Dark Horizons (The Red Sector Chronicles) (41 page)

I closed my eyes, warring with my conflicting emotions. Part of me still belonged to Aden, but another half felt responsible for taking care of Leo, since he was technically mine now.

Aden’s not going to be happy.

I inwardly sighed
, irritated with myself
. Screw him. I
didn’t
care what he
thought
. I wanted to save Leo, and by God, if he
wanted to come live with us, I wasn’t
going to abandon him. He had
been through enough already. I
couldn’t
leave him alone to navigate this strange new world all by himself.

A light tinkling sound floated over the music, like someone tapp
ing a fork against one of the m
any crystal champagne flutes floating around. The conductor cut off the orchestra, and we all turned as someone appeared at the balcony.

I paled.

Mother.

Sovereign McAllister looked stunning in a deep red gown, her golden hair swept up into an elegant bun. She had no mask, though her eyes had been dramatically done up in silver eye shadow, making it appear like butterfly wings
unfurled around her eyes
.

“My wonderful friends,” she said,
speaking into a microphone
.
“Thank you for joining me this evening for some truly monumental news.”

A tremor went through me at hearing her voice,
all frosted elegance,
and Leo wrapped his arm around my back, holding me steady.

“As you know, our partner,
Elkhorn
Labs, has been hard at work
on
finding a solution to the vampire infestation.” Her noise shriveled up on that last word. “And my good friend and esteemed colleague, Dr. Ivan Johansen, has been laboring diligently for the past several years to find a cure to
vampirism
.
While I know it’s popular conviction these creatures can only be destroyed and not saved, it is my firm belief that v
iolence and death can only lead t
o humanity’s undoing.”

I wanted to hiss at that statement. My bloodthirsty mother couldn’t stain her hands any
more scarlet than they already were, with all the innocent blood the Scarlet Guard had spilled over the years.

Murmurs and gasps went up from the crowd at the word
cure
.
My heart skipped a beat
too, but I knew better. There had to be
a
catch.

Sovereign McAllister held up a hand, and the noise died down.
Her mouth stretched into
one o
f her plastic smiles.
“Please join me in welcoming one of my dearest friends, Dr. Ivan Johansen, our guest of honor and humanity’s savior.”

The crowd burst into applause as a tall but skinny man appeared beside my mother.
He was handsome, and a lot younger than I had expected, with short black hair and a neatly trimmed black beard. After taking the mic
rophone
from my mother and doing the “kiss-each-cheek-meet-and-greet,” he glanced around the room nervously. He looked like the type of guy who was uncomfortable in a tux, let alone speaking in front of a crowd.

“Um, good evening,” he said in a deep, kind voice. His voice rasped on the last word, and he awkwardly cleared his throat while everyone stared.

While he launched into what promised to be a particularly boring speech about a lot of medical stuff I didn’t understand, I gazed around the room, reaching out with my mind and tapping into people’s auras. There wasn’t a single telekinetic signature to be found, outside of mine and the others who came with me.

I frowned.
Orion wasn’t
here.

It sounded ludicrous, but I was running out of options. And hope.

The conversa
tion I’d had with Dezyre about
mind conn
ections
between vampire siblings played through my head.
Desperate, I tried
feeling
for just Orion.

At first, I didn’t feel anything other than completely ridiculous. Then i
t started as an itch, an inkling of movement I thought at first was my imagination. But when it didn’t go away, I knew it was something more.
It settled deep in my gut like a built-in GPS.

He
was
here. He just wasn’t on this level.

“Stay here,” I whispered to Leo, starting to break away.

He caught me by the hand. “Where are you going?”

I paused. What could I tell him? That I had a “feeling” Orion was upstairs?

“I, er, have to go to the bathroom.”

Leo’s brows lifted. “Oh. You, er, want me to come with you?”

“To the bathroom?”

He flushed. “I mean, do you want me to be your wingman?”

I shoved him playfully. “Easy there, Mr. Debonshire. This lady can handle herself. I’ll be right back.”

In hindsight, it probably would have been best if he had come with me, but that would have drawn too much attention
if both of us had left. I started to turn
when Ivan said, “… by studying the DNA of the first vampire.”

I froze, spinning on my heel. Everyone began talking amongst themselves,
sounding
excited, scared,
and
unsure of this new development.

I stood there, thinking.
What had he just said?
I swore, silently chastising myself for not paying closer attention.

“Did you catch
any of that?” I asked, grabbing
Leo’s arm.

He shook his head. “No. All I caught was that last part. Someone was too busy flirting with me.”

I blushed
, about to deny I was flirting, or at lea
st
not intentionally. “You started it,
”
I mumbled instead, not wanting to hurt his feelings and feel like a jerk.

He chuckled.

Ivan held up his hands, politely waiting for everyone to quiet down. My mother would have promptly silenced them with one of her sub
-
zero stares.

“Thanks to our extensive research, and the projects funded so generously by Sovereign McAllister’s team –” Ivan continued.

I narrowed my eyes.

“– we have done enough testing to…”

His voice died away as I
glanced upstairs.
It sounded like his speech was nearing an end, and I needed to move while everyone was distracted.
“Keep an eye on him,” I said to Leo. “I’ll be back shortly.”

“Be careful,” he said.

I smirked. “Don’t worry. I don’t think the toilet’s going to suddenly grow fangs and try to eat me.”

He gave one of his “you know what I mean” looks, and I turned and maneuvered through the crowd.

After discreetly exiting the ballroom, I found myself alone in the foyer. Where were all the guards?  My mother never threw one of these functions without ample security.

I passed the refreshment table, staring at it longingly, but it had been pretty picked over. Even the punch bowl –
which contained
strawberry or fruit
punch at one time
, judging from the red tint – had been practically licked clean.

Seeing crumbs brought on a stomach growl, and I refocused my
attention on the grand staircase
looming before me.

Glancing around, I lifted up the hem of the dress and climbed, being extra careful how I stepped so I wou
ldn’t roll my ankle in the four-
inch heels.

There wasn’t a single soul on the second level. Everything was dark, with only a handful of red candles lighting the way here and there. Every now and then, my mother
liked to employ mood lighting. What she found elegant was spooky as hell
to me, but I didn’t let the creepy lighting – or lack thereof – scare me off as I quietly tiptoed down each hall, searching rooms.

Every room was empty. For some reason, that made my heart beat
faster
.

The air shifted
behind me, like someone had just been standing there, and I whirled around. No one was there.

Creeped out, I sucked it up and kept going. I froze in the hall, my ears straining
on something high-pitched and repetitive
, like someone was rocking back and forth
. That was definitely the sound of a leather chair squeaking.

Ready for a fight, I braced myself and gently pushed open the door to my mother’s study.

The desk light was on, like someone had been in
t
here recently. It didn’t surprise me much; my mother practically lived i
n her study. What she went over
I had no idea, and I really didn’t care. Her work life was as much a mystery to me as her personal life, if she even had one.

Stepping fa
rther into the room, I looked around. It
appeared
the same
as it always did;
shelves of books
lined
the walls, and a large cherry desk
sat
before
the
bay window. A leather chair
sat behind it,
s
till turning
as if someone had just moved.

“Well, well, well. Aren’t we looking gorgeous this evening?”

Sucking in a tig
ht breath, I hiked up the dress and reached
for
the knife strapped to my thigh.

CHAPTER 24

Pain erupted along my hand as I slammed into a
bookcase
, gritting my teeth against the feeling of
the shelves
grinding into my spine. He had me pinned, with my wrist firmly in his grasp, twisting. Against
my will, my fingers loosened up
and the
knife fell to the floor.

The soft yellow glow of the desk lamp illuminated Orion’s handsome features. “
Hey, S
is. Long time, no see.”

“Take your sarcasm and shove it up –”

His grip tightened around my
wrist
, twisting it to the point of hyperextending my arm. I hissed in pain, glaring at him with a locked jaw.

“You always were stubborn,” Orion murmured. “Then again, so was I. We get that from both our parents, I think. No wonder their relationship ended in divorce.”

“It ended in divorce because Mom became a selfish, cruel woman,” I spat. “Don’t you dare drag Dad’s name through the mud with hers.”

Anger flared over his face. “Our mother was only trying to do what was best for us. For all of us.”

I wanted to roll my eyes. Of course he would take her side. He had always been closer to her than
I had
. I was “daddy’s little girl.”

“Mom only thought about herself,” I said. “There was no ‘us.’”

“And who does that sound like?” he asked wistfully.

I pressed my lips together. There was no way I was anything like my mom.

Orion glanced down, thinking something through. After a few seconds, he
kicked my knife out of the way. I
t skidded across the floor and went under a
bookcase
.

“Promise to play nice?” he said.

“Define ‘nice’?” I said coldly.

He chuckled. “As in, don’t take my head off if I let you go?”

“Now why would I want to do that?” I asked sweetly.

He gave me a rueful stare before dropping his hand. I immediately flexed my wrist; it was starting to bruise from where he’d gripped me so hard.

My gaze wandered over to the bookcase. There was no way I could cross the room and fish for it without Orion stopping me. When he’d pinned me to the shelf, I never saw him coming. The vampire blood he’d drank back at the lab must have stre
ngthened his vampiric
abilities.

He had also let me go.

That struck me as odd. Then I thought about all the other times we’d butted heads. He had let me go every single time.

“Why did you let me go?” I asked suddenly.

Orion’s face never betrayed what he was thinking or feeling. He always had a good poker face. “Because it suited me at the moment.”

I studied his eyes. They always were the only true clue I had into his inner workings. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t hide the haunted longing buried deep within.

“No,” I murmured, stepping closer. “There’s something else. You’ve had plenty of chances to kill me, and yet you didn’t. Why?”

For a precious
split second, I saw a look of such breathtaking loneliness of his face
that
I was almost leveled. Then he shrugged and masked his expression with cool indifference.