Vincent shifted faster than Adam could move, evading the needle aimed at his back, grabbed one of the weaklings by the hand and twisted his arm around behind him, forcing the man to bend forwards to avoid his shoulder popping out of its socket. Vincent shoved the flat of his free hand against the man’s bent one, shattering his wrist.
The weakling cried out, the sound gaining too much attention for Tor’s liking.
Adam grabbed Vincent and dragged him backwards. Vincent immediately defended himself, releasing the male and focusing on Adam instead, slipping out of his grasp in order to attack him. The bastard rabbited, throwing humans in his wake to slow Vincent down. The injured weakling took off in the other direction.
Daemon came out of nowhere and tackled the third weakling male, taking him down and pinning him to the ground. The Aurorea Law Keeper punched him repeatedly in the face, bloodying it and splitting flesh. Two more men sprinted away from the scene, too fast to be human. Adam led them.
“Fuck it,” Eve snapped and hauled Daemon off the weakling male, too late to make a difference. He was unconscious, or possibly dead. She growled. “We could have used him for information.”
The four weaklings split up.
Daemon got to his feet, flicked the blood off his hand, and casually said, “Are we tracking them or not? They have to go to ground before day breaks. Easy hunting.”
Vincent jogged back to them. “He makes a good point. Four of us for four of them.”
“Five of us,” Eve said.
“Three of us,” Tor corrected and everyone looked at him. “Vincent, take her back to the mansion.”
Eve opened her mouth to protest. Tor covered it, muffling her words. She bit his palm but he didn’t release her. He stared down into her eyes, letting her see in his how serious he was and that he wasn’t asking her to idly stand by while they did the hunting. She had a task to do too, one that might help them.
“I want you to contact Section Seven. Get them on the line somehow and tell them what their boy is up to. Maybe they can provide some assistance to clean up this mess.”
She frowned and then nodded, and he released her mouth.
“No one tracks Adam,” Eve said and ignored the incredulous looks the three Law Keepers threw her way, not breaking her stride as she took command of the situation. Tor found the way she stood up to the three powerful men and didn’t let them take control of her mission mildly arousing. She shoved her hands against her hips and tipped her chin up. “I get the feeling he’s involved in this at a high level and he’s been trained to know when he’s being tracked by vampires. He’s not going to risk returning to their base of operations if he thinks he’s being followed, and he might call ahead and get them to clear out the place before we can find it. We can’t risk it. If they move, then they’re going to be on their guard and even harder to find.”
Daemon took off without a word, picking the injured weakling. Serge nodded, a new glimmer of respect in his eyes as he looked at Eve, and then melted into the crowd.
Eve grabbed Tor’s arm before he could move.
He looked back at her and caught the flicker of fear in her eyes and in her feelings, a contrast to the confident woman who had stood before him a heartbeat ago. He pulled her against him and kissed her softly, hoping to reassure her.
“It’s just a scouting mission. I’ll call in if I discover anything, and I’m right on the other end of the line if you need me.” He pressed his forehead to hers and she nodded.
“Be careful,” she whispered, her breath soft on his lips, making him want to kiss her again.
“I will. You too.” He pulled back and eyed Vincent. “Take care of her.”
Vincent inclined his head and Tor dragged himself away from Eve, running as fast as he could in the direction a weakling had taken.
He caught the man’s scent, climbed the buildings to hit the rooftops and tracked his prey. The further he moved from Eve, the more he felt a pull on his insides, in the region of his heart. He hadn’t realised just how strong their bond was. It hurt to be apart from her, a physical ache that dulled his senses and made it difficult to track the weakling.
It grew worse as he ran across the rooftops, leaping the gaps between buildings with ease, heading towards the outskirts of the city.
His heart demanded he return to Eve.
Tor forced himself to keep going. He had his prey in sight now. He couldn’t let the man go. He had to see where the weakling led him.
An ominous feeling deep within him whispered it would be to his doom.
To corridors of fire.
To his nightmare made real.
T
or slipped through the darkness, staying to the shadows surrounding the large industrial warehouses. His prey had led him on a long dance but, in the end, the man had slowed to a walk and headed to this location. Since entering the area, Tor had spotted other vampires, most of them leaving the warehouse district and heading towards the city. Only his vampire kept moving deeper into the maze of buildings, and Tor kept moving with him, silently racing from shadow to shadow, keeping his distance but remaining close enough that he wouldn’t lose the man if he began running again.
The man didn’t run though. He stopped outside a dark warehouse and stood still for long seconds in which Tor knew he was scanning the area with his senses, checking to see if he had been followed.
Tor was far enough away that the male wouldn’t be able to distinguish him from the other vampires or humans in the area, but he walked away from the male just in case, giving him the impression he was just another signature on the move and nothing that concerned him.
Tor’s sensitive hearing picked up the creak of a metal door opening and his internal radar detected his prey moving again. Into the building. The presence of so much metal played havoc with his senses, blurring signatures together into one mass and making it impossible to tell what was on the inside of the building. For all he knew, there could be an army of weaklings in it or just the one he had followed.
He edged back towards the front of the building he was using as a hiding place and leaned against the wall, surveying the warehouse the vampire had entered. It looked like the rest of them—modern, corrugated metal, big. Security lamps mounted on the corners shone light in all directions, illuminating the wide stretches of tarmac between the buildings.
The door opened again. Tor pressed himself flat against the wall and watched three men emerge, talking in low voices about the chill in the air and not being allowed to hunt. One mentioned purebloods. Another mentioned the incident in the red light district. His prey must have spread the word to them on his way into the building, warning them to stay out of the city.
A subtle scent wafted across from the building, barely noticeable at first, but slowly growing stronger. Blood. Human blood.
Had he found their location? If he had, then his team were in trouble. The weakling he had tracked would inform whoever was in charge about what had happened tonight and they would move location.
He cast a glance up at the sky.
Night hung like a veil over the city, darkness that wasn’t due to fade for several hours yet. Time was against him. The weaklings had more than enough of it to move their entire operation. He needed to stop them, but first he needed to be sure he had found their base and not just a place where weaklings were hiding out.
He needed to infiltrate the building.
Tor turned his back on the three men, pulled his phone from his pocket and fired off a message to Eve, telling her that he had found something and was checking it out, and would contact her again later with an update. He didn’t want her to come rushing down here with the Law Keepers when he wasn’t sure that he had found what they were looking for. He needed to be certain.
Two more weaklings appeared off to his right, heading towards the building. Tor saw his chance and took it, rushing around the back of the warehouse beside him and coming up behind them. He pulled his hood up, jammed his hands into his jeans pockets and fell into step with them, keeping a few metres behind them. These two were young and weak, probably turned in the past year. With their low-level senses, they wouldn’t be able to tell he wasn’t a weakling too. He hoped all of the vampires were as young as his escorts, but experience told him that wouldn’t be the case.
If this was their base of operations for the Midnight project, then the vampires running it would be much older, and far more wary of a strange face.
The two young vampires reached the warehouse and the three men loitering outside it greeted them, and him.
“Fucking cold tonight,” Tor said and the vampires murmured in agreement. “Coming inside before you freeze your balls off?”
The three men shook their heads, and one said, “Taking a break. Sick of smelling so much blood when we can’t drink a drop.”
Tor grunted in agreement. It was driving him crazy too, twisting his stomach in knots. He wanted to feed. Weakling blood was useless to him and these five men were lucky that was the case otherwise he might have considered draining them all to death and stashing their bodies where their comrades wouldn’t find them until they had decomposed into ashes.
He followed the two younger vampires inside, his eyes instantly adjusting to the low lighting. The warehouse was vast, but not a base of operations. The only things inside the building were a few crates and some makeshift beds. He scanned the cavernous space, searching for the source of the blood he had scented outside.
The two men crashed on the mattresses, their idle conversation filling the silence. Tor branched away from them, heading deeper into the building, constantly scouring the cavernous room for a sign of the source of blood. Nothing.
He paused when a woman appeared out of the floor and walked towards him, a smile curling her lips as she ran an appreciative gaze over him from head to toe. He forced a smile in return and headed towards where she had emerged from. As he drew closer, it became clear. Steps. Leading downwards. There was a level beneath the floor.
He approached the metal staircase and focused his senses. Several more vampire signatures came back from below him and these ones were older.
He kept his hood up and walked down the steps into a low-lit wide white corridor right out of his nightmares. He suppressed a shudder and his sudden desire to turn back and moved onwards, deeper into the compound. Hallways branched off in all directions at the first junction a short distance along the corridor.
Tor took a deep breath to catch all the scents pervading the musty air. A lot of human blood, but there was vampire blood too, among other things. He tracked the scent of other things off to his right, down a corridor with strip lighting that was on its last legs, flickering and buzzing as he passed. A series of rooms lined the corridor. Cells.
All of them were empty now, but the odour of stale urine and blood told him they had held humans there for some time.
This was their base of operations.
It had to be.
He needed more evidence, proof of some sort before he contacted Eve and told her to dispatch the Law Keepers to his location. He would demand that she stay away though. If she wasn’t here, then nothing bad could happen to her. He needed to keep her safe. He needed to stop the glimpse of the future he had seen from happening.
Tor turned back and reached the junction again. He went right, following the corridor directly opposite the entrance steps. The floor sloped, leading downwards, deeper into the ground. Was there another level?
Whoever had built this place had done it specifically for the containment of humans and other prisoners. This plan had been in motion for some years now, probably since the night they had killed Eve or possibly before then. It was about time it came to an end.
The scent of blood grew stronger as he moved further into the building and he came to another floor. Muffled noises travelled along the pale corridor ahead and the one that intersected it, forming another crossroad. The ceiling strip lights blinked on and off. He focused on the muted sounds, trying to discern the direction they came from, and banked left.
A scream echoed down the hallway, drenched in agony and terror that blasted over him. It sounded as if someone was going over the victim with a hot poker. He hurried forwards, towards a doorway near the far end. Every step closer he took, the smell of blood and death grew stronger, and the signatures of the vampires grew clearer.
He pinned his back against the end of the wall and peeked around the corner into the room.
Two rows of upright metal boards lined either side of the wide room, humans strapped to some of them, held at an angle in steel restraints that banded around their necks, waists, wrists and ankles.
A familiar male voice barked orders.
Tor bit back the growl that rumbled up his throat and tracked the man with his senses, monitoring him.
Another man in a grubby white coat stained deep brown in places came forwards and unbuckled a dead young male. Two other men moved to assist him, these ones burlier than their colleague, dressed head to toe in black. They took the dead human and dragged him out of the door and past Tor. Neither paid him any attention as he casually leaned against the wall and toyed with his phone.
“We need stronger blood,” Adam snarled, his signature overflowing with frustration. “It has to be the key. We need to run more tests… new quantities. It has to work.”
Tor pocketed his phone again and frowned. Evidently, things weren’t going to plan.
“We have tried all the blood we have available and in every quantity possible. The test subjects either awaken like us or like the purebloods. You are sure you have all the information?” the man in the dirty lab coat said and turned his back on the remaining few humans.
They writhed and wriggled, fear in their wide eyes.
“Yes,” Adam snapped and growled. “The strength of the blood must be the key. We must keep trying.”
“To keep trying, we shall need to source more blood. It will be dangerous.”