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Gordon Fasso. Son of Dragos.
The letters began to jumble and resequence in Rio's mind. And then he saw it, as clear as the blare of red taillights that stretched up ahead of him for about a mile solid.
"Niko," he said woodenly. "Gordon Fasso is the son of Dragos. Gordon Fasso's not a name. It's a fucking anagram. Son of Dragos."
"Ah, Christ," Nikolai replied. "And if you mix up the letters of Gerard Starkn...you get another anagram: dark stranger."
"That's who's got Dylan." Rio rolled up on the parking lot of traffic and slammed his hand down on the dashboard. "Dragos's son has Dylan, Niko."
She was alive, that much he was sure of, and it was enough to keep him from losing his mind.
But his enemy had her, and Rio had no way of telling where he might have taken her.
And even without the bottleneck that was blocking all southbound lanes of the highway, he was still some long hours away from the New York state line.
He could be losing her forever...right now.
Dylan came awake in the dark backseat of a fast moving vehicle. Her head was thick, her senses dazed. She knew this foggy feeling; she'd been tranced at some point, and was now, somehow, breaking out of it. Through the heavy psychic cloak that had been dropped over her mind, Dylan felt another force reaching out to her.
Rio.
She could feel him in her veins. She could sense him in the power of their blood connection and in her heart as well. It was Rio reaching past Fasso's trance to give her strength, urging her to hang on. To stay alive.
Oh, God.
Rio.
Find me.
The low hum of the road beneath the vehicle's spinning wheels vibrated in her ears. She tried to see where they were heading, but through the bare slit of her lids, all she saw was darkness outside the tinted windows. Treetops rushing by, black against the night sky.
Her face ached from the blow Gordon Fasso had dealt her when she'd fought against her capture. She'd tried to scream, to escape, but he and the bulky guard who accompanied him had proven too strong for her.
Fasso alone would have been far too powerful for her to fight off.
But then, he would be, since he wasn't a man at all, but a vampire.
She had the very real sense that he was not even Gordon Fasso, if that man ever existed.
The monster who had her now was also the one who killed her mother. She didn't have to see her mother's broken body to know that it was Gordon Fasso who murdered her, either by pushing her off that twelfth-floor balcony, or by scaring her so totally that she leapt to her own death to escape him.
Maybe she'd done it for Dylan, a thought that made the loss even harder for Dylan to bear.
But she could grieve for her mother another time, and she would. Right now she had to stay alert and try to find a way out of this horrific situation.
Because if her captor succeeded in bringing her to wherever he intended, Dylan knew that there would be no escaping.
All that awaited her at the end of this path was pain and death.
At some point well into Connecticut, Rio realized that no matter how fast he drove, he stood no chance of finding Dylan. Not in New York, certainly. He was still a couple of hours away, and there was no telling where she was - or even if she was in New York anymore at all.
He was losing her.
Close enough that he could feel her reaching out to him, yet too far to grab hold of her.
"Goddamn it!"
Fear permeated every cell in his body, combined with a sorrow so profound it shredded him from the inside. He was raw, bleeding...racked with futile rage.
