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“Patrick Wallace?” His eyes narrowed on the sudden dilation of her pupils. She wasn’t trained to lie. She was good. Damned good. But still an amateur. Easily read and easily deceived. “Where is he, since it’s obvious he’s no longer dead?”
Danna stared back at him levelly. “Patrick Wallace died twenty-two years ago.”
Cabal tilted his head and stared at her before straightening and roaring back in her face in rage. “Where is he?”
He could sense the lie. He knew a liar when he sensed one.
“Oh God.” Terror raced through her; the stench of it was nearly overwhelming.
“Get back, Danna.” Myron pushed in front of her, using his own body to shield her as Cabal advanced on them. “Look, Cabal, we don’t know shit!” he yelled back. “Whatever the hell happened to your mate, we don’t know shit about it. We don’t know where Walt has Banks, and we don’t know where Rick’s at.”
“Who is Rick?” he snarled in Myron’s face.
“Patrick Wallace,” he answered truthfully. “But in the labs he was known as Azrael.”
Cabal almost blinked back at him in surprise and in shock. Azrael had killed himself, six other Breeds and an entire lab of soldiers and scientists more than thirty years ago. He had been created in a hellhole in Libya. His Lion genetics were crossed with the genetics of a young woman rumored to be a descendant of an ancient, bloody pharaoh.
Each DNA sequencing that had gone into the creation of Azrael had been precise. Nothing had been left to chance. He was their prize. He had become their death. And it was believed he had become his own death due to feral fever.
“Azrael,” Cabal murmured. He had been a legend among the Breeds when he lived. There had been no Breed bloodier, or more merciless, than he.
Eyeing them both for long moments, he reached out first to jerk Myron’s sat phone from its belt clip, before pushing past him and taking Danna’s.
Opening the call log, he shook his head and muttered. “Amateurs.”
The numbers were clearly displayed, giving him all he needed.
Tucking the phones into the narrow pocket on his mission pants, he smiled coldly. “It’s been a nice visit, but it’s time for me to go now.”
He had no compunction about knocking them both out. It was that or kill them, and the need to kill was already rising hard and fast within him.
After making sure they were unconscious, he pulled two pressure syringes from his pack and a vial of sedative. They needed to stay out for a while. He didn’t have the time or the patience to deal with the interference they would cause.
Using the sheriff’s restraints, he secured them by the wrists and ankles and left them lying on the kitchen floor. If either of them had an ounce of intelligence, then it wouldn’t take them long to get free. But it would give him enough time to do what he had to do. They were going to nap for a while anyway.
Cabal reengaged the comm link as he left the house, and pulled the sat phones free again as he hit the secure line to Jonas’s link.
“I’m going to kill you when I find you,” Jonas promised with lethal deliberation.
“You have a bigger problem. Azrael is alive.”
There was a long silence, dark and dangerous, across the link.
“That’s not possible,” Jonas finally answered, his voice cold. “His DNA was identified at the scene.”
“You said yourself when we found Alonzo that these kills reminded you of Azrael,” Cabal reminded him. “That’s because they are his kills. I suspect the six Breeds he led are here with him as well. You need to get an accounting of your Breeds, Director. All kinds of problems are beginning to crop up here,” he finished sarcastically.
“It’s not Azrael.” Jonas denied it again. “He’s dead, Cabal. Whoever this is is just doing a damned good job of impersonating him. Do you have anything else?”
Cabal shook his head. Jonas didn’t want to admit Azrael was out there, simply because there would be no controlling that particular Breed.
“I guess giving you the sat phone number I have for our god of death would be a bad idea then,” he drawled. “I was hoping you could trace it, but I think I can handle that little chore now.”
“Don’t make me kill you painfully, Cabal,” Jonas warned him, and it wasn’t an idle threat.
There would be payment for literally going rogue on the director of the Bureau of Breed Affairs. That wasn’t usually a wise move. However, in this case, it had been Cabal’s only possible move.
“Sorry, Director. Some things are more important than the bottom line.” He disconnected the link as he mulled over Jonas’s insistence that Azrael was indeed dead. The director should have learned by now that nothing was definite where Breeds were concerned.
