He’d started with the traffic cameras around the institute, using them to track Samantha and Nadia after they’d each left work. Nadia had disappeared from camera view almost immediately, but Trey had been able to follow Samantha for almost fifteen miles until they’d lost her on Interstate 30 heading west toward Fort Worth. Since he had no idea where she might have been heading at that point, he’d tracked down her sister and talked to her, hoping Samantha might have told her something. But beyond freaking the poor woman out, he hadn’t gotten anything useful from that conversation. Though it seemed pretty damn obvious Loralei was suspicious of him for some reason. If he wasn’t so worried about Samantha, he would have been concerned that his soul mate had already spilled his pack’s secrets to her sister. Right now, he simply didn’t have time to think about it.
STAT had done their thing next, digging through the hours of tollbooth video from all over the Dallas/Fort Worth area, checking into Samantha’s and Nadia’s credit cards, even trying to ping the location of their cell phones. Nothing had worked. When Connor had called to tell him that they’d struck out with the autopsy records, Trey had been left with little choice but to drive around the city, hoping to get lucky.
By the time the sun had come up, he had been forced to accept that plan wasn’t going to work. With no other avenues to explore, he’d finally headed back to his apartment before he fell asleep at the wheel. He prayed that a hot shower and a little food would clear his head enough to allow him to come up with another angle to approach this situation—because he was so scared for Samantha that he was about to lose his damn mind.
When he opened the door to his apartment, his nose was assaulted by multiple scents that had his body fighting to wake up. There was that overly sweet odor coming from inside even as the burnt electrical smell suddenly filled the hallway behind him.
Trey was reaching for his service-issued weapon when a ton of bricks slammed into his back, pinning his arms to his side and smashing him through the partially opened door of his apartment. His werewolf instincts responded faster than his sluggish human mind was in the mood for, claws and fangs extending, muscles shifting, to twist him around in midair so he landed on top of whoever had tackled him.
But the grunt of pain that exploded through the small apartment was all his. Shit. It felt like he’d landed on a frigging boulder. He knew without even being able to see him that he was dealing with the guy he’d fought with in the Cedar Ridge Preserve.
Trey moved to gain a little space, then slammed his head backward as hard as he could. He connected with something that crunched—the guy’s nose most likely. But even though the sound told Trey he’d done some damage, the arms around his torso and arms didn’t loosen a bit. If anything, they clamped down even harder. It was like this thing couldn’t feel pain at all.
Movement to the side caught his eye. Trey jerked his head that way to see a short, stocky man who was all shoulders and arms swinging a baseball bat in his direction. He yanked aside just in time to keep the guy from smashing in his skull, the bat glancing off his temple and thudding hard into his shoulder. Stars exploded behind his eyes and Trey had to fight to keep his grip on consciousness as hard as he fought against the man holding him.
“He wants him alive you fool!” a female voice hissed as the arms around his chest loosened a little and the guy with the bat was suddenly jerked back out of Trey’s sight and sent flying across the room. “He’s no use if his head is bashed in.”
“How are we supposed to get him out of here if we don’t knock him out?” the man across the room muttered. “He’s got frigging claws and fangs!”
There was a laugh and then Nadia Payne was in front of Trey, a vicious grin on her face. “Claws and fangs are overrated.”
Before Trey had time to blink, she morphed from her human form to a bug-eyed vita lamia with a cackling laugh. From the grunt of shock that came out of the goon on the far side of the living room, the man with the baseball bat was clearly surprised to discover Nadia was a life-sucking vampire. He stopped wondering how much the stocky guy knew when the vita reached out her pale hands toward him. If she got her hands on him while he was trapped like this, he was done for.
He let his wolf instincts take over, shifting until he heard bones cracking as his whole body began to reshape itself. The noise must have startled the monstrously large man holding him because his grip loosened. Trey broke free with a savage growl, slashing his claws across the vita’s face and shoving her away at the same time. He paused for half a second to make sure the guy with the bat was still standing on the far side of the living room, then he spun, reaching for his SIG, ready to put a bullet through the man who’d been holding him captive. But then he saw the guy’s face and he froze.
“Kyson?”
Trey suddenly felt like he couldn’t get enough air into his lungs as his eyes locked with the friend he thought was dead.
Trey was faintly aware of long, cold fingers wrapping around his neck from behind, but couldn’t force himself to care—not until he felt his soul being ripped out through the icy contact. His inner wolf responded, snarling and telling him to twist around to defend himself. But before he could move, Kyson’s huge hands came up and grabbed him again, holding him firm as the vita began to pull the life right out of him. Trey realized his groan of pain sounded a lot like that guy downtown had made right before Trey rescued him.
There was no one here to rescue Trey, though, and as every muscle in his body locked up in spasms of excruciating pain, there was no way in hell he was going to be able to rescue himself.
He felt like he was a battery being drained too fast. He went from exhausted to not caring about anything in the span of a few seconds. The last thing he saw before fading into darkness was Kyson gazing down at him with sad, sorrowful eyes, as if he didn’t want to be part of this.
If that was true, then why was his best friend helping the vita lamia kill him?
***
Samantha leaned back against one of the stone walls of her cell, trying her hardest to tune out the constant drone of Louis’s obnoxious voice. He was talking in the same tone she’d always identified as his mentoring voice, but now that she knew he was a certified whack-a-doodle, she decided she couldn’t stand it. Of course, it didn’t help that he’d spent the past two hours going on nonstop about how brilliant—if misunderstood—he was. During that time, she’d learned more about bringing dead people back to life than she ever wanted to know. The scary part of it was that Louis really was brilliant. Unfortunately, he was also bent as an old coat hanger.
“I first proposed my resurrection theory during my third-year rotation at Johns Hopkins,” he murmured.
When he didn’t say any more, Samantha looked up, curious despite herself. Louis was staring intently at a monitor on the wall, which was displaying an enlarged image from the electron microscope on the desk. From her angle, she couldn’t see what he was so interested in, but it shut him up and that was good enough for her.