She then went to Clara’s bedroom door and tossed it open. No one was there. Ignoring Clara’s continued protests, Nicolette went right for Clara’s bathroom and opened that door as well.
Nothing.
Strange.
She could have sworn she heard someone walking upstairs.
Clara rubbed the bridge of her nose. “We’re checking your room now, aren’t we? We’re not calling the police, are we? We’re going to be very stupid again, aren’t we?”
Nicolette went to her bedroom door and opened it.
She was instantly hit with an unfamiliar scent. It smelled like cloves, cinnamon, and vanilla. Had someone been baking in her bedroom?
Weird.
“Nicolette?” asked Clara, her voice shaking. “What is it? Are you having a bad vibe? Tell me now so I know to get something to defend us with. Your bad vibes are never wrong.”
Nicolette stepped farther into her room. Her gaze was drawn to the window near her bed. It was wide open. Wind blew in, lifting the curtain and making a framed picture of Nicolette and Clara rattle on the dresser.
She went quickly to the window and looked down at the back courtyard. It was well lit, since she’d only just replaced the bulbs in all the lights the night before. She had to do that a lot. More than she thought was normal. It was easy to see no one was back there.
She turned to face Clara. “I swear I need to get more sleep. I don’t remember opening my window, let alone leaving it open.”
Clara touched her chest and exhaled loudly. “Nicolette, I love you, but you have got to remember stuff like this. Last week it was the back door. I came home from work and it was standing wide open. I swear this kind of stuff happens monthly anymore.”
She was right. It did.
“Sorry. I got home, showered, and then I came downstairs. I really do not remember opening the window at all.” She looked out it once more, noting just how high off the ground the window was. There was no way anyone climbed in from outside. Unless the person could leap extraordinarily high, no one had gained entrance that way. She laughed softly. “We got spooked over the wind. Hey, maybe a vampire floated up and through the window. You might get your wish for a hottie vamp after all.”
Clara’s eyes widened, and she hurried to the window, pushing Nicolette out of the way and inspecting it herself.
“Relax there, Van Helsing. I think we’re safe from bloodsucking intruders,” said Nicolette as she touched Clara’s arm.
Clara glanced at her. “You’d think. I’m not sure I should go away for work now. I’m supposed to be gone a week. That is a week of you here alone. Who knows what you’ll do by yourself.”
Nicolette laughed. “Because I’m absentminded when it comes to opening and closing things? Not a good enough excuse.”
The doorbell rang.
Nicolette stepped back from the window and headed towards the bedroom door. “Pizza is here.”
“That, or you’re about to answer the door for Jack the Ripper. Girl, you need to learn to have an ounce of self-preservation.”
Nicolette rolled her eyes. “Yes, because I was in so much danger of catching a cold from the window being open. Thanks for the warning. And I’m pretty sure Jack wouldn’t bother to ring the bell.”
Chapter Four
PSI (Paranormal Security and Intelligence) Division B Headquarters. Location classified.
Garth sat near the bedside of his best friend and former second-in-command and stared at the machines monitoring the man’s condition. The steady, rhythmic beeping had become a comfort of sorts. It meant his friend was alive. And so long as the beeping didn’t change, there was a chance for Gram. The thinnest sliver of hope remained that the alpha male would heal from the incredible amount of damage he’d sustained in a blast that should have killed him just over a week ago.
But with each passing moment, Garth’s hope died a little inside.
Already in the past two days, alarms had gone off more than once, bringing with them various doctors and nurses in the state-of-the-art PSI medical facility. Everyone on staff was top-notch (if you didn’t count the fact Auberi was a doctor there as well), and they worked tirelessly attempting to fix the very broken man before Garth.
Most divisions in the organization had taken to expanding in order to include some level of medical treatment. Though not all divisions had the space to do so, Division B did, so the medical facility was housed within the building.
Division B was newer on the grand scale of things. It had been built with large alpha males in mind. Where some headquarters had tight halls, small rooms, and no elevators, this one was spacious. There was still plenty of room to expand should the need arise. And the elevator held more than one supernatural male. The entranceways had enough clearance that even Garth managed to walk through them without having to duck.
Had he been given a choice, he’d have stopped growing sooner than he had.
That wasn’t the case. Thankfully, he wasn’t the only above-average tall supernatural male in PSI. There was a fair number. He couldn’t think of any who were under six foot.
One would assume that the PSI building headquarters would have had accommodations for the men from day one.
One would be wrong.
Garth had been assigned to more than one division in his long career with PSI. To date, Division B in the United States was his favorite. Probably because he didn’t give himself a concussion every time he walked through the front door.
Always a plus.
Division B was also surrounded by woods that stretched out for miles. The woods were stocked with game. It tended to cut down on issues with attacks on humans if the supernaturals had something else to hunt when they needed to release whatever darkness they carried.
Jannick had once eaten a man who had wandered into the facility’s private woods, and the paperwork Garth had been stuck filling out was a nightmare. It did help some that the man turned out to be a human wanted for various murders, but still, they didn’t have a checkbox on the forms for “human is a dick, so he had it coming.” Though, they should.
As he looked at Gram, who was lying in a medically induced coma, he couldn’t help but think about his brother, Grid. His brother was part of the reason Garth sat at the bedside of a close friend, silently willing the man to live.
Garth hung his head, his elbows going to his lap. His long blond hair fell forward. A few varying braids were secured with small silver beads. He pushed his hair back and wrapped it in a self-contained knot of sorts at the base of his neck. He put his head in his hands and sighed, feeling as if the weight of the world was upon his shoulders.
In many ways, it was.
So much had happened in such a short period of time that it was nearly impossible to avoid feeling overwhelmed. No amount of preparation would have helped. Besides, how exactly did one prepare for their close friend nearly being killed, mad scientists doing gods only knew what, evil Fae who were named after trees, and finding out one’s twin brother had decided to go to the dark side?
Yeah.
There was no fucking preparedness and readiness courses for any of that offered through PSI. Though, with all the crap that was hitting the fan at work as of late, there really should be. But if a course had been offered, he’d have seriously second-guessed his career choice.
Who was he kidding?
He’d been a card-carrying member of PSI for so long that he’d actually lost count of the years. The organization had held a variety of names over the course of the centuries he’d been affiliated with them. No matter what it was called, it all boiled down to policing supernaturals and keeping both humans and supernaturals safe. Often from each other.
There was no end to the number of assholes out there, so his job was secure. Anymore, it felt as if he could throw a rock and hit some criminal mastermind hell-bent on world domination.
They were a dime a dozen.
At least that was how it was starting to feel. It made Garth miss the days of
old when the biggest thing he had to do was keep warring supernatural lines from killing one another. Now, even the supernatural lines had blurred with the advent of crossbreeding and genetic engineering.
His thoughts drifted back to twenty years ago. When his team and a number of the Fang Gang had found the secret labs in the lower level of an organized crime boss’s home. That day stuck with him still. So did seeing the children who had been neglected and tested upon.
The tiny girl who Auberi had given his blood to still haunted Garth’s dreams. In them, she didn’t make it. In reality, all he’d been able to glean as far as details upon returning to human form was that she had lived. Landros had worked closely with the director of PSI, General Newman, to see to it that all the children had received the necessary medical care, and then had been placed quickly into good homes.
Homes that the heads of PSI weren’t big on sharing the locations of.
Hell, Garth had even attempted to have paid hackers dig through PSI computers for information regarding the children from that experiment, but nothing had been found.
As he thought harder on it all, he realized that if the child had indeed survived, as Landros assured him she had, she would be in her early twenties by now.
An adult.
That, in itself, was difficult to wrap his mind around.
So was the fact that he’d totally and completely lost his shit that night in the lab. His wolf had overtaken him in a way that it never had before. He’d been stuck in wolf form for nearly three full weeks. Upon returning to human form, Garth had found himself held captive by his own fucking teammates.
Of course, being held by his teammates might have had something to do with the fact Garth’s first order of business back then had been to seek out Auberi and try to drive a stake through his heart.
PSI frowned upon that.
Apparently, some idiot who made decisions thought the vampire was worth protecting.
Garth didn’t agree.
As far as Garth knew, Auberi was also in the dark on the whereabouts of the children involved in what was later termed the Asia Project. The facility they’d uncovered back then hadn’t been the only one. Each had housed children of varying ages. They’d all had one thing in common. They’d had their DNA manipulated while still within their mothers’ wombs to suit the scientists’ twisted desires. They’d been hodgepodged together from varying strands of DNA, spliced and genetically manipulated to be far more than merely supernaturals. They were each blends of more than one thing.
And if intel was right, there were hundreds, even thousands of these children who had been experimented on. No one was sure how many in total, or how many had survived the testing. What they did know was that PSI had turned over a rock twenty-plus years ago and the roaches beneath it had scattered to the winds, hiding their creations away and going deeper underground. Proof that they’d never stopped their wicked ways had recently come to light.
All of it only served to remind Garth of the little girl who had stopped breathing on the table long ago. Who had looked at him with hopeless eyes, making a ringing the likes of which he had never heard again sound in his head. The little girl who had needed his help. The little girl he’d failed by losing control of his beast.
Each day, new information came to light about the enemy, who now had a name—The Corporation. Their fingers were in everything. In every government around the world. They could be traced back to the Nazi regime and earlier, all throughout history. They’d been a puppet master for centuries, and seemed to have limitless resources and assholes willing to serve their cause.
Hell, they even had traitors in PSI who the men were trying to ferret out.
With each grain of knowledge, Garth inwardly hoped something would come up about the little girl. A list had come to light not long ago and Garth had scoured over it, searching for any links to that particular lab, but he’d found none.
That was saying something.
It was like that lab and experiment never took place.
But it had.
He’d been witness to it.
Since the first list had turned up, two new techs had come into the PSI family fold. Each were mates of PSI operatives. Laney, who was mated to James Hagen, was one. The other was a relatively new addition who had only just started work today, Brooke—who was mated to Garth’s good friend Malik Nasser. Garth had pulled Laney aside earlier in the day and asked her to look into the children from the experiment twenty years ago as discreetly as possible.
No sense alerting the guys in charge at this point. Besides, Garth wasn’t sure they could all be trusted.
Laney was good at what she did, and from what he’d been told about Brooke, she was as well. Maybe the two women would have better luck than the techs he’d worked with before.
The thought that they might be successful, only to find out the child had not made it, weighed on him. It shouldn’t bother him as much as it did. After all, he’d fought in countless wars in his twelve hundred years. He’d been exposed to so much death that he should have been indifferent to it. He wasn’t. He didn’t fear death. For him, there would be no greater honor than to die in battle. His people had always believed doing so would grant them access to Valhalla.
He didn’t fear dying.
His fear ran more along the lines of those he cared for dying. It happened way more than he wanted to admit. Case in point, a man he considered family was currently clinging to life in the hospital bed because he’d been hurt protecting an innocent child from the very people Garth’s brother had aligned himself with.
Unable to swallow the harsh reality that had been thrust upon him recently, Garth closed his eyes and did something he’d not done in centuries. He prayed to the gods for guidance, asking Odin to show him the way. To help with the dark road he had ahead. One that would leave brother standing against brother.
Absently, Garth reached out and touched Gram’s hand. There was very little of the man that wasn’t covered in severe burns. He was showing no signs of healing. If anything, he looked worse than he had when they’d rushed him in. Gram had given his all in order to keep a fellow operative’s daughter safe. While he’d succeeded in protecting Malik’s daughter, he’d suffered greatly.
So much so that Garth wasn’t sure his friend would pull through.
He’d lost too many people he’d been close to in his thousand-plus years. And he knew that would never end. Death was part of life despite how much he hated it.
Auberi entered the hospital room. At the sight of Garth, he curled his lip. Tension filled the air.
Auberi said nothing as he went to Gram and began checking him over. From the vamp’s expression, things with Gram were not improving.
Garth didn’t need medical training to know as much. It was fairly obvious.
“Why isn’t he healing?” asked Garth, a certain gruffness to his voice because of Auberi’s presence. Time had done nothing to lessen their dislike of one another.
Auberi didn’t bother looking at him as he replied. It was no secret the vampire thought himself above most in life. “A syringe was recovered from the scene of the explosion. We just finished running tests on its contents. We suspect it has something to do with why his natural healing abilities haven’t kicked in. James is working on something to counteract it with the use of Brooke’s blood. He thinks she might be the key to helping Gram.”
A growl broke free from Garth. The enemy had already sunk low enough to try to harm a child, so he shouldn’t have been shocked by their actions. Yet he was. He was not only shocked, he was outraged. He wanted blood.
Auberi nodded. “It infuriates me as well. Gram is a good man, despite his friendship with you and the fact my best friend can’t stand him. Correction, Malik couldn’t stand the guy before he saved his wife and kid.”
Garth glared at the vampire. Auberi and Malik were best friends. Though, Garth couldn’t understand what Malik saw in the man.
Dr. James Hagen entered the room a
nd lifted a brow at the sight of the two men near Gram’s bedside. “Am I going to need to separate the two of you—again?”
James had taken over heading up the medical affairs of Division B upon his return to the fold not long ago. Prior to that, he’d been on what the Ops liked to term an extended leave. One that had lasted a decade.
The man was in his signature white lab coat. Something he never seemed to be without when they were within the building.
Auberi flashed a wicked smile. “I can behave myself if the stupid wolf can.”
Stupid wolf?
Garth nearly came up and out of his seat, but the look James gave him said he was tired of having to separate the men. It was hard to blame him. Auberi and Garth had already come to blows more than once as of late.
Tensions at PSI were high.
One of their own was severely injured with the very real possibility that he would not recover.
James glanced at Auberi. “How are you feeling? Because you sure in the hell didn’t rest like I told you to.”
Auberi shrugged nonchalantly. “As I told the others, the blood of a virgin healed me perfectly. I don’t require any more rest.”
James and Garth groaned in unison at the vampire’s remarks. They could only hope the man was joking. But knowing Auberi, one could never be too sure.
Auberi had also been seriously injured in the battle that had left Gram in his current state. Pride had the vampire refusing treatment. He was slower than normal but otherwise seemed fine.
Shame. It would have been nice to have the enemy take out the asshole and save Garth the time.
Win some. Lose some.
“Any news on your brother yet?” asked James of Garth.
Garth stiffened then shook his head. “No. I’ve reached out to all his last known contacts. He no longer runs with them.”
Auberi sneered. “Now he’s too busy in his high-powered position in the enemy’s ranks.”
Garth said nothing because there wasn’t anything he could say to make it better. It was true. Grid was deeply embedded with The Corporation.
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