Page 18 of Hunted

Let’s get out of here. They’ve tampered with these samples. I can’t check everything without alerting them that I know, but someone has gone through the blood samples we ran earlier today and I need to figure out what else they contaminated.

Outside on the street, I shifted back to human. Ellie was pacing back and forth on the sidewalk, biting her nails.

“What would they stand to gain by manipulating your samples?” I asked.

“Depends what they’re after. If their goal is to corrupt our data to throw us off course, they could make it to where we can’t get approved for funding because it looks like the science behind what we’re doing isn’t sound even though we really are on the right track.”

“They have to know you’ll rerun the samples.”

“Yes. Which means they may have gone in and corrupted more than just that set.” She lifted her eyes to mine. “This could set us back weeks if we have to rerun everything, start all over.”

Vlad said, “We’ll help you. If you need volunteers for blood samples or anything else, I’ll find them.”

“As will I.” We turned as Cristof approached, smiling thinly at his younger brother.

Vlad growled. “Cris. What the hell are you doing here?”

“Delivering the two hostiles your people didn’t manage to apprehend so that they can be interrogated. Perhaps they can shed some light on what they were doing in the lab.” He cocked his head. “Unless you’d rather I release them?”

Smug arrogant bastard. Vlad took a step towards him, hands balled into fists. Unfortunately, at that moment, I needed Cris and couldn’t afford to be in the middle of this family pissing contest.

In other words, situation normal, all fracked up.

I stepped between Cris and Vlad. “Can you take Ellie home?”

Vlad glared at me. “This isn’t over.”

But he held his hand out like a gentleman, and Ellie took it, throwing one last look over her shoulder at me before they dematerialized into the night.

The moment they were gone, I grabbed Cristof by the collar of his shirt and shoved him up against the side of the building. “Just so we’re clear, vampire. I don’t have time for your bullshit. I’m hunting Rossi and most of my days come with body counts. If you’re here to play games and piss off your brother, I’m out. You can go act like a prick on your own time.”

Cris straightened his shirt, correctly reading my don’t-fuck-with-me expression. “Like I said before, my people are well trained. We apprehended the two hostiles who broke into the lab and are holding them for you to question. We have as much at stake with getting Rossi off the streets as you do.”

“It’s not your people I’m worried about.” I got up in his face. “If you are here because you and your mother have decided an alliance with us will give you access to Rowan or better yet Vlad, who is the single greatest threat to your power, I will be your worst nightmare.”

Cris held both hands up. “We do want to meet with Vlad and Rowan. But that isn’t the primary reason I’m here.”

“What is it, then?”

“I want to join you in the hunt for Rossi.”

I barked out a sharp laugh. “You can’t be serious.”

His expression didn’t change. “You’re a fool if you think you can hunt him alone. I don’t care if you are River Caldwell. We get the same intelligence reports you do. People are saying he may be more powerful than Guillermo Montemayor. He’s already killed three Tracers you’ve sent after him.”

“One small problem. How do I know that the minute we start working together you won’t put a knife in my back?”

“I expected you would ask that.” Closing his eyes, Cris dropped his mental shields. I didn’t react. The less other people knew about the specifics of my gift, the difficulty involved in reading vamps, the better.

“Do it,” he said calmly when I made no move to read him. “I’m not lying. See for yourself.”

“If this is a trap—”

“It’s not.”

As if he knew what I was thinking, Cris held his hands out at his sides. Fine. He wanted to dance? We would fucking dance. I reached for his mind. Reached for it was too clinical a term. More like blasted a fucking spotlight in between his ears and lit up his gray matter like it was opening night at the rodeo.

Memory was a fragile thing, spun of twisted threads of hopes and dreams. It was the scent of the air just before a thunderstorm. The taste of a first kiss. The precise shade of green-gray eyes that haunted you no matter how many times you wished you could scrub them from your memory. There was no time I quietly hated my gift more than in the moments I was about to rip apart the threads of another person’s life, erase the truth and weave falsehoods into their place. There was no time I hated myself more than when I remembered how it had felt to hold Ellie’s face in my hands as she stared up at me, something so fragile, so breakable between us, feeling the hair stand up at the back of my neck as I opened the connection to her mind, realized what she was to me, what she’d always been.