Deeper Than Midnight (7 page)

For a moment, no one said a thing. Sterling Chase’s absence was the elephant in the room, the topic on everyone’s mind, if not their tongues.

“No word,” Gideon answered. “His cell rings straight to voicemail and he’s not returning my calls.”

“Same here,” Dante put in from the other side of the conference table. Of all the warriors, Tess’s mate was easily Chase’s tightest ally. Just a year or so ago, when Chase had come on board with the Order, he and Dante had been at each other’s throats. In the time since, they’d had each other’s backs as friends and brethren. But even Dante seemed doubtful about Chase now. “I tried him just before we came into this meeting but got no answer. Harvard’s dodging us hardcore this time.”

“That’s not like him at all.” Elise glanced at Tegan as he reached out to draw her hand into his. “He’s too responsible to just take off like this without any explanation.”

“Is he?” Tegan’s question was gentle, but there was tension in his jaw—a fierce protectiveness—as he looked at his troubled Breedmate beside him. “I know you want to think the best of Chase, but you need to look at him through clear eyes now. You saw him last night, Elise. You told me how he acted with you in the chapel. Was that the Chase you think you know?”

“No,” she answered quietly, her eyes downcast as she slowly shook her blond head.

Earlier that day, Elise had relayed to everyone her confrontation with Chase in the moments before he’d left the compound, how he’d lashed out at her, full of anger and crudeness. Lucan had bristled to hear about the whole thing, but no worse than Tegan. The other Gen One still vibrated with palpable malice toward Chase’s actions, despite the care with which he handled his beloved mate’s feelings for her former kinsman.

“I shouldn’t have struck him,” Elise murmured. “I knew he was upset. I should have walked away and left him alone. That’s what he told me to do. I shouldn’t have pushed him—”

“Hey,” Tegan said, tenderly lifting her chin with his fingertips. “You didn’t push him out that door last night. He went willingly.” Tegan glanced Lucan’s way then. “Let’s face it, Harvard’s been walking a damn thin line for a while now. Maybe it’s time we all start looking at him with clearer eyes. Time we stop making excuses for Chase and acknowledge what I’m sure more than one of us has been thinking about him lately.”

Lucan caught the meaning in Tegan’s knowing stare and in the statement that hung over the room like a funeral shroud. Hell, how could he mistake Tegan’s point, considering Lucan’s own recent history and the battle he’d waged not so long ago to resist falling victim to the weakness that plagued all of the Breed?

“Bloodlust,” Lucan said, grim with the thought. He glanced up at the faces of his Breed brethren seated around the table, more aware than any of them—except Tegan, that is—of what it meant to become addicted to the thirst. Once a vampire stepped foot on that path, the decline was swift. Plummet too far and you never came back. “No offense, T, but I hope you’re wrong.”

Tegan’s stare remained steady, too certain. “And if I’m not?”

When no one else filled the answering silence, Dante hissed a curse. “Either way, we need to haul Harvard’s ass back into the compound and set him straight. Someone needs to tell him to pull his shit together before it’s too late. I’ll pound it into his thick skull personally, if that’s what it takes.”

Lucan wanted to agree with Dante’s argument but found himself shaking his head the longer he considered it. “Chase knew what he was doing when he walked out of here. And if he didn’t, then he sure as hell knows now. We’ve got bigger problems to deal with than cleaning up another of Harvard’s messes. He’s AWOL, and that’s coming on the heels of a fucked-up mission that might have gone even further south if not for Hunter having been with Chase on patrol. Let’s not forget it was Chase who failed to keep Lazaro and Christophe Archer safe during Kellan’s rescue last week. He’s been screwing up left and right. Frankly, he’s becoming a liability.”

“I can go after him, try to bring him around,” Dante insisted. “I mean, Christ, Lucan. He’s proved to be solid in combat. He’s saved my ass more than once, and he’s done a lot of good for the Order since he’s been on board. Don’t you think he deserves some benefit of doubt here?”

“Not if his behavior jeopardizes the Order’s objectives,” Lucan replied. “And not if his presence here endangers the security of this compound or anyone within these walls. Like Tegan said, nobody pushed Chase out of the fold. He walked out of here on his own free will.”

Dante stared in grim silence, along with the others seated around the table.

This wasn’t a call Lucan wanted to make, but he was leader here, and, ultimately, his word was law. None of the warriors would argue the subject any further. Not even Dante, who slumped back into his seat and muttered a low curse.

Lucan cleared his throat. “Now, let’s get back to Murdock—”

Before he could finish the thought, the tech lab’s glass doors hissed open and Rio’s Breedmate, Dylan, rushed into the room. Her freckle-spattered face was pale against the fiery color of her hair, her eyes wide with panic.

“Tess sent me,” she blurted, skidding to a sharp halt. “She’s in the infirmary. She needs help quick!”

Dante shot out of his seat. “Oh, fuck. Is it the baby?”

“No.” Dylan shook her head. “Nothing like that—Tess is fine. It’s Kellan Archer. Something’s wrong with him—really wrong. He’s in a lot of pain. We can’t get him to stop convulsing.”

The meeting broke up in a rush of movement, Lucan and Dante leading the way. Everyone scrambled down to the infirmary at the other end of the corridor.

Dylan hadn’t been exaggerating when she said the situation with young Kellan Archer was bad. The Breed youth was doubled over on his infirmary bed, clutching at his abdomen and moaning in obvious agony.

“His nausea started worsening about half an hour ago,” Tess volunteered as the group crowded into the room. Kellan’s grandfather, the Gen One civilian Lazaro Archer, stood at one side of the bed, Tess at the other. Her hand rested lightly on the teen’s back as another deep convulsion rippled through his body.

“What’s wrong with Kellan?” asked little Mira, who stood nearby with Gideon’s mate, Savannah. The girl clutched an opened book to her chest, as though she’d recently been reading from it. Her eyes were wide and anxious. “Is he going to be okay?”

“Kellan’s got a bad tummyache,” Savannah told her, glancing to Gideon and Lucan as she guided the child away from the bed. She spoke and moved with utter calm, but her dark brown eyes were grave with concern.

The fact was, no one knew what was wrong with Kellan Archer. Instead of rebounding after he’d been abducted and tortured on Dragos’s command, he seemed to be getting weaker. He needed to feed, that much was certain, but he wasn’t yet in any shape to venture topside and find a Host on his own.

Bad enough Lucan had been forced to open the Order’s headquarters to Lazaro Archer and his grandson after Dragos razed their Darkhaven and obliterated their kin. If things didn’t improve with Kellan damn soon, Lucan was going to have to break yet another rule of the compound and bring a human inside to feed the kid.

Renata reached out to take Mira’s hand. “Come on, Mouse. Why don’t you come with Savannah and me for a little while? We can come back when Kellan feels better, all right?”

Mira nodded but kept her head turned toward the youth suffering on the bed until the other two Breedmates had removed her from the room. No sooner had they gone, the young vampire doubled over into a deeper spasm, saliva dripping from his open mouth.

“Please,” Lazaro Archer said. “Please, do something to help my boy. He’s all I have left—”

A terrible groan ripped out of the Breed youth’s throat. He gagged and wheezed, then, with a great heave of his torso, he leaned across the infirmary bed and began to vomit. A stream of liquid shot out of his mouth as he pitched forward and retched again.

Dante leapt forward and pulled Tess out of the way, sheltering her against him. Dylan and Rio rushed to grab paper towels from the cabinet nearby while Elise stepped in to comfort the youth and help clean him up.

He kept heaving, spasms racking him even after his body had expelled what little it had to give up. He tried to speak, an embarrassed moan of apology, but only managed a raw rasp of sound.

“Shh,” Elise whispered, stroking his damp hair where he’d crumpled on the mattress. “It’s okay now, Kellan. Don’t worry about anything except feeling better.”

Dylan was on her hands and knees below, mopping up the mess on the floor as Rio worked on stripping away the soiled blanket and sheet. Lucan heard Dylan’s indrawn gasp and watched as she suddenly went very still next to Kellan Archer’s bed.

“Um … you guys?” She stood up then, a wad of wet paper toweling in her hand. “I think I know what was making Kellan sick.”

Lucan stared, a feeling of sickness opening up in his own gut as Dylan held out the soiled, soggy clump. In the center of it was a coin-size silver disc.

“Ah, Christ. Ah, fuck me,” Gideon murmured. His face went slack as he reached out to take the object out of its wet nest of spittle and stomach acid. “I don’t believe this. Son of a bitch!”

“What is it?” Tegan asked, grim as the rest of them.

“It’s a GPS chip,” Gideon replied. “A goddamn tracking device.” He raked a hand over the top of his head and turned to face Lucan. “We’ve been compromised.”

Lucan exhaled, the magnitude of his mistake hitting him like a freight train plowing into the center of his being.

Now it all made sense. The abduction of Kellan Archer. The too-easy rescue. The simultaneous attack on Archer’s Darkhaven—an attack that was so thorough, it would have ensured the boy had no place else to go but back to the compound and into the protection of the Order.

Dragos had staged the entire thing, all for this purpose.

He knew where they lived now. He’d known for days, ever since Lucan had made the decision to allow the civilians into the Order’s home.

The only question that remained was how long it would be before Dragos or his army of homegrown killers brought this war right up to the mansion’s front gates.

A
re you hungry, darling? I’ve asked Tilda to prepare something nice for you, but if you’d like anything to eat before the dining room is ready, you need only ask and I’ll get it for you. Anything you wish—”

“I’m fine.” Corinne turned away from the window in the room she’d been brought to a short while ago, after her mother had ushered her into the house and her father had disappeared into his study to confer with Mason and the other Darkhaven guards.

The fuss and activity were making Corinne uncomfortable. Now that she was home, all she wanted was a few private moments alone with her parents. Time enough to tell them how badly she’d missed her family … and how desperately she needed their help.

When her mother began to wonder aloud about calling the kitchen for a tray of food to be brought up to the room, Corinne walked over and clasped hold of her hands. “I’m all right, really. Please, don’t feel you have to fuss over me.”

“But I can’t help it. Do you know how many times I prayed for the chance to fuss over you again?” Regina Bishop’s skin was moist and cool, her fingers trembling as they gripped Corinne’s in an urgent hold. Tears swam in her kind eyes. “Good lord, are you really here? I’m looking at you—I feel you, alive and beautiful as ever, but I can hardly believe this is happening. We lived a nightmare after you went missing.”

“I know,” Corinne acknowledged softly. “I’m sorry for what all of you went through too.”

“Lottie cried for weeks after you disappeared. She’ll be so happy to learn that you’re home again.”

Corinne smiled at the thought of reuniting with her little sister. Although both were born with the Breedmate birthmark, she and Charlotte were not blood related. Nevertheless, they’d been fiercely devoted to each other—perhaps all the more so, having been born into neglect and abandonment as infants, only to become family as wards of the Bishops.

“Is she here, Mother?”

“Oh, no, darling. Charlotte has her own Darkhaven in London with her mate and their two sons. In fact, her youngest and his Breedmate just celebrated the birth of their first son a few weeks ago.”

Corinne felt a bittersweet jolt in her core. Five years Corinne’s junior, Lottie had been a gawky adolescent at the time of Corinne’s abduction. Now she was grown up with a mate and adult children of her own. Corinne should have been happy for her sister; deep down, she was. But the news only drove the point more sharply that time had marched on while Corinne was gone.

Far more painful was the reminder of all the things she had lost—the precious things that had been taken from her—while Dragos held her imprisoned. Now that she was here, back in her parents’ home, she could put all of her energy into reclaiming the pieces of her own broken life.

“I didn’t see Sebastian when we came in earlier,” she said, recalling the handsome, studious Breed youth who’d been so patient with his adopted sisters. He’d been twenty the year Corinne was abducted. Now he was probably leader of his own Darkhaven, with a beautiful Breedmate and half a dozen sons of his own as well.

The long silence that met her question made Corinne draw in an anxious breath.

Regina Bishop’s mouth quivered. “Of course, you wouldn’t know. We lost Sebastian to Bloodlust more than forty years ago now.”

Corinne closed her eyes. “Oh, God. Not our sweet Sebastian.”

“I know, darling.” Her mother’s voice was small, still rife with grief over her son all these decades later. “Sebastian had changed in the years after you went missing. We knew he was struggling, that his thirst was consuming him, but he withdrew from us. He tried to hide his problems from us, wouldn’t accept help. He’d been on a terrible killing spree in the city that night. When he came home, he was covered in blood. None of us could reach him. He was Rogue by then, too far gone to be saved. And he knew it. Sebastian was always so perceptive, so smart and sensitive. He locked himself in your father’s study. We heard the gunshot not even a moment later.”

“I’m so sorry.” Corinne hugged her, feeling the anguish as the other woman stifled a tight sob. “It must have been awful.”

“It was.” Sorrowful eyes met her gaze as she withdrew from her mother’s embrace. “Until you’ve lost a child—and until tonight, I’d thought I’d lost two—no one can imagine what it’s like to feel such hollowness inside.”

Corinne said nothing, unsure how to respond. She bore her own emptiness, endured her own loss, even now. It was that loss that had brought her home, even more so than her own selfish needs for comfort and the sheltering arms of her family.

“You must recognize this room, don’t you?” her mother asked abruptly, wiping at the corners of her eyes.

Halfheartedly but glad for the momentary distraction, Corinne took in her surroundings. Her glance traveled over the elegant dark cherry sleigh bed and the antique chest and dresser that still looked so familiar to her, despite all these years. The linens and window treatments were different. So were the walls, no longer swathed in yards of shimmering peach silk but painted a soothing matte shade of dove gray. “This used to be my bedroom.”

“It still is,” Regina replied, a forced brightness in her voice. “We’ll put it back exactly as it was before, if that’s what you’d like. We can start tomorrow, darling. I’ll take you shopping for a new wardrobe in the morning, and we can make an appointment with my decorator to refurnish the whole room, top to bottom. We’ll set everything back to rights and it will seem as though you’ve never been gone a day. Everything can be made exactly the same as it was before, Corinne. You’ll see.”

Corinne was hardly aware she was shaking her head until she noticed her mother’s crestfallen expression. “Nothing can ever be the same. It’s all changed now.”

“We’ll fix it, darling.” Her mother nodded as if her certainty alone would make it so. “You’re home now, and that’s the most important thing. None of the rest matters.”

“Yes,” Corinne murmured. “It does matter. Things happened to me while I was gone. Terrible things that I need to tell you about. You and Daddy both …”

She hadn’t meant to blurt it out like this. Her intent had been to sit both her parents down together and gently walk them through the circumstances of her captivity as best she could. Now she knew there would be no graceful way to convey the truth, as she watched dread creep into Regina Bishop’s pretty face.

The two of them could have passed as sisters in public, both of them youthful looking, the process of aging halted near thirty years old. It was the same for all Breedmates, due to their genetic anomalies and the life-giving power found in a Breed male’s blood. Corinne was gone seventy-plus years, but she’d hardly aged. She’d been kept alive, deliberately kept young and viable because that’s where her value had been to her captor.

Regina Bishop saw this truth now; Corinne watched the realization dawn, as though her mother hadn’t really looked at her closely until that very moment. “Tell me,” she whispered. “Tell me what happened to you, Corinne. Why would anyone want to hurt you?”

Corinne gave a slow shake of her head. “Why would anyone want to hurt any of the young Breedmates who were captured along with me? Insanity, maybe. Evil, certainly. That’s the only way to explain the things he did. The torture and experimentation …”

“Oh, darling,” Regina cried, the words lost within a choked intake of breath. “All this time? All these years, you’ve been made to suffer such things? To what end?”

“We were used for a very specific purpose,” Corinne replied, her voice sounding wooden even to her own ears. “The one who took us—the one who locked us in a lightless prison and treated us no better than cattle—needed our bodies to help him grow his own army. We weren’t his only captives. He also had another, a creature I’d only heard about in stories Sebastian used to tell Lottie and me to frighten us.”

Her mother’s face drained of all its color. “What are you saying?”

“There was an Ancient imprisoned in the labs too,” she said, speaking past Regina Bishop’s recoiled gasp. “Our captor used him for experimentations as well. And he used him for breeding, to father Gen One vampires who’d be raised in service—enslavement, more like it—to the madman who’d controlled all of us.”

For a long moment, her mother simply stared, mute and pale. A tear rolled down her cheek as the understanding settled on her fully. “Oh, my dear child …”

Corinne cleared her throat. She’d gone this far now; she needed to speak the rest. “I fought every chance I got, but in the end they were stronger. It took a long time, but eventually—thirteen years ago, as best I’ve been able to guess—they got what they wanted from me.” She had to draw a deep breath in order to continue. “While I was in those awful laboratory cells, I gave birth to a son. I have a child out there somewhere. He was stolen from me just hours after he was born. Now that I’m free, I intend to get him back.”

Something wasn’t right.

As Hunter parked the car in the Order’s private hangar at the airport, he kept thinking back to Corinne’s reunion with her Darkhaven family. He kept wondering why his predator’s instincts were circling back around to Victor Bishop like a hound on a trail that had nearly gone cold.

Nearly, but not quite.

Something about Bishop’s reaction toward Corinne’s reappearance didn’t ring true. The Breed male had seemed shocked, certainly, and obviously moved to see the young woman who’d been dead to all of her kin for such a long time.

As any Darkhaven leader would be, Bishop had been notably concerned about the immediate security of his home and its inhabitants. He’d been cautious and protective, all things to be expected. Yet Hunter had detected something more in Bishop, something that seemed to run deeper than his outward expression of astonishment and relief at Corinne’s unexpected homecoming.

There had been a remoteness to Victor Bishop’s gaze as he looked at his daughter. There had been a hesitancy to the man, a hint of distraction in his demeanor, even as he’d embraced her and told her what a relief it was to see her again. Victor Bishop was hiding something. He was holding back somehow with Corinne; Hunter was sure of it.

Then again, who was he to judge when it came to any demonstration of emotion?

He had been raised to deal in logic and facts, not feelings. His instincts were honed toward stealth and combat, toward the pursuit and destruction of any given target. In those things, he was expert. And it was those very things that awaited him in Boston—both the pursuit of the Enforcement Agent who’d fled the club in Chinatown and the rooting out and destruction of Dragos and his untold number of homegrown assassins.

But still …

Suspicion nagged Hunter as he got out of the vehicle and strode toward the corporate jet inside the private hangar. Ahead of him, at the lowered steps of the Cessna, one of the pilots came out and greeted him with a polite smile.

“Mr. Smith,” murmured the human. He and his copilot were part of a discreet charter service kept on permanent retainer by the Order. Hunter knew little about the arrangement, other than that the humans who operated the private jets exclusively for the Order were top of their class and paid a good sum to ask no questions of their typically late-night clientele. “We are cleared for taxi and takeoff as soon as you are ready, Mr. Smith.”

Hunter gave a faint nod of acknowledgment, his instincts still prickling as he put his foot on the first step. It was then that the realization hit him.

Something Victor Bishop had said.

What of your abductor?
he’d demanded of Corinne.

Good God, please tell me the bastard who stole you from us is dead
.

Although neither Corinne nor Hunter had mentioned any details about where she’d been or who had held her, Victor Bishop spoke as if he knew the blame for her capture rested on a single individual.

An individual who had the Darkhaven leader visibly anxious. “Paranoid” was the word that sprang to Hunter’s mind when he recalled the hurried orders that sent Bishop’s guards in a scramble to batten down the hatches of the estate and to hustle Bishop’s mate and Corinne into the mansion. Now that Hunter thought about it, Victor Bishop had been acting like a man on the verge of a coming siege.

The question was, why?

“Is anything wrong, Mr. Smith?”

Hunter didn’t answer. He pivoted off the plane’s staircase and stalked across the concrete floor of the airport hangar, his boots thumping hard with every long stride. He got back into the car and turned on the engine.

The black sedan roared to life, tires screaming as he punched the gas pedal and headed back to confront Victor Bishop and whatever secret he was hiding.