Dark Horizons (The Red Sector Chronicles) (31 page)

Seeing Dezyre’s face wash cold with fear at Leo’s question, I said quickly, “I remember you said something about blood ties or blood connections back at the cottage, between brother and sister. Is this how you found out, when you turned Rook?”

She looked at me oddly
, almost with gratitude,
and then nodded. “I could sense him aft
er that. If he was hurt, I knew.
I c
ould even share dreams with him, though I’ve heard that can also happen between a maker and his child.
”

I flushed, thin
king of my dreamland rendezvous
with Aden.

“
If we were supposed to somehow ‘sense’ each other, then how come Orion didn’t find
me
sooner once I was a vampire?” I asked.

Dezyre shrugged. “Probably because he hadn’t tasted your blood. I think both parties have to share blood. I don’t know exactly how it works. It’s weird, and none of my tests have been able to provide a concrete, scientific explanation for it.”

“Speaking of scientific explanations, were you able to resurrect Rook back there because you’re his sister? Or is it because you’re his maker?” I asked.

She shook her head. “It’s not just that – my blood can heal anyone, so long as they are only on the brink of death. I can’t bring anyone back from the dead.”

“But Rook –” Leo started.

“Was not dead,” Dezyre finished, her voice hard.
The pallor of fear remained in her eyes, betraying how scared she had been – and still was – for her brother’s life.
“His heart was barely beating, but he still had a pulse. Had I waited any longer, I might not have been able to bring him back.”

A stray thought crossed my mind, and my eyes ea
gerly flashed upward. “If your
blood can heal, then do you think it could reverse the Red Death?”

Dezyre shook her head. “Paris was already way ahead of you on that one. When she approached me one day and randomly asked for a sample of my blood, she wouldn’t tell me what she needed it for. Only later did I find out about her experiment.”

My heart sank. “I’m guessing it didn’t work?”

“No,” Dezyre said with a sigh. “My blood cells reacted the same way any other vampire’s would.”

So much for using that idea to save Aden.
I wanted to stomp my foot but refrained.
I thought back to when I had fried myself trying to save Mrs. Knight, and Paris said Dezyre healed me. “You fed me your blood, didn’t you?” I asked. “Back at the base, when I had
my
play
date with an electric bracelet.” Frost had ordered I be tagged with an electric bracelet, set to activate only when I stepped outside of Aden’s apartment when I wasn’t supposed to. When a group of religious radicals came to make an example out of me for being a vampire hunter, they took Mrs. Knight instead, almost killing her. They would have had I not stepped out of the home and stopped them, unfortunately frying myself in the process.

Dezyre’s lips turned up into a smile. “You were close to death,” she said. “But yes, I fed you my blood and you
came
to a few minutes later.”

“Have you always been able to do this?” Leo asked. “Heal people?”

“I’ve always been drawn to medicine,” Dezyre said, tucking a frizzing curl behind her ear. “But I only learned what I could do when I told Paris how I had changed Rook and she studied my blood, suspecting something was off.”

“And what did she find?” Leo pressed.

“She couldn’t tell,” Dezyre said. “My cells bond differently. That’s all I could gather from the Greek spewing out of her mouth. I was a fledgling medical student then, so I didn’t know what all the terminology meant. And you can forget about asking Paris De Lange to repeat herself. ‘You should have been listening the first time. Asking for repeats is a sign of incompetence.’”

I snorte
d. That sounded like our cuddly
French doctor.

I stared at Dezyre. Now it all made sense, how she had risen to the top of her class, being hailed as somewhat of a medi
cal rock star.

“Guys!”

We turned around; Arika was standing a few feet away. “He’s waking up,” she said.

I heard Dezyre’s breath catch
and our eyes met. “Don’t worry,” I said. “I won’t say anything. Neither of us will, right?” I said pointedly, looking at Leo.

He gave me a curt nod, and we all walked back
into
the other room
.

Rook
was sitting up with a groan when we walked in. Dezyre immediately went to him, one hand at his back while the other probed his face, checking him out. “You should lie back down. You had a really close call.”

His eyes were squeezed shut, like he might be having a killer headache. “What happened?” he
asked
between gritted teeth.

“You were shot
by Scarlet Steel,” I said, kneeling next to him and resting a hand on his arm. “Dezyre dug the bullet out before it did too much damage though.”

Blinking several times, his eyes focused on his exposed chest. An ugly, gooey, circular scar was planted right over his sternum. He patted it, staring in wonder. “I was shot in the heart and survived?”

I gl
anced at Dezyre; her face paled
and she minutely shook her head. I smiled brightly at Rook and stood, shrugging. “Guess you must have one hell of an immune system. I wish I could sleep off my injuries as well as you do.”

His forehead creased with confusion, but then he stood.

“Careful,” Dezyre said, taking his arm and helping him rise. “You’re still probably weak from blood loss.”

Rook looked at her and then his gaze slid down to her hand. He arched a brow but didn’t say anything.
He looked at the jacket, sniffing it. “What is that smell?
It’s like blood and beer all in one.
”

“
Eau de
asshole,” I said, crossing my arms and shuffling my feet. “I snatched it off Orion before he got away. Sorry, it was the only thing I had, and you looked like you could use it.”

“You saw Orion?” Rook asked, his voice turning sharp.

My throat constricted. “Yes,” I said, my voice
small
.

“And you let him escape?” Rook said, brows rising.

“It wasn’t her fault,” Leo
interjected from beside me
. “The Black Cross Guild started shooting up people, and saving your life took a priority over running after Orion.”

The faintest of blushes stained Rook’s cheeks, and he had the decency to look embarrassed. “Sorry, Sloane. I didn’t mean to be
a
dick.” He sighed, wincing as he stretched his arms over his head. “I just feel like crap, and it’s kind of making me edgy.”

“It’s okay,” I
said lightly, giving him a half-
hearted smile. “I can totally relate.”

Something slipped out of the jacket pocket, fluttering to the floor and landing
face
up
in the small pool of light from the deteriorating bulb.

I knelt to retrieve it, frowning.
“What’s this?” It was a faded piece of paper with a symbol sketched on it in pencil.
It
looked hauntingly familiar
and I gasped
.

Now I knew what the symbol was on the map, the one that was too faded to see clearly.

It was a forget-me-not. The Mark of the Creator.

Leo took it, eyeing it like he had seen a ghost. “It’s the symbol for
Elkhorn L
abs, where my father worked.”

“But that was destroyed, wasn’t it?” I asked, trying to phrase it as gently as I could so as not to dredge up any painful memories for
him
.

Too late. His eyes saddened
and he swallowed hard before speaking. “Yes, but they had another facility for backup, deep below ground in case the main lab was destroyed.”

“Do you think Orion could be trying to find this place?” Rook asked.
His eyes flicked to mine, serious, and I knew
he had
drawn the connection between the symbol and the Mark.

“It’s possible,” Leo said, eyeing the paper a moment longer before looking at Rook and then me. “The question is why.”

“Guess we’re going to have to go
to
the lab to find out,” I said. “Do you know where it is?” I asked Leo.

“Maybe,” Leo said, chewing on his lip. It was a token gest
ure that drove many girls crazy.
I’d put up with years of listening to my friends
’
fangirling while not really paying it any attention. “I’d have to do some digging, find a map and maybe get on the Internet.”

“Then it’s settled,” Rook said. “We’ll go to this secret lab and find out what Orion’s after.”

Dezyre’s mouth stretched into
a yawn. “You’re not going anywhere,” she said, steeling her voice. “You almost died. You need to
rest
.”

“Sleep doesn’t sound like a bad idea for any of us,” Leo muttered, yawning. Seeing him yawn, I started to. I’d always heard yawns were contagious, like watching someone yawn could produce one.

“All right,” I said, clapping my hands together and making everyone jump. “We’ll camp out here and hit up the lab tomorrow night. We can’t do much of anything right now anyway.”

The crack of light around the boarded up windows
was
beginning to lighten, meaning it must nearly be dawn.

Settling in, Dezyre said she would watch over Rook, who continued to deny that he needed help but promptly shut up – or rather, gave up – when he realized she wasn’t going to take no
for an answer. I ma
de her look at Leo’s neck first
though. To my immense relief, it didn’t look nearly as bad after all the blood had been cleaned
away
. For a Rogue, the bit
e
had been a little rough but clean, puncturing just deep enough for it to drink but not sever an artery like most Rogues did.

After Dezyre finished patching Leo up, he
and Arika sat in a corner off to themselves, chatting quietly.

I was too tired to feel jealous, if that’s what it even was. It didn’t feel the same as when I learned Aden and Dezyre had previously dated, maybe even slept together.

Not having the mental capacity to even begin to sort out my tangle of emotions, I crawled on top of a pile of clothes,
not caring if they were dirty.

Before I could form another thought, I passed out into the sweet embrace of sleep.

CHAPTER 19

“Sloane. Sloane, wake up.”

The voice sounded distant, like it was yelling underwater. Groggily, my eyes cracked open. Murky light shone down on the poppy meadow, drowning everything in shade
s of gray. There was no breeze;
everything was perfectly still, as if holding its breath, waiting for something.

Squinting against the obnoxious glare of the overcast sky, I sat up, nearly bumping heads with Aden.

He let out a long sigh,
his shoulders relaxing. “Thank G
od. I thought you weren’t going to wake up.”

“Technically, I’m still asleep,” I said, rubbing my temples. I’d had migraines before, here and there, but this one put all the others to shame. It felt like a gremlin had crawled inside my head and was taking a sledgehammer to my skull.

“Sloane?”

A shiver rolled over my skin
at hearing my name in Aden’s husky voice; he
had
said
it so tenderly, like a prayer.

“Something’s not right,” Aden said. He bent over me, his
light
blond eyebrows steeped in concentration as he scrutinized my face. “Did something happen?”

I was going to tell him about Orion; the “O” had already formed along my tongue, but then I got a good, solid look him.

My heart nearly dropped into my stomach. Aden’s skin was ashen, and dark
circles hung beneath his blood
shot eyes. He looked thinner, not lean in a toned, athletic way, but rather like something was eating him from the inside out.

I scra
mbled to my feet in a heartbeat – and was
nearly leveled by the tsunami of dizziness that rolled over me.

Aden quickly rose, clutching my arms so I wouldn’t fall. When I steadied, his hands slid up to my cheeks,
encasing
my face. “What happened? Are you hurt?”

A tremor settled in my skin, though I wasn’t cold. It was like fear, real and sentient, had taken over, drilling into my heart and poisoning my blood. “I –” I started to say, then cleared my throat and swallowed. Why was I so breathless? It wasn’t the good kind of breathless that came from almost-kisses and tantalizing touches. This was trigg
ered by something more sinister –
raw,
all-consuming
fear.