Worse, they both looked exactly like Brock—only older. She would even say they sounded like him, except for how they always used “we”. They must take the whole team aspect of the Blades pretty seriously.
The resemblance had to be why it was so hard to look at them, why she felt a stabbing flash of grief every time they spoke or said her name. Especially when they used “Rhodes”.
How did they find out my name so fast?
As far as she was concerned, Tessa Rhodes died along with her family over a decade ago. She was just Tessa now.
The uncertainty of it all was getting to her. She couldn’t see Marcus, and that made her more afraid. She should be relieved to be away from him. Instead, she wished he was at her side.
She slowed down when he appeared at the end of the hallway. He was walking with his head bent. At first, she thought he was in pain. The hunched shoulders, fists clenched at his sides…
No, he was angry. Killing-angry.
“Marcus?” she said.
His gaze snapped to hers. The light reflecting off his glasses couldn’t hide their glow.
Shit, he looked like he was about to rip Dexter’s head off. So why did she find herself walking back down the hallway toward him?
She told herself she didn’t want to be in the middle of something with these guys. They were both deadly. But she had a feeling she stood a better chance of survival with Marcus, especially after fighting back-to-back at the junkyard—and what they’d almost done after.
Dexter shifted so he was more than half-blocking the hallway. He was even creepier up close. So like Brock, but…wrong.
“Excuse me.” She tried to brush past him on her way to Marcus.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Dexter reached toward her arm, but she spun away and glared at him.
“When you’re at a strange party, it’s best to stay with your ride.” She took Marcus’s hand. Took a goddamned werewolf’s hand. Voluntarily. While it was still attached to his arm.
Her heart was thundering in her chest.
She was just maximizing her chances of survival. That was all. It didn’t matter how warm his hand felt, or that he gently interlaced their fingers.
She kept glaring at Dexter as they passed him. Vaughn and Porter had already disappeared through an open doorway. She focused on following and not the soft footfalls of the guy walking behind them. The warmth and…menace Marcus was putting off next to her was actually reassuring.
And I didn’t think my life could get any weirder.
The room they entered was a sparsely furnished…office maybe? The Blades apparently didn’t squander resources on cushy furniture. At least, not in the “sublevels”. There was a plain metal table in the middle of the wall opposite the door with a huge array of monitors above it. A few mesh chairs formed a semi-circle around the table. Vaughn was sitting at one.
“Thanks for joining us,” Porter said.
If he was surprised to see Marcus and Tessa holding hands, he didn’t let on. Vaughn was another matter. He stared at them briefly, then spun around and started tapping hard on the table.
“We were able to gather some great footage from today’s patrol,” Vaughn said.
The monitor lit up as Vaughn’s fingers danced over the table in front of him. Tessa stepped closer to get a better view. She could see etchings on the surface. The keyboard was built into it? There was even a square section that seemed to be the trackpad.
Up this close, she noticed that Vaughn was wearing a watch with a large blank face that she was pretty sure hadn’t come off a factory line. He also had silver polish on all of his nails.
“Slick,” she said.
Porter sat in one of the chairs next to Vaughn. “It would be even more impressive if Vaughn had managed to record the audio as well as the video.”
Vaughn shrugged. “Nobody’s perfect.”
She looked back up at the monitors. Her face filled one of the screens, the footage taken from an oddly close angle. She was standing in the alley where she’d first met Marcus. How the hell had they taken that picture? It was almost as if—
“You have a camera in your glasses?” She felt her cheeks heat. He had seen… They had done…
She pulled her hand from his.
“I had a camera in my glasses,” Marcus said. “It…um. Broke.”
Vaughn snorted. “At the same time your earpiece went out.”
“Which was right after we killed the queen,” Marcus said. “Before we…went to the van.”
Dammit. She’d almost hoped that he’d recorded their make-out session. It would prove that he was an unfeeling monster—or at least an asshole. Instead, his weirdly self-conscious and apologetic behavior was making him more sympathetic.
He was an alpha werewolf, for crying out loud. Why did he care about her feelings?
How dare he be considerate. She shook her head and laughed inwardly at her thought.
“Sorry about all the technical difficulties tonight,” Marcus said.
Vaughn shrugged. “Forget it. I can make another set.”
Marcus finally took off his glasses, setting them on the table. He turned to Tessa and her breath hitched.
His eyes had looked pretty before—what she could make out through the constant glare on the lenses. But seeing them uncovered—bright gold next to his thick, inky black lashes—they were absolutely gorgeous. Their color seemed to intensify as their gazes held, glittering lights sparking to life in their depths.
“If you guys can quit with the meaningful gazes for a minute, I have some questions,” Vaughn said.
Tessa snapped herself out of it, shifting her focus to Vaughn gladly. Not reluctantly. Not at all.
“I thought you Blades had all the answers,” she said.
“Tonight has shown us our true ignorance.” Porter gestured to one of the mesh chairs. “Please.”
Marcus walked around behind the chair and held the back as he pushed it slightly toward her. The gesture was oddly gallant. She wished it was a straight-backed chair so that she could sit in it backwards and show them all that she wasn’t some wilting flower. Instead, she glared at them and sat on the table, only realizing afterwards that she might be hitting some sort of controls.
She half-twisted around, looking at the table space nearest her. No etchings. That didn’t mean sitting on the table was a good idea, but she was trying to prove a point and didn’t want to move.
“I hope my ass isn’t pushing your buttons,” she said.
Vaughn laughed. “No worries there.”
She smiled at him, which was easy to do. Of all the Blades she’d met, he seemed the least abnormal.
“What questions do you have?” she said.
“First on my list, could you see Marcus’s eyes clearly through his glasses? Especially the color.”
That surprised her. “Not well. I kind of thought they looked gold, but wasn’t sure.”
“I’ll up the reflective index to obscure them better.”
“You made them that way on purpose?”
“Everything I do is on purpose,” Vaughn said.
Marcus let out a cough that sounded suspiciously like a laugh.
Vaughn glared at him. “It just doesn’t always turn out the way I plan.”
“We were able to extrapolate the Redcaps’ physiology better based on what the glasses picked up and what Vaughn overheard.” Porter pointed to a different monitor.
A freeze-frame of the corpse-riding Redcaps in the alley filled the screen. As Tessa watched, Vaughn’s computer drew a series of red gridlines over one of them. The rest of the image disappeared, leaving just the one Redcap and its ride filling the left side of the screen.
Another image appeared on the right. A Redcap without a host. The same gridlines appeared over its body, only blue, making its form more discernible.
Tessa wished it had stayed vague.
Its tendrils were much longer and thicker than she expected. It looked kind of like a jellyfis
h, with the spider-crab body at the top. She suppressed a shiver.
The computer shrank the un-obscured image of the Redcap on the right and superimposed it over the one on the left—the one disguised as a human. She could see the Redcap’s tendrils snaking through the corpse’s limbs and torso, the dweller clearly defined sitting on its neck. The eyestalks and pincered arms were pulled back into the Redcap’s body, making it look…not really human at all.
“Add a bandana and sunglasses, and you’ve got a human you wouldn’t want to stare at,” Vaughn said. “They try to look intimidating so that people don’t make eye contact. If you don’t study their faces too much, you don’t realize what you’re looking at.”
“It’s remarkable,” Porter said. He was staring at the monitor with an almost rapt smile on his face.
“Porter is our resident Doctor,” Vaughn said. “If dwellers didn’t vaporize when they died, we’d probably have a morgue filled with dissected specimens. I’m working on a stasis field for him, but we haven’t been able to get many test subjects back to the ranch.”
“We content ourselves with logging everything we can in the Blades’ dweller database.” Porter turned to her and smiled. “Redcaps have shown an amazing ability to adapt to their environment.”
“You might want to hold off on starting a fan club,” Tessa said.
“There’s nothing wrong with respecting your adversary.”
“So, you admit that they’re your adversary?”
“Of course.” Porter leaned back in his chair. “Redcaps can’t be reasoned with. They’re one of the few types of dweller that have a kill order among the Blades.”
“Unlike—” She stopped herself from saying, “werewolves.” As if they didn’t already know what Marcus was. Then again, maybe they didn’t.
She couldn’t believe that the tiny possibility that it would endanger Marcus had stopped her from mentioning it. Why the hell was she protecting him? She was still considering killing him herself. Wasn’t she?
Dexter picked up on what she’d been about to say anyway. “Werewolves don’t have an instant kill order. We monitor their behavior, hopefully getting to them before they commit a capital offense. So far, Marcus is the only one we’ve been able to spare.”
She wasn’t surprised. Werewolves were incredibly violent. Strong, territorial—when they settled in one place—and fiercely protective when it came to their pack.
And they were carnivores. Like most dwellers.
“Since the earpiece and glasses didn’t work as well as we’d hoped, how about you take us through it the old-fashioned way.” Porter picked up what looked like a chrome clipboard and a stylus and crossed his legs, using his thigh as a flat surface to support his writing.
She was sure the “clipboard” was actually some kind of computer.
“That’s old-fashioned?” she said.
Porter just smiled. “Walk us through it. You tagged one of the Redcaps and followed it to its nest in the junkyard.”
She didn’t see the harm in teaching them about Redcaps—especially if it meant the Blades would become more effective at taking them out. Fewer bugs for her to stomp.
“Right,” she said. “The nest is where the queen lives. The main tunnel usually leads straight down to the queen’s cavern.”
Vaughn tapped on the table again, and an image of the cavern she and Marcus had just cleared came into view. More gridlines appeared, with numbers scrolling on one side of the screen. She recognized a few dimensions and angles, but most of it didn’t make sense to her.
The picture of the cavern blinked a few times, then an image of the queen appeared. The same analysis repeated, but this one had biometrics as well. It also had some pretty gnarly freeze-frames of the queen with her mouth fully extended.
“That’s fairly nightmare-inducing,” Vaughn said.
Tessa agreed. “I’m glad I’m usually too busy killing them to look at them.”
Marcus was standing behind Vaughn’s chair. He reached out and rested his hand on Vaughn’s shoulder. The gesture was out of place from someone on the road to becoming a vicious killer.
“What’s the standard procedure for killing them?” Dexter talked about killing monsters as if he was writing a technical manual. For all she knew, the Blades had one.
The thought was appealing. She wondered if she could get a peek. If nothing else, it would be entertaining.
“I use bug repellers to paralyze the little ones, then head into the nest with my flamethrower.”
“Hold on a minute,” Vaughn said. “Bug repellers? ”
“Yeah, the sonic ones. I don’t know how well they work on bugs, but something about them freezes Redcaps.” She stopped herself from adding, “Just make sure you use ones with fresh batteries, even if you think you’ll be in and out of the nest in no time.” It was such a rookie mistake.
Porter turned to Marcus and said, “Now that we know Redcaps are actually quite small, the next time you encounter one, we want you to bring it back here for study.”
“Bringing a dweller into your home is—” Tessa stopped herself as all four Blades turned to look at her. “Okay, bringing a dangerous dweller into your home is insane. I don’t know how you domesticated Marcus.”
His eyes flashed gold and his lips pulled back from his teeth. It looked like he was stifling a snarl. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly, glaring at her the whole time.
“Marcus isn’t an animal,” Vaughn said. “He can control himself.”
“For the moment.” She still hadn’t figured out what was going on with him.
With all those scars, he had to be an alpha. That made it a little more believable that he could control himself better than most werewolves. It did not cover why he let Dexter and Porter order him around or why he was so tender with Vaughn. Marcus had been nothing but gentle with her as well.
It seemed like a fairytale that he could actually control himself. Then again, her life often felt like it was taken right out of a storybook. One of the dark ones, where people were eaten when they ventured too far into the forest.
Leaving town immediately wasn’t an option anymore. She had no transportation, no weapons. Even the clothes she wore were borrowed.
If she hung around the Blades, she could watch Marcus, then decide whether to kill him before she left. Her brain felt better having made that decision. Still, she only had two days.
“Let’s get back to the debriefing, shall we?” Porter said. “What happens after you get into the lair and have incapacitated the Redcaps?”
Tessa shrugged. “Once I locate the queen, I hose it down with fire till it’s nice and melty, add a few grenades, and run like hell.”
“Calling it a queen implies a female gender, yet you insist on calling her an ‘it’,” Porter said.
“What, you can be picky with your pronouns, but I can’t?” She glared at him.
Porter kept smirking and went on as if she hadn’t spoken. “How do you know for certain that the queen is dead?”
Tessa snorted and decided to let him off the hook. For the moment.
“If I’m too far away to see the glow, I can tell by its brood on the surface. They all die when I take it out.”
“Vaughn said you killed the queen, but you were neck deep in Redcaps when we showed up,” Dexter said.
Tessa shook her head. “I haven’t figured that out yet. Marcus killed the queen. All its brood died around us.”
“Maybe the ones who attacked us afterwards were tied to the king and they didn’t die with him,” Marcus said.
Porter swiveled toward Marcus. “King?”
“Yeah,” Marcus said. “An even bigger dweller attacked us after we killed the queen. Its markings were different, but it was structurally similar. We figured it was probably a king.”
“How did you deal with it?” Dexter asked.
“It got its head stuck in my van.” Tessa glared at Marcus, willing him to gloss over the details. “Which was rigged with e
xplosives. We set them off after getting far enough away.”
She wasn’t ready for the Blades to know about her infection. The look on Porter’s face when he was talking about bringing a Redcap to their base… She almost felt sorry for the thing. He’d probably vivisect it or something.
Maybe she should just blow out of town and leave Marcus for the Blades to deal with.
She kept them on the topic of Redcaps, hoping to keep the scrutiny off of herself. “Everything about this hunt was different. I’ve never encountered a mobile queen outside of its nest. The king was new, too.”
“It sounds like you interrupted their spawning practice,” Porter said.
Tessa shivered. “That’s a really disturbing thought.”
“If it was some sort of Redcap mating ritual, there could be more than one queen involved.” Vaughn shrugged when all eyes turned to him. “It’s the simplest explanation. Many species have multiple females to one male.”
“I hope you’re wrong,” Tessa said.
Vaughn turned to her. “Why?”
“Because, based on how many Redcaps attacked us, I think there’s more than one queen left. And they’re probably really pissed.”
Chapter Twelve
Marcus could feel Dexter’s gaze boring into his back. After working together to protect humans—and dwellers—for almost a decade, there was still little trust between them. What did that say for the hope that dwellers and humans could live and work alongside each other peacefully?
Marcus would never turn Tessa—or anyone. He wasn’t out to increase his pack, no matter what she said about dwellers wanting to reproduce. Yes, he felt the urge, but he refused to give in to it.
Based on the exchange in the garage, Dexter had to have the same concerns. Why else would he be so worked up over Tessa already?
Then again, the same could be asked of Marcus. No one had ever affected him the way she did. One moment, she’d be connecting with him on a level he didn’t think was possible. The next, she’d shut him out, painfully. It seemed like she’d crack a joke, then threaten to kill him in the space of a breath. Trying to figure out the mixed signals she was sending could get him killed.
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