Hunting Daylight (9781101619032) (51 page)

“Samin, get rid of the weapon. Move Vivienne away from Miss Kaskov.”

A thin, red-haired vampire rushed out of the shadows. He put the Taser in his waistband, then dragged the girl off to the side.

“Good boy, Samin. Now find Dr. Hazan. Bring him to Vivienne.”

The red-haired vampire ran through the archway, his footsteps pattering. Fadime backed away from Tatiana. She let out a breath. Wiped her eyes. Forced herself to smile at Mustafa. “You look tired. Sit down before you fall.”

His eyes were sharp, yet unemotional, like a hawk studying prey. He stood taller, pulling the IV tubing taut behind him. “You have not heard my good news? I am in remission.”

Tatiana felt something crash inside her chest. “When did this happen? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I have not seen you in weeks.” His gaze was unreadable. “My blood tests were wrong. The machine had not been properly calibrated. Dr. Hazan believes Yang had tampered with it. My white blood count is now eleven thousand, not one hundred and eleven thousand.”

“What makes you think the remission will last?”

“What makes you think that
you
will last?”

“Don’t threaten me,” she said, nostrils flaring.

“You have ruined my dinner.”

Right. The real problem was Jude’s daughter.

“I’m
not
your enemy,” she said. “But this girl is a miscreation. She will kill you. She is hemakinetic. So is that French dwarf who was keeping her. She bewitched Maury’s guys—tough, paramilitary men. She made them hallucinate. She killed some of your best soldiers. I was injured.”

“Yes, Maury told me. Did you catch the dwarf?”

“I was incapacitated.”

“This is your excuse?”

“Did Maury tell you how he botched the Paris job?”

“Jealousy has torn your mind apart.” Mustafa gestured at Fadime. “She looks unwell. Make her sit.”

“I am not jealous,” Tatiana cried. She felt her arm twist painfully behind her back, then a force shoved her into a gilt chair, and her arms fell to her sides. She knew Mustafa’s strategy. He was showing Fadime that her rank had dropped. She was below eye-level. Now everyone would look down at her.

Footsteps pounded in the outer dining hall, then Dr. Hazan hurried into the room and knelt beside the girl. He gently pulled back her eyelids and checked her pulse.

“Vivienne, can you hear me?” he said. “This is Dr. Hazan, my dear. You will be fine.” He caught Tatiana’s gaze. “Torturing this child is most unwise. You are shameful.”

Tatiana felt the balance of power shifting in the room, moving away from her. Would it go to Hazan or the mutant girl? No, it was the girl. If Mustafa was in remission, he could live another decade. Had he replaced her with Vivi? His next protégée? Out with the old, in with the new. And Jude loved the girl—that hurt most of all.

She shifted in the chair, watching Hazan fuss over the brat, dabbing a napkin over her face, telling her not to weep, she’d be fine, just fine. Tears swarmed behind Tatiana’s lashes. Next chance she got, she wouldn’t use a Taser, and someone would be washing the girl’s brains from the wall.

“Dr. Hazan, take Vivienne to her quarters,” Mustafa said.

Tatiana’s vision blurred. “Why are you fussing over this girl? She is a danger to us all.”

“She is courageous.”

“So am I.”

“But you possess great cruelty.”

Why has he turned against me?
Tatiana brushed the water from her eyes. He was a military genius, skilled at mind games. But once he’d formed an opinion, he never changed it. She must find another way to appeal to him. Quickly. The last time she’d been this afraid, the Berlin Wall had fallen. Or maybe before that, when she was a girl, and her father had walked out into the snowy night in a black tuxedo, and her mother had raced after him. The back of his head had splashed into the snow, like the borscht Babushka had made that morning.

“I loved you, Mustafa,” she said grinding her teeth. “I love you still.”

“Yes, I can see. But love is unimportant.” He sat down in the chair. A scrabbling noise began under the table, then the ferret climbed into Mustafa’s lap.

“I don’t deserve this.” She put her hands in her lap, balled up her fists, and the diamond horseshoe ring cut into her leg.

“Your voice hurts my ears, Tatiana. I want you to leave tonight. Find Vivienne’s mother. What is her name? The half-breed.” He flipped his hand. “Bring her to me.”

Tatiana’s chest tightened. Bring Caro
here
? “You’re reuniting the holy family?”

“Listen to yourself. Do you hear how pathetic you sound? I will harvest the half-breed woman’s eggs. Then I will obtain semen from my finest human soldiers. In vitro fertilization will produce many Viviennes. These embryos will produce the daylight serum that I want.”

Tatiana draped her palm over her mouth, trying to hide the sudden downward turn of her lips. How would an uneducated Turk know about IVF? She lowered her hand. “I didn’t realize you had a prodigious understanding of reproductive science.”

His smile was machete-sharp. “I know about Western medicine. I have decided to produce a son with this half-breed.”

“You want to breed monsters?”

“No, I am building a new world. Now that I am in remission, I will live to see the prophecy fulfilled. Vivienne will allow me to walk in the light. I will own the day and the night. I will be a modern-day Mehmed.”

“A child army can’t help you achieve this. Unless you drain them and make an endless supply of serum.”

“They will grow. And if Vivienne dies, I will have another and another and another.”

Tatiana opened her hand and stared at her palm. She sensed nothing but doom in Vivienne Barrett, a creature that ripped through the veil between daylight and darkness. A miscegenation. So was her mother.

“I don’t want Caro Barrett in this compound.”

“That is not your decision.”

She looked up. His eyes were hard, the pupils dilated. “I want no part of that woman. I’m staying in Sutherland. Let Maury’s guys fetch her.”

“I do not ask my soldiers to do what
they
want.”

“I was more than your subordinate.”

“That time has ended.”

“You’re angry because I Tasered your messiah.”

“Do you not understand my order? You will begin your hunt tonight. Kill the people around her, but do not harm the woman. Or you will feel my wrath. Do you understand?”

“Yes. But I don’t approve.”

“You do not understand your own nature. If you remain in the compound, you will hurt Vivienne. You will not be able to stop yourself. Your lack of control will threaten everything I want. I will have no choice but to remove your head from your shoulders, and Fadime will take your pieces to Level 3.”

A tear caught at the edge of Tatiana’s mouth. “Mustafa, please—”

He cut her off. “Either find Vivienne’s mother or I will banish you from this compound. If you attempt to stay here, you will be executed. Make your choice. I will give you one minute to decide. Think carefully before you answer.”

Her heart clenched. She didn’t want to die. But she didn’t want to fetch Caro. The last thing she wanted was to leave the compound. She’d wanted Jude from the first time she’d met him in the Gabon camp. She’d felt something stir inside her, a Freudian glitch. Jude was like her father, a man who had loved her unconditionally. Dr. Pavel Kaskov. Oh, she’d loved him. He’d praised her intellect, her spirit, and gift with languages. She’d loved his honor and the soft plunk that his boots made when he’d set them
inside the front door, taking care to arrange them on the pile of newspapers that her mother, Galina, had set down with malice. Galina had killed Pavel in a jealous rage, and she’d forced Tatiana to quit ballet lessons. But Galina had paid for her sins.

Tatiana pressed her fist against her chest, feeling the erratic surges. She had not expected to find another man with a brown-speckled blue eye. Her father’s jaw hadn’t been square, and his chin hadn’t been dimpled, but Tatiana didn’t expect perfection. Jude saw only her defects, but he would see her virtues. And she would be loved. She rose from the chair.

“I’ll find your breeder.”

PATIENT TREATMENT AREA—LEVEL 2

AL-DÎN COMPOUND

Vivi didn’t know how long she’d slept. She lay in bed, rubbing her chest, feeling the spots. She remembered the jolts of the Taser. Pain. Rigid muscles. Angry voices. Dr. Hazan had taken her to her dorm. She’d been afraid he would give her an injection, so she acted calm and sleepy. After he left, she’d immediately tumbled into a nightmare about bats and blood.

Her door buzzed and Fadime walked in. “Put on your slippers and come with me.”

“What time is it?” she asked.

He glanced at his watch, a fancy chronometer with dials. “Ten
A.M.
”

She fit the paper booties over her feet. Now she was starting to see how things worked in the Al-Dîn
compound. If you didn’t make a fuss, if you pretended to go along, they would assume you were a wimp and quit watching your every move.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“No questions.” He led Vivi into the corridor, where crimson light pooled in the corners. They walked past the elevator and turned down another long hall, past a large, glassed-in room where the redheaded vampire sat in front of a computer. She followed Fadime to the end of the hall. On the steel doors, D
O
N
OT
E
NTER
was written in French, English, and another language that looked Cyrillic.

Fadime swiped his security card on a scanner. The doors creaked open, and he led her into a corridor that smelled of disinfectant and animal dung. The walls on both sides had glass walls. On the right, Vivi saw a concrete aisle with cages on both sides. It looked like a dog kennel, but chimps were inside the runs. Another room held little cages, and mice ran inside metal wheels.

The next set of doors made Vivi think of NASA—they were oval, made of thick metal, and posted with a warning sign: N
O
U
NAUTHORIZED
P
ERSONNEL
B
EYOND
T
HIS
P
OINT
.

Fadime swiped his card again, and these doors made a whooshing sound and came apart like a jigsaw puzzle. They walked through, and Vivi sensed a change in the air pressure. Fadime turned to a keypad. A message appeared on the screen.
Close doors? Yes No

He clicked
Yes
.

The doors rumbled shut behind them. Vivi’s ears popped. She moved behind Fadime into a metal tunnel. Another glassed-in room was on the left. No one sat at
the desks, and the computer monitors showed a twirling screen saver.

Vivi turned to Fadime. “Where is everybody?”

“This way,” he said.

Halfway down the corridor, Vivi saw three small windows on the left side of the tunnel. She paused beside one, stood on her toes, and peered through the glass. It looked thick, and her nails made a dense, plunking sound as she tapped it. Was something radioactive in there? She pushed closer. The room was dark, two stories, huge and cavernous. Near the hazy ceiling, large black things hung upside down from a wire ceiling. White gunk was piled on the floor. It was spattered on the walls also.

“What’s in here?” she asked.

“You ask too many questions.” Fadime pulled her away from the window.

Vivi’s ears kept popping, and she tugged her lobes as she walked through another set of steel doors. Two minutes later, she and Fadime stood outside a door that read L
ABORATORY
—C.

He opened it, and cool air blew out, carrying the odor of fingernail polish remover.

“Doctor? You have a guest,” Fadime called, pulling Vivi inside.

Which doctor?
She thought.
Hazan or Barrett?

“Just a moment,” called a crisp, British voice. It seemed to be coming from behind a shelf, where brown jars were lined up.

Dr. Barrett pushed his chair around the shelf, the fluorescent light shining on his dark ponytail. His legs looked
shriveled beneath his blue scrubs, but the rest of him looked fit. He wheeled toward her, muscles outlined in his upper arms.

Vivi glanced behind him, where a long black counter was jammed with equipment. Microscopes, empty beakers, machines, computers, and a Bunsen burner.

Is he really my dad?
she thought.
But he makes me feel shy and suspicious.

“How nice to see you, Vivi.” His smile quivered at the edges.

What should she say? “Uh, yeah. Should I call you Dr. Barrett or Jude?”

“Whatever pleases you,” he said. “Jude’s fine.”

Fadime stepped between them. “Mustafa wants a blood sample from the girl.”

“Sorry?” Jude said, raising his eyebrows. “Dr. Hazan’s assistant always does that.”

“Not today,” Fadime said. “Do not argue. I am following Mustafa’s orders.” He removed items from his pockets, heaping them onto a counter: a vacuum syringe with a long, capped needle; a large, floppy rubber tube; glass vials with colorful stoppers.