“A little of both.”
“You’re welcome to put it on the network’s dime.”
Chris shook his head. “This place may look like shit, but at least I know where everything is. If someone comes in and starts cleaning, I’ll have to waste time looking for things.”
“Just tell whoever does it to only worry about the dishes, the trash, and the clothes. Because . . . damn.”
Chris laughed. “If you think this is bad, don’t look in the kitchen.”
“I don’t have to. I can smell the fungus and the dried-up, crusted food from here.”
Still grinning, Chris stuck the pads in his coat pocket and added a couple of short, stubby pencils.
“At least think about it,” Seth requested.
“I will. Okay, let’s book.”
Seth teleported them both to the entrance of the compound’s main building.
David’s blurred form raced toward them from the vicinity of the hangar. “Nothing so far.”
While Chris and David exchanged greetings, Seth opened one of the front doors and motioned for them to enter.
They showed him the dead soldiers first. Out came the first notepad and pencil. Chris didn’t enter the room. He merely studied it, taking in every detail and scribbling down notes.
“Which ones do you recognize, David?”
David pointed out the ones he had seen at the network.
“Okay. What’s next?”
They showed him the rooms Seth believed had temporarily housed the vampires.
“You think they still have both of them?”
“Joe may have been destroyed by the blood loss.”
“I don’t think so. They probably wouldn’t have bothered to pick up his clothes if he had expired and there aren’t any lying around.”
Good point.
Chris exhibited no emotion until they showed him the first pair of the civilian bodies downstairs.
Seth cast David a questioning glance when Chris’s face lost all color.
“Do you know them?” David asked.
Chris swallowed. “The man is one of my contacts. I think . . . I think the woman is his wife.”
Or what was left of her. Emrys and his men must have tortured her to extract information from her husband.
Chris left the room, walked to the next and halted in the doorway. “Shit!” He strode to the next room. And the next. And the next. Spun around. “They’re my contacts!” He turned and continued on to the next. “They’re my fucking contacts. All of them!” Judging by the moan of regret that hummed in his throat, he had caught sight of the children in that one. “And their families! Why the fuck did they kill their families? Their children?”
“Leverage,” Seth stated.
David sighed. “What better way to make a man talk than by threatening to harm those he loves the most?”
Chris paced furiously for a moment.
Seth didn’t have to read his friend’s mind to know guilt was eating him up inside.
Pausing, Chris closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose as if he were trying very hard to erase those images from his mind. “Why leave them here like this?”
“Only two reasons come to mind,” Seth said. “A message, warning you not to use such resources again to search for the mercenaries in the future.”
“Or bait,” David added. “Seth and I are going to scour the place for explosives or other booby traps that may have been set to take us out while we were distracted by the bodies so we can be sure no harm will come to the cleaners when they arrive.”
Chris nodded.
“This wasn’t your fault, Chris,” Seth told him.
“I recruited them,” he said, unconsoled.
“At my instruction.”
“You aren’t going to make me feel better about this.”
Seth nodded. He could relate.
“So how are we going to locate Emrys and the remainder of his men now? This was our biggest lead to date.”
Seth met David’s gaze, knowing they had both come to the same conclusion.
“I don’t see that we have any choice,” David said.
Seth sighed. “We’ll have to let Ami lead us to them.”
Chris stared. “Is there no other way?” He had read the files. He may not have seen what Emrys and his butchers had done to Ami, but he knew all of the details.
“I think the one thing we can bank on is Emrys being wherever the vampires are. Since Ami was in close proximity to the vampires on numerous occasions during the attack on the network, she should be able to lead us to them.”
Somber silence enfolded them, made worse by the sickening stench that constantly assaulted them.
“Tell me something,” Chris said. “Have you guys ever dealt with a situation this . . . dark . . . before?”
“Yes,” they answered simultaneously. Seth and David had seen trials the others would never believe.
“Okay. Pity party is over. You guys go ahead and do your thing. I’ll start making calls.”
“Make them outside.” Seth didn’t want the man to stay down here and stare at the bodies he felt he had placed in these rooms.
“Is he dead?”
Emrys, Donald, and Nelson stood in the observation room that overlooked one operating room on one side and a second on the opposite. Both of the rooms below looked very much like the ORs one might find in a hospital. Except the table in the center rested atop a titanium pedestal and was bolted to the floor with titanium screws coated in heavy concrete.
The patient they currently studied was held immobile by steel manacles it would take a blow torch hours to cut through. Two at the wrists. Two just above the elbows. Two across the thighs. And two more at his ankles. A ninth steel manacle, covered in a strip of leather, kept him from moving his head.
The short stubs of his dreadlocks poked out above it.
A narrow sheet had been draped across his groin to spare the partners’ delicate feelings.
Delicate my ass, Emrys thought, eyeing Donald resentfully. The man acted like he shit diamonds.
He returned his gaze to the captive. “No. He’s sleeping.” Sedated actually, but that was need-to-know.
Both vampires had been in pretty bad shape after their examination by Emrys’s medical team. The other one had left half his damn brain on the wall and hadn’t cleaned up as well, so Emrys had shown Donald and his yes-man this one first.
“Why is he restrained?”
Because he’s fucking Charles Manson times a thousand. They both were. “The torture the immortals subjected them to has driven them insane.” He had not yet confided that the virus tended to have that effect on any humans infected with it. He had removed that little tidbit from any and all information he had handed over to Donald, who may have wondered how exactly they would command an army of supersoldiers who were totally off their rockers.
Emrys would figure out the whole insanity thing later. After he made his first billion.
He pressed a button on the wall beside him. “Proceed, Nate.”
A man in scrubs and gloves stepped into view. A blue surgical mask hid his face. A cap the same color covered most of his light brown hair.
Rolling a cart full of instruments along with him, he stopped beside the vampire.
“Check this out,” Emrys said, smiling in anticipation.
Picking up a scalpel, Nate pressed it to the vampire’s waist on the far side and carved a deep path across the vamp’s abdomen.
Blood welled and spilled out of the wound that, on the battlefield, would have required the attention of a medic and taken a human soldier out of play. As they watched, the wound narrowed, the gaping sides drawing together as though magnetized, then sealing. Scar tissue formed, then faded. All in a matter of minutes.
Donald stepped closer to the glass. “Holy shit.”
Even that little pissant, suck-up Nelson moved closer to the glass and stared with wide eyes.
Again, Emrys depressed the button. “Demonstration number two, please, Nate.”
Nodding, Nate left their line of sight for a few seconds. When he returned, he wore protective ear phones and carried a Smith & Wesson M&P. He raised the semiautomatic pistol and aimed it at the vampire’s torso.
Donald and Nelson both stuck their fingers in their ears.
Pussies.
“Fire in the hole,” Nate called and squeezed the trigger. Emrys had told him to leave the silencer off for effect.
The vampire’s body jerked as a hole sprang open in his chest.
Blood welled and spilled from the wound in thin rivulets that wound their way down the vampire’s sides to drip onto the table. Moments passed. A misshapen lump of metal slowly rose to the entrance of the wound and tumbled out.
The ass-kisser gaped. “You are shitting me!”
The hole closed, sealed itself, and began to scar over. It took longer than Emrys would’ve liked because the vampire was drugged (and would have taken longer if they hadn’t pumped him full of extra blood), but the men beside him were no less astonished.
Donald turned to Emrys. “He’s still alive?”
“Yes. After what he endured in the immortal’s compound, we thought it kinder to sedate him.”
“I want a closer look.”
“I thought you might. Follow me.”
Emrys led them down to the room they kept the Black vampire in, glad Donald hadn’t asked to see the other one. The White vampire’s wounds weren’t healing as quickly because they had nearly OD’d him on the tranquilizer, so he was still in pretty rough shape. They’d slapped some makeup on him to hide the worst of it, but that wouldn’t fly up close and personal.
Emrys waited while both men donned scrubs over their suits.
Nate nodded to each of them in turn as they entered.
Donald leaned over the recumbent form on the table. The vampire’s medium brown skin was smooth and free of wounds, the blood that had not yet dried and the expelled bullet the only evidence left that he had been cut and shot.
Donald held his hand out for the scalpel. “May I?”