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"But you admit that's what you've been doing." God, he wanted to waste this piece of shit. "Tell me who you've been trafficking to, before I rip your ugly head off."
"I swear--I don't know who wanted them!"
Kade wasn't about to let it go at that. "Was it more than one inpidual who came to you for the females? What about the name Dragos--ring any bells with you?"
Kade watched with narrowed eyes, waiting for the vampire to take the bait. But the name Kade cast out to him went unacknowledged. Anyone having dealt with the Breed elder known as Dragos--a villain whose evil had only recently been discovered through the efforts of the Order--would surely register some amount of reaction at the mention of his name.
Homeboy, however, was oblivious. He exhaled a sigh and gave a weak shake of his head. "I only dealt with one guy. He wasn't Breed. Wasn't actually human, either. Not by the time I met him, anyway."
"A Minion, then?"
The news didn't exactly put Kade at ease. Though the creation of Minions went against Breed law, not to mention basic morality, only the most powerful of the Breed could create the human mind slaves. Drained nearly to the point of death, Minions were loyal to their Master alone. Dragos was secondgeneration Breed and held himself above any law, Breed or otherwise. It wasn't a question of whether Dragos kept Minions, but rather how many, and how deeply embedded into human society did they go.
"Would you know this Minion if you saw him again?"
The animal carcass wrapped around the vampire's neck lifted once more with another shrug of his shoulders. "I don't know. Maybe. He hasn't been around for a long time now. Stopped doing business with him about three, maybe four months ago. For a while there, he was one of my regulars, then nothing out of him again."
"You must have been so disappointed," Kade drawled. "Describe him to me. What did the Minion look like?"
look like?"
"Tell you the truth, I never got a good look at the guy. Never really tried, either. I could tell he was Minion, and the dude paid in large bills. Nothing more I needed to know about him." Kade's veins tightened with animosity and a barely restrained rage to hear the ambivalence in his words. He had killed for lesser offenses than this--far less--and the urge to tear apart this worthless excuse of a male was fierce. "So, what you're saying is you repeatedly sold him innocent females who were too drugged up to defend them-selves, with zero regard for what he was doing with them or where they might end up. No questions asked. That about it?"
"I guess you could say I run my business on the basis of 'don't ask, don't tell.'"
"Yeah, you could say that," Kade agreed. "Or I could say that you run your business like an asslicking coward and you deserve to die a slow and painful death." Worry spiked in an acrid stink as the vampire held Kade's stare. "Now, let's just wait a minute. Let me think for a second, all right? Maybe I can remember something. Maybe there is some way I can help--"
"I doubt it." Kade scrutinized him, seeing from the look of scrambling panic on his face that he wasn't going to get anything more useful out of this conversation.
Besides that, he was tired of looking at the asshole.
He reached down to lift the dogs' chins in his palms, glancing into the intense brown eyes of one, then the other. The silent command was acknowledged with a faint twitch of sinew. The pit bulls jumped up onto the desk and sat in front of their former master, their eyes unblinking, sharp-toothed maws open and dripping saliva.
"Good boys," Kade said. He pivoted to leave.
"Wait, so ... that's it?" Homeboy asked hesitantly from around the pair of slavering gargoyles that were now perched before him. "I wanna be sure we're cool for now. I mean, I told you everything I know. That's all you want from me, right?"
"Not exactly," Kade said without looking back at the skin trader. He put his hand on the doorknob.
"There is one more thing I want."
As he walked out of the office and closed the door, he heard the pair of pit bulls launch into their attack. Kade paused there, closing his eyes and letting himself enjoy the violence of the moment through his talent's visceral connection to the animals. He felt every breaking crunch of bone, every tear of the skin trader's flesh as the dogs ripped into him. Inside the room, the vampire screamed and wailed, his pain a pleasant punctuation to the music and moaning still carrying on in the other part of the building. Brock came striding up the hallway as Kade was stepping around the corpse of the driver.
"You take care of the females?" he asked as he and his patrol partner met up halfway.
"I scrubbed the memories of their whole captivity and sent them home," Brock said. The big male spared only the briefest glance at the body before arching a brow at Kade. "How about you? Did you manage to get anything out of Homeboy?">"We're not alone down here, my man." Brock indicated a barred door all but obscured by shadows and the rusted skeleton of an old box spring that leaned too neatly against it. "Humans," he said. "Females, just on the other side of that door."
Hearing the quiet, broken breathing now, and feeling the current of pain and suffering that rode on the fetid air, Kade moved with Brock toward the lightless corner of the cellar. They pushed aside the old box spring, then Kade lifted the thick metal bar that locked the door from the outside.
"Holy hell," Brock whispered into the darkness. He stepped inside the small room where three young women sat huddled together in the corner, shivering and terrified. When one of them started to scream, Brock moved faster than any of the drugged humans could track him. Reaching down, he brushed his hand over the female's brow, trancing her into silence with his touch. "It's all right. You're safe now. We aren't going to hurt you."
"Have any of them been bled?" Kade asked, watching as Brock willed the other two captives into similar states of quiet.
"They've been beaten recently, so there's bruising. But I don't see any bite wounds. Don't see any Breedmate marks, either," he added, doing a quick check of the women's exposed skin and extremities, looking for the teardrop-and-crescent-moon birthmark that differentiated mortal females from their more genetically extraordinary sisters. Brock gently released the pale arm he held, then stood up. "At least none of these three is a Breedmate."
A small mercy, and one that hardly exonerated the vampire scum who'd been making a business out of trafficking women to the highest bidder.
"Give me a minute to scrub their memories of what they've been through and get them safely out of here," Brock said. "I'll be right behind you."
