Somber silence enfolded them, made worse by the sickening stench that constantly assaulted them.
“Tell me something,” Chris said. “Have you guys ever dealt with a situation this . . . dark . . . before?”
“Yes,” they answered simultaneously. Seth and David had seen trials the others would never believe.
“Okay. Pity party is over. You guys go ahead and do your thing. I’ll start making calls.”
“Make them outside.” Seth didn’t want the man to stay down here and stare at the bodies he felt he had placed in these rooms.
“Is he dead?”
Emrys, Donald, and Nelson stood in the observation room that overlooked one operating room on one side and a second on the opposite. Both of the rooms below looked very much like the ORs one might find in a hospital. Except the table in the center rested atop a titanium pedestal and was bolted to the floor with titanium screws coated in heavy concrete.
The patient they currently studied was held immobile by steel manacles it would take a blow torch hours to cut through. Two at the wrists. Two just above the elbows. Two across the thighs. And two more at his ankles. A ninth steel manacle, covered in a strip of leather, kept him from moving his head.
The short stubs of his dreadlocks poked out above it.
A narrow sheet had been draped across his groin to spare the partners’ delicate feelings.
Delicate my ass, Emrys thought, eyeing Donald resentfully. The man acted like he shit diamonds.
He returned his gaze to the captive. “No. He’s sleeping.” Sedated actually, but that was need-to-know.
Both vampires had been in pretty bad shape after their examination by Emrys’s medical team. The other one had left half his damn brain on the wall and hadn’t cleaned up as well, so Emrys had shown Donald and his yes-man this one first.
“Why is he restrained?”
Because he’s fucking Charles Manson times a thousand. They both were. “The torture the immortals subjected them to has driven them insane.” He had not yet confided that the virus tended to have that effect on any humans infected with it. He had removed that little tidbit from any and all information he had handed over to Donald, who may have wondered how exactly they would command an army of supersoldiers who were totally off their rockers.
Emrys would figure out the whole insanity thing later. After he made his first billion.
He pressed a button on the wall beside him. “Proceed, Nate.”
A man in scrubs and gloves stepped into view. A blue surgical mask hid his face. A cap the same color covered most of his light brown hair.
Rolling a cart full of instruments along with him, he stopped beside the vampire.
“Check this out,” Emrys said, smiling in anticipation.
Picking up a scalpel, Nate pressed it to the vampire’s waist on the far side and carved a deep path across the vamp’s abdomen.
Blood welled and spilled out of the wound that, on the battlefield, would have required the attention of a medic and taken a human soldier out of play. As they watched, the wound narrowed, the gaping sides drawing together as though magnetized, then sealing. Scar tissue formed, then faded. All in a matter of minutes.
Donald stepped closer to the glass. “Holy shit.”
Even that little pissant, suck-up Nelson moved closer to the glass and stared with wide eyes.
Again, Emrys depressed the button. “Demonstration number two, please, Nate.”
Nodding, Nate left their line of sight for a few seconds. When he returned, he wore protective ear phones and carried a Smith & Wesson M&P. He raised the semiautomatic pistol and aimed it at the vampire’s torso.
Donald and Nelson both stuck their fingers in their ears.
Pussies.
“Fire in the hole,” Nate called and squeezed the trigger. Emrys had told him to leave the silencer off for effect.
The vampire’s body jerked as a hole sprang open in his chest.
Blood welled and spilled from the wound in thin rivulets that wound their way down the vampire’s sides to drip onto the table. Moments passed. A misshapen lump of metal slowly rose to the entrance of the wound and tumbled out.
The ass-kisser gaped. “You are shitting me!”
The hole closed, sealed itself, and began to scar over. It took longer than Emrys would’ve liked because the vampire was drugged (and would have taken longer if they hadn’t pumped him full of extra blood), but the men beside him were no less astonished.
Donald turned to Emrys. “He’s still alive?”
“Yes. After what he endured in the immortal’s compound, we thought it kinder to sedate him.”
“I want a closer look.”
“I thought you might. Follow me.”
Emrys led them down to the room they kept the Black vampire in, glad Donald hadn’t asked to see the other one. The White vampire’s wounds weren’t healing as quickly because they had nearly OD’d him on the tranquilizer, so he was still in pretty rough shape. They’d slapped some makeup on him to hide the worst of it, but that wouldn’t fly up close and personal.
Emrys waited while both men donned scrubs over their suits.
Nate nodded to each of them in turn as they entered.
Donald leaned over the recumbent form on the table. The vampire’s medium brown skin was smooth and free of wounds, the blood that had not yet dried and the expelled bullet the only evidence left that he had been cut and shot.
Donald held his hand out for the scalpel. “May I?”
Nate met Emrys’s gaze.
Emrys nodded.
When Nate handed over the blade, Donald sliced a deep gash across the vampire’s thigh.
Like the others, the wound welled with blood, then closed and healed.
“See?” Emrys said. “No special effects.”
“Are they really as fast and as strong as you say they are?”
“You saw the video. Did your analysts find anything to indicate the footage had been altered in any way or sped up?”
Donald shook his head.
“We are going to be so rich,” Nelson said, his expression full of awe as he stared down at the vampire.
For once, Emrys agreed with him.
And so did Donald, who at last met Emrys’s gaze. “Let’s talk.”
Melanie felt strange in her new vampire-hunting togs. Almost as if she were playing dress-up. Instead of her usual jeans and Chuck Taylors, she wore boots and black cargo pants with a butt-load of pockets. A black turtleneck hugged her torso. A gun belt hung on each hip, sporting Sig Sauer P220s. Her breasts were flattened by a Kevlar vest. A bandolier sporting a dozen daggers draped across her chest. Several auto-injectors full of the antidote filled one hip pocket. Extra clips and auto-injectors containing a human dose of tranquilizer filled the other.
Bastien paced the bedroom they shared, throwing off a real caged tiger vibe.
“Is it that you’re pissed?” she asked finally. “Or are you just worried?”
“Just worried?” he repeated. “We’re heading into the den of the men who shot you three times in the chest. Men who tortured Ami. Men who left piles of bodies behind at the compound Seth and David found. Just worried doesn’t cover it.”
“I’m immortal now, Bastien. I’m also wearing a vest. And I’ve already been trained, so it’s not like I’m going into this blind or unprepared.”
“Immortal doesn’t mean immortal. It means almost immortal.”
“You’re going up against the same people,” she pointed out. “Why—”
“I didn’t nearly die twice in recent weeks.”
“If I’ve cheated death twice, I can cheat it again.”
“Don’t joke about this.”
She sighed. “I’m sorry. I don’t want you to think I’m not taking all of this seriously. I’m taking it very seriously. I know any of us could be killed tonight. I also know that having me around to both kick ass and serve as a medic will be to your advantage. And if, when we find Cliff and Joe, either one of them has gone over the edge, I know that I’m most likely the only one who will be able to talk them down and bring them back under control without hurting them.”