Forever, page 19
Daniel Joseph was in fact dying. The scent of the tumors inside of him was obvious—and it explained the withered state of his body.
Blade took a step forward. And another. And sure enough, as he intended, one of his boots landed on a dry stick and snapped it. In spite of his frailties, Daniel was on the sound, swinging that gun around as he carefully shifted off the back of the vehicle and onto legs that were clearly unreliable.
“I thought you were dead,” Blade said in a low voice.
Daniel’s facial expression didn’t change and he did not lower his weapon. He did weave a little in his boots, however, proof that he was affected by his surprise visitor.
“And it looks as if you’ve gotten yourself sick,” Blade tacked on.
Knowing that there was little time, that the females would be returning soon, Blade burrowed into the man’s mind and sifted through Daniel’s memories. One thing hadn’t changed. Of all the humans whose thoughts he’d intruded into, the soldier gave him the most resistance—
“You’re a patient then.” Blade laughed in a low purr. “I send you in to destroy the lab, and instead, you use it. Why did I not see this coming?”
The obvious answer was because he’d never caught the scent of the cancer before, but then he hadn’t been looking for it. Amazing how you could miss things when they didn’t fit into your confirmation bias: He’d been primarily concerned with Daniel betraying the mission. He hadn’t been aware there were any other fate vectors to manipulate.
And there was another now.
This human with the bad prognosis… was with the wolven. The love and the struggle with her were all over his grid, consuming him as much as the illness was, a different kind of cancer to eat him alive.
Plus her scent was on him.
Well, wasn’t this a night for surprises. And the simplest solution was to implant into Daniel Joseph’s mental chaos a clear and present imperative to blow the lab up, turning the patient into a Trojan horse. The man was the perfect ticking time bomb, accepted by the doctors and staff in the lab, and fully knowledgeable about the layout. Work of a moment.
Except… a mind under the kind of stress his was? Bad platform for instruction. When influencing a human, when getting them to do your bidding, stability in the receptacle was required. Daniel had been extraordinarily stable previously, tied to no one, with nothing but an amorphous need to destroy things and a fine shooting arm defining him. He’d been a weapon Blade had pointed at his will, and Daniel had never known the extent of the influence poured into his brain. Even when it became clear the weapon had fallen in love with a woman, Blade had thought nothing of it—other than using the emotional attachment to his own benefit.
As any symphath would do.
Except he had not known… exactly what it was that the man had fallen for.
A wolven. Who was utterly captivating.
“I have to go,” Blade lied. “I think you’ll agree it’s best for everybody that our reintroduction is something kept between ourselves.”
“Wha—”
Daniel Joseph, former operative, winced and put his hand to his head. As he did so, Blade cursed himself. Xhex had the ability to read those Homo sapiens minds, too. And if the patient was looking like he had a sharp stinger in his frontal lobe, there was a fair chance she’d probe the reason why.
And then Blade’s cover would be blown.
She had her own issues, however, so perhaps he would get lucky.
“Bye for now, Daniel Joseph,” he murmured as he stepped back into the darkness. “Rest assured, I won’t be far.”
* * *
Lydia returned to the SUV alone, the vampire having dematerialized off into the night—which was a little freaky to be around. Although given what Lydia was capable of? The fact that a person could just be somewhere one minute and gone the next shouldn’t have been that alarming.
Yet it was.
As she hotfooted it back to Daniel, snippets of the conversation played ticker tape in her mind, the memory flares precise because the interaction had just happened, and yet resonant because of her situation—
“Daniel!” she called out as she came around the rear of the vehicle.
He was right where she’d left him, but he’d slumped to the side and had his hand up to his head.
“What’s going on?” She rushed over and straightened him. “Talk to me—”
“I’m fine.” He batted at her hands. “I’m just—I’ve got a headache all of a sudden.”
“Can you stand?”
“Yeah, of course.”
The bravado was lost quick as he shifted off the back bumper and lurched into her. Gathering him up, she helped him over to the front passenger side, belted him in, and raced to get behind the wheel.
She should have known, she thought as she started the engine and put them in drive. Things never stayed on the level for very long with them.
Hitting the gas, she had a thought that she should stay up here and just find one of the access hatches into the lab. She could take him directly to the doctors that way—except no. After the showdown back in the spring, C.P.’s security team had sealed all the tunnels that ran from the mountain’s flanks into the lab. The only way to enter now was through her house, which was like Fort Knox.
She had no choice but to take the long way home.
The trail they’d used to go up to the summit was the road-like one specifically cut and maintained to ensure access of heavy machinery to the highest elevation. She’d been the one to insist that the Wolf Study Project, which was responsible for the acreage, create the emergency access for use in the event any hikers were injured.
And now she was using it for just that purpose. Not that Daniel was a hiker.
“The headache’s getting better,” he said as he sat up a little higher in the bucket seat. “I don’t know what it was.”
“Okay, but we’ll still hustle on down.”
He turned his head on the rest and looked at her. “Well, there’s one piece of good news.”
“What’s that?”
In his best Arnold Schwarzenegger voice, he said, “It’s nought a toomah.”
Lydia blurted out a laugh. “That’s not funny.”
“Sure enough is, and we have the scans to prove it.” He smiled at her. “Hey, maybe one of the undisclosed side effects of carboplatin is a sense of humor. I’m going to try some more jokes out. Knock, knock.”
Lydia pumped the brakes to keep them from gaining too much momentum. Then she jerked the steering wheel to the left to avoid a rock in the middle of the lane.
“Who’s there.”
After a pause, he said, “Guess not.”
“Guess not who?”
“No, I mean, I guess not on the jokes. I got nothing.”
She glanced over at him and smiled. “We’ll work on it together. Take a master class in jokology.”
“Sounds good.”
When she looked back again, he had closed his eyes and parted his lips. And for a split second, she pictured him in a bed somewhere, maybe in their room at C.P.’s, maybe in the clinic, his lids shut, his breathing slow, too slow.
Until it stopped altogether.
As her mind spun out over old familiar terrors, she distracted herself by thinking of the way her life had been before, her days spent counting and monitoring the wolf population on the mountain, dealing with the WSP board—which C.P. Phalen had been head of—filing for grants for money. Dealing with her boss. Working with Candy, the receptionist. There had been stress, of course, but nothing like what Daniel was going through. Things had been so much simpler then, back before her boss, Peter Wynne, had been killed… by their veterinarian. Who had been working with C.P. to test the Vita prototype on the wolf population—and prepared to betray them all.
At least until he had gone to the resort site across the valley to set an IED, so he could pretend to blow himself up and take off for parts unknown.
She and Daniel had come up on him and stopped him.
After which he had gone home and blown his own head off with a shotgun.
Between one blink and the next, Lydia remembered walking in on him.
“It’s going to be fine,” she blurted, unsure exactly what she was talking about.
“What is,” Daniel murmured.
“Everything.”
Fifteen minutes later, just as they bottomed out at the trailhead’s parking area, Daniel announced, “You know, I really am feeling better.”
“Good.” Crossing the vacant gravel square, she hit the brakes and looked both ways at the county road. “But maybe we check in with Gus anyway?”
“It’s after midnight.”
“He told us to call anytime.”
“Let’s wait a little?” He put his hand on her arm. “I swear, if I feel weird at all again, I’ll tell you. No bullshit.”
“Okay.” She forced a smile. “It’s a deal.”
As she hit the gas and got them on the rural route, he said, “What did you talk to her about? Xhex, that is. You guys were gone for a while.”
“Ah, nothing much?” She slowed down as they came into a turn, her eyes searching the shoulders for deer. “I mean, she was kind enough. I liked her. She told me to go to the mountain and I know part of my heart is always going to be there. I’m just not sure why she’s so significant.”
He cursed. “I don’t think it helped as much as I hoped.”
“You never know what comes of anything, though.” She covered his hand with her own. “I mean, I thought I was hiring a handyman and look where it led me.”
For a split second, there was a pause, but then, like he’d resolved to focus on what positives there were, Daniel smiled—and in the glow from the dashboard lights, he looked more as he had before.
“I love you,” she said.
He stretched over the console. “I love you, too.”
They kissed briefly and resettled in their separate seats, and as she refocused on the road ahead, she wrapped the normalcy of the quick contact around her like a shield.
Hold it close. Keep it close.
Beat the demons away with it.
By the time she piloted them through the gates of the Phalen estate, she was a little less worried about Daniel—although it was still a relief to pull up to the mansion’s porte cochere, walk him directly back to their bedroom, and lay him out on their bed. The way his eyes closed so quickly caused a ripple of worry, but it was nothing compared to how she’d felt as she’d come around the back of the SUV to find him slumped and holding his head.
“I’m going to go park the SUV in the garage.”
“Okay,” he murmured as he curled on his side and tucked his arm under his head. “Take your time.”
As he repositioned his cap, she leaned down and tugged it a little more into place. “I won’t be long.”
Lydia left their bedroom and had her phone in her hand even before she closed their door behind herself. But she waited to make the call until she was out in the grand foyer—
A soft chiming sound stopped her, and as it came again, in a precise rhythm to what was being piped into her ear, she pivoted around and looked up the stairs.
“Speak of the doctor,” she said as she lowered her iPhone.
Gus didn’t seem to hear her, but just as she was going to say his name, he paused in his descent and glanced down. “Oh. Hey.”
He seemed to have no clue his phone was ringing, so she held up her own. “I was just calling you.”
“You were?” He took out his cell and frowned at the screen. “Oh, so you are. Sorry.”
What was he doing upstairs, she wondered.
“Everything okay?” he asked as he continued down and stepped off the last step. “How are we doing?”
Lydia breathed in through her nose, and the subtle scent rolling off the man was a shock. If she’d been a human, she wouldn’t have caught it. But as a wolven, even in her biped form, she sure as hell did.
Gus had spent some time in very close proximity to C.P. Phalen.
“Lydia?”
“Oh, ah, sorry. Daniel has a headache. Is there any way you could—”
“Pay him a little visit without it looking like I’m doing anything?” Gus put a friendly arm around her shoulders and started walking in the direction of her bedroom. “There’s nothing I’d like to do more. Good thing I’m on call tonight, huh.”
He was so casual and relaxed… that she wondered if maybe there was a professional reason he’d been up on the second floor and smelled like the perfume C.P. always wore.
Either way, it was none of her business—and God knew she had enough on her plate.
“Yes,” she murmured. “It’s a very good thing.”
TWENTY-THREE
THERE WERE TOO many reasons to count, really.
Why Blade shouldn’t be here, that was.
This was what he told himself as he stood draped in darkness outside of a home that was a modern castle. The sprawling structure was stone and quite horizontal, only two, or perhaps in places three, stories high. Interestingly, there was no seeing into the interior. Between the security lights that glowed and some kind of covering on the windows, it was clear that both privacy and fortification efforts had been taken quite seriously.
An SUV was parked under an extensive overhang by the front entrance, and the passenger’s side door had been left open—as one would do if one were helping an infirmed into the house. Further, the vehicle was at a cockeyed angle, as if ensuring a proper angle had been the last thing on the operator’s mind.
So the wolven was going to come back, either to shut the heavy panel or to move the SUV somewhere else.
He imagined the wolven helping Daniel Joseph up the modest number of steps to the grand portal—would she have to wait for the door to be opened by a security detail, or would they have greeted her upon arrival? And once inside, where did she go?
Exhaling, Blade looked up to the sky and then he glanced around the estate. There was a detached garage set to the right, and he was willing to bet there was an underground tunnel connecting the chick to the hen beneath the parking square. Behind the mansion, a field. Behind the field, a forest.
He knew the setting by heart, even though he had never been here before. Then again, he had done his research about eighteen months ago. Aerial photographs of Deer Mountain, as well as the valley to the west of it and this flat acreage to the east, had been his first order of surveillance when he’d learned through various sources that an antiquated, subterranean laboratory had been resurrected into service. A drone had done the surveying duty, and Daniel Joseph had been the one to fly it over the area about two months before he’d been assigned the case and started his infiltration.
By applying for that handyman’s job at the Wolf Study Project.
Funny, how things came full circle. Now Blade was here, waiting for—
The door to the mansion opened and his wolven appeared in the entryway, a slip of a female compared to the scale of the place. As she exited, she was quick and light on her feet, descending the steps with alacrity—and he was so consumed by her presence that he didn’t bother to try to get a glimpse into the interior of the structure.
Whilst she shut the passenger door and then rounded the rear of the vehicle, her head was down and he was disappointed. He wanted to see her face. He settled for watching how her body moved in her casual, simple clothing.
How did her corporeal entity shift like that? How did it work on a molecular level, two forms sharing the same space?
It was as his mind chewed over the implications that he realized why he was captivated by her. He was also two things in one, part vampire, part symphath, and he had always struggled with the incompatibility of his biological makeup. As the latter, he cared about no one; as the former, he had a loyalty that was dispositive.
Thus he had to hide while he was in the Colony. And he was not accepted when he visited Caldwell. Both made sense. He had to protect himself to survive, and he didn’t trust his impulses any more than anybody else did—
As the wolven arrived at the driver’s side door, she opened it—and then paused with one foot lifted up on the runner. After a moment, she twisted around…
… and looked straight at him.
Blade’s heart stopped, and he felt that stirring go through him again. Her regard was so frank, so pointed, that he glanced down, wondering how in the fuck she saw him. He was dressed in black and even wearing a mask—
The tackle came from behind him, a body taking him down into the dry, pre-winter grass—and as he was roughly rolled over and a gun was pressed under his chin, he thought, Ah, she hadn’t seen him. She had tracked the movement of this human man.
Who had seen Blade.
As a broad hand pressed into the center of his chest, he assessed the intrusion into his personal space. It was a stunning blond specimen of a guard with a military haircut and military clothing, precisely the kind of man who, under very different circumstances, he might properly have enjoyed making the visceral acquaintance of—provided their roles were reversed and he was the one doing the mounting.
“Bad decision, my guy,” the human said.
On the contrary, Blade thought.
There was a communicator mounted on the guard’s shoulder, and it required a patience Blade had in abundance to wait until the hand on his sternum went for the Velcro-mounted unit—
Just as a shout traveled over from the porte cochere, Blade slapped both his palms on either side of the gun’s muzzle and rerouted its business end off to the side. Then he pulled a trade-place, overpowering the human and pinning him facedown to the browned lawn.
Blade didn’t hesitate. He jerked the man’s head back and twisted.
The crack was loud enough to carry, and the Adonis instantly went limp.
A quick glance back to the porte cochere, and Blade became infuriated. The wolven was starting to run—and not for reentry into the safety of that house. No, the female was coming at him, even though she didn’t know how many of whatever it was were out in the darkness.
