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The place had been built to treat the human tuberculosis patients who suffered such cruel, suffocating deaths through the 1800s and into the twentieth century. Back then, the treatment for the bacterial infestation was fresh air, and as much of it as you could stand, no matter the season. Well, that and hacking pieces of your lungs out, or cod-liver oil, or inhaling hemlock.
Until streptomycin and other drugs came to the rescue in the late forties.
Why did he know all that about those rats without tails and their coughs? He liked his trivia, even if it was about shit that didn’t affect vampires. Or vampire-wolven half-breeds.
The New York Times crossword puzzle had been his favorite.
Looking down the south wing, he measured the open porches that ran all the way to the far end. The patient rooms were behind the loggias, the rusted frames of the old hospital beds cluttering the tight spaces, all kinds of debris down the hallways and graffiti marking the stained and rotting walls. The north wing was the same, as was the administrative core that anchored the structure.
Everything abandoned and decaying, only the ghosts of dead patients remaining now.
Above ground, that was.
In a way, prisoners like him and the others belonged here. They’d been discarded, too. Forgotten. And most were rotting as they shuffled around beneath the earth, their only use cutting and portioning drugs to make money for yet another despot.
“One death,” he said grimly as he reached for the tarnished brass pull. “One death, and I’m out of here.”
There were advantages to having been excised from your family.
No more leverage when it came to your bloodline ’cuz you didn’t care if the fuckers were smothered in their own beds.
The old place still had some electricity running through it, and a dusty light bulb hanging from a wire cast sad light over what had been the reception, waiting, and check-in area. From what he’d read on a plaque on the wall, the hospital had stopped treating tubercular patients in the early fifties and switched to housing the mentally ill. That had lasted until the seventies, at which point, everything had been deserted.
He didn’t think anyone was going to add a bronze plate honoring the coda that included vampires.
Diverting from the open area with its moldy, toppled chairs and chipped, cheap-wood tables, he headed to the right. The north wing’s hall was marked “North Wing”—surprise!—and there were administrative offices on both sides, missing doors allowing views into rooms with ceiling collapses and broken windows that had let in the weather as well as years’ worth of fallen leaves. In a few spots, weeds had set up shop and started to inch ascents over the stained walls.
As he went along, he didn’t bother to hide the sounds of his boots. The sentries who were watching expected him—well, maybe not back this early, but he was a known commodity, allowed to go in and out.
The farther away he went from that single bulb, the darker it got, but his eyes were even sharper than normal vampires’, his wolf side giving him a night-vision-goggle effect, everything going shades of red.
Which was how he’d known exactly where to shoot back in that alley. What a clusterfuck—
“You’re home early.”
Lucan stopped. Well, shit. Another twenty yards, he’d be down into the basement complex. So close.
He kept his eyes on his prize, refusing to turn away from the steel reinforced door that had been an installation of the new owners.
“What’s the matter, wolven. Someone take your kibble away down in Caldwell?”
“That’s right,” he said smoothly. “At the same time they removed your soul.”
The chuckle in the darkness was like a switchblade traveling across a jugular vein. Well, it would have been, if Lucan gave a crap about being alive.
“You know I’d trade places with you if you can’t handle it.”
Now Lucan glanced over his shoulder, in case this verbal poking was going to elevate to prodding—and hey, he’d be good with that. He wanted to hit something.
“Too bad the Executioner won’t allow that,” Lucan murmured. “You can’t be trusted, can you, Apex.”
The vampire stepped out into the corridor, and he was a nasty piece of work, the kind of thing that even the actual killers and sociopaths in the camp gave a wide berth to. With black eyes that glittered with a predator’s instinct for fresh blood, and a body that was heavily muscled as well as lightning fast, he was just as he appeared: A soulless murderer who, unlike some of the people trapped in this hell, actually deserved his sentence.
And goddamn, the fact that the male had started shaving his head hardly made him look any warmer and fuzzier.
“You don’t have to come back here,” Apex said. “You could just disappear down in the city.”
“You know exactly why I come back. And I’m not justifying my rock and a hard place to the likes of you.”
