23
DARIA stood stricken for a moment, and then ran
past Brandon and out the door.
Alejandro and Brandon stared at each other for a
moment. “Is he dead?”
“Don’t know, but it’s pretty bad.”
Alejandro rushed after Daria and Brandon followed.
Outside he saw that Daria had taken off on a dune bike, rushing
across the surface of the ground at top speed toward Sante’s house.
He grabbed another and was off, leaving Brandon to fend for his own
transportation.
By the time he reached the house a crowd had
already gathered. Half the place was on fire, smoke billowing up in
a heavy plume. Not even the steady rain seemed to be having an
effect on the raging inferno that seemed as though it would engulf
the rest of the house in no time.
In horror, he watched Daria jump from her bike
before it had even stopped and go running past the guard gate,
toward the burning house. The bike crashed into the heavy steel
fence surrounding the house and whined to a halt.
Alejandro gunned the engine on his bike and sped
after Daria. Coming up alongside her, he grabbed her around the
middle and slung her over his lap.
Daria slammed her fist into his gut. Hard.
“Let me down.”
He grunted. “Mierda, Daria! No way in
hell.”
As they approached the house, he began to believe
they actually were in hell. Heat warred with the downpour, the
flames licking dangerously close to them.
He veered the bike away from the house, but Daria
was having none of that. She punched him in the gut again and at
the same time bit his leg, fangs extended. It was not a love bite,
and there was no veil. It was just pain, pure and simple. Blood
gushed from his thigh and he loosened his hold on her just for a
moment.
It was all she needed.
Daria yanked herself backward, using her foot on
the edge of the bike to get leverage to propel herself away from
him. She fell five feet to the ground and rolled.
“Fuck!” Alejandro pulled a hard right, just in time
to see Daria hauling ass into the burning house. He pulled up and
jumped off the bike himself. Alejandro hit the ground running,
ignoring the pain in his leg where she’d bitten him.
Heat burned his face and exposed arms. He was
grateful he was soaked, or it would have been worse. He had a split
second to notice that near the house no rain fell; the heat of the
fire made it evaporate before it even hit the ground.
Brandon came up behind him, but Alejandro pushed
him back. “Get out of here! All three of us don’t need to commit
suicide.”
“I can help!” He pushed past Alejandro.
Alejandro grabbed his shirt and flung him violently
backward. Brandon ended up on his ass. They needed one agent still
alive and kicking after today.
Smoke billowed around Alejandro as he entered the
kitchen and he covered his mouth with his forearm.
“Ari?” Daria’s voice coming from the living room.
“Ari? Where are you?”
He ran after her. “Get your ass out of here. This
place is going up.”
Daria coughed and turned toward him. She shook her
head. “I was supposed to meet her here. She’s in this house
somewhere and I have to find her.”
He took her by the shoulders and shook her. “No,
Daria! We have to get out of here,” he yelled over the roar
within the house.
“I won’t let her die!” Tears ran down her
soot-covered face.
He stared down at her for a moment, his lungs
burning. Somewhere above them, timber cracked ominously. “Goddamn
it.” He released her.
Daria pushed past him, going for the stairs.
Alejandro followed.
When they reached the top, they caught sight of a
white bit of fabric on the floor just at the beginning of the
upstairs hallway.
Ari Templeton.
Daria knelt and pulled her up, but the woman was
out cold, maybe dead already. The Chosen were immortal, but that
only meant they didn’t age and had above average immune systems.
Smoke inhalation could do them in the same as a human.
Daria struggled to get her down the stairs.
Alejandro stepped in and slung Ari over his shoulder. Together they
made their way out of the burning building as pieces of the floor
above them began to rain down.
They both stumbled outside, coughing, and made
their way down the path and past the gates. Behind them, the house
collapsed in the middle. If they’d stayed in there just a minute
longer, they’d be fried, flat Chosen pancakes.
Then Sante was there, pulling Ari from Alejandro’s
arms. Sante laid her on the ground while he and Daria collapsed to
the grass, both wheezing in an effort to get air into their
scorched lungs. Beside them, Sante performed mouth-to-mouth
resuscitation on his lover.
Daria sat up and watched Ari with a desperately
pained expression on her face.
Ari wasn’t moving.
Alejandro reached out and pulled Daria into his
arms. She came willingly, gratefully, snuggling against his chest
as they watched Sante try to breathe life back into Ari Templeton.
A crowd had formed around them, all keeping a respectful
distance.
“Live,” Sante murmured against her lips. Then
louder, “Live!” He kept up the resuscitation, but Ari remained
limp, lifeless.
Carlos broke past the circle of onlookers and came
to stand near his boss. Alejandro was struck for a moment at the
expression of utter horror on Carlos’s face. It was as though he
actually cared about Ari.
Carlos hesitated a moment, then stepped forward and
touched Sante’s shoulder. It was clear to everyone that Ari wasn’t
coming back.
“Leave me alone!” Sante snarled. Then he rested his
forehead on Ari’s, closed his eyes, and whispered, “Please, Ari. I
can’t do this without you. Please live.”
In that one unguarded moment, all doubts Alejandro
had about whether or not Sante truly loved Ari Templeton
vanished.
Sante sealed his mouth over Ari’s once more and
pumped her chest. Nothing. He leaned back, rain beating down, and
looked at his dead lover.
All was silent but for the crack and burn of the
house behind them.
Then Ari’s chest heaved. She coughed and gasped. A
look of absolute, pure happiness transformed Sante’s face and he
caught her up against his chest and held her. Ari grabbed his
shoulders as he rocked her back and forth, murmuring things into
her soot-streaked hair.
Daria turned her face into Alejandro’s chest and
breathed deeply, shuddering in relief against him.
Brandon stood near them, looking a little bruised
from Alejandro’s emphatic denial of his aid. A smile played on his
lips. Maybe he wasn’t such a womanizing bastard after all.
After several moments, Carlos drew Ari away to the
dome doctors who had rushed to the scene. There was no way to put
out the fire, though it did seem the rain was coming down even
harder now in this area, perhaps engineered to do so.
Once Ari had been handed over for medical
attention, Sante stalked over and pulled Daria from Alejandro’s
arms and into his. “Thank you,” he said as he embraced her. The
sincerity of those words rang through the air.
Daria went visibly stiff in Sante’s arms—probably
shocked—and pushed away from him almost immediately. “I didn’t go
in to save Ari for you.” It was a hostile comment, something
that Valerie wouldn’t say. It was the first time Alejandro
had seen Daria’s mask slip.
However, Sante didn’t seem to notice it. He
answered smoothly, “I don’t care, Valerie. You saved her. That’s
all that matters.”
Alejandro drew her back against him. Emotions were
running high, and they’d just risked their lives. He worried Daria
might slip even more.
“Who did this?” Alejandro asked, his voice rough
from coughing and smoke inhalation.
Sante’s lips pursed in thought. Around them Carlos
had begun to shoo the onlookers away. “I have enemies. Many of
them. We’ll investigate, but it sounds like it was a bomb.”
Alejandro stated the obvious. “You have someone in
this dome who means you harm.” Besides himself, Daria, and Brandon,
that was.
“Wouldn’t be the first time.” Sante made a fist.
“When I find them, and I will, they’re dead for this.”
“You were at your headquarters,” Daria broke in.
“It was public knowledge. Either the bomber wanted to threaten you
and didn’t know Ari was in the house, or they did know she
was there and their intent was murder.”
Sante’s smile was cold and the look in his eyes
brutal. Here was the Christopher Sante who had killed Julia and the
guards and who’d taken pleasure in slowly torturing their witness
to death. Here was the Sante who had slept with and romanced
Daria for years under a pretense. “Either way, he’s dead . . .
slowly.”
“Keep Ari safe.” Daria’s voice was hard. “Keep her
guarded.”
Sante cocked his head to the side a little and gave
a curious half smile. “Why do you care so much, Valerie? You barely
know her.”
Daria hesitated a moment before answering. “She
reminds me of someone I knew once, a friend.”
His smile faded. “I’ll take good care of Ari, don’t
worry.”
CHRISTOPHER lay in the dark, in an apartment on the other side of the compound. Above him was a skylight, one of two large ones in this residence. Through it he could see the slit in the dome they’d opened to release some of the smoke from the destruction of his house. The dark, gaping opening looked like a crack in the illusion of their reality.
Daria/Valerie, who never missed a thing, asked how
they maintained security when the dome was opened. He’d told her
about the invisible energy barrier that covered the slit and about
the quirk in the barrier’s operation. The security mechanism shut
down while the dome opened and closed, which took a little over a
minute.
During that minute he’d set guards to watch for
anyone who tried to get out of the Shining Way. It was bait. If
they caught the person who’d almost killed Ari, he or she was
slated for death in the most horrifying way he could imagine.
Sante had enjoyed planning that death, but he’d
enjoy the actual killing even more. He imagined blood and flesh
filling his mouth, and pure white-hot bliss filled him.
He closed his eyes for a moment, fighting the
rising bloodlust within him, the leading edge of age insanity that
ate at the fringes of his mind. He could control it. He had to
control it for Ari’s sake.
She lay next to him in the bed, her breathing
finally deep and even. She was still a new succubare and her
enhanced healing abilities hadn’t fully developed, but she was
doing much better than anyone had expected after her near brush
with death.
Now she slept, and that was good. However, sleep
remained elusive for him. His mind turned over the possibilities
endlessly.
Who would want Ari dead? Who would dare threaten
him?
The obvious answer was that someone under the dome
was gunning for Ari and they were affiliated somehow with her
father. Someone paid to be here. It could be anyone.
Alejandro and Daria were here at the behest of
Richard Templeton and therefore were a threat to Ari. That’s why he
kept them so close. They would have been top on his list were it
not for the fact they’d risked their lives to save her. He
dismissed the notion. No, they were just good agents working under
the notion they were doing good things.
There were some other possible suspects. Tomorrow
he would set to work analyzing all the recent members once more,
even closer, in an effort to discover who had done this.
He put his arm over his eyes and blew out a sharp
breath. Ari reminded Daria of Julia. He couldn’t get it out of his
mind. There were parallels. Julia had been tougher than Ari
physically, but they’d both possessed the same touching
vulnerability, a quality that made you like them right away and
made you want to draw them under your wing.
His memories flashed back to that night, when he’d
gone to take care of the witness. When Julia had seen his face on
the camera at the base of the high-security building where they’d
been protecting Stephen Miller, she let him right in. All going
according to his plan, she’d met him at the door and smiled, asked
him why’d come so late at night. He’d given her a plausible excuse
. . . then choked her to death.
Christopher could still see the look of surprise on
her face after he’d snaked his hand out fast and hard and caught
her in the foyer of the apartment. He could still feel the way her
slender neck had cracked under the pressure of his grip. He’d gone
for her throat, so she couldn’t alert the two other guards.
He hadn’t wanted to do it; he’d grown to like
Julia. Yet there’d been an undeniable, feral part of him that
enjoyed her soft skin squeezing in his palms. A violent, maybe even
age-insane, part of him had gloried in the control he’d had over
her and enjoyed it when the light of her fragile, human life had
flickered and died in her eyes.
Once he’d had a taste of that murder and it had
coated his tongue like a sweetly bitter sip of wine, he’d gone in
and killed the two guards. Fast. Clean. Cut their throats with a
blade and let their blood sink into the beige carpet. The sight of
it, the scent had made him insane with hunger.
He’d found Stephen Miller, an aging human who’d
been his blood mother’s accountant, hiding in a closet. Before he’d
pulled him out, he’d played with him a little, making him whimper
and wet his pants.
Christopher had saved the best for last and had
taken his time with the man. He’d tied him up and tortured him
slowly, breaking each of his fingers and toes and biting pieces out
of his arms, legs, and stomach until Miller had been insane with
terror and only been able to babble.
Then Christopher had drained him slowly until
Miller’s life had slipped from his fingers and Christopher had been
sated.
He’d left the apartment that night high on what
he’d done, crazed by it. That night, even though he’d loved Daria,
he’d fought the urge to return to her apartment before his kills
were discovered and torture her, too. That’s how much he’d wanted
to do it again.
Christopher closed his eyes. Instead he’d plucked a
homeless woman from the streets and sated his need.
That night he’d discovered a part of himself he’d
always known existed, but had tried to suppress—the very edge of
age-inspired insanity. One day Christopher knew it would come for
him in earnest. When that happened, he would be a very dangerous
Chosen.
Once the highs from his kills had worn off and the
reality of what he’d done, and how much he’d enjoyed it, had set
in, he’d sunk into depression.
After he’d served his short stint in jail for
impersonating a human, he’d gone back to his blood mother and
discharged himself from her forever. Then he’d disappeared for
years, resurfacing only when the idea for the Shining Way had
manifested itself in his mind and ultimately saved his wretched
life.
There wasn’t a day that went by that he hadn’t seen
the faces of Julia, the guards, or Stephen Miller in his mind’s
eye. The homeless woman had never bothered his conscience much.
There wasn’t a day he didn’t suppress the sweet flush of excitement
those faces created in him as he remembered the killings.
Every day was an effort to remain sane. He’d been
doing better with it, but with the attempt on Ari, he could feel
his bloodlust flickering to life.
And the lust wasn’t very discriminate.