The gasp was right by Blade’s ear, like a lover coming, intimate and just for the two of them.
“Look at me,” he whispered as he eased back while leaving the knife in place. “Dr. Randall Hertz, look at me—that’s it. That’s right. Now, listen carefully. Your legal address is One-Oh-Nine Prescott Lane in Charleston, South Carolina. You have a wife, Susan. You have two children, Martin, who goes by Marty and is named after your father, and the other one is Mary. The idea to go with M names was your wife’s.”
Those eyes got wider as that face got even paler.
“If you give me the codes to the cages in the experimentation unit, I won’t leave here and go directly to your house and slaughter the three of them wherever I find them.”
“Please,” the man breathed. “Please, don’t hurt my—”
“You have tortured and killed males and females here. You have taken them from their families. You have injected them with drugs and subjected them to experiments for the last ten years. You have left this fucking shithole and gone home to your fucking mate and your young while they have suffered. You’ve slept like a fucking baby in your goddamn bed, and filled your belly, and enjoyed all the creature comforts during your breaks—while those in the steel cages with the wires and the IVs and the motherfucking implants and electrodes suffered. So considering all that, I’m presenting you with an opportunity to save your family that you do not deserve. Give me the codes.”
It was, of course, all bullshit.
The first thing Blade had done when he’d come up behind the man, spun him around, and submitted him against the corridor’s wall? Burrowed into that brain and retrieved the codes.
But that was the difference between vampires and symphaths. A vampire would have gotten what he needed, slit the throat, and gone along his way. A symphath? This emotional exchange was a feeding that was necessary. He consumed the surges of emotion, lived for the flares along the grid, hungered for that priceless instant before death rendered this man nothing but a wind-down of biological functions.
“Give me the codes,” he prompted.
“S-s-s-seven-twenty-two-nineteen-eighty-one. T-there’s only o-o-one.”
Blade smiled. “Your birth date. How cute. But not very safe. You should have gone with something more unusual, and used a few of them. What if someone infiltrated this facility with an eye toward destroying what you’ve worked so hard for.”
Down at the gold knife, Blade’s hand was getting coated in warm, fresh blood, the tide lazy because of a lack of pressure and the erratic heart rate. It was almost like he’d come inside the man, his ejaculate making a reappearance.
Abruptly, he had to steady the scientist by wrapping an arm around the small of his back. As if they were waltzing. “Randy, let me ask you something.”
Moaning. Fluttering of the eyes. Like the dying man was in ecstasy.
Blade gave him a little shake. “Randy, did you honestly think one of us wasn’t going to come for you? After all these years, and all the different sites, did you really not think that, sooner or later, we were going to find you?”
With that, Blade twisted the knife.
Then he snapped off the hilt.
As the body dropped to his feet, and that ruby red stain instantly doubled in size, Blade dropped what he had gripped onto the chest. The black wrap of boxing tape made him think of how long it had taken him to attend to the weapon’s grip, and he smiled, wondering what humans would make of such a dagger.
Except they weren’t going to find it. When he was done here, there wasn’t going to be anything bigger than the diameter of a quarter left, and more to the point, the lab’s owners were going to be so busy hiding the remains of the site, no kinds of forensic investigation would be performed.
Such a shame. At over sixteen hundred dollars an ounce, there was a pretty penny in the weapon, and at least if it spooked some human, he’d get some value out of its abandonment. And he would have taken both parts back with him, but he preferred to leave something of himself behind in his victims.
With grim intent, Blade stepped over his prey and kept going.
He knew what he was going to find.
But he hoped, this time finally… he would be wrong, and some of the subjects would still be alive.
NINE
SO YOU’VE CHANGED your mind.”
As Gus repeated the words Daniel had just thrown out at the guy, the good doctor mostly kept the disappointment from his voice. And clearly, this wasn’t the first piece of bad news C.P.’s head scientist had gotten tonight. Even before he’d sat down at the table just off the big kitchen, he’d looked like he’d been hit by a truck.
“I’m sorry,” Daniel said. Then he glanced at Lydia. They reached for each other’s hands at the same time, and as she squeezed his palm, he let out a long breath. “I just…”
Gus held up both his palms. “I’m not going to argue with you. Don’t worry about that.”
“We’ve come to a mutual decision,” Daniel finished.
Lydia nodded and brushed a wisp of hair out of her eyelashes. “We think it’s… time to live instead of trying desperately not to die.”
The doctor nodded and sat back. Then he clapped his thighs and rubbed the top of his legs, his torso rocking in his chair like he was frustrated but trying to stay cool. “I get it. Trust me—”
The clipping sounds were dim at first, but as they got louder, Gus dropped a cuss word. Or seven. “And here she is, Miss America,” he muttered under his breath.
At that moment, C.P. Phalen entered the alcove, and as usual, her perfume was like the beat of her stilettos—a banner announcing her presence. Not that she needed the extra highlight. With those heels, her Truth or Dare Madonna hair, and that tended-to face, she was polished as her marble floors and just as cozy. Daniel had never seen her out of her wardrobe of business suits, and had long ago decided she’d come into the world looking like the evil villain in a Marvel movie.
“So I gather we’re not moving forward,” she said.
“No.” He glanced again at Lydia. When she nodded firmly, he murmured, “I’m sorry.”
Actually, the more honest statement was that he was confused as fuck. He’d had one plan. Then another. And now he was back where he started with refusing that Vita-12b the lab had cooked up. For a military man with a strict sense of discipline, the flip-flopping was making him mental—and he was no happier with this resolution than he’d been with the other, go-for-it one.
He was still leaving Lydia alone. And sooner rather than later.
The difference was that at least now she didn’t want him to keep with the medical pollution. She just wanted… to be with him.
Same page at the same time, finally.
Not that C.P. was happy about it.
The woman looked at Gus, who was focused on the Coke can he’d brought in from the kitchen. The guy seemed to run on the stuff, yet he was never twitchy, never the kind who bounced a foot under the table or tapped fingers. Then again, he’d probably last slept a full night through back in the nineties and was running on fumes.
C.P. pulled a chair out and sat down at Gus’s left. As the man shifted his seat a little away from her, you didn’t need to be a body language expert to see the rift between the two.