“I don’t know.” Bastien pulled out his phone. As he dialed, he eased forward, eyes alert, and tried to identify faces. “I don’t smell any of them, but with so much blood …”
“I have never seen the like,” Yuri muttered, voice tight.
“Stay sharp,” Bastien warned as Chris answered.
“Are you there?” Reordon asked.
“Yes.”
“What do you see?”
“Death.”
“No one’s left standing?” Chris asked tightly.
“No. What happened?”
“Roland, Marcus, Lisette, and Étienne are down, hit with a drug delivered via darts from an animal tranquilizer pistol.”
Bastien frowned. “Drugs don’t work on us.”
“Well, they fucking do now!” Chris snapped. And Bastien heard the unspoken accusation: they worked now that Bastien had put Montrose Keegan on it. “They’re all out cold, barely breathing. We haven’t been able to revive them even after blood transfusions.”
“What about the others?”
“Sarah is okay. Wounded, but not drugged.”
Bastien was surprised by the intensity of the relief that struck him with those words.
“Richart is missing. He teleported from the clearing just before Sarah left. She had to carry both Roland and Marcus and thought Richart might be coming here for reinforcements or going to get you, but … We don’t know where he is. If he is. For all we know he teleported right back to the battle.”
If he had, Richart must be amongst the decaying corpses, Bastien thought, perusing them with dread. “And Ami?” A heavy silence followed. When Sarah began to weep in the background, Bastien’s hand tightened around the cell phone. “Reordon, what happened to Ami?”
“I don’t think she made it.”
Bastien closed his eyes as raw pain prodded him. Not Ami. Please, not Ami, who had always been so kind to him. The only one who had reached out to him instead of judging him and finding him lacking.
“Tell me,” he demanded hoarsely.
Yuri and Stanislav prowled forth, circling the clearing as Reordon related Sarah’s last contact with Ami.
“If the drug can do this to immortals and drop vampires instantly, I don’t see how Ami could have survived it,” Chris said. “And, even if she did, she was surrounded by two dozen vampires and faced their king the last time Sarah saw her.”
Bastien pried his eyes open and forced his feet to carry him forward.
Humans didn’t deteriorate within minutes when they were killed. If Ami …
He tried to swallow past the lump in his throat and couldn’t.
The freshest bodies—located near the center—weren’t even bodies. They were pieces. It looked like whoever those pieces had belonged to had either exploded or been ripped apart with a violence only a maddened vampire could deliver.
The odor of putrefying flesh overwhelmed him, blotting out all else. Unable to smell her, he examined the gore carefully for anything that might distinguish her. Green eyes. Red hair. Pale feminine flesh.
Only mouldering, withering vampires met his gaze.
“I don’t see her,” he told Chris, feeling no relief. If she wasn’t here, the surviving vampires had claimed Ami either to transform her and make Ami a vampire or to use her as a blood bank and a toy they would feed on and torture at will.
“I don’t see her either,” Stanislav announced.
“Nor I,” Yuri added.
“Wait.” Stanislav halted his slow perambulation. Eyes narrowing, he examined the trees near him. “Here. She came this way.”
“I’ll get back to you,” Bastien told Chris. Ending the call, he crossed the clearing in one leap. He could see the dirt stirred by small footprints where Stanislav indicated, her blood on the leaves.
Bastien shoved his phone into his pocket and plunged into the trees.
He had to find her before the other vampires got their hands on her. If he didn’t …
She would be lost to them in more ways than one.
“What the hell is this?”
The voice, full of alarm, swooped out of the darkness and lured Ami toward consciousness.
“I need to stash this here for the day,” the vampire king said, calm now.
“What? Are you crazy? Who is that? Is she … is she dead?”
“Not yet.”
Her head pounded with every heartbeat, perhaps because she was hanging upside down over someone’s shoulder. At least, she was until he slung her forward and dropped her like a bag of bird seed onto a hard surface. The ache radiating outward from her forehead magnified as the back of her head ricocheted off the table. Old habits arose and helped her hold back a moan.
“What happened with the immortals?” the first voice asked.
“They slaughtered my men.”
“All of them?”“Those I didn’t kill myself,” the vampire king said with a shrug in his voice. “Roland and Bastien brought reinforcements. One of them could jump like that guy in that movie.”
“What movie? What does jump mean?”
“Jump. Like in Jumper, where the guy would be in New York one second and Paris the next.”
“He could teleport?” Excitement took hold of the first speaker, raising his voice. “Are you telling me one of the immortals could teleport?”
“Yeah, and it really fucked things up. He killed vamps left and right. They had no warning. He’d pop in, kill one, then pop up somewhere else and kill another. They never saw him coming. And when I finally got a bead on him and tranqed the fucker, he jumped away with two other immortals. After that, some immortal bitch ran off, carrying Roland and Bastien.”
“What about this woman? Who is she? Is she an immortal?”
Through the fuzz clinging to her mind, Ami tried to identify the vampire king’s friend. He bore no voice she had heard before, but was clearly someone the vampire king worked with.
The elusive Dr. Montrose Keegan perhaps?
“No, this is Sarah.” The venom contained in the vampire king’s voice made Ami shiver.
“The human woman who fought beside Roland Warbrook?”
“Yeah. I thought I would take a page from Bastien’s book and use her as bait.”
“And you brought her here?” The man sounded both petrified and appalled. “Are you crazy? They’ll come looking for her!”
Would they come looking for her? Did they even live?
Despair struck hard alongside fear that the drug Marcus and the others had been injected with might have killed them.
Marcus. The thought of losing him wrought more pain within her than any physical torture she had ever endured. If that drug killed him …
“Don’t shit your shorts,” the vampire king said. “They won’t come looking for her until tomorrow night. And, since they have no idea where to begin, I’ll have plenty of time to come back and get her.”
“Why don’t you just take her with you now?”
“Because I want her to be in one piece when I kill her in front of Bastien and Roland. That ain’t gonna happen if my men get their hands and teeth on her.”
Ami surreptitiously uncurled her fingers and felt the table beneath her. Cold. Metal. But lightweight. Not like the other.
“What did you do to her?”
“Tranqed her.”
A pregnant pause followed. “And she’s not dead?”
“No. Her heartbeat is all over the place. Slow one minute. Fast the next. But she’s still breathing.”
Terror tended to have that effect on her. Thankfully, they seemed to attribute it not to her waking, but to the drug.
“She should be dead,” Montrose said, his voice rife with bewilderment.
“She isn’t.”
“She will be soon. No human can withstand that dosage. You’ve seen what it does to vampires.”
“Well, it took several of the darts to take down each immortal.”
“Several?”
“Yes.”
“She should be dead.”
“She isn’t fucking dead!” the vampire roared. Glass shattered, accompanied by loud crashes.
Ami started, then risked cracking her eyelids open enough to peer through her lashes at her surroundings.
A lab. She was in a lab. She hated labs.
A pudgy man of average height cringed against one wall as the vampire king succumbed to another raging temper tantrum and overturned a desk, a table covered with beakers and medical equipment, and a trash can marked with a hazardous materials symbol.
Montrose emitted a swine-like squeal of fear as the vampire swung around and leaned in close, spittle dripping from his fangs.
“And she’d better not fucking be dead when I return tomorrow night,” the king growled.
“Th-the drug is too strong. I can’t—”
“You will do whatever you have to do to keep the bitch alive.”
Trembling, the man stared up at the vamp with wide eyes.
This must be Montrose Keegan. He was human, had his own lab, worked with vampires, yet feared them.
Satisfied that his orders would be followed, the vampire swept from the room.
Montrose slumped against the wall for all of ten seconds, then took off after him, tripping through the door then up what sounded like a full flight of stairs.
As soon as he left, Ami opened her eyes and sat up. The vampire had dumped her on a steel gurney, standard hospital grade with no manacles or other forms of restraint. The lab encircling her was sizable and possessed an impressive array of equipment, some of which the mad vampire king had destroyed. If the vampire flew into such rages often, it was no wonder Montrose had had to replenish his funds.
Swinging her legs over the side of the gurney, Ami hopped down and looked for a window through which she might escape. There were none. Nor were there any exterior doors. The only way in or out was through the hallway and up the stairs Montrose Keegan had just traveled.
Was this another basement lab, like the one he had kept during his work with Bastien?