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And yet she couldn’t shake the sense that nothing was as it seemed.
Rio stayed beside the bed on the floor for a little longer, and then she told herself she needed to use this time wisely. Going over to the table once again, she took a piece of paper and a pencil from out of the clutter—and sat down with her back to the door in case she had to cover up what she was doing.
Closing her eyes, she pictured the clinic area. The stairwell. The workroom with its tables and those two desks and the bin of kilos in the corner.
When she reopened her lids, she started to sketch out the plans of everything she could recall about the facility. The effort was not only intel she intended to give her superiors . . . it felt like a test of her cognitive abilities.
If she lost those in this situation?
She was a dead woman.
Amere thirty miles away from where Rio was playing amateur architect, V re-formed on a country road out in the middle of nowhere. As he waited for Rhage to hop-along his Cassidy, he took out a hand-rolled, lit up with his Bic—which he’d gotten from the Pit, thank you very much—and looked at the mountains in the distance. The valley between the two ranges was a straight shot of flat and narrow, and he imagined, if he were a nature-loving type, that he’d find a lot of peace and comfort in the landscape. As it was, he was a tetchy, techy sonofabitch with stunted emotional growth, a god complex, and questionable taste in cartoons.
Hey, he liked Tom & Jerry. Not that he brought that up around Lassiter.
So no, he wasn’t all that impressed by the Mother Earth stuff.
Rhage materialized beside him. “Okay, let’s go. And I’ll do the talking since you’ve pulled on your grumpy pants about all this.”
“Not my fault the bunch of you have your heads wedged.”
“Isn’t that your favorite thing?”
They started walking toward a farmhouse that was so picture-perfect, V choked on the quaint. From its porch to the obligatory tree in the side yard, its chimney and the happy-face arrangement of its windows, he would be afraid, if he lived in such a place, that he’d start crapping sunbeams and Care Bears.
He was also aware of wanting Butch to be with them, too—but as a half-breed, the former cop couldn’t ghost out and travel in a scatter of molecules. That was the thing with mixed blood. You got some of the characteristics of both sides, but it was a buffet you didn’t get to choose from. What your personal rules were got randomly assigned by the fruit salad of your genetic makeup.
So it was ground travel only for Butch, and it would take well over an hour for the brother—
A vibration went through V’s body, his marrow going tuning fork on him. And as Rhage stopped short and looked down at himself, it was clear the brother picked up on it, too.
“Is that . . .” Rhage let the words drift as he glanced back up toward the house. “I mean . . .”
At that moment, the front door of the farmhouse burst open and a female in a long dress and a bulky sweater rushed out. She had both palms forward and she was halfway into an epic no-no-no stream.
“—needing. You can’t be here!”
Needing? V thought. Oh, shit.
The Jackal’s shellan, Nyx, had gone into her—
“Do you want my mate to help?” he called out. “Jane can come here with the drugs to ease her.”
Posie, Nyx’s sister, flushed and shook her head. “That’s not . . . that’s not how it’s going to be handled. This was a little bit of a surprise, but females’ cycles? They can be unpredictable, especially during stressful times.”
She doubled back and shut the door. Then she came down off the porch to them. “I’m leaving as well. For . . . you know, their privacy.”
“Are they safe?” Rhage asked. “For the day?”
“They’re in the cellar bedroom. I made sure there was food and . . . Pete already left when the first signs of the fertile time started showing. I only stayed to get the house in order and make sure they’d have what they need.”
What a mess, V thought.
Vampire females were only fertile about once a decade—and good fucking thing. The hormones released were incredibly powerful and painful, and his mahmen, creator of the species, had set it up such that only constant mating with a male could make the agony bearable. Still, the sex act soothed the cravings only for a short time, so the orgasms had to be constant, for hours and hours. It was either that or drugs. All things considering, the cycle was a brutal system, but considering how high the mortality rate was for females on the birthing bed? It would take something that overwhelming to make them want to run the risks of getting pregnant.
