Twilight Vendetta (26 page)

Basking in her essence was a balm to him.

And so he was with her in that room, even though she thought he wasn’t, and even though he was physically outside the house. The night enchanted him as it always had. The birds who came awake in the evening were an entirely different group from their diurnal counterparts. Their songs were mournful and haunting. The air tasted different at night, cool and moist, not burned dry by the daytime sun nor altered by its rays. The nighttime air was pure, and he enjoyed taking great deep breaths of it just for its taste and the slight buzz it brought to his brain.

He’d fed on a stoner once, tasted the bong smoke in his blood, adding a bitter herbal twang to its salt and sulfur richness. It had left him with a feeling much like the one deep draughts of nighttime air gave to him. A natural sort of high, minus the nasty taste.

He walked into the woods about a mile from the house, and then circled the house from that distance. He kept his mind and his senses attuned for any sign of human encroachment, but found none.

Assured of that, he pulled out his recovered cell phone. Will had charged it for him during the day. It was long past time he made contact with Tavia to let her know he was all right. He remembered Emma saying each phone had the other numbers programmed in. They’d all keyed in initials instead of names, to identify whose was whose, and so he opened the text feature and sent his message to T.

Free and safe,
he typed.

There was barely any pause before she replied. Thank God. Been worried. Where R U?

With friends. U?

Home.
The single word held so much power. He knew she meant the island. That she thought of it as home, made him realize that he did too. Even though he’d barely spent any time there yet, it was their place. Their haven. Their home. He hadn’t realized until that moment how eager he was to get back there.

But then another text appeared, and he sensed Tavia’s urgency even from this distance.
W and S free 2?

Yes, but not with us. Took off.

Thought so. Their pics R on TV. Wanted. Dangerous. Do not approach.

He lifted his brows, realizing anew how desperate DPI was to get the Offspring back. He had to find them before DPI did. And make the crow tell the truth. And find Emma’s father. And get them all safely back to the island. It was a lot.

Dev, there’s more.
www.ERFU.org

Frowning, Dev tapped the link, and landed on a website with “Equal Rights for the Undead” and ERFU at the top beside a short explanation that this anonymous blog was to keep the American public informed about the misinformation and mistreatment of “vampiric citizens.” The latest posts were a series titled “Walking With Vampires.” He only needed to read the first few lines to realize who had penned them.

Emma.

Another text came through, then, popping up on the screen.
She’s writing a book, Dev. I found the outline. She betrayed us.

He frowned hard and typed back,
She’s one of us now.

WHAT?

Devlin explained, briefly, what had led to Emma’s transformation. And Tavia replied soon enough.

Doesn’t mean we can trust her. Speaking of trust, Bell and Andrew broke up.

Devlin wasn’t surprised. He’d sensed a rift forming between the two. And more.

Where is Andrew now?

Don’t know. Not here, though. They fought, he left.

I don’t like it, Tavia. How angry is he?

If he shows up to cause trouble, we’ll fight.

U and Bell?

A smiling, winking emoji appeared on his phone’s screen. Then,
I’ve been busy recruiting. Lots happening here. Get back soon so you can see.

I will. And I’ll stay in touch.

Devlin went back to Emma’s secret blog, and read the series of posts that had begun the night she’d set out to find them, and continued right up until her final hours in the cell. Hell, she was probably writing more even now. And yes, it was clear by what she’d written that she was trying to help, to educate and enlighten, but she was also telling secrets. They did not need to sell humans on the notion that they were ordinary people who just happened to have special dietary needs. They did not need a PR campaign.

What they needed was an army.

He pocketed the phone, angry. It even occurred to him to wonder if Emma had been telling the truth about her own mother. Not that she’d been a vampire. He’d believed that. But that she’d vanished, that she was motivated to walk with vampires in hopes of finding her. That seemed suspect now, given the blog post, the book in progress.

Dammit, he hated this.

He pocketed his phone and continued walking to complete the loop, but because he’d sensed no human presence, he allowed his mind to drift away from the task, and soon, almost before he knew it, he was slipping into Emma’s head, feeling her energy, hearing her voice and her thoughts. He didn’t feel guilty about invading her privacy. Not now, not knowing what he knew.

So he heard their captive crow when he offered Emma information about her father in exchange for his freedom. And he felt Emma’s temper flare. She was indignant that the man would dare try to bargain for information he should simply give to her. It wasn’t a small fire, burning inside her. And she wasn’t used to the heightened nature of vampiric emotions.

“Why would I help you escape, when you were content to stand guard while I was held prisoner, tortured, killed?”

“You were
not
killed,” he countered, his defensiveness and denial flashing into her awareness, and therefore, into Devlin’s as well.

“I was most certainly killed. I’m Undead now. I’m not human anymore. You took that from me.”

“I didn’t–”

“You’re as guilty as Hobbs and that mad scientist he calls a doctor. You stood by and didn’t lift a finger to help me. And now you’re trying to blackmail me?”

“I couldn’t have helped you if I’d wanted to!”

“You had a fucking automatic rifle strapped to your chest.”

For a moment, the power of Emma’s anger hit Devlin like a mallet between the eyes. Was she really that furious about what she had become? That unhappy to be a vampire? Had his sense of her exuberance been that far off base?

He tried probing into her mind more deeply, but only saw her complete attention focused on the prisoner. He could see the man through her eyes, lying there in the bed, lowering his gaze, swamped in guilt and still trying to figure out how to outwit her and get free.

“You were the one who grabbed the scalpel,” he said. “You’d be dead if they hadn’t done what they did.”

“I am dead. And they only did what they did because they wanted to torture me into telling them where Devlin was. Make no mistake, kid, you are still alive for one reason and one reason only. Because I want to know where my father is, and you can tell me that. And if you don’t tell me, I won’t have to protect you from Devlin, because I will kill you myself.”

Devlin felt a ripple of admiration ripple through him wrapped in pure desire as he felt her anger build. He’d completed his circuit and was on his way back, but suddenly the need to see her was stronger than his common sense, or his need to analyze why. He launched into a burst of speed, and when he drew near the house, he cloaked himself completely, hiding his energy beneath a blanket of vampiric will.

Standing in the darkness outside the window of the guest room that held the young militant, he peered in.

“You know what I’ve found out since becoming one of them?” Emma asked, moving closer to the man in the bed. “When I drink human blood, I can see inside their minds. I can experience them as if I
am
them. So all I have to do is drink you dry to find out where my father is. I don’t even need you to tell me.”

She was beside the bed now. Devlin saw her there. The ceiling fan was swirling above her, moving her hair as if its strands had come to life, and her eyes began to glow, just a little. Just enough so he could see. More pink than red in this early stage, but she was working up to it slowly, and trying to guard against losing control.

“If you kill me, who’s going to tell the world what really happened out there, in the woods?” The wounded crow tried to sit up in the bed.

She gripped his shoulders and slammed him flat against the pillows, leaning over him, her face close to his. “I don’t care about that. I care about my dad.” Then her eyes focused on his throat, and her tongue darted out to moisten her lips. “I could try to take just a little. To drink just until I get the information I need. The problem is, you’ve already lost a lot of blood. I don’t think you can stand to lose much more.” She shrugged. “On the other hand, your well-being is no more my problem than mine was yours when you were helping my murderers, so....”

She leaned in, and he shouted at the top of his lungs, “They took him to The Sentinel!”

“The Sentinel?” she asked, backing off a little. But her eyes still glowed.

He nodded hard. “East Coast. White Plains, New York. On the site of the old DPI Headquarters. High security. They think he knows more than he’s saying, that he’s conspiring with the vampires against the government.”

“And why do they think that?”

“Because of what happened to his wife. Your mother.”

Emma’s entire being went very still and very cold in that instant. Devlin felt every cell in her body spring to attention and a light, a glimmer, came to life deep in her heart. “What do you know about my mother?” she asked. Her voice was dangerously soft.

“She was a...a vampire,” he said. “You...you knew that, right?”

Emma nodded and stayed silent, for the first time exerting her will on him. It was probably unintentional. She might not even be aware she was doing it, but her will shot forth from her like a laser beam.

Tell me what happened to her, you son of a bitch

“She was held there....at...at The Sentinel. Until she died in captivity.”

An avalanche began inside Emma’s mind, a rockslide of thick, inky grief burying her soul beneath it. Crippling her. Breaking her. She fell to her knees as a strangled cry emerged from her very soul. The window in front of Devlin shattered, and he barely hit the ground in time to avoid the shards that exploded his way. Her heartbreak, though, he could not avoid feeling.

Emma emerged from a mindless red haze to find people all around her. In front of her, that crow Devlin had rescued, cowered on the floor, his back crammed into a corner, whimpering and covering his face with his forearms. Behind her, Devlin’s powerful hands were on her shoulders, holding her forcibly away from the mortal. On either side of her, Sarafina and Willem Stone were trying to wedge themselves in between her and the mortal prisoner.

And a second later she realized she was fighting them, all of them, to get to the boy. And he was that, a boy. Twenty-one, twenty-two at the most. And she’d been about to kill him. To rip his jugular from his neck and bathe in his blood.

She let go of that urge, which was far too unlike her to be her own. It felt like she’d vacated her body and some demon had taken it over. Except on some level, she knew that the demon was her. Everything about her was more, greater, bigger. Including her rage and grief, apparently.

She blinked and stopped struggling, and as soon as she did, she was pulled backward into Devlin’s chest as his arms closed around her from behind.

In front of her, Sarafina stood with her hand up, palms out, as if poised to stop her if she lunged again, while Willem knelt and gathered the trembling, weeping boy up off the floor. Emma thought he would drop him back into the bed, but when she glanced that way, she could see that the window beside the bed was gone. The bedcovers, pillows, and nightstand were outside, lying on the ground in a tangle of fabric and splintered wood. The curtains waved like flags in the night wind.

Blinking, she looked at Sarafina and found angry eyes gazing back at her. “You are no longer welcome here,” Sarafina said.

“‘Fina–” Will began.

“I never should have left you alone with him. I thought you were reasonable. I thought you wanted peace–”

“They took my mother from me,” Emma said, still seething inside, quaking under the landslide of emotions that had held her in their grip.

“We don’t kill innocents,” Sarafina went on. “We
do
police our own.”

Devlin said, “He’s no innocent and you know it.”

“He’s a child,” ‘Fina said. “She’d have killed him if I hadn’t burst in when I did. You know that as well as I do. You felt her rage.”

Emma blinked. They were talking about her, but what they were saying didn’t feel like her. It didn’t sound like her. It was completely alien to her.

And yet, the knowledge that her mother was dead, at DPI’s hands, and that they now held her father in the very same place....

She glanced at the man on the floor. “This
boy
stood guard while I was tortured and my life was taken from me. He stood by while they took my father, and two helpless teens prisoner and did God only knows what to them. This
boy—
” she spat the word “is as guilty as any of them.