And from the looks of the guy, he might as well be.
The previously fit pain in the ass was sitting on the back of the SUV, looking like he was still recovering from some serious wounds, six months after the skirmishes on this very mountain. Except that wasn’t it, was it. As the wind shifted, the scent of the human man drifted over to him, and Blade flared his nostrils. When he caught what was on the air, he refused the conclusion outright. Except there was no denying it.
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.”