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Brock moved to the opening of the door. He threw the C-4 in a high arc, and as it disappeared into the shadows of the mine shaft, the three of them opened fire. It was hard to tell if they'd hit the cake, until a spark cracked brightly in the darkness. Then the material exploded with a shuddering blast. A billowing cloud of smoke and pulverized rubble pushed forward like a tsunami, blowing bits of concrete and choking dust into the room where Kade, Brock, and Tegan had taken cover. And then, charging through the blinding wave of debris, came the Gen One assassin. He was nothing more than a blur of motion and momentum, all of it crashing forward like a cannonball. Tegan leapt out to intercept him, and soon both Gen One males were engulfed in a deadly fight. The darkness and the churning cloud of debris swallowed them up as the struggle intensified, weapons clanging against the stone floor, fists crunching against flesh and bone.
The sudden, pungent scent of blood rose up from the confusion of movement. A roar of fury--Tegan's low bellow of rage ... then silence.
Someone found a light switch and flicked it on. Fluorescent tubes lit the corridor in a hazy fog of bluish-white light.
And there was Tegan, his thigh bloodied from a deep wound, his serrated titanium knife slipped between the assassin's thick neck and the black polymer collar that ringed it. "Slowly, now," he cautioned Dragos's homegrown killer. "Stand up very carefully."
The bald Gen One growled, his eyes flashing pure hatred. "Fuck you."
"Get up," Tegan commanded. "Careful. It's real easy to lose your head in a situation like this." Grudgingly, radiating menace, the assassin rose to his feet. With Kade and the others holding their weapons on the vampire, Tegan slowly walked him into the nearby chamber. The room's function was familiar enough to Kade since he and the Order had encountered a similar one when they'd raided Dragos's headquarters in Connecticut just a few weeks ago. It was a holding cell, the cylindrical cage at its center, with its electronic restraints and computerized control panel designed for the containment of one particular captive.
"Where is the Ancient?" Tegan demanded as he guided the assassin over to the heavy-duty restraints that had been built to hold the otherworlder. Tegan glanced at Kade and Brock. "Lock this son of a bitch down."
They each took a hand and slapped the shackles around the Gen One's wrists. While they secured his arms, Chase walked over and fitted two more cuffs around his ankles.
"Where is the Ancient?" Tegan asked once more, his words tightly clipped. "Okay, how about this. Where's Dragos? He's obviously persifying his operation now, moving his pieces around instead of keeping them all together in one place. So, he moves the Ancient into cold storage up here, but what about the rest of it? Where is he hiding now? Where are the Breedmates he's holding prisoner?"
"He won't know." Hunter's deep voice cut through the din of the alarms outside and the tension mounting inside the Ancient's containment chamber. "Dragos tells us nothing. As his Hunters, we serve. That is all."
Tegan snarled, looking like he wanted to snap the assassin's collar then and there. Keeping one hand on the blade that pressed against the UV collar, he put his other hand on the assassin's brow and pushed the big head backward. "Motherfucker. He knows something."
The assassin's mouth curved with private amusement.
"Start talking, you lab-spawned piece of shit, or you go up in smoke right here and now." The assassin's gaze was glacial. "We are all about to go up in smoke," he hissed through his teeth and fangs.
Kade glanced at the control panel on the opposite wall, only just that second realizing that there was a digital timer counting down on a five-minute clock. On top of the gnawing cold that was still chewing away at his chest, now a sick sense of deja-vu gripped him as he watched what had to be the mine's selfdestruct mechanism ticking off seconds. "Shit. He's already dropped the switch. This whole place is gonna blow."
Tegan growled, low and deadly, as he withdrew the knife from under the assassin's chin and left him standing in the Ancient's holding cell. Kade and the others stepped back as he strode over to the control panel and punched the button that operated the ultraviolet light bars. The vertical beams of light went live, circling the Gen One assassin inside and imprisoning him more securely than any amount of metal could.
"Let's get out of here," Tegan said, stalking out the door. The rest of the warriors fell in behind him, Kade and Brock at the rear.
Brock paused to give the captive assassin a broad smile. "Don't go anywhere now, you hear?" Ordinarily, Kade would have gotten a good chuckle out of his partner's grim humor, but it was damned hard to appreciate anything when his heart was hammering like he'd just run a hundred miles and his veins were lighting up with the same odd chill that had made a home in his chest. He ran with the rest of the group, out of the mine's building and into the main yard of the site, which looked like a war zone. The alarm sirens howled the loudest outside, screaming into the night. The snow was coming down at a furious pace now, blanketing the field of dead Minions and dropping visibility to next to nil.
"We need to adios these bodies, make sure there's nothing left to identify once this place blows," Tegan said. "Come on, let's drag them inside one of the outbuildings and send them off with the rest of that C-4."
"On it," Brock said.
Kade joined the rest of the warriors as they worked to clear the yard before the self-destruct clock wound down to zero. It was getting hard for him to breathe now, his blood throbbing with alarm sirens of its own, awareness seeping through the wash of adrenaline and battle focus that had swamped his senses for much of the combat at the mine.
As he and his brethren dragged the last of the Minion dead into place, and the first rumblings of the coming explosion began to shake the ground, the cause of his internal distress hit him broadside. Alex.
Holy hell.
Something had happened. She was upset, shaken. Something had terrified her ... horrified her. And he felt her trauma like his own now, because he had taken her blood into his body, and it was that blood bond that had been clamoring in his own veins.
Her name was a plea--a prayer--as the ground beneath him gave a mighty shudder, and the mining company blew sky high behind him.
Chapter Twenty-five
Okay, Alex. Now, hold on here. Slow down, all right?" Zach Tucker carefully closed the door of the shed in back of his house and looked at Alex in stunned disbelief. She couldn't really blame him. No one in their right mind would believe what she'd just told him--not unless they'd seen it with their own eyes.
"You're telling me you just found another dead body in the bush, and you think it was ... a vampire attack?"
"I know it was, Zach." Her heart ached to say the words, but the image of Kade, and the image of the hunter's savaged body he'd left behind, tore at her with icy talons. "Oh, God, Zach. I know you don't believe me, but it's true."
He frowned, staring at her for a long moment. "Why don't you come inside? It's freezing out here, and you're shaking like a leaf."
Not from the cold of the outdoors, but from the confusion and horror of discovering that Kade had betrayed her. He'd sworn he was different from the monsters of her nightmares, and she had believed him. She would have believed everything he'd told her, if she hadn't seen the blood-soaked proof of his deception for herself just a short while ago.
