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She captured his hand before he went for the door. Her eyes were wide and anxious. “I love you.”
With a nod, he pulled her in close. “You’re going to do all the right things, you, Manny, and Doc Jane. He’s in the best hands.”
The next thing Rehv knew, he was out in the corridor, and for the briefest moment, he couldn’t remember which direction he was supposed to go in. As he took out his cell phone, things clicked into place and he headed to the right.
As he strode for the locker room, he initiated the call.
And prayed Xhex picked up.
Dead.
They were all dead.
As Blade stopped in front of the bank of ten-by-ten-foot cages, he stared through the fine steel mesh that was installed over the steel bars. Two males and a female, all hanging by ligatures, their flimsy hospital gowns limp as their limbs, some of the feet still twitching above the drains in the tile floor.
Each of their heads were cocked slightly to the side, as if he had called their names and they’d heard the sound. All of their eyes were open and blindly staring at him.
“Help… me…”
At the plaintive entreaty, Blade looked across the lab space. The setup was what he’d come to expect, the work stations of computers, monitoring equipment, vials, and test tubes ringing the space, an examination table with restraints in the center of the facility, the overhead lights bright white and glaring.
The man he’d just shot in the chest was slumped by a drain next to where the experiments were performed. Where those vampires had been cut open, prodded, injected. Where the suffering had been so acute.
Convenient, really. The blood would just drip down into the plumbing system.
“Help…”
“You realize,” Blade drawled, “that expecting a rescue from the person who shot you is not logical. And may cause me to provide you further attention.”
He refocused on the cages and the steel mesh.Vampires couldn’t dematerialize through that alloy of iron and carbon, and he wondered how long it had taken the humans to figure that out. It had to have been a rate limiter that was solved pretty damn quick. Those rats without tails were inferior in every sense of the word, so to keep their subjects captive, to work on the males and females, they would have had to sacrifice quite a few of their own kind before they were successful at imprisonment.
Walking closer to the bodies, he knelt in front of the middle one, his hand going down to sweep robing out of the way—except he wasn’t dressed in his blood-red drape. Not tonight. For this mission, his clothes were formfitting, and upon his back, he bore a heavy pack that had not slowed him down in the slightest.
He lowered his head in a measure of respect. The female had been in her prime, at least going by age—but she was in bad condition. She had been starved of at least blood and perhaps food, leaving her arms and legs without muscle. Ulcers marked her skin, the raw patches red and infected. Sections of dark hair had fallen out on her head.
The other two were in similar conditions, but the female was what bothered him the most.
She was just like his sister in so many ways.
An image of Xhex flashed into his mind’s eye, and he replaced the stranger hanging by her throat with his own kin.
And then… another memory. From the Colony, a good twenty-five years before. He was looking out the window of one of the shill buildings, the structures that had been built and maintained to look like homes so the humans in that isolated upstate town would not become suspicious.
His sister was being driven away in a van. Against her will.
Funny that “symphath” and “sympathy” shared so many letters. Because the former had none of the latter—
A tickle in his eye made him blink, and as his vision got blurry, he wiped at the sensation with impatience. Looking down, he saw a red smear on his fingertips.
The tears of his kind were bloody, which did seem fitting. And even though he was a half-breed, as was his sister, he considered himself closer to their sire’s side of things.
A gurgle from behind him drew his eyes over his shoulder. The scientist was losing blood fast, the red pool under his body gleaming like Blade’s irresponsible, undeniable expression of tears in the harsh lighting.
Good thing he had come here alone. Weakness was to be exploited, and regret was, among all the levers that could be pulled in a person, the most devastatingly effective.
He should have been working alone all along.If anyone found out he had been creating messes in the human world, even if they were covered up by thehomo sapiensthemselves… if anybody discovered the reasons for his aggression, the complications would be swift and onerous. But when he had begun targeting these rogue setups, so buried among all the human industry, so carefully tended, their secrets so guarded, he’d been ill prepared for the number of them.
He had thus hired on humans, creating through mind control a false governmental agency that was as those farmhouses up around the Colony, an illusion that allowed him to function at a higher level in the midst of a bumbling, fumbling, lesser enemy. Except then, back in April, a fuckup had occurred, and it had been a lesson well learned. He had therefore reverted to being a solo operator, hunting for these illicit, under-the-radar sites and destroying them.
