Deeper Than Midnight (30 page)

“Come here, guys,” she ordered the dogs, waiting as they both loped over. Her heart was hammering in her chest, beating a hundred miles an hour. Something was wrong here, really wrong. She glanced down as the dogs circled nervously at her feet. Their paws left dark stains in the snow around her boots.

Blood.

Mira screamed.

H
unter brought the young assassin into the back of the box truck and laid his motionless body on the floor. Corinne was beside him, holding her son’s hand, tears streaming down her cheeks.

“His hands are so strong,” she murmured. “My God … I can’t believe it’s really him.”

Hunter said nothing to spoil her moment, but he knew very well that the boy was far from safe yet. It had been a risk simply to remove him from the house. The UV collar around his neck would be programmed to allow only a certain distance from the assassin’s cell without Dragos’s permission. With the Minion dead on the front porch, the risk of the collar detonating was doubled.

As though the boy himself sensed the tenuousness of his situation, he began to rouse back to consciousness. He started struggling, his eyelids lifting wide. Corinne drew in her breath, her tension and worry spiking Hunter’s pulse through their bond.

Hunter held the boy by the collar, his fingers wrapped around the thick black polymer. He gave a warning shake of his head. “You must be still. There is nowhere for you to go.”

“Nathan, don’t be frightened,” Corinne soothed, her voice gentle and warm. “We’re not here to hurt you.”

The boy’s gaze flicked between the two of them. Hunter suspected it was knowledge of the collar’s purpose that kept the teenage assassin from risking escape, more so than the compassion Corinne offered. Nathan’s nostrils flared as he panted under Hunter’s hold, his face as untrusting as that of a trapped wild animal.

“We have to get rid of the collar if the boy stands any chance of leaving this place,” he told Corinne. “Dragos may already be aware that his handler is dead. He could have sensors and communication devices planted all over the grounds.”

“How can we remove the collar?” she asked, meeting his gaze with a stricken look. “I know what happens if it’s tampered with. We can’t possibly take a chance that it …”

When she didn’t seem able to finish the thought, Hunter told her gently, “We have to try something. If we don’t, it could be only a matter of seconds before the collar detonates in my hand.”

She glanced away from Hunter then, looking back down at her son. He was listening to every word they said, silent but absorbing all of his surroundings. Calculating his means and odds of escape, just the same as Hunter would be doing if he was the one trapped by a pair of strangers.

“We are here because we want to help you,” Corinne told him. Her smile was sad, hopeful. “You may not remember me, but you are my son. I named you Nathan. It means ‘gift of God.’ That’s what you were to me, from the moment I first laid eyes on you.”

He stared at her for a long moment, blinking quickly, studying her face. Then his struggles began again, a careful twisting and bucking, testing Hunter’s hold on the collar.

“I once wore one of these too,” Hunter said, catching the wild gaze and holding it steady. “I am a Hunter, like you. But I found my freedom. It can be yours too. But you have to trust us.”

The boy went wild now, and Hunter had to wonder if it was his words that had terrified him so much—the mention of freedom, a concept both foreign and dangerous to their kind—even more than the threat of the collar.

In Nathan’s struggles, the thick black ring of polymer and high technology knocked hard against the floor of the truck. As it did, a small red LED blinked on.

“What’s that light mean?” Corinne asked, panic edging her voice. “Oh, God, Hunter … we can’t do this to him. You have to let him go … before he hurts himself. Please, I’m begging you, let him go, Hunter.”

A sudden flash of Mira’s vision shot through his mind at Corinne’s terrified words. He pushed it away and focused on the task at hand. “If we let him go, he is dead for certain. The detonator is active now. He can’t run without setting it off.”

And now that the LED was blinking, time was even more fleeting. He glanced around him, searching for a tool to use in removing the collar, even while he understood too well that tampering with the device would only hasten its explosion.

Then he remembered the cryogenic containers.

The liquid nitrogen.

“Stand up,” he told Nathan. “Do it carefully.”

Corinne gaped at him. “What are you doing? Hunter, tell me what you’re thinking.”

There was no time to explain. He walked the boy over to the tanks, his hand still wrapped around the lethal ring at his neck.

“Hunter, please don’t hurt him,” Corinne begged, a further confirmation that Mira’s precognition could not be thwarted. “Can’t you understand? I love him! He means everything to me!”

Hunter held fast to his conviction that he was doing the right thing—the only viable thing—to possibly save her child. With his free hand, he reached for the hose that connected the cryo container to the tank of liquid nitrogen that fed it. He yanked it loose. White fumes spewed from the severed hose.

“On your knees,” he told the boy, firmly guiding him to the floor. “Take off your shirt. I want you to place it over your head like a hood, tucked between your skin and the collar.”

“Hunter,” Corinne cried, weeping now. “Please, just let him go. Do it for me …”

Her fear clawed at him, but he couldn’t stop now. “This is the only way. It’s his only chance, Corinne.”

Nathan obeyed, silent, uncertain. When the tank top was in place, Hunter told him, “Lie down on your stomach.”

Slowly, the boy got into position on the floor. Hunter wound the tail of the cotton shirt around his hand then took a firmer hold of the collar, the liquid nitro hose in the other. He exhaled a low curse, then brought the hose toward the back of Nathan’s head and held the plume of freezing chemicals directly onto the collar.

Clouds of white steam frothed up into the air. Even through the layers of fabric protecting his hand, his skin burned from the intense cold blasting the impenetrable casing and circuitry of Dragos’s cruel invention.

Beneath him, Corinne’s son was utterly still. He panted quickly, quietly, just a terrified kid who was giving all he had to hold himself together in what could very well be the final seconds of his life.

All too soon, the liquid nitrogen began to thin and sputter from the hose. Hunter would have liked to freeze the damned collar for a lot longer, but the tank was petering out. He’d have to take his shot right now and hope for the best.

“What’s happening?” Corinne asked. “Is it working?”

“We’re going to have to find out.” He threw down the hose and reached for one of the daggers sheathed on his thigh. He took it out and turned the hilt around in his hand, ready to bring the butt down on the frozen collar.

Corinne’s hands took hold of his arm. “Wait.” She shook her head, her face stricken with fear. “Don’t do this. Please, you will kill him.”

He might end up killing the boy and himself, if his gamble failed and the device went off in that next moment. With Corinne weeping, pleading futilely for him to stop—the vision playing out just as Mira had predicted—Hunter pulled his arm out of her grasp.

Then he brought his fist down on the collar.

It shattered.

The pieces broke away, crumbling down around Nathan’s shirt-covered head as the device disintegrated. Hunter got up and stood back from the boy. Corinne threw her arms around him.

“Oh, my God,” she breathed, clinging to Hunter, sobbing and laughing at once. “Oh, my God … I can’t believe it. Hunter, it really worked!”

Nathan was motionless for a moment, still lying prone on the floor. Then he reached up and pulled the tank top from around his head. He stood, turning to face them. His fingers shook a bit as they climbed up to trace the bare skin of his neck.

Nothing but a white-tinged ring where the chemicals had burned him. The skin would heal in a short time. The miracle was, he was free.

“Wh-what have you done to me?” he asked, the first words he’d uttered to them. His voice was deep but carried the rough scrape of fading adolescence.

“You are free,” Hunter told him. “No one can control you anymore. Thanks to your mother’s love, her determination to find you, you are finally free to live as you choose.”

Corinne stepped away from Hunter’s side and held her hands out to her son in welcome. “I want to bring you home with me, Nathan. We can be a family now.”

He swung a look on her as she approached him. Guarded, mistrusting, he frowned and gave a faint shake of his shaved head.

Before Hunter could register the change in the boy, from caution to cornered, Nathan was moving. In a flash of Breed motion, he had grabbed one of the broken shards of his collar and held it tight against Corinne’s throat. She gasped, totally unprepared for the assault.

Hunter growled, his eyes trained on the jagged, makeshift blade that was poised at his Breedmate’s carotid. Whether this boy was her flesh and blood or not, he had just declared himself an enemy.

And Hunter would not hesitate to kill him if the threat escalated even so much as a fraction.

Even as Nathan backed her with him toward the open doors of the truck, Corinne’s eyes pleaded with Hunter for mercy. “Nathan,” she said, trying once more to reach her son’s humanity. “You don’t have to be afraid. Let us be your friends now. Let us be your family. Just give me a chance to be the mother I should have been for you.”

He moved closer to the doors, saying nothing. That damnable bit of sharp material still riding near her vein. “Nathan,” Corinne said. “Please, just let me love you—”

He shoved her forward, a violent rejection of all she’d said and all she’d done for him.

Then he bolted out of the truck, escaping into the woods as the first light of dawn was already beginning to glow on the horizon.

C
hase hadn’t actually expected to wake up. His last conscious memory had been running in a blind tear through the city, losing too much blood from the gunshot wound in the artery of his right leg and the lesser hit to his shoulder. He’d taken worse injuries in combat before, but that was then. This was now, when his body was shuddering and weak, his nearly indestructible Breed genetics hobbled by the disease that roused him awake on a pained groan.

He tried to sit up but didn’t get very far. Metal restraints clamped his wrists and ankles to an infirmary bed. Another wide band of steel and leather lashed him around his middle. He cursed through his gritted teeth and gave the manacles a good hard rattle.

As his vision slowly came into better focus, he saw a dark head peering in from the hallway at him through the small window in the door.

It took Dante a minute before he finally strode inside. As the door closed shut behind him, he stared at Chase from across the room and shook his head. “You’re a fucking idiot, you know that, Harvard?”

Chase scoffed. “Thanks for the concern. I hope you didn’t come all the way down here just to tell me that.”

“No, I didn’t,” Dante replied, not rising to his bait at all. “I’ve been next door, sitting with Tess while she’s recovering.”

“Tess is in the infirmary?” Recalling the Breedmate’s delicate last few weeks of pregnancy, Chase immediately felt like a first-class asshole. “Ah, Christ, man. I didn’t know.”

“How could you know? You weren’t here.”

Chase exhaled a short sigh and nodded in acknowledgment. He couldn’t say he didn’t deserve this cold reception. After all, he’d done just about everything he could lately to make sure he was
persona non grata
with the Order. Especially where Dante was concerned. “So, how is she doing? Everything all right with her?”

“Yeah. Tess is fine.” Dante gave a faint incline of his head. “So is the baby. He’s resting next door with her.”

Tess gave birth already? The news flash hit Chase with double barrels. He couldn’t hold back his surprise, or the regret that slapped him to realize he’d been absent for the event Dante and Tess had been looking forward to for many long months. Hell, he’d been pretty damned eager about the whole thing himself. He’d even wondered on more than one occasion if Dante had been thinking about asking him to be godfather to his son, an honor Chase was hardly worthy of, but one he would have accepted with humbled pride at one time.

A million years ago.

And now a million miles out of his reach.

That’s what it all felt like to him, looking at the other warrior’s grave, disappointed expression as he approached the bed where Chase was shackled. “Well, congratulations, Dante. To you and Tess both,” he said. “When did the baby come?”

“Yesterday morning, a few minutes before noon.”

Chase guessed, “So, what is that, December tenth?”

“Seventeenth,” Dante replied, his look going even more grim than before. “Shit, Harvard. How bad is it for you now? I mean seriously. Don’t bullshit me.”

“Bad,” Chase admitted. His throat was parched, voice little better than a rough growl. “But I can handle it. I’d handle it a lot better if I wasn’t strapped down to this damned bed like a criminal.” He lifted his fisted hands as far as the steel manacles would allow. Which wasn’t much at all.

“Not gonna happen,” Dante said soberly.

Chase grunted. “Doctor’s orders?”

“Lucan’s orders. It took some convincing for him to even let Niko and Renata bring you inside after Mira found you. Didn’t help matters that your face has been plastered all over the news as some kind of goddamn nutjob domestic terrorist.” Dante exhaled a curse. “What’d you do, pose for pictures before you lost your mind and started shooting up the senator’s Christmas party last night?”

“What are you talking about?”

“They’ve ID’d you, man. There was an eyewitness who provided your description to law enforcement and the freaking Secret Service. Whoever saw you nailed your face down to the last pore and whisker. They’ve been running the artist’s sketch on every network and cable channel ever since.”

“Shit,” Chase muttered, remembering the laser-intense stare of the senator’s attractive assistant when she’d spotted him up in the gallery of the ballroom. “It couldn’t be helped, Dante. And it doesn’t matter that I’ve been made. Dragos was there. He was trying to get close to the senator and the vice president. He’s targeted both of them.”

Dante went quiet, studying him as if he wasn’t sure Chase could be believed. “You saw Dragos at the senator’s party? You’re sure of this?”

“Goddamn right, I’m sure. I watched the senator introduce him to the vice president in the middle of a ballroom full of humans. When I saw them walking off to a private meeting, I saw my shot and I took it.”

Dante raked his hand through his dark hair. “You saw Dragos, and you didn’t call it in to us? The Order should have been the ones to handle the situation. What the hell were you thinking?”

“One thing I wasn’t thinking about was stopping to make a phone call,” Chase argued. “I didn’t know Dragos was going to be there. I didn’t know I was going to be just a few yards away from him—close enough to put a bullet in the son of a bitch and take him down. All I had was a hunch, and I acted on it.”

“Jesus, Harvard. This is not good news.”

“Are you listening to me?” Chase shouted, anger spiking, adding fuel to the flame of his already tightening blood hunger. “I’m telling you I shot Dragos last night. I saw a bullet hit him dead-on and take him to the floor. For fuck’s sake, maybe you should be thanking me instead of crucifying me for not following protocol. I’m telling you there’s a damn good chance I killed the bastard.”

“Dragos isn’t dead,” Dante replied soberly. “No one was killed last night. There were reports of a few injuries, but none of them was deemed life-threatening. If Dragos was there, if you shot him like you say you did, then he was able to get up and walk away.”

Chase listened, his temples banging with rising fury. “I need to get out of here. I found him once, I can find him again. I can fix this—”

“No, Harvard, you can’t. And you’re not going anywhere. There’s too much at stake for us right now. Lucan wants your ass planted right where it is until he says otherwise.”

Chase couldn’t bite back his snarl. He was pissed that Dragos had escaped and pissed that Lucan, Dante, or anyone else thought they could hold him against his will. He was getting the message loud and clear that he was no longer part of the Order, and he’d be damned if that meant they could keep him from going after Dragos on his own. He wanted Dragos taken out as much as any of the warriors.

And he had another, equally pressing reason to want to be let loose from his captivity in the compound.

“I need to feed,” he murmured low under his breath. “The gunshot wound in my thigh isn’t going to heal very fast if I don’t get some fresh red cells in my body. I need to be free to hunt, Dante.”

The warrior’s gaze bore into his own like a probing searchlight, leaving no shadows for Chase’s deception to hide in. “You said it yourself; your leg is in bad shape. You’re in no condition to hunt, even if Lucan didn’t feel it would be a mistake to turn you loose topside right now.”

The thirst that had been clawing at him began to rake its talons even deeper, shredding him from the inside out. He was sweating, an icy sheen that made him shudder as his stomach twisted into a tighter knot. “Can you risk leaving me in here?” he said, his voice rough as gravel, almost unearthly. “I might end up hunting inside the compound, seeing how there’s a human living here now.”

Dante’s face blanched a bit before his eyes fired up with sparks of bright amber. “Because you’re hurting, I’m gonna pretend you didn’t say that. And I’m going to do you the one-time favor of not telling Brock either, because I promise you, that male would kill you with his bare hands if you so much as breathed on Jenna, human or not. Hell, keep pushing and I might save him the effort.”

The coil of agony in his gut made Chase sneer up at Dante in response. “If I wanted to break out of these restraints, I could. You know that.”

“Yeah, I know.” Dante edged in closer, moving so quickly Chase’s sluggish senses couldn’t track him. He was startled to feel the cold kiss of sharp metal pressed up hard against his throat. Dante’s curved twin blades bit into his flesh, one on each side of his neck, a hairbreadth from breaking the skin. “You could try to break out of the restraints, Harvard, but now you’ve got two good reasons why you won’t.”

Chase bristled at the threat, one he knew from experience that he’d better respect. “That’s some tough love, especially coming from a friend.”

“My friend is gone. He’s been gone for longer than I want to admit,” Dante said, his voice tight and controlled. Lethal, when it lacked the warrior’s usual bravado. “Right now, I’m talking to the blood addict glaring up at me with bared fangs and amber-soaked eyes. He’s the one who’ll be eating these titanium blades if he thinks I’m wrong about him walking the thin line toward Bloodlust.”

He didn’t ease off with the nasty curved daggers, not even when Chase slowly retreated, letting his spine settle back onto the mattress of the infirmary bed. The sharp edges followed him down, dangerously close, testing Chase’s nerve.

He didn’t dare escalate the situation.

Although he wasn’t yet Rogue, Dante was right. Chase could feel Bloodlust nipping at his heels. And he couldn’t be sure that the titanium wouldn’t act like poison to his blood. He glowered up at Dante but made no move to try him.

“That’s the first smart move you’ve made in a long time, Harvard.”

Chase said nothing, waiting to breathe until the razor-sharp claws fell away from his throat and the warrior who had recently been his tightest companion left him alone once more in the room.