Rise of the Fallen (4 page)

"We've got all this top-notch surveillance shit."
Tristan waved his arm like an angry Vanna White. "We've found
harder-to-find shit than one of our own. Surely we can tap into some of this
fucking technology and find him!"

The pen went airborne again.
Thwack!
This time Trace
let it fall to the floor. Tristan turned and paced.

Tristan didn't need this shit right now. He had been wound tight
since finding out six weeks ago that Josie was pregnant. She was as badass as
most of the males in the room, but even she had to bow down to biology, and the
morning sickness had been terrifyingly bad for the last week. It worried
Tristan, but that's how it was for a male whose mate was pregnant, even if he
hadn't actually mated Josie, not in the vampire sense of the word, anyway. His
biology hadn't fired up a bond with her, but that didn't mean he didn't love
her or worry like hell about her being so sick. Now he had Micah to worry about
on top of everything else.

He spun on his heels to face the others again. "Malek,
I want you and Trace to hit the streets. Sniff his ass out. If he's alive, I
want him back here yesterday."

"What if he's dead?" Arion said.

Trace stepped up and slapped Ari across the back of the
head.

"Hey!" Arion turned and glared at Trace, grabbing
his noggin.

Trace growled back, causing Ari to reconsider and turn back
around.

"If he's dead, I still want him back here."
Tristan hoped he wasn't. As much as Micah got on everyone's nerves, he and
Micah went way back – since before Katarina's death – and Tristan thought of
the pain-in-the-ass as a friend, even if Micah didn't necessarily reciprocate.

The mood sobered at the thought that Micah could have bitten
it without their knowledge. They were so tightly bound to one another it often
felt like they shared the same mind half the time, even if they didn't all get
along. And with all the shared blood among them, surely they'd have felt it if
Micah had died, right?

"Io, I want you to work the computers, try and dig into
the records and find his new place. Shouldn't be too hard for a hacker like
you."

Iobates half-grinned and fist-bumped Arion. "Fuckin'
A." Tristan rolled his eyes. Io was a cocky cuss, but the best hacker
Tristan had ever met.

Tristan looked over at the new guy, Severin. "Sev, I
want you to go with Arion to Jackson's place. If Micah is staying where they
lived together, then Jackson will know where to find him. That's probably our
best shot."

Severin cleared his throat as he glanced at Arion,
acknowledging the other male with a single nod.

"I'm handing off the rest of our workload to the other
teams until we find him. I got word that the VanGruben clan made it to safety
out of Sumatra after the earthquake, so we don't have to send a team there to
search, and if anything comes across the scanners, I'm routing it to Stryker's
team."

Nobody challenged him, which was good, because he was ready
to nail someone to the wall. Literally.

He paced back behind his desk, raking his hands through his
blond hair before stopping to press his fists down onto the industrial wood
surface. If what Tristan feared was true, Micah was in bad shape. Tristan only
hoped the fucker hadn't gone and done something stupid. Given how Micah had
reacted when Katarina died, it wasn't a far stretch to imagine he was capable
of killing himself now that he had lost a second mate.

Fuck! How had Tristan let this happen? At one time, he and
Micah had been friends. They had joined All the King's Men – or just AKM –
together, soon after King Bain created the enforcement agency, which had bases
of operation in major cities all around the world. He and Micah had worked
side-by-side on security details, policing the drecks to ensure the precarious
truce between their races remained intact, and had performed a hundred other
types of tasks and missions together. But they had drifted apart as Micah sank
further into his self-imposed isolation, and when Tristan had been promoted,
the rift between them made it so they hardly knew each other anymore. Even so,
Micah was his responsibility, and Tristan still loved him like a brother.

"Go. Find him. Let me know as soon as you have a six on
his place. I want to go there personally."

Trace stood to the side, watching him closely while everyone
filtered out of the room. Only after everyone else had left did Trace push away
from the wall and walk out the door. Tristan often wondered what went on inside
Trace's head. As long as he went out and found Micah, he really didn't care
right now.

The guardian growled with frustration as he gazed up the
luxury apartment building to the eighteenth floor balcony. He could feel
Micah's inky black imprint, but that was all. Micah wasn't home.

Fucking meeting. If Tristan hadn't called them together, he
could have gotten here earlier and followed Micah. All he could do now was
follow the cold trail Micah had left behind and hope it was enough. But first,
a quick stop inside Micah's apartment was in order. The guardian was curious to
see what had been going on up there, and with Micah gone, this was the perfect
opportunity.

The security guard looked up as the guardian entered the
lobby.

"Excuse me," the guard said. "You have to
sign in. You can't just go up."

"Really?" With a glance and a wave of his hand,
the guardian gently compelled the guard to sit back down and forget he had ever
been there. "Consider me signed in."

The guardian stepped into the elevator, rode up to the
eighteenth floor, then unlocked Micah's door with his mind. Not all vampires
could pull that trick off, but he was special.

Once inside, he closed the door behind him. Silence. The
place felt like a tomb. He opened the fridge. No food. He opened the cupboard
and found more of the same. What the fuck was Micah living on? He closed his
eyes, reached out his senses, and got the answer. Pain. Micah was living on
pain and suffering and not a whole lot else.

Shit, what was he going to do? He needed Micah. Or, rather,
he would eventually. Even now, he felt himself losing his grip on his power.
Micah could help him keep it under control. Well, he could if he didn't wind up
dead first. And the guardian still had to gain Micah's trust. So much was at
stake.

A quick peek inside the master bedroom found the massive
four-poster in messy shambles. Clothes littered the floor. And what did he
smell? Was that Micah's blood? He looked in the bathroom and found the mirror
had been shattered. Shards of glass littered the floor and dried blood dotted
the sink and marble tiles.

Damn! What kind of mind-fuck was Micah seeped in?

He had to find him.

Spinning on his heels, the guardian rushed out the door,
re-locked it, took the elevator down, and shot past the guard and back out to
the streets of Chicago. Micah's trail was weak. He had left a long time ago.
Hopefully it wouldn't go cold before he found him.

* * *

The pitch black in the alley matched Micah's mood. It had
been two weeks since Jackson had left him. Two weeks of giving less and less of
a shit as each day came and went. Two weeks of pain and misery and slicing his
forearms to relieve the ache in his chest.

Red, angry cuts covered his forearms. His latest
self-mutilation had failed to give him the relief he needed, and he hadn't even
bothered licking over the wounds to heal them. He liked the way they looked
scoring his flesh like claw marks.

With an acidic gaze, Micah prowled for the pain he
desperately needed – pain that would put an end to his suffering. One way or
another, it would all be over soon.

He exited the alley and looked left then right through a
haze of fog that diffused the light from the neons. The creature he sought was
near, but moving away, as if it knew it was being hunted and didn't want a
confrontation.

Come now, don't be shy.
Micah followed the trail, his
pace quickening now that what he needed was so close.

Shoulders that had once been wide and thick, but which now
only halfway supported clothes that hung off his thinning frame, rolled as he
marched alongside the busy thoroughfare. The hour may have been late, but this
was South Chicago, the part of the city where deals were made in the shadows
until the wee hours of the morning, corner taverns entertained well past the
legal hour, and nightlife took on a whole new meaning. More than just humans
gravitated toward the South Side at this time of night, which was what Micah
had counted on.

The trail led him to a run-down corner bar – a dive, but
packed. As if the Angel of Death himself had entered, the patrons seemed to
sense him more than see him as he stepped inside. Heads turned cautiously to
give him the once-over around longnecks of Budweiser. A group of roughnecks
playing pool unconsciously shrank back from him as he passed to take a vacant
table in the corner.

Lately, he seemed to have this effect everywhere he went.
Must have been his sparkling good mood.

His thick, black brows furrowed and his dark gaze raked the
room, searching for the one he needed.

A waitress approached, fidgeting nervously. It was obvious
she would rather be alone in the alley with Jack the Ripper than waiting on him.

"Th-Those are some ugly c-cuts there." She nodded
toward his arms, trying to warm him up, pen poised over a tablet resting on a
tray propped against her hip. When he didn't say anything, she smiled tightly
and sighed. "What'll you have? Kitchen's about to close if you're hungry,
but we've got plenty of booze."

"Fuck. Off." Micah said. He was in no mood for
her, food, or a drink.

He didn't have to tell her twice. Scurrying away, her relief
that she wouldn't have to go near him again washed over his raw senses like
saltwater on an open sore, except that Micah was too numb to give a shit.

As he scanned the room, his gaze dug into the shadows. Where
was he? The one who could end it all tonight.

A figure stirred in the shadows, a hood pulled over his
head. The movement was subtle, but Micah zeroed in on it like a hawk to a field
mouse.

Bursting from his chair, he barreled toward the man whose
bulky sweatshirt belied his brawny form and the weapons he no doubt carried. No
guns, but surely a knife or two, or maybe even a cop's nightstick. Most drecks
carried nightsticks being they usually posed as cops. A nightstick would be
perfect. Something to be beaten with that would cause him the pain he needed.

"You mother fucker. You've been dodging me all night.
You and me, outside. Now!"

"Fuck you." Malevolent hatred shot back at Micah.

Unrest rippled through the bar, silencing most of the
patrons as George Thorogood's "Bad to the Bone" rocked out from the
jukebox. All eyes were on Micah and the man in the shadows, and everyone was
poised to beat feet if guns came out – or draw their own guns, as the case may
be, because it was a good bet a quarter of the customers were carrying, not to
mention the bartender.

Micah grabbed the dreck by the collar, cotton fleece
bunching in his fist as he pulled the guy up. "I need you to do me a
favor, fucker. Consider this a freebie."

The dreck snarled, but nodded a wary acquiescence. Micah
slowly released his sweatshirt and turned for the door, expecting the dreck to
follow him.

There was no love lost between the drecks and vampires, who
lived a tremulous, mistrusting co-existence with each other. Vampires and
drecks were closely related, like second cousins to one another, really, with
the vampires coming out higher up in the gene pool. And didn't that just make
the drecks resent vampires even more? It was also why vampires got the job of
policing them and maintaining the peace. Technically, vampires were stronger
and more powerful.

Drecks looked like humans, just as much as the vampires did,
but the vampires knew better. When the façade came off, most drecks made nasty
shape-shifters.

Moreover, most drecks – including the group this guy
belonged to if the scent was right – loved killing vampires, even if there was
some fucked up truce between them that prevented it. Which meant that this
lucky fucker was about to get an early gift from Santa Claus.

"You been keeping out of trouble, Apostle?" Micah knew
the names of every dreck in the city, and he knew this one was particularly
fond of giving pain. "Or should I call you Officer John Apostle?"

"Okay, you know me, so who the fuck are you?"
Apostle replied.

"Just think of me as the guy who needs a favor."

"Fuck that. Give me a name or I'll bleed you right
here, blood sucker."

Micah scoffed. Apostle had balls. If he didn't need the
dreck's services so badly, he would enjoy showing him how wrong he was about
that bleeding business. "Okay, asshole. Call me Micah."

Apostle eyed him warily. "What do you want, Micah? And
this had better be good."

"Got any friends nearby?" Micah growled the
question over his shoulder as he led John Apostle away from the bar.

"A couple." The dreck followed cautiously.

"Call them."

"Not until you tell me what you want." Apostle's
voice was edged with malice.

Micah spun around and came nose-to-nose with the shifter.
"I'm about to be your fairy godmother, asshole. Now, call your
friends."

Dark curiosity passed between them as the dreck considered
Micah's words. "What do you mean?" he said, but he took out his
phone. His gaze never left Micah's.

"You like to kill vampires, right? Well…" Micah
stepped back, arms extended to the sides, presenting himself for the sacrifice.
"Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and happy birthday. Oh, that's right,
you fuckers don't do birthdays."

"We don't do holidays, either, but, in this case, I
think I might make an exception." John Apostle's tone rose with interest
as he appraised Micah. "Why? I mean, not that I give a shit, but I thought
you guys could just walk into the sun if you wanted to pull a Kevorkian. Why do
you need me?"