by Kelly Meding
“And you offered this nonexistent cure to Felix, just in case blackmail wasn’t enough,” Baylor said.
“Of course. He hated what he was. The dream of one day being free and returning to his loved ones was the perfect incentive.”
Next to me, Tybalt let out an impressive string of expletives.
“I gave all of them a purpose,” Thackery said. “A mission. Direction, which are things our young people sorely lack.”
“You really think you’re the hero here?” Baylor asked. “You changed their basic nature without their consent. Making someone sick and then offering them treatment doesn’t negate the original crime. It only proves intent and ill will.”
“Call it what you like,” Thackery replied. “But the vampires you’re so eager to help started this plague. I did what I had to do in order to further a cure for our people and to put an end to theirs. My Halflings proved that there can be life after infection. They don’t all have to die because of what those vampires have done to us.”
“The vampires you infected today did not kill your wife and son.”
Thackery flinched and, for a moment, he looked sad. Wore the appearance of the broken man he was inside. Then he blinked hard and the weakness was gone. “Have you ever lost someone you care about to the parasite?” he asked.
Baylor nodded. “Two Hunters. I put them down myself.”
Ouch.
“And the half-Bloods who infected them?”
“Killed one on the spot. One got away.”
“Do you ever think of the one that got away?”
“I like to think that some other Triad hunted him one night and killed his ass dead.”
“But you don’t know.”
“It’s the past, Thackery. I don’t live there. My life’s in the present.”
That irritating, thoughtful face came back out. “You think I’m living in the past, then,” Thackery said.
“Hell yes.”
“You may well be right, but my actions today are to preserve the future for our kind. There is nothing, save the ruling hand of a few, to prevent the Dregs you used to hunt from taking this world from us. One bite from a vampire, and it’s over. And the shape-shifters? An army of animals capable of higher thought?”
Baylor snorted loudly and threw his arms wide. “And what the hell do you think we’re doing here, jackass? We’re working together for all of our peoples, so we don’t have to fight or fear one another.”
Astrid touched his elbow, and he backed up a few steps. I hadn’t even noticed how close Baylor had gotten. He was as angry as the rest of us, with more direct ability to take his frustration out on Thackery. And as much as I wanted ten minutes alone in a room with the bastard, we needed him to keep talking.
“You’re a fool, Thackery,” Astrid said. “You profess to protect the longevity of the human race, and yet you are a puppet to those who seek your destruction. You’re just too blinded by grief and vengeance to see it.”
He frowned, seeming genuinely offended by that. “And whose puppet am I, pray tell?”
Don’t tell him, don’t tell him, don’t tell—
“What’s this cure you supposedly discovered for your Halflings?” she asked, switching topics perfectly.
“Good,” I whispered. No sense in showing Thackery our last card, either. If he didn’t realize the breadth of Amalie’s deceptions, we gained nothing by enlightening him.
“Whose puppet am I?” he asked again. The idea distressed him. He liked being in control, the man in charge. Seeing him squirm for a damned change made me all warm inside.
“What’s the cure?”
“Whose puppet?”
“The cure?”
They glared at each other. Phineas stepped forward. He reached into his jeans pocket and withdrew a bundled handkerchief. Shook it out. Little pinkish sausages tumbled to the floor by Thackery’s feet. No, not sausages. Fingers.
“These belonged to your werewolves,” Phin said. “To the two I killed this morning. They chose not to cooperate with questioning. How many of yours would you like added to the collection?”
Thackery gazed at the fingers, and when he looked up, his face was blank. “I’ll tell you nothing else.”
Phin twirled his antique blade as he took a few steps closer to Thackery. “Do you believe I’m bluffing?”
“No.”
“Excellent. You tortured me. You tortured a woman I care about. You kidnapped my family. Cutting off a finger is only a small portion of the pain I wish to heap upon you, Walter Thackery.”
In that moment, I hated my distance from Phineas. I’d seen him enraged, but I had never before seen this quiet menace he exuded in both posture and words. It frightened me. I half expected him to reach out and rip Thackery’s head clean off his neck and laugh while doing so. Phineas had lost his wife. He’d lost his entire Clan except for three members. We’d recovered one. Two were still missing.
He had very little left to lose.
I was up and out of my chair before I made the conscious decision to leave. Tybalt shouted my name, but I ignored him. Ignored the words still being traded on the projector. Dodged past bodies trying to get inside Operations and listen, and finally burst into the corridor.
My entire body was rubbery, used up, not quite up to the task of figuring out which room Thackery was being held in. Thankfully, a small crowd stood outside a storefront about a quarter of the way down the northern corridor, toward the gym. Nevada stepped away from the quartet of—I assumed—guards once he realized my intended destination.
“Stone, you can’t—” he started.
“Are you kidding me?” I said with more oomph to my tone than I felt. I gave him a solid glare. “You can let me in, or I’ll just teleport through the wall anyway.”
The bluff worked. He let me in through a papered-over hinged door. I kind of expected something like in the movies, where the whole room is dark except for a circle of light hanging right over the suspect. Instead, the store was mostly empty, save a few metal clothing racks, and brightly lit. The video camera was mounted on a tripod, which was balanced on a table to give it height.
Past that was my target.
Thackery saw me first, and whatever rebuttal he was about to deliver died on his lips. His eyebrows arched, which got the attention of everyone else. Astrid tossed me a poisonous glare. I ignored her.
“Ms. Stone,” Thackery said. “I had hoped to speak with you again.”
“Oh yeah?” I said, circling to stand closer to Phin, hands planted on my hips. “I’d hoped to see you dead and bleeding by now, but we don’t always get what we want.”
“A lesson well learned?”
“As if I had a choice. You know, you have a bad habit of killing people I care about.”
“I have never killed—”
“Blah, blah, blah. You can twist words any way you want, Thackery, it doesn’t change your actions. Tie a pretty bow around a jar of horse shit, but it’s still horse shit inside.”
He snickered. “That’s colorful. Then again, you always were.”
“You don’t know me.”
“I’ve seen you bleeding and screaming, child. I think I know you very well.”
Behind me, Phin shifted. I held out my left hand, a stop gesture. My insides were quaking with anger and loathing for the man in front of me, but I would not allow the man behind me to do something he might (intellectually, at least) regret later. If one of us lost it and killed Thackery, both Ava and Aurora would pay the price. That couldn’t happen.
“You know,” I said, “you always seemed like a man who honored his promises. First you promised Felix a cure, but then you blew him to pieces.”
“I promised to free him, and I did. Just not in the way he expected.”
Oh, how I loathed that smug bastard. “What about me?”
“I’ve promised you nothing.”
“You’re wrong.”
“Am I?”
“Oh yeah.” I took one step
closer. “You remember that day in the tractor-trailer, when you told me what you were going to do to me? You outlined your thoughts on my ability to heal?”
“I remember,” he said cautiously.
“We made a deal that day. I promised to cooperate, to answer your questions, and to not fight you or your experiments. Remember?”
His expression went slack. “Yes.”
“Do you remember what you promised in return?”
“Yes.”
“Did you fulfill your end of our bargain?”
Trapped like the rat he was, and he knew it. Pride was one of the human male’s greatest flaws, and I was playing his ego like a piano prodigy. “No. The opportunity was removed when my lab was destroyed by the gargoyles.”
A fortuitous turn of events for me, as it turned out. The gargoyles saved my life that day by preventing Thackery from taking it. “Regardless, you welched on our deal. You owe me.”
Those dark, haunted eyes simmered with annoyance. I ignored the three people in the room with us, keeping my attention wholly on my target. He was so close to cracking, to giving me at least one of the answers I desperately needed.
“What do you want?” Thackery asked.
Score one for our team.
“Three questions,” I said.
“One.”
“Three.”
“Two.”
“Two questions, then.”
Phin touched my arm. I turned my head and met his gaze, his blue eyes cold as ice. A thousand different emotions churned in them, asking a thousand different questions. As much as I wanted to ask Thackery where Ava and Aurora were, he’d find a way to truthfully dodge the location. And I had no doubt that Thackery wanted the Lupa to stay on the move. I could ask and get “in a van driving through the hillside” just as easily as a street address.
I had to be more direct, less obtuse. I just hoped Phin would understand. No one had any intention of trading Thackery for Ava only.
“All right,” I said, mentally reviewing the wording of my first question. “You say you found a cure for the insanity wrought in half-Bloods by the vampire parasite. What are the ingredients of this cure?”
Thackery fidgeted in his chair, distressed at having to divulge the secret of one of his precious projects. Not that I gave a shit about his distress. I had a suspicion—had ever since I found out he’d been drawing blood from the Therians—but I needed to know from his own lips.
“Therian blood,” he replied.
Hell.
“He lies,” Astrid said. “Half-Bloods have fed off our people before.”
“It isn’t ingested,” Thackery said, affronted by being called a liar. “Fifty milliliters given intravenously every twenty-four hours. I’ve been studying this for months, at first using the Lupa to collect samples. Ingested, the blood does nothing. The correct dosage administered directly into the bloodstream, though … the change is almost instantaneous.”
He was drugging his Halfies with Therian blood. He’d kidnapped Therians involved with the Watchtower and used their blood to drug his Merry Band of Halflings. He’d taken the blood of a child. And he’d initially used the blood of the Lupa pups he’d been given. Three of which were still loose in the city, with half a million potential human bite victims at their mercy.
“Fact,” I said. “You, a human male, were given charge of at least seven Lupa children whose saliva is highly infectious to you.”
His eyes narrowed.
“Question,” I continued. “How is human infection by a Lupa bite cured?”
For such a brief moment that I might have imagined it, Thackery seemed sad. My insides quaked. It was my answer; he didn’t have to say it.
“There is no cure that I am aware of, Ms. Stone,” he replied anyway. “I was only lucky to have never been bitten by my boys.”
I closed my eyes, held my breath, fighting off a wave of despair. Although I trusted Dr. Vansis to do everything he could to save Wyatt, part of me had always hoped for a miracle serum from among Thackery’s dozens of illicit experiments. Anything to stop the raging fever and give Wyatt back to me. To prevent a potential disaster scenario if the Lupa trio decided to get snacky on the general population.
“Rumor is your lover is infected,” Thackery said. “It’s heartbreaking, isn’t it?”
The impact of my fist against his jaw vibrated up my arm and shoulder. His head snapped sideways and stayed there. “Don’t you compare our losses, you son of a bitch. I wasn’t responsible for your wife’s infection, but you are wholly responsible for Wyatt’s.”
Thackery flexed his jaw as he turned his head again to look at me. “Perhaps. But with all the other charges you’re leveling at me, one more death is of no consequence.”
I saw red at that, and Phineas, bless him, grabbed me by the waist before I could inflict any permanent physical damage on Thackery’s person. I let Phin spin me around and hold me tight against his chest. His heart jackhammered against mine, faster than its usual accelerated rate. My own pulse was threatening to put me into cardiac arrest.
No consequence. No fucking consequence, motherfucker!
“The Lupa have their instructions,” Thackery said. “If I don’t meet them at a predetermined location at seven o’clock this evening, they will kill mother and child.”
Chapter Nineteen
2:10 P.M.
After this morning’s round of Question the Werewolves, my tolerance for torture was completely topped out. Marcus took Phin’s place on the interrogation squad, and we left before they settled in to pry more answers out of Thackery. He’d hold out, I had no doubt, and it would likely get messy. And as much as I despised Thackery, I just didn’t want to see anyone else suffering today.
Or ever, really, if I had my druthers, but my line of work pretty much ruled that out. Violence was part of my job, part of my life, and not something I could escape. Not until I was dead.
We crossed paths with Dr. Vansis just outside the store. He had a laptop balanced on one arm and a sour look on his face. As soon as he spotted me, he shook his head. “Nothing new for you on Truman, I’m sorry,” he said. “Is Astrid inside?”
“Interrogating the prisoner,” Phin replied. “What’s that?”
“Some of the research they found on the ferry. It’s all coded, and without the key it’s going to take hours to crack. By someone else, mind you. I’m no computer expert.”
“Rufus is good with computers,” I said. “So’s Oliver Powell.”
“Thank you. I’ll look for them.”
“Rufus was in the War Room last I saw him.”
Dr. Vansis nodded, then moved along toward Operations. Long, clipped strides. I probably should have told him there was no cure for Wyatt, but he already knew that. He had to know that by now.
The infirmary was across the hall and down several dozen yards. I gazed at the doors, aching to walk there and sit with Wyatt for a while. I also ached to just find a bed somewhere and sleep until this was over. All over, and I didn’t have to fight anymore. Didn’t have to do any of this shit anymore.
My feet moved of their own volition, carrying me in the opposite direction of the infirmary. Phin shadowed me as I walked. I wasn’t even sure of my destination or intentions, until I was standing in front of the entrance to the vampires’ quarters. The doors were closed, sealed, and guarded by a pair of lionesses.
I had friends in there. Sort of. Isleen had assisted me several times, even saved my life once by pulling me out of a garbage Dumpster. She was sick. We still didn’t know why, and I hadn’t spoken to her in hours.
“Are we able to communicate with them?” I asked.
“Yes,” Phin replied. He leaned around one of the lounging cats and plucked a walkie off the floor. “The channel is set.”
I turned the volume up a few notches, then pressed the Talk button. “Isleen? It’s Stone, are you there?” A few seconds of static passed. I repeated my message.
More static, and then, “I am here.”
Her voice was … wrong. Shaky, broken, nothing like the calm lilt of a stolid, self-assured vampire princess. She was daughter to one of the ruling Fathers, and she was an amazing warrior. I’d seen her in battle, cutting through her enemies like fire through straw. Beautiful.
Now sick. Weak.
I no longer knew what to say. “We captured Thackery.”
“We were told.”
“He was using Therian blood to stabilize his Halfies. Injecting it, instead of feeding it to them.”
A brief pause. “Intriguing. Our illness?”
It shamed me that I hadn’t even considered that as one of my two questions. “He isn’t saying much. Astrid’s leading the interrogation. As soon as they learn anything, I’m sure they’ll tell you.”
“Of course.”
“How are you?” Stupid question to ask, really, but it slipped out.
“Our symptoms have progressed. My skin is dry, cracking. Bleeding.”
A shiver tore down my spine, and I squeezed the walkie a little too tight. “How long have you been like that?”
“Perhaps thirty minutes. It does lend itself to a theory.”
“Theory?” I glanced at Phin, who looked both puzzled and hopeful. Therians and vampires were not natural allies. However, they had developed a mutual respect in recent months, and for some it extended to friendship.
“I have been asking questions.” She grunted, a pained sound that raised my hackles. “I may have found a commonality among we who are ill.”
“What is it?”
“Sunscreen.”
“Sunscreen?”
“Yes, the UV sunscreen.”
Right—the sunscreen developed for the vampires several years ago that allowed them to walk freely in the sunshine. The initial application was quite painful, and few vampires outside the Family warriors volunteered to use it. It made a horrible kind of sense.
“Isleen, are all of the warriors sick?”
“Yes. As well as a courier. She used the sunscreen.”
“Have you told your father?”