anything about why they were here when I was with them."
"Did you see where they went when you came inside?"
Jared hated that all gazes suddenly switched back to lock on him. "We came down the garage floor and walked down the hallway to the blood farm. Once we got inside, they headed to the back of the farm and I started looking for my dad."
"Wait, did you lower the garage door or did they?" David asked.
"Seth did." He frowned at them, shuffling his feet.
David exchanged worried glances with Tessa. "Did they exclaim or comment in any way about the odd door, the hallway, or the blood farm? Or did they act as if it was all normal?"
He raised his eyebrows. "They definitely knew how to operate the floor. How to open the weird door at the top and to walk all the way down. They'd been here before. No doubt about that."
Serus’s voice cracked across the room, "And you didn't see where they went or hear them say anything about where they were going?"
The fear in the elder's voice had Jared immediately shaking his head. Then he cleared his throat. "No sir, but they walked in, never made any comment, and strode right to the back of the warehouse. I never saw them again."
*.*.*
Goran couldn't get his head wrapped around this information. The only way that Seth could have known about the garage mechanism and the weird doors was if he'd had prior knowledge. If he'd been here before, it followed that he'd had something to do with the blood farm. He wracked his brain to come up with something, anything, to explain Seth's knowledge.
And came up with only one explanation.
Seth had to have something to do with these assholes.
Just like Tyson. Seth was incredibly young to be involved though, a full century younger. Like Jacob. If these assholes were recruiting boys Seth and Jacob's age, were they recruiting through educational institutions? Tyson might have also been involved in the recruitment process.
That would be doubly hard. It was one thing to lose his son in this mess, but another to have a son responsible for recruiting other people's sons.
His grief was not something he'd wish on anyone else.
Especially Serus's boy. He'd known Seth since he was little. And he'd never seen any behavior to indicate his involvement in something like this.
Then neither had he seen anything in Tyson's actions. Maybe he'd never wanted to.
But what could possibly cause these decent young men to willingly join this mess?
He watched the emotions ripple across Serus's face. The pain and shock, the awareness, and the grief as they ravaged his soul. His gaze, black pits of agony, had Goran's gut reeling from the crippling memories. Tyson. Goran had already lost so much...and Serus's pain was just bringing it all back to him. Again.
Damn.
He shuddered with the effort to keep it all contained when what he really wanted to do was to kill his son all over again.
Tessa walked over to the hole in the wall where Jared had entered. She wanted to go home. But she wanted her brother to be alive even more.
When she found him, she planned to smack him good. And then she'd ask him what the hell was going on.
But she had to find him first. Before these soldiers killed him. She stepped over the heaped rocks, dirt layers, and crumbled supports to peer out into the tunnel. There was no sign of anyone.
Tessa?
She pulled back enough to face Cody. "We need to follow the soldiers and find out what and who is down there."
"I think Jewel and Ian should go home."
She nodded. "I agree. I just can't leave my brother. What if he's trapped somewhere? Or lying injured? Needing food?”
"I get it. I do. I just don't know what the answer is."
"The same as always." She shrugged, "Stay together. No one else can fly and Goran can't take all of you home and come back."
"I know but..." Cody studied her face for a long moment, then ran a quick glance down to her leg. "And then there is the issue of your leg."
Goran's voice called from behind them. "You kids are going to go home together. Serus and I are going to find Seth and his friends."
Tessa shook her head. "No—"
Goran cut her off. "Yes. You are injured. At this point you are more of a liability. We need to find the boys. And in order to do that, we need you home safe and sound."
David asked, "And how are you going to do that? Ian and Jewel can't fly yet. And Tessa can't jump, at least not very far."
"Not to mention that Cody's wing is still not fully healed." Tessa said coolly. "He won't speak up, but I will."
"Damn it, Tessa. My wing is healing. It's not that bad," Cody growled. "I'm fine, sir."
But Goran had stopped to stare at him thoughtfully. "It was a bad injury. And you haven't fed properly, so you are weak, too." He glanced over at Serus and shrugged. "I think that means we all have to stay together until these kids heal."
"And someone would have to carry me." Jared stepped forward. "I sure wouldn't want to be left behind."
"That wouldn't happen," Tessa said with a smile. "And it's good that you are here. You will be an asset if we meet the army."
A stone went flying as Jared let loose a bit of temper. "I don't know how much good I will be. They wouldn't listen to me before."
"But they aren't likely to slaughter us with you as a witness." Ian suggested with a grin. "So I'm happy to have you."
Cody snorted. "That just means they will shoot him too so as to leave no witnesses."
His face paling, Jared nodded slowly. "I'm afraid you just might be right. These guys are trigger-happy. I don't think they are bothered abou
t who they take out."
Serus walked to the hole Tessa had looked out of. "If we have to stay together, then the best thing to do is get moving fast. So we can all go home."
"Home." Jewel sighed as if a dream had been dashed. "Like I'm ever going to see that place again."
David hugged her gently. "You will. We all will. This is almost done. We just need to make sure there aren't more of us that need help. I can't leave Seth behind.”
"I'm still trying to figure out why he's here," she muttered.
"So am I," said David angrily. "There's no reason for him to be. For any of them to be here."
"You might want to consider things before jumping to conclusions," Cody said, "That if they were a part of this, they'd have known about the blast, if it was one, and wouldn’t be here at this time."
Tessa perked up. "That's true. And the other consideration is those damn drugs. Seth is young and if he'd been given drugs over a period of indoctrination, he wouldn't know what he was doing. Just like mom."
Everyone there had seen the effects of the drugs on both willing and unwilling participants. Tessa knew that the reminder would at least keep back some of the fear and judgment the others were racing toward.
She didn't want to believe that Seth was involved. She refused to believe it until she knew for sure, and until then she'd treat this as yet another problem to solve.
It might not be that easy, you know, Cody's voice murmured gently in her mind. Like Tyson, Seth could have signed up willingly, too.
I know it's a possibility. But until we know for sure...
"So if everyone is in agreement? We follow this tunnel deeper into the mountain to find my brother. If we don't find him in the next bit, say a couple of hours, then we need to go home and come back with other vamps to help us look."
"Make it an hour." Goran added, "And I'll lead the way. One hour to search, then we go home and get help. We'll get a vamp army up here to combat the human army."
Tessa hated the thought of leaving if they hadn't found her friends by then. But at what point could she walk away? She felt responsible for Catherine and Jill's plight. Motre and the army had made the decision to go deeper into the mountain, but her friends were victims... they didn't deserve this. Still, she had an hour... with any luck it would be enough.