Chase swung toward them, his eyes shooting feral amber beams into the dark woods, his gore-slickened weapon clutched in his hand, ready to do more damage. Without a single word, the pair of law-breaking Agents bolted in opposite directions, disappearing into the night.
The woods fell silent once again, except for Murdock's pained groans. Chase drew in a cleansing breath. Intellect and reason slowly filtered in through the dark fog of his fury and the nagging thirst that still rode him. The situation he now found himself in was hardly ideal. One dead Agent bled out on the ground. Two more on the loose, certain to identify him as having attacked them unprovoked. Given his reputation lately, there would be few who'd believe him if he said he'd stumbled upon an illegal blood hunt and only did what he had to in order to break it up.
And then there was the problem of the escaped humans, the runners. He knew as well as any of his kind how dangerous it was to allow humans back into the general population without first scrubbing their memories of all knowledge of the Breed. Centuries of careful coexistence could be wiped out in an instant if enough hysterical humans were to scream the word "vampire."
Chase snarled, torn between responsibility for his race and the deeper, more personal need to wring Murdock for any information on Dragos.
Chase knew the right thing to do. He took a step away from Murdock, ready to fall in behind the escaped humans and contain the situation.
The wail of distant sirens, growing louder by the second, gave him pause. He could be too late already.
He glared down at Murdock.
With a muttered curse, he hefted the injured vampire up onto his shoulder, then bounded off into the thicket with him.
There was enough gas in the tank of the pimp's purple El Camino to carry them a good distance out of the city. This far from New Orleans's revived central hub, the homes were small and sparse, many still in disrepair or derelict from the ravages of the hurricane that had blown through years prior.
As Hunter drove, he kept a calculating eye on the eastern horizon where day was soon to break. Already the deep blue quiet on the other side of midnight was giving way to the pastel shades of morning. He glanced at Corinne, who sat silent in the passenger seat. Her split lip was swollen and bruised. Her eyes were trained on the empty road ahead. She seemed weary, her delicate shoulders trembling from either shock or chill; he wasn't sure which.
"We will stop soon," he said. "You need to rest, and dawn is coming."
Her nod was vague, little more than a tremor of acknowledgment. She inhaled a shaky breath. Blew it out slowly. "Did you know him?"
Hunter didn't have to ask who she was referring to. "I'd never seen him before tonight."
"But you and he ..." She swallowed, then ventured a sidelong look at him. "You fought the same way. Neither one of you would have stopped until the other was dead. You were both so vicious, so relentless. So unemotional as you went about it."
"We were both trained to kill, yes."
"At Dragos's command." He felt her stare fixed on him as she spoke, saw her stricken expression in his peripheral vision. "How many are there?"
Hunter shrugged, uncertain. "I could only guess at our numbers. We were never told about each other. Dragos kept us isolated, with only a Minion handler to look after our basic needs. When we were called into service, our work was always done alone."
"Have you killed many people?"
"Enough," he replied, then scowled and shook his head. "No, it won't be enough until I see Dragos dead and gone. Even if I have to take down every one of the others like me in order to get to him. Then it will be enough."
She turned her gaze back to the road, quiet and contemplative. "What was the thing you used to kill the assassin back at the airport? He was wearing some kind of collar. You took it when we left, and I saw that you were aiming for it when you shot him. The explosion from it was blinding."
Hunter could still see the piercing blast of light in his mind. There were times when he could still feel the confining bite of his own collar, the one he'd shed the night he joined the Order. "It's an obedience device of Dragos's design. Inside, the collar houses concentrated ultraviolet light. It cannot be tampered with or removed without triggering the detonator. Only Dragos can deactivate the sensor."
"Oh, my God," she whispered. "You mean it's a shackle. A lethal one."
"Effective, certainly."
"What about you?" Corinne asked. "You don't wear a collar like that."
"Not anymore."
She watched him carefully, her eyes rooted on him as he turned off the main road and followed a side street toward what looked to be an abandoned row of houses. "If you used to wear that awful device too, how did you manage to get free?"
"Dragos had little choice but to release me. He'd assembled a meeting of his allies last summer at a private location outside Montreal. The Order discovered what he was up to and moved in to attack. Dragos commanded me to provide the sole cover while he and his men fled out the back."
He felt Corinne's grave understanding in the quiet way she listened. "He was sending you out alone against how many of the Order? He meant for you to die."
Hunter shrugged. "It only showed me the measure of his desperation, and his contempt for me. He and I both knew that if I didn't charge out to confront the warriors in those next few moments, he and his associates stood no chance of escaping. I told him I would go, but only if he released me from my bond."
It had been a long while since he'd thought about that night in the forests outside Montreal. In truth, his journey toward freedom had begun even earlier that summer - the night he'd stolen into the private lodge of a Gen One vampire named Sergei Yakut on orders to kill from Dragos and found himself staring into the mesmerizing, mirrorlike eyes of an innocent little girl.
"It was Mira who gave me the courage to demand my freedom," he said, a warmth opening in the center of his chest at just the thought of the child. "She is a seer. She has the gift of precognition. It was in her eyes that I saw myself released from Dragos's control. If not for her, I might never have known it was possible to live any other way."
"She saved your life," Corinne murmured. "No wonder you care for her like you do."
"I would lay down my life for her," he answered, as automatic as breathing. And it was true. The observation jolted him on some level, but he couldn't deny the fondness he had for the little girl. He had become fiercely protective of her, just as he was coming to feel protective of the beautiful woman seated beside him now. But where his affection for Mira was a soft warmth, his regard for Corinne Bishop was something altogether different. It went deeper, burned with an intensity that only seemed to grow stronger every moment they were together. He desired her; that much had become evident when they'd kissed earlier. He wanted to kiss her again, and that was a problem. As for the other feelings she stirred in him, he didn't know what to make of that. Nor did he want to know. His duty was to the Order, and there was no room for distractions. No matter how tempting they might be.
It took Corinne a long while before she responded. "Every child deserves to have someone willing to do whatever it takes to keep them safe, to ensure their happiness. That's what family is supposed to be, isn't it?" When she looked at him now, her expression seemed troubled, haunted somehow. "Don't you think that's true, Hunter?"
"I would not know." He slowed in front of a dark little shotgun house with boarded windows and a sagging front porch. It looked abandoned, as did the rest of the meager homes that still stood after the waters had receded years earlier. Cracked, weed-choked cement foundations marked the places where other houses had been. "This one should suffice," he told Corinne as he put the vehicle in park.
She was still staring at him oddly from across the wide bench seat of the El Camino. "You never had anyone at all - not even when you were a child? Not even your mother?"
He killed the engine and took out the key. "There was no one. I was taken away from the Breedmate who bore me in Dragos's laboratory when I was still an infant. I have no memory of her. The Minion handler assigned to me by Dragos was responsible for my rearing. Such as it was."
Her face had gone pale and slack. "You were born in the lab? You were ... taken away from your mother?"
"We all were," he replied. "Dragos engineered our lives from the instant we were conceived. He controlled everything, to ensure we became his perfect killing machines loyal only to him. We were born to be his assassins. His Hunters, and nothing more."
"Hunters." The word sounded wooden on her tongue. "I thought Hunter was your name. Is it your name?"
He could see her confusion. Her frown furrowed deeper as she quietly processed all that she was hearing. "Hunter is the only thing I've been called from the day I was born. It is what I am. What I will always be."
"Oh, my God." Her soft exhalation trembled a bit. Something else flickered across her face in that moment, something he could not place. It looked like sorrow. It looked like fresh, dawning horror. "All the infants born in Dragos's labs were taken away. They've all been raised like you were? All those innocent baby boys. That's what became of them all ..."
It wasn't asked as a question, but he answered her with a frank, solemn nod. Corinne closed her eyes, saying nothing more. She turned her head away from him, toward the dark glass of the passenger window.
In the suddenly awkward and lengthening silence, Hunter reached down and opened the driver-side door. "Wait here. I'll go check the house and make sure it's suitable shelter."
She didn't answer. She didn't even look at him, her face now tucked into her right shoulder. As he walked away, he thought he noticed tears sliding down her cheek. Corinne all but vaulted out of the vehicle as soon as Hunter had gone into the house. The prolonged drive in the confining space would have been enough to spike her anxiety, all the more so considering what she'd witnessed at the airport tonight. But it was something far worse that sent her fleeing the car for the dank, predawn outdoors.
Fear and horror gripped her, threatening to turn her stomach inside out as she stumbled toward a concrete slab in the derelict yard next door. She sank down onto the damp foundation and buried her face in her hands.
In all of her many nightmares over what might have become of her son, never had she imagined the brutal fate Hunter had just described to her.
Hunter.
Good lord, it wasn't even a true name. Just a label for an object, no different from one that might be used to refer to a blade or a pistol, or any other tool manufactured for the sole purpose of destruction.
Insignificant.
Expendable.
Inhuman.
She wiped at the tears that had begun falling even before Hunter had left the vehicle. Her heart ached for his past suffering, but it tore apart in her breast at the realization that her baby boy - the beautiful, innocent child she'd loved instantly on sight - was still trapped inside the ugly world of Dragos's making.
A sob rose in her throat as she remembered the sweet face of the squalling infant she'd delivered some thirteen years ago. She could still picture his tiny fists flailing as the Minion nurse carried him across the labor room to wash him and wrap him in a plain white blanket. She could still see his eyes - almond shaped and bluish green, like her own, his dermaglyph- covered scalp crowned with a smattering of silky black hair, the same color as hers. Her son would have her sonokinetic ability too, inherited genetically from her the same way he would inherit his Gen One strength and power from the creature who'd sired him. The talent Corinne gave her son was something Dragos could never take away from him. That ability would forever stamp him as hers, no matter what Dragos had done to him in the years he'd had to bend him to his twisted missions and ideals.
Her son had a name as well. Corinne had whispered it to him in that first moment their eyes had met and locked in the delivery room. He'd heard her, even at a scant few minutes out of her womb, she was sure of it. And he'd heard her cry for him as the Minion nurse carried him away an instant later, never to be seen again.
God, how many days and weeks and months - how many years - had she mourned his absence from her life? And now, to think what he'd been born into. It made her sick with anguish to imagine what he might have become in the thirteen years Dragos had controlled him. Hope churned desperately within her. Maybe he wasn't living that awful existence, after all. Maybe he'd been taken away from her for some other purpose, not shackled to Dragos's whims by a deadly ultraviolet collar. Not forced to exist as a killing machine without knowing who he truly was, without anyone to hold him or nurture him or love him. And if he was one of the many Gen One boys Dragos bred as assassins in his labs? Maybe he'd somehow escaped his horrific enslavement as Hunter had. Maybe her son wasn't living at all anymore. For one shameful second, she wished him dead, if only to spare him the bleak existence Hunter had described.
But he was alive. She knew it the same way every parent must know, regardless of how much time or distance separates them from their child. Deep in her marrow, she was certain her little boy was still breathing.
Somewhere ...
The hopelessness of finding him when she didn't even know where to begin looking pressed down on her as she sat alone on the concrete slab, staring out at the vast, empty wasteland of what had probably once been a pleasant neighborhood on the outskirts of New Orleans. Now there was next to nothing left of it. Displaced families, homes in neglect and ruin, countless lives rent apart by a force they had been powerless to stop. She had weathered her own storm in the decades Dragos had imprisoned her. He hadn't beaten her yet. He hadn't won. Nor would he, so long as she had breath in her body.