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This was good—
Blade stopped short. Turned on his heel.
Ah, finally.
Curling up a fist, he rapped on the polished wooden door. He did not wait for an answer, and opened it wide.
The private quarters that were revealed by a sudden, automatic illumination were a study in minimalism. Unlike this portion of the tunnel, it was a full construction with a proper floor, walls, and ceiling, as well as heating and cooling, electricity, and all the mod cons in the kitchen. But the suite was solely functional, its simple furnishings sparse, hard-angled, and uncomfortable-looking, but classic of the postmodern, fifties era.
Frankly, he hated orange accents on anything, and the wood grain mixed with the chrome was discordant.
“Greetings, cousin mine,” he called out. “Wherever are you? You departed your workshop before I arrived to rescue your current project.”
Crossing the living area, he came to stand by a closed door just off the galley kitchen. No knocking this time. With his hand on the gun he had hidden in the deep pocket of his robes, he immediately opened things.
The bedroom beyond was dominated not by a bed, but by a high-tech suspension rack, where one’s ankles were locked in and one’s body could be tilted so that the head became the feet.
“You are still sleeping like a bat, I see.”
Blade walked around the contraption and peered into a bathroom that had swimming-pool-blue tile with black accents and a toilet that had been manufactured at the same time as the B-52 bombers of World War II. Breathing in, he did not smell any cologne, shampoo, or soap. No cleaning supplies. No scent of the male at all.
Back out in the bedroom, he went to the closet. There were plenty of red robes hanging on the horizontal rod. Plenty of slipper shoes just like his own lined up on the floor.
Still no scent of his cousin.
The last thing he did before he returned to theliving area was run a forefinger across the top of theLeave It to Beaverpine bureau. The stripe that was left behind in the fine accumulation of dust was obvious as a neon sign.
That brutal workshop had not been his cousin’s personal residence.
“Where have you gone,” he murmured.
Before he left the quarters, he paused and pivoted back around. The only visual chaos in the place was a block of floor-to-ceiling shelving across the room, the books upon the various levels of all different thicknesses and lengths.
He walked over to the collection of tomes, his eyes bypassing the engineering and computer programming titles to search the dark crevices created by the lack of homogeneity…
The camera eye was in the lower third all the way on the left, a tiny lens that, if one had not been looking for it, one would have missed it. Motion activated? Probably. Just like the lights.
Squatting down, he stared into the artificial iris. Then he brought his hands up to his hood… and revealed himself.
In the last twenty years, as he had been searching for the human labs that had experimented on vampires, he had had the sense that he was someone else’s prey, that those animatronic soldiers that had inevitably shown up around his men were inactuality meant for him: The units had never attacked the labs or the scientists. They had found his operatives from time to time, but not with any regularity, and if clashes occurred with his men, the conflicts had been incidental, rather than anything that appeared tactical in nature.
And then the clarifying event had occurred. He had been up on Deer Mountain, falling in love on sight with the wolven Lydia… when one of the lookalike cyborgs had found him and tried to kill him outright.
So yes, he was their target.
During his recovery from that bullet wound, he had had plenty of time to think about who he knew who had the resources to create an army out of nuts and bolts, and also the hatred for him that would provide sufficient impetus for such an endeavor. Dear cousin Kurling had come to mind—and in fact, Blade had noted the human alias thesymphathused in that world in a couple of entries in the database he’d kept with his men.
Kurtis Joel.
Which was how Daniel Joseph had known to bring it up to the wolven.
Within the Colony, Blade had been so careful to keep his little explosive side hustle quiet, but now he was seeing that his hunch about his cousin was confirmed. Kurling had sussed his efforts outsomehow, at some point, and abducting the doctor had been a way of closing in on the last of the underground labs.
And how had Blade known where to go for the rescue? He had engineered a little tip owed to him by a male who had sought pleasure of the painful kind. A male who was mated and wished to keep what he enjoyed private.
A male who had given himself over to Kurling once or twice, who knew where Kurling’s “workshop” was.
It had been time to find out the truth of his cousin, that which had been suspected pushed into the reality of truth: The reckoning had been long overdue, but Blade had not wanted to know on some levels.
