Kerry Allen

“The butchers delivered fresh meat.”

Amanda Tessler kept her face pressed to the microscope, her scribbled notes barely keeping up with the rapidly degenerating liver tissue on the slide beneath the lens. “In the middle of something here. I’m sure I’ll meet him later.”

“I wouldn’t count on later.” Spencer bumped the table with his hip, jarring the cluster of cells she’d been studying out of the magnification field. Employed solely by virtue of nepotism, he was a stranger to work, incapable of understanding anyone else’s desire to engage in such an activity, and had made it his mission in life to convert her to the shiftless side. “They had him out in the desert for a week. He’s in bad shape.”

Amanda gave up on recording accurate data on that sample and directed her gaze toward the wall, blinking until her eyes readjusted to real-world view. After a week of SPH hospitality, the new subject was lucky to have a shape at all. She’d better get a look at him while there was something left to identify. “All right, I’m coming.”

Her sensible shoes rang like hooves in the concrete corridors, masking any whisper of sound from Spencer’s rubber-soled tread. She felt less like a Clydesdale when they stopped at the only observation room in use, yet a weighty yoke bore down upon her when she looked through the glass.

Five men surrounded the stainless steel table bolted to the floor in the center of the room, two in lab coats, three in black paramilitary garb. Each of the latter carried enough weaponry strapped to his body to overtake a small country. A fourth soldier stood to the side, rifle gripped in both hands. A ragged line of sutures ran around his hairline, as if his face had been peeled off and reattached. His finger flexed over the trigger every time his restless eyes fell on the table.

One of the scientists stepped away, exposing the subject’s upper body. Amanda’s stomach cramped, but she suppressed any visible betrayal of her horror and dismay. Performing countless autopsies should have rendered her immune to such reactions, but the specimens under her knife were usually in better condition than this one, and she didn’t have to bear witness to their suffering.

His head turned toward her as if he heard her stuttering heart through the soundproofed barrier. She fell still as a mouse in a hawk’s shadow, even though he couldn’t see her, either. Beyond the swelling and the layers of filth and blood caked on his face, the unnatural flatness of his lids indicated they had taken his eyes. She’d never understood the logic behind blinding them as a matter of protocol. Darkness had never been a handicap to vampires, and they regenerated anything they lost, except blood. If he survived, none of the damage would be permanent.

Of course, he wasn’t there to be nursed back to health.

His own mother wouldn’t be able to ID his battered, misshapen face, but his tattoo should suffice for that purpose. Surely he was the only “savage miscreation” with a cartoon panda inked into his left upper arm.

The soldiers tightened the straps binding the vampire to the table until the leather bit into his shriveled skin. The scientist returned with an IV drip of clear fluid and worked the needle into a prominent neck vein. Satisfied debility, restraints, and sedatives would immobilize him until the time came for whatever purpose he’d been acquired, they filed out of the room. Scarface lagged behind, swinging the butt of the rifle around and ramming it into the vampire’s forehead by way of goodbye. The blow snapped his head around so he faced the other way. Only then did that sightless stare release Amanda from its paralyzing grip.

The last scientist to exit the room coded the seal on the door for maximum security clearance. The lab personnel disappeared down an adjoining corridor. The soldiers passed behind Amanda and Spencer, one muttering he was glad to have that one off their hands, the others already moving on to their next crucial operation: finding the nearest titty bar.

Scarface met Amanda’s icy gaze and licked his lips, pumping his fist up and down the barrel of the rifle. She compressed her lips to stifle a remark about using his weapon to compensate for his shortcomings. The reptilian malice glittering in his eyes warned her he’d blow her brains out over a slight against his manhood and consider justice served.

Her lips were numb by the time the men turned the corner. “Monsters.”

Spencer rubbed her shoulder. “It can’t hurt you. By the time they get here, they’re not a threat to anybody.”

She shrugged off his touch and his assumption she was referring to the thing on the table. The vampire was so emaciated, she could count his bones. “They’d have to bleed him to get him in that condition in only a week.” A vampire could survive longer than that without feeding, but drained of his reserves, he’d be too weak to hunt and in terrible pain when his demanding metabolism attacked his soft tissues in a not-so-gentle reminder to refuel.

“How come you’re such an expert on vampire health?”

“I grew up among them.”

The look Spencer gave her contained a different brand of interest. “That explains why Dad made such a big deal about recruiting you. You have inside information.”

“And motivation to share it.” After one last look at the vampire, she returned to her corner of the lab and went through the motions of finishing her shift.

When she arrived home, she changed into her running clothes as usual, the only deviation from her routine the cell phone clipped to the waistband of her sweatpants. She performed some token stretches and set out at a steady plod around the golf course that backed her apartment complex.

Cars whizzed by on the street bordering the fourth fairway. She slowed to a walk, rubbing her side, then leaned against a tree for support. If she was under surveillance, her weakness should arouse no suspicion. She was genuinely winded and nursing a stitch every day by the time she reached this marker. She didn’t have one athletic fiber in her body, and it sent her punishing reminders each time she pretended differently.

A deserted expanse of golf course rolled out in front of her, and the din of the fast-moving traffic provided a measure of privacy behind. She flipped open the cell phone, which displayed indecipherable hieroglyphics as it powered up rather than the provider logo that flashed on the screen of her personal cell. A new phone arrived in the mail every month, in what looked like a shipment from a romance novel subscription service. It was the only package she ever received that showed no evidence of tampering. Her handler had devised a perfect way to repel unwanted interest, but she often wondered what he did with the books missing from the shipment.

Each phone had one number programmed into speed dial, encrypted so she never saw it. She strongly felt this qualified as the emergency she’d been instructed to save it for. She sent the call and waited while the signal bounced through untraceable relays around the globe. The cloak-and-dagger business wasn’t for her benefit. If she got caught, she’d burn on her own, but at least the party on the other end would remain anonymous.

The background noise when he finally answered sounded as if that party was having a party. “What?”

A man of few words and even fewer social graces, that Leo Hilliard. His people skills might improve if he read a sentimental book or two, but Amanda wouldn’t bet on it. She’d known him most of her life and watched him become more callous and uncompromising with each passing year. She’d think him completely heartless if not for the one thing she knew he would move heaven and earth for. “You lost something.”

“Hold on.” He made a curt excuse to his companions and went somewhere quiet. “Since that’s not common knowledge, I gather you found it.”

She scanned the jogging trail in both directions to verify no one had ventured within earshot. “How quickly can you send someone to retrieve it?”

“I can’t do that.”

“Excuse me, what?” The meaning buried in the deliberate ambiguity had obviously gotten lost in translation. “Do you understand how much this something means to you?”

“Perfectly. I also understand the directive. Do you?”

Her fingers tightened on the phone, her locked knuckles preventing her from hurling it under the wheels of a passing bus. He knew exactly what she meant. He not only refused to do anything about it—by reminding her of the directive, he was also forbidding her to take action.

“Answer me.”

She drew a shallow breath, the tightness in her chest having nothing to do with jogging. “Yes. I understand.” You heartless bastard.

He disconnected without another word.

Amanda slumped against the tree for support, the phone dangling at her side.

It had taken her six years to advance to her current position within the Society for the Preservation of Humanity, winning the trust of her superiors by minute increments. Her own spot in the inner sanctum was almost within reach. Once she gained access to top-level SPH secrets, her real assignment—feeding that information to Leo—could begin. Her one order until then was to maintain her cover at any cost, using whatever vampires she was given as lab rats, torturing and killing them if necessary to confirm her commitment to the cause.

Even if one of those vampires was Leo’s brother.

Even if she’d once been in love with him.

(Continue to Chapter 2)