The lights began to dim. Her heart pounded so hard against her chest it felt as if it would burst. There was a roaring in her ears and a thrum like a thousand wing beats inside her head. Images flashed before her eyes, color and light and movement, but all she could think was a single word.
Christian.
It wasn’t over yet. She could still find a way.
Caesar reared back, then slammed his fist into her face.
She heard the crunch of bone as if from very far away, felt the wet warmth spread over her cheek and down her neck. There was still no air, and her lungs burned with the effort to breathe. Caesar screamed his question in her face again, but the room was starting to go black, and everything was fuzzy around the edges.
“This can’t have been her idea—the boyfriend must have planned this—we have to assume he knows where we are!” Caesar was furious, shouting at his men, the vise around her throat tightening with every word. “Call Marcell—evacuate the bunkers—institute emergency protocol! And for fuck’s sake, make sure they take the serum!”
Suddenly the vise was gone and Ember was dragged off the desk, landing with a bone-jarring thud on her knees. She coughed and gagged, gulping air and tasting blood. Her arms were held high over her head as Caesar ran his hands carefully over the vest, and around her waist, legs, and shoulders, searching for the detonator.
He found the short metal cylinder, slender as a pen, taped to her right forearm.
He carefully removed it, unstrapped the vest from her body, and set both aside on the desk.
“Take that with us Nico, we might have a use for it—but be fucking careful!” he barked.
The one with the bandaged hand came forward and took the vest, while another picked up the detonator between two fingers, stared at it for a beat, then slowly left the room, holding it at arm’s length in front of him.
The two men holding her released her arms at Caesar’s command, and Ember collapsed to the floor, struggling to remain conscious. Pain flared like fireworks through her nerve endings, and everything was fractured and disjointed, like images in a funhouse mirror. Caesar stared down at her, his chest rising and falling rapidly, eyes silvery-black and glittering like coins at the bottom of a wishing well.
“You’re so lucky you have something I want. If you didn’t, you’d already be gutted like a fish.”
He leaned down, grabbed a fistful of her hair, and dragged her to her feet. He held her up while she swayed and struggled to focus her eyes on him, to breathe through her shattered nose. He pulled her closed and hissed into her face, “What should we name him?”
He saw the confusion in her glassy eyes, and smiled with evil glee. “Oh dear, this just keeps getting better! You don’t know, do you?”
In the frozen, bottomless moment that followed, Ember’s mind struggled to absorb what he was saying while at the same time recognizing the sound of cars pulling into the lot behind the store and braking to a screeching stop. Caesar heard it too, and so did his remaining two men. They all stiffened, on instant high alert.
“Out the front!” he commanded. In one swift movement he lifted Ember off her feet and threw her over his shoulder, headed for the door.
“What do we do with this one, sire?” asked one of Caesar’s men, indicating a petrified, panting Marguerite.
Without even looking back, Caesar snapped, “Break that bitch’s neck.”
Hanging upside down with blood from her nose dripping in her eyes, Ember saw the two men approach Marguerite. She cowered back into her chair, sobbing as they surrounded her.
Even above the sound of her own screams, Ember heard the crunch of bones, then an abrupt, ghastly silence, then nothing at all as Caesar’s hand closed hard around her throat, cutting off her air supply, and dragging her down into darkness.
“I told you we shouldn’t have come in so goddamn hot!” shouted Thirteen to Jahad as they raced to catch up with the two black sports cars speeding away from the bookstore through the crooked tangle of Barcelona’s streets.
“Shut up or I’ll rip out your intestines through your throat!” growled the albino.
Thirteen ignored that and screamed, “They can hear everything—they can hear a pin drop from a mile away! you think they wouldn’t be able to hear us pull into the lot like bats out of hell? You just blew the element of surprise, you stupid fucking snowflake!”
Jahad shot him a murderous glare then drove on in glowering silence while Thirteen in the passenger seat pounded his fists on the dashboard of the SUV, red-faced with fury and frustration.
This was not how he’d imagined this moment.
Though Thirteen had the sneaking suspicion his throat would be slit the moment he let his guard down or turned his back, the albino had agreed to work with him. It was clear the other man didn’t like being threatened, even clearer he hated having to rely on anyone outside his little cult, but he’d called his men together, gathered his weapons and supplies, and let Thirteen ride shotgun as he directed him to the little bookstore where the tip had indicated the Ikati might be.
As it turned out, the tip was 100% spot on.
But instead of sneaking up in a covert fashion, the albino had come in guns blazing and they’d blown the whole thing. Now they were engaged in a high speed car chase through the narrow, cobblestone streets of a city with an excellent police force who were armed with Walther P99 sidearms and known for shooting first and asking questions later.
Fucking brilliant.
“They’re separating!” Thirteen watched in dismay as one of the black sedans took a right-hand turn at full speed, squealing off onto a dark side street, while the other zoomed straight ahead toward the entrance to the two-lane highway that led out of the city and up into the hills.
“Which way?” spat the albino, and Thirteen’s mind, accustomed to thinking under pressure, offered up a little gem: the Chairman’s list.
If they were headed for the hills, they might be headed for the only place on it that lay outside the city limits.
The abandoned Civil War bunkers.
“Follow him!” shouted Thirteen, pointing to the car speeding away in front of them. Jahad punched it and the SUV leapt forward. In the side mirror Thirteen saw the line of SUVs filled with Jahad’s men follow. They passed the street the other car had turned down and as he watched, a pair of red taillights disappeared around another corner.
Hoping he’d made the right choice, Thirteen gritted his teeth, sat back, and hung on.
The air this high in the atmosphere was chilled and thin and much easier to maneuver through than the heated, thicker air of the city, which was one of the reasons Christian had decided to approach the bunkers from the forest side.
The earth below gently curved as it bled off into the night horizon. Over the pointed dark tips of the sea of pines, he spied his destination, magnified by his intense concentration like the crystalline lens of a spyglass. Off in the distance, the lights of Barcelona blazed Christmas-tree-bright right up to the dark indigo strip of the Mediterranean; beyond that there were only the tiny, twinkling pinpoints of stars.
He was grateful he couldn’t feel emotions as Vapor. Grateful the rage and anguish he’d felt reading Ember’s letter at the house had disappeared when he’d shed his human form, like a snake shedding its skin. The short time it took him to travel through the night sky from his home in the forest to the bunkers perched far above the city offered him a reprieve of sorts; without all that emotion short-circuiting his brain, it was much easier to think.
Using a narrow channel of fast-moving air, he descended silently toward the back of an outlying cement structure in the compound, swift as smoke, stretched as thin as possible to avoid detection by any curious eyes that might happen to look up.
He counted six sentries above ground at the complex. Armed with rifles, they prowled the exterior walls and barbed wire fences, silent and watchful.
Not watchful enough, however. Christian materialized right behind a muscular male farthest away from the oth
ers and broke his neck before he could whirl around or even make a sound of surprise.
He dragged the body into the opaque shadows beneath an Aleppo pine and stripped it of clothes, weapons, and a small mobile satellite phone.
He stared at the phone for a beat, surprised. Depending on the architecture of the system, the coverage of a sat phone might include the entire Earth—and would also include the GPS coordinates of the other phones on the system. He didn’t have time to think more about it though, because his ears picked up the sound of cars driving up the winding road to the bunker.
There were perhaps a dozen, one slightly ahead of the rest—and they were moving fast.
He dressed in the dead man’s clothes, slung the rifle over his back, stuffed the sat phone into the zippered pocket of the cargo pants, covered the body with fallen branches and brush, and set off at a silent run toward a gaping hole in the ground about three hundred yards away from the main bunker entrance that he’d spotted on his descent, avoiding four buried landmines in the process. He suspected the hole was one of the hidden exits to the labyrinth underground tunnels, and when he stepped down carefully into its pitch black opening, his suspicions were confirmed.
He smelled hundreds of Ikati—males and females both—spread out over several acres, a few dozen human females in close proximity to one another to the east who he assumed were captives, the sour metallic tang of a large cache of weaponry to the north, stores of food and water to the west, the dull organic smells of damp earth, dead rock, and vegetation all around, and underlying everything a cloyingly sweet chemical scent he didn’t recognize.
He held still for another moment, stretching his senses, opening his nose and ears to probe the deepest recesses of the tunnels, allowing the night air to waft over his body, bringing with it all the evidence of everything unseen.
Then he began to panic.
No vanilla. No orange blossom.
Ember wasn’t here.
Caesar’s sat phone rang just as he stepped into the opulent burl wood and butter crème leather cabin of the motor yacht he kept docked in the harbor of Port Vell.
Since he’d killed the captain who’d sailed it south for him when they’d fled France, Caesar had taught himself to operate the hundred-foot luxury craft, and spent quite a bit of time cruising the glistening waters off the golden coast of Barcelona, daydreaming and scheming, imagining in vivid detail the outcome of the operation he’d aptly dubbed “The Hammer.”
Depending on how dire this little road bump turned out to be, a serious crimp could be made in his plans.
And he simply couldn’t allow that to happen. He’d worked too hard. He’d waited too long. He’d arranged everything, and now all he was waiting for was Easter Sunday when he’d pull the trigger and watch the world implode. He wasn’t going to let a little thing like being chased by inferior life forms in SUVs stop him.
So when he looked at the ringing mobile in his hand and saw it was Armond, one of the guards who patrolled the bunker, he experienced a brief thrill of dread.
This couldn’t be good.
“Armond!” he barked into the phone. “What’s happening?”
There was no answer. Only a brief burst of static crackled through the line, then it went dead.
In the huge, luxurious living area that sprawled in an elongated oval behind the bridge, Nico dumped the semi-conscious girl he’d carried from the trunk of the car onto the sofa, and bound her wrists together with plastic zip ties. She was bleeding profusely from the nose and made a soft, choked moan when Nico stuffed a handkerchief in her mouth.
Seeing that, Caesar snapped, “If she suffocates, I’ll cut off both your hands!”
Nico removed the handkerchief. Caesar turned back to the bridge and fired up the engines.
Shaking in a fury that felt thermonuclear on the other end of the phone Caesar had just answered, Christian scrolled through the recent calls menu, selected the stored number he’d dialed, brought up the GPS option, and pressed “locate.”
Google maps appeared in a browser window, then a red dot followed, along with coordinates.
Port Vell.
He looked up just as a dozen SUVs chasing a lone sports sedan came roaring over the crest of the hill toward the bunkers at top speed.
Then he watched as chaos unfolded.
Thirteen knew it was over the minute he heard the tiny click when he stepped on a small, innocuous-looking mound of dirt. He just had time to look down at his feet in horror before the world exploded into a huge, orange fireball of heated gasses and pain.
That fucking albino. This was all his fault.
Even the dumbest soldier knows you don’t stage a direct assault on a highly motivated enemy in a heavily fortified encampment with zero intel about their numbers or weaponry and no offensive strategy of your own. Direct assaults don’t work. Guerilla warfare—now that works, especially when dealing with non-human creatures far stronger and faster than you are, accustomed to living in hiding and fleeing at a moment’s notice when discovered.
But Jahad was like Rambo Jesus: he was on a holy mission to kill. Apparently he didn’t have time for pesky little things like plans.
So he’d blown their cover at the bookstore, and he’d blown their cover at the bunker by driving up the dirt road in single file behind the sedan like the biggest bunch of idiots on planet Earth. Then Jahad and all his minions had jumped out of the SUVs, screaming like banshees, when the sedan screeched to a stop at the top of the hill in a billowing plume of dust.
Then came the firefight.
The two males who exited the sedan started firing first, one of them laying down cover for the other, who ran across the dirt expanse between the car and the chain link fence topped with barbed wire in less time than it took Thirteen to blink. Jahad’s men returned fire, but not before the man at the fence turned into a huge, snarling animal and leapt clear over the top of the barbed wire in a single bound, then took off toward the main concrete building on the other side in a streak of black, almost imperceptible against the night.
He’d disappeared inside the building, while the other one continued to exchange gunfire with Jahad’s men.
Thirteen had a weapon as well, the H&K P8 semiautomatic pistol he’d kept from his time in the Kommando Spezialkräfte, but he didn’t bother to engage in the stupidity, and instead crept off behind the line of SUVs, around the back of the bunker where the barbed wire fence disappeared into a stand of trees.
There he cut a five-foot tall opening in the metal links of the fence with a bolt cutter, and stepped through.
From his vantage point behind the main building, he saw a flurry of activity that was hidden from the front. Emerging from a hole in the ground bedside a large boulder that clearly served as hidden access to the bunkers, dark shapes quickly and efficiently loaded small plastic boxes into the back of a pickup truck. There was another narrow dirt road that led off through the trees, and when the back of the pickup was fully loaded with boxes, it set off down the road, the sound of its engine concealed entirely by the loud reports of gunfire from Jahad’s men.
The pickup was followed by a silent line of figures, moving fast, who quickly melted into the night.
Shit. They were getting away. He had to capture at least one of them.
He withdrew his gun from the waistband of his pants. He slunk forward in a crouch, scanning the darkness ahead of him, grateful he was upwind of the hole and the bunkers.
Then came the little, horrible click. Then the orange fireball of pain.
Then there was nothing at all.
Feeling as if her head had been used for batting practice by an entire team of sluggers, Ember slowly swam up into consciousness.
Gritting her teeth against the shooting pain in her skull, she opened her eyes and found herself lying chest-down on a sofa in an unfamiliar room, hands tied behind her back. Without lifting her head, she glanced around and quickly determined she was on a boat—a yacht, more correctly—in the marina.
Through the windows she saw night sky, bobbing masts of adjacent boats, and the graceful, lighted arches of the pedestrian bridge that connected the city to the aquarium and Maremagnum shopping complex. Nearby, voices murmured and the vibrating hum of big engines shivered the walls.
She was alone. The Semtex vest was casually draped over a desk beneath a window across the room, as if deposited there in a hurry and forgotten.
Carefully, holding her breath, she swung her legs over the edge of the sofa, sat upright and tested the binds around her wrists.
Tight. Unbreakable. Shit.
She swallowed, tasting blood, then spat a mouthful of it onto the ivory silk, filled with dark satisfaction when it seeped through the cushions in a splattered cranberry stain.
Of three things she was certain. One: her nose was badly broken. Two: Caesar was on this yacht somewhere and other parts of her body were likely to get broken if she didn’t act fast. And three: killing him had become more than her mission.
It had become her religion.
She felt deep horror and anger over what he’d done to Marguerite. She felt responsible, too, because that was her mind’s default setting when everything went to hell, even though she knew on some level he would have killed Marguerite no matter what she did or didn’t do. That was just Caesar’s MO.
But she also felt a profound sense that ridding the world of this murderous, crazy bastard was the right thing to do, not only for Marguerite and for Christian, but for everyone else on the planet as well.
He was a rabid dog that needed to be put down.
And she was the one who’d do it.
She stood, then froze as a wave of vertigo hit her and her head began to spin. When it passed in a moment, she kicked off her shoes and stepped over to the desk, careful to keep her feet as silent as possible against the floor. It wasn’t too hard; a thick layer of white carpet muffled the sound. She crept up to the desk, frantically scanning the glossy mahogany surface and the vest itself for any sign of the detonator.
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