“Well, try not to make too much of a mess. I’m tired of all of the blame-it-on-Bastien shit wrecking my home.”
Bastien’s throat finally expanded enough for him to speak. “I thought you wanted to kill me, too,” he wheezed.
David shook his head. “I just planned to kick your ass.”
“Gee, thanks.” Any way it went, he was screwed. His big battle with Roland a couple of years ago had shown him quite clearly that any immortal hundreds of years older than him could pretty much wipe the floor with him. Sure, he’d get some hits in and do some damage of his own, but that’s about all he would do.
He looked from one to the next to the last and thought of Melanie curled up in his bed, still ill from the transformation.
You know what? Fuck that defeatist crap. Melanie needed him. He’d fight every immortal and Second in this house if he had to. He wasn’t going to let her down.
David groaned and rolled his eyes.
Seth swore.
Marcus looked confused. “What?”
“Had you shown as much concern for Ami,” Seth said, “I wouldn’t wish to reduce you to ashes right now.”
“You think that decision was easy for me?” Bastien demanded. “You think I wanted Ami there? I’ve known her for almost as long as you have and love her just as much as you all do.”
David ambled forward. “Seth and I removed Ami from Emrys’s clutches. You put her directly in his path.”
“Emrys wasn’t there.”
“But if he had been—”
“Marcus would have ripped him limb from limb and I would’ve had Marcus’s back. I want Emrys dead. The longer it takes us to locate him, the more opportunity he has to share his discovery with others. Chris isn’t making any headway through his contacts. The whole vampire recruitment thing turned around and bit me on the ass.”
“Stuart didn’t betray you,” David mentioned. “From what I could glean from the mercenaries’ thoughts while we fought them—”
“They’re definitely mercenaries?”
“Yes,” David confirmed, then continued. “The men Stuart encountered at Duke listened in on his conversation with the other vampire, observed their attack on the students they fed from, then tranqed them. They knew Stuart intended to meet with an immortal—he was trying to convince Paul to go with him—and decided to use that to their advantage, implanting the tracking device, then leaving him where he might wake up and think he had escaped. They tranqed the other vamp twice by accident and destroyed him.”
Well, at least Stuart didn’t screw him over like certain other vampires had.
“Stuart’s behavior isn’t at issue here. Yours is,” Seth reminded him.
“I couldn’t reach you,” Bastien said. “And I knew Ami had the ability to find any of those soldiers again if we could just get her near them.”
“David could track them without detection.”
This again? Really? “I didn’t know he could shape-shift!”
“What’s going on?” Ami entered the training room. “My ears are burning.” She looked to Marcus. “That’s a saying, isn’t it? My ears are burning? Because someone’s talking about me?”
“Yes, love.”
“Well, Lisette, Étienne, and the others came upstairs, then everyone started looking at me funny. Marcus, you didn’t punch Seth again, did you?”
“No, sweetling. We were just . . . having a little discussion.”
She pursed her lips and eyed them with skepticism. “You’re picking on Bastien for inviting me to the battle, aren’t you?”
Seth moved toward her. “Ami—”
“It was a smart move,” she defended, thrusting out her chin.
“David was fully capable of tracking the soldiers who escaped without detection.”
“Yes, David can tell you where they went. But David can’t tell you if they stayed there or where they went if they didn’t. I can.”
“Ami—”
She held up a hand, craning her neck to look up at the eldest immortal. “I already told you I want to play an active role in bringing Emrys to justice and David agreed that I have that right. Marcus did, too.” She caught and held her husband’s gaze. “Didn’t you?”
Marcus sighed heavily. “Yes.”
“Then we don’t have a problem, do we? Now, let Bastien get back to Melanie. He’s been worried sick about her.”
Bastien waited a full minute. When no one objected, he cautiously exited the room and headed down the hallway to the second of two quiet rooms David had added recently.
Seth appeared in front of the closed door.
Bastien stopped in front of him and waited.
Seth reached out and gripped Bastien’s shoulder.
Bastien stiffened as the hallway around them fell away and was replaced by visions Seth implanted in his mind. Pain accompanied the visions. Hours of agony as men in scrubs and surgical masks cut him, burned him, removed bits of flesh. Over and over again. Hundreds of slices. Thousands of samples taken. Organs removed. Fingers and toes cut off. White hot bolts of electricity delivered to his head, his heart. A live dissection.
He had never experienced such suffering and opened his mouth to shout with it.
Seth released him. The visions vanished. The hallway resurfaced.
A cry died in Bastien’s throat before he could free it. The strength left his knees. Panting, he sank to the floor and waited for the pain to recede.
“What the hell was that?” he gasped. Bracing a hand against the wall, he struggled to regain his feet.
“That,” Seth said, “was a fraction of what you risked Ami being subjected to again when you called her to the battle.”
Horror suffused him. He had known that whatever had happened to her had been bad, but . . . “That’s what they did to her?”
“That and more. They spent six months torturing her and dissecting her without sedating her or giving her anything to numb the pain.”
Seth was right to want to kill him.
“I won’t make the same mistake twice,” Bastien vowed. Even if Ami hadn’t been the closest thing he’d had to a sister since Cat had died two centuries earlier, he wouldn’t risk her being caught and subjected to such atrocities again. He hadn’t wanted to risk it when he hadn’t known what she had suffered. If her safety had been threatened at the network and Marcus had failed to protect her, Bastien would not have hesitated to give his life to protect her himself, but . . .
Now that just didn’t seem like enough.
Seth moved away from the door and slapped Bastien on the back. “I knew you were worth saving.”
Bastien stared at him. “You said you wanted to kill me!”
The elder immortal shrugged. “Ask Roland how many times I’ve wanted to kill him. It’s a family thing.”
Bastien frowned. Did he really want to be a part of that kind of crazy-ass family?
“Yes, you do. Trust me.”
“I’d have an easier time doing that if you didn’t keep trying to choke me.”
“You pissed me off. I suggest you think twice about doing so again. As long as you always place Ami’s safety first, you and I will be good. She’s precious to me. If your stupidity should cause her death, you shall swiftly follow her into the afterlife.”
Which raised another question. “How precious is she to you?” Bastien had never seen any romantic moments pass between the two. But Seth was extremely protective of her.
Seth cuffed him on the side of the head. “Don’t be impertinent. Ami is in love with Marcus.”
“And that doesn’t really answer my question.”
“She’s like a daughter to me. Is that clear enough?”
Bastien nodded. “That’ll do.”
“Then we’re finished here. Keep me posted on Melanie’s transformation.” Seth smiled suddenly and waved at someone down the hallway.
Bastien glanced over his shoulder and saw Ami standing just outside the training room. Marcus loomed in the doorway behind her.