Page 20 of Hunted

His eyes were wild, pupils dilated. Not feral precisely. Feral wolves heeded only the call of the moon and their base urges. They couldn’t be reasoned with. Until recently when werewolf scientists had developed a drug called Eclipse that suppressed the lycan virus, ferals had been kept in segregated colonies within each pack managed by the Alphas, most in terrible conditions. I reached into his mind, immediately feeling the familiar wall Rossi had built around the other wolves he turned into his drones.

“What’s your name?” I said, probing for cracks in the shield.

“Screw you.”

“Nice.” I tilted my head. “Where is Matteo Rossi?”

At this, his heartrate picked up. “I don’t know anyone by that name.”

“What name do you know him by?”

“I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

“Yes, you do.” I got down in the male shifter’s face, pulled his head back so he was forced to look at me. “You can feel him in your head, that blank place in your memory when you try to remember what happened just before you were sent here. Maybe there isn’t a face. Maybe it’s just a voice. A phrase. A place. But you’re going to tell me what you know. We can do this the easy way or the hard way.”

“I—” He blinked, eyes briefly losing focus, and I was in.

His memories had been wiped, just like all the other shapeshifters we’d recovered, vast swaths of time erased with yawning black holes gaping in their place. I tried to sift through what remained, to piece together clues that might help me find the madman I was hunting. The inside of a non-descript barracks. A shapeshifter unit drilling outside in the desert. A meeting at a bar somewhere in south Austin, motorcycles lined up outside the door. With the way his mind had been carved up, it would be a wonder if this guy would be able to recognize his own family without hospitalization and extensive treatment. Rossi was taking military recruits who had something on their record they needed to erase, a gambling debt, a sick family member who couldn’t pay for medical treatment, and forcing them into his black ops program where they were infected with the lycan virus. They were hired mercenaries. All were disposable to him.

Quinn, one of the soldiers who had found his way to my parents’ ranch the previous fall, had been one of the first recruits to escape the military base out in the New Mexico desert where these experiments were taking place. Fallon had been able to restore some of his memories and reverse the damage. Her particular talents gifted her with the ability to manipulate other neural manipulator’s rewrites, something few could do.

I closed my eyes and touched my fingers to the shifter’s temples, concentrating on the snarled tendrils and blank spaces the way Fallon had showed me, searching for a loose thread that would give me something. Sweat broke out across my temples. Rain lashed my cheeks. I kept going. Two minutes later I struck pay dirt. A single strand of memory Rossi had missed, blurry, but there. Three vampires in military fatigues stood in a line, drinking from the wrists of shifter soldiers in some sort of military hanger. They had bombs strapped to their chests. I swore. The memory flickered, a lightbulb threatening to go out. I pushed harder. The scene shifted. The vampires, two middle-aged females and a male, knelt as a dark-haired man pressed his fingers to their temples much the same way I was doing now.

Matteo Rossi.

He was medium height with dark, wavy hair. High aristocratic cheekbones and an arrogant smirk I wanted to knock right off his face. Hazel eyes burned with concentration as he spoke orders the shifter hadn’t picked up. But I’d already seen enough.

I released the shifter’s mind. He sank back onto his knees, panting. Rising, I turned to Cris.

“Who knows the locations of your covens and safehouses?”

“We don’t post them on Google maps, if that’s what you’re asking.” He shrugged. “They’re hardly a secret within the vampire community though.”

“So the location of a specific coven would be known to vampires other than the ones who live there.”

“Yes.” Cristof’s phone buzzed. He swiped at the screen and frowned. “There have been times when we’ve tried to restrict that information for security reasons, but our people talk too much and word inevitably got out within weeks of a new safe house being acquired.”

“Nice to know leeches are as gossipy as shifters.”

“Now we use blood wards to prevent anyone who isn’t authorized from entering.”

“They’re getting past your wards somehow, just like they got past them tonight. How many vampires can set blood wards?”

“Not many. That magic is rare among our kind. Few in the aristocracy possess it. We’ve lost too many with that gift to Vlad’s traitors.”

I got up in his face. “What do you expect? You were born into privilege and wealth. You’ll never have to go out and fight or take werewolf blood against your will and get the wasting disease. Imagine growing up in the lowest caste knowing you would be sent out on dangerous missions as soon as you turned thirteen or fourteen, and that you would probably die by twenty-five, if not sooner. Vlad comes onto the scene offering a chance to fight for things to be different, for a Vampire Nation where there is no aristocracy.”

Cris bared his fangs. “The last thing I need tonight is to hear from another of my brother’s fanboys.”

“The thing my dad always says about leadership? If you’re doing the job right, you don’t have to force people to follow you. No one knows at this point what the Vampire Nation becomes. Maybe it splits off into two factions. Maybe you inherit Zara’s half one day. Or you keep your people in a stranglehold and lose everything, which from my read on the room, is what your mother is pretty much on track to do if someone doesn’t course correct fast.”

Cris glared daggers at me, but after a moment, he turned over his shoulder to one of his subordinates. “Send an urgent priority message to all the covens to check the status of every person living there immediately. I want a report of who is present and accounted for and if they are not physically there, when they were last seen, within the next thirty minutes.” His expression turned grim. “I have a feeling if any more missing persons turn up, that will point us in the direction of where they plan to strike next.”

The wind gusted as I stared grimly out at the dark. “Now that we know where to look, we’ll be waiting for them.”