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That's when he saw the other source of the railcar's foul odor. A dead human male lay nearby where he'd been sleeping. The man's army green parka had been wrested off his shoulders, his face twisted in horror, ghastly white. His throat had been punctured and torn in numerous places. "Savaged" seemed a better way to describe the grotesque evidence of Chase's frenzied feeding.
He remembered his raking thirst. He recalled slipping inside the occupied shelter of the railcar, sending the homeless addicts screaming when they saw his glowing eyes and bared fangs. As the humans fled their makeshift shelter, he'd grabbed the slowest of the bunch, culling the easiest prey from its herd.
The big man had gone down fighting, but he'd been no match at all. Nothing could have stopped the feral need that had been spiraling so dark and deep inside Chase as he'd thrown the human to the filthy floor of the railcar and fed.
He'd drained him.
Killed him.
Shame for that engulfed Chase as he looked at what he'd done. He had crossed a line here, broken an immutable tenet of Breed law. He had trashed his own sense of honor, the one thing he'd clung to so steadfastly through all his years of life.
And there was the matter of the Order. He had squandered their trust. Last night when Dante and Kade had spotted him, gone after him out of concern, he'd cowered in the shadows of the rail yard like vermin. They had known he was there, using his talent to conceal himself, deliberately ignoring their calls. If they'd had any faith left in him at all, he'd smashed it to bits by refusing to face them.
It hurt to shut them out - Dante, especially - but it would have hurt him even more to let either of his fellow warriors see him in the state he'd been in. He'd been hunting all night, had already fed once but it hadn't been enough to sate him. Thirst had driven him down into the squalor of the industrial area near the river, where whores and addicts - failures, like him - tended to cluster. His thirst had known no shame, only craving and need. Chase craved still, despite having clearly drunk more than his fill only hours ago. He glared at the dead human, offended by the sight and stench of it. He needed to get out of there. With a fresh, needy ache blooming in his gut, Chase stripped the corpse of its coat, then pulled off the heathered gray sweatshirt and baggy jeans. His own clothes, the black fatigues he'd worn when he left the Order's compound the night before, were blood-soaked and revolting from careless feedings. He took them off, then put on the human's clothes. The jeans and sweatshirt were on the small side for one of Chase's kind, and probably hadn't been cleaned since their former owner had picked them up at Goodwill.
Chase didn't care, so long as he didn't draw undue notice by walking around looking like he'd murdered someone. Taking his ruined fatigues in one hand, he walked to the partially ajar door of the railcar. He pushed it wider and stared out at a sight few of his kind would ever willingly witness.
Sunlight beat down from a bright blue midmorning sky. It illuminated the ground below, glinting off the dirty snow and frozen mud of the rail yard. Despite the ugliness of his immediate surroundings, there was a beauty in that moment - that first glimpse of daylight on a crisp new dawn - that defied the squalor around him.
It defied even the urgency of his thirst, making him pause where he stood and simply look at the miraculous world he inhabited. The one he felt slipping through his fingers with every throbbing pulse through his veins.
Chase lifted his arm like a visor to shield his hypersensitive eyes from the impossible glare. He tipped his face up and let the unfamiliar, glorious heat of morning warm his face. It started to sting.
Before long, it started to sear.
How long would it take for the sun to bake him crispy? Probably half an hour, he guessed, savoring the acid burn as his skin across his cheeks and brow grew hotter. Thirty minutes, and there would be no more hunger. No more shame. No more struggle to keep himself out of the abyss that seemed so welcoming, so blessedly dark and endless.
He considered the notion for a long, excruciating while, testing his will. But he failed, even in that.
With the talons of his thirst sinking deeper into him, Chase stepped off the edge of the railcar and dropped to the ground below. He crossed the tracks and pitched his ruined warrior's garb into the smoldering belly of a smoking rubbish barrel.
Then he slunk off quickly to find shelter to wait for nightfall, when he could begin his hunting once more.
* * *
They had arrived in New Orleans in the dark early-morning hours and took a taxi from the airport to a hotel in what Hunter assumed was the heart of the tourist area. Street noise and music had echoed up from below their fourth-story window until long past daybreak, creating a racket that had kept his senses on full alert, anticipating the slightest hint of trouble. Not that he'd had any intention of sleeping. He hardly needed rest; an hour or two at most each day. It was how he'd been trained, a discipline that kept his body ready for any situation, his mind prepared to engage with hair-trigger response.>"Hunter didn't seem to be concerned," Gideon replied. "Said he had the situation under control."
Lucan grunted, wry despite the weight of the discussion previously under way. "Where've I heard that line before? Famous last words from more than one of us over the course of the past year and a half."
"Yup." Gideon cocked a brow over the rims of his pale blue shades. "Usually followed not long afterward by a call from the field that the situation so assuredly under control has gone suddenly and totally FUBAR."
Lucan himself wasn't above blame on that score, nor was Tegan or Gideon, for that matter. Still, this was Hunter they were talking about.
Tegan seemed to pick up on his line of thinking. "If I hadn't seen that male come back bleeding on occasion from some of his nastier missions, I'd say he was made of steel and cables, not muscle and bone. He's a machine, that one. He doesn't fuck up - it's not in his DNA. There won't be any surprises from Hunter."
"There better not be," Lucan replied. "We've sure as hell got our hands full enough as it is."
With that, the three of them turned their attention back to the plans Lucan had spread out on the table. The blueprints were something he'd been working on privately for the past few months, soon after he began to realize how vulnerable the compound was becoming the longer Dragos eluded the Order's grasp.
It was the design for an all-new headquarters.
He'd already procured the land - a two-hundred-acre tract in Vermont's Green Mountains - and the plans were nearly complete for a sprawling, high-security, state-of-the-art bunker that could house a small town in its many underground chambers and specially designed facilities. It was immense, incredible, exactly the kind of place the Order needed now that Dragos knew the compound's location.
The only problem was, a facility of that size and scope was easily a year or more out of reach.
They needed something today, not down the road.
"Maybe we need to think about splitting up," Gideon suggested after a while. "None of us is without money or holdings of our own. I mean, none of our properties are as secure as this compound is - rather, as secure as it was. But we're not without options. Maybe the smartest, fastest thing would be for each of us to take our mate and move to other locations."
