"There wasn't anything on the news." Kevin crossed his arms, his tone aggressive, but his uncertainty was clear. I glanced at Malcolm, who answered the unspoken question.

"Very little made the news because we contained it. If those deaths had been connected to a drug, there would have been ma.s.s panic."

"They wore Goya gear," I said. "The distributors down south. How do you explain that?"

"They what?" Kevin's face was a mask of confusion. "No, that's not right. The company never even knew. I never labeled anything or..."

"Abel planted the trail," Mal said, making the connection before I did. "He wanted to draw Bronson to a neutral place. Goya's headquarters happens to be near that neutral place. This way, he got to sow a little destruction first."

"That f.u.c.king..." Kevin made an incoherent sound, his face growing redder. He paced angrily, swearing every time I tried to reengage him. Angry, indeed.

I joined Malcolm, leaning against his side so that our arms touched. His fingers brushed my side, inching my shirt up until they skimmed flesh. I smiled, caught the motion in the foggy mirror, and bit my lip to hide it. I felt like I was thirteen, lingering in a room I had no business being in just to be near someone.

"This is bulls.h.i.t." Kevin stomped to a halt at the foot of the nearest bed. I faced him. "How do I know you're not still working for Abel? If that guy's trying to pin all that s.h.i.t on me, well...I'm not going to take it." He turned to Malcolm and put his hands on his hips. "You know what she is, right? His pet project. She'll turn me over to him so fast-"

"Kevin, calm down." My stomach clenched, full of bitter sickness.

"I saved your life! And for that, you k-kidnap me and who knows what's next? You were almost f.u.c.king dead. Do you remember that? Another minute and you wouldn't have had a pulse! And what thanks do I get? You're going to turn me back over to that guy!"

"Enough," Malcolm snapped, but I could feel him staring at me.

"Kevin, shut the f.u.c.k up." My throat burned and my stomach turned into a cold rock.

"No! No! This is your fault. Abel had a f.u.c.king gleam in his eye when he went after you. You're like a G.o.dd.a.m.n albatross for undead s.h.i.t."

"Enough." Malcolm, absolute. "You will stop. Now."

The room chilled beneath the burst of influence, and Kevin swayed, staggering back.

"Is what he's saying true?" he asked.

"Mal-"

"Is it?"

Kevin's jaw dropped and his eyes went gla.s.sy.

"Stop it, Mal. It's not his fault. He's scared, saying anything." I grabbed his arm. The wave of influence ceased abruptly, and Kevin reeled back.

"What happened when Abel blooded you?"

"My heart went ballistic. I'm pretty sure I told you this before."

"You died? You f.u.c.king died?" He grabbed my elbow with bruising force, his expression vicious.

I twisted my arm, but couldn't break his hold. "Lucky me, I got all the side effects on the warning label. Cardiac arrest. Memory loss. A state of infantile comprehension. All the s.h.i.t they warn about."

He bowed, resting his forehead against mine as tension tore around us. Light leaked through his lashes. "Whatever happens, I will keep you safe or I will help you put yourself back together. But I will not lose you. That isn't an option. Tell me that you feel the same."

Something cracked in my chest and I wrapped my hands tight around Malcolm's wrists, my voice low but steady. "I'm not sure I even know how to give up."

"Good. That's good." He tilted his head to kiss me, holding me in place as he pressed his lips to mine. Holding me as though he could keep me there forever. Then he stilled.

There was a sound on the other side of the door, Soraya's voice, low and steady like she was reading from a list, or giving instructions. She'd been talking for a while, but I hadn't been paying attention to her, and apparently neither had Mal. His head swiveled toward the door. Their extraction team must have arrived. From outside, a man barked short words in rapid rhythm. Something thunked against the door.

Too late, I realized that what I was hearing was a countdown. Too slow, I turned toward Malcolm, who shoved me. For a confusing instant, I was airborne. Then I landed hard on the bathroom floor. Tears sprang to my eyes, and through them I didn't see Malcolm move, only a sweep of darkness as he slammed the door between us. I blinked, and the seam around the door exploded with light.

It took me two tries to rock to my feet in the near dark, and by then the fight was fully on. Furniture shrieked as it sc.r.a.ped along the floor. Men shouted. Soraya snarled, a sound of feminine wrath that sc.r.a.ped along my nerves. Something crashed against the door and I threw myself against it, pushing back. The last thing I wanted was for whoever was out there to get in and get their hands on me. One abduction a week was more than enough.

The door began to splinter around the handle and I held on through two more kicks, teeth rattling and hands shocked from the force of the blows. Gla.s.s shattered in one of the rooms, followed by the sound of something large crashing around. Over that, I heard a man yell "shoot the lock." They were already in the room, which left only one lock to shoot. I jumped into the bathtub, curling against the tile as a burst of gunfire demolished the door.

They scuffled about at the entrance, but didn't enter. And then, all of a sudden, it got quiet. From outside someone yelled at us to turn the TV down, and I hiccupped as I swallowed a hysterical laugh.

Crouching, hands fisted, I peeked around the wall. The men wore tactical gear, desert camo, black vests, and lots of straps and lumps. But it wasn't coordinated. Army surplus matched to gun-store specialty stuff. Amateurs. They had guns, but the firearms were useless as Malcolm held one several inches off the floor by his throat while he smashed the other's face into the door frame. Wood rained down, followed by the first body. The second guy continued to kick and claw at him, but the strikes were weakening.

"Sydney?" He turned so that I saw his profile in the uneven light. His voice was low and harsh when he asked. "Are you hurt?"

I stepped out of the tub, boots rolling on debris before I found solid footing. The door was little more than a jagged sheet of splinters hanging askew from the top hinge. I pushed it aside with a finger and ducked around it.

"I'm okay." Except for how I was shaking so hard my teeth were rattling. Mal's eyes were pure gold above fully extended fangs. The man dangling from his hand had gone limp.

"Mal?" I touched his arm and he jerked so violently that I stepped back, half expecting him to snap at me. His eyes weren't just bright; they were illuminating half the room, and the power flooding out of him was sharply hostile. n.o.body would mistake him for a human now. I swallowed with a click.

"Maybe...maybe you could set that guy down."

His head turned slowly and he examined the man-six feet tall and solid-as though he hadn't realized he was holding him. He dropped him into an unnatural heap, then crossed the s.p.a.ce between us in a blink.

He was trying to be careful, but I still felt my bones creak when his arms closed around me. The floor was covered in wood, drywall, and disemboweled mattress parts, and blood and candy-apple-red wax streaked the walls like a series of small Rorschach images.

"Are they dead?" I asked, staring over his elbow at a figure that appeared to be breathing.

"Not yet." His voice rumbled in his chest, and I wormed my hands between us. It should have triggered a claustrophobic reflex, but instead it felt like all of me was protected in the shelter of him. We stood there for a long moment, during which the wattage of his eyes dimmed, and the power and tension in his body subsided...some.

"Is everyone else okay?" I asked, realizing that it was awfully quiet. His fingers dug in for a moment before he released me.

"Come." He tugged on my hand.

"Who are they?" I asked as I picked my way along behind him. There were four bodies on the floor, all men. Their weapons lay near them, except for one wicked-looking knife stuck in the wall at about head level.

"Mercenaries, human. Not well trained."

"They look like a gang of overgrown kids that decided to play SWAT."

"Abel would have hired them earlier, since he and all his people are under watch at Tenth World. He couldn't contract with one of the regular outfits, not without drawing notice. Not that their skills mattered. All he had to do was get the order out."

"I'm sorry," I whispered. "If I could undo it, I would."

"No." He stopped in the doorway to the adjoining room and grabbed my arm. "This isn't on you. The fact you survived at all is a G.o.dd.a.m.n miracle. And you didn't only survive. You fought. That's all you need to think about."

It didn't make me feel any better, but this wasn't the time to dwell on it. I cleared my throat. "So what now?"

"As soon as everyone is in shape to travel, we'll move out. Will you see to the chemist?"

The other room was fortified. The two queen-size beds had been torn apart and plastered over the window and door, which must have been broken in. Kevin sat on the dresser beside the TV with a broken tube, cradling one arm and looking pale. Thurston knelt over a body on the floor, a body which Malcolm quickly dropped beside. I sucked in a breath. It was Soraya, and she'd been burned.

Chapter Twenty-One.

"It would appear," Malcolm said, "that we will not be receiving a.s.sistance." His tone was low, a pleasant cover laid over a jagged surface as he sc.r.a.ped burned flesh away from Soraya's arm with a shard of wood. It was the sort of voice you used in a hospital room when a family member lay dying and you didn't want to upset them.

He'd known her for almost two decades, had sacrificed years of his freedom for hers when they'd barely even been acquaintances. While she was strong now, she hadn't always been. He'd talked about her emaciated body, her fragile mind. Never when she was around, and he didn't question her in front of anybody now, but there was a time when he was the only thing standing between her and true death.

And now she seemed close to it again. She was motionless. Burns covered half of her right arm and parts of her neck and face. Sun didn't burn vampires like fire burned humans. There was no redness, no blistering. Her flesh had turned gray and was...crumbling. Falling to ash when Thurston jostled her as he turned her head. Fangs extended, he tore into the flesh of his arm and held it over her face. Blood fell in a steady patter, and absorbed immediately into her flesh.

"It slows the spread," Malcolm explained as he turned her arm. Flakes of ash floated away. It wasn't merely skin that the sun had destroyed. It had charred both muscle and bone. "This will remove the dead tissue so that it doesn't infect the remainder."

I looked away when he started the next, deeper layer of peeling, flinched when Thurston tore into his other arm. Kevin had caught some shrapnel, but the slices across his shoulder and back were shallow and had mostly stopped bleeding. For once, he didn't say anything. His tics, however, were going almost nonstop. I rolled a towel and helped him place it beside his neck to cushion the repet.i.tive jerky roll of his head to the side.

"I'm usually better when I'm around vampires," he said.

"Odd." I finished taping a bandage to his back. "In my experience, usually everything is worse when I'm around vampires."

The idea that my call had triggered these guys was a caustic grater in my mind. But there were other forces at work. The security team was supposed to have been prepped, and Mal had gotten his call out before I had. Abel wouldn't have dared to intercept Bronson's soldiers, so there was no way his team should have arrived first.

"Was it because it's daytime?" I asked.

"They have gear for short excursions. Proper vehicles and rapid-deployment canopies. The time of day shouldn't have stopped them."

"Could they have been called back?" I asked.

Malcolm's jaw ticked and he caught my eye. I sorted through the feel of him, digging down beneath the anger and beating aggression. He was frustrated and uncertain. He didn't know. That wasn't good.

I crossed my arms and gripped my elbows. The red crystal I'd found stuck to my palm after I'd finally been able to unclench my fists was warm against my skin. It was also about ten times bigger than the one I'd found in my mouth, and I was starting to suspect it had nothing to do with Abel.

"d.a.m.n." Kevin tested the movement in his battered arm. "That's so cold. I mean, I thought pharma was a tough business, but-"

"Your version of 'cutthroat' is figurative," Malcolm said. He cupped the unsullied side of Soraya's face. His thumb stroked gently over her cheekbone before he rocked onto his heels and stood. Shadows narrowed his face. "The degradation has stopped. Keep feeding her for as long as you can, Thurston, but do not exhaust yourself. You'll have to watch over her."

He opened the door to the bathroom and washed his hands. The mirror didn't show his reflection, but it did show a pile of bound and gagged mercenaries stacked on and around each other. They looked p.i.s.sed, and scared. One caught my eye and I held his gaze with a hard one of my own. He'd made his bed, and now it was a chipped bathtub. That was his decision.

I turned the crystal over in my hand. It was nearly the size of a nickel and smooth. "So what do we do?"

"We operate under the a.s.sumption that someone is working against us from the inside and that others might be coming. We need to get Soraya moved to a safe place, and we need to get gone."

Kevin b.u.mped me as he slid off the dresser, starting for the bathroom before turning on his heel to go into what remained of the other one. I guess he'd rather pee in a cracked toilet than in front an audience.

I crossed to Mal, drawn by the grief dragging at him. He rested his cheek against the top of my head and I slid my hands around his waist. When he tensed, I looked down to see dark stains on his shirt.

"How badly are you hurt?"

"Most of that's not mine." He drew back and grabbed my wrist. I opened my hand. "What I want to know is, where did you get this?"

"You know how some people take up knitting?" I scrunched up my nose. "I appear to have taken up creating red pebbles when I get stressed."

"Pebbles, plural? Where are the others?"

"I..." I couldn't quite bring myself to say that I'd spit the first one out. "I threw it away."

"You made this," Mal said, and it wasn't a question.

"They seem to be forming inside and on me." I raised my chin as I said it. Maybe if I sounded confident, that would make it seem less weird. "It started...after Abel. I think it was coming from my hands. I kept finding red grit there, like a powder. I thought it was his...his."

"It doesn't have anything to do with him blooding you, except maybe for the stress he caused."

"You know what it is?" That was a bright side, kind of. I tried to hand the thing to Malcolm but he stepped back. Not a big bright side, I guess.

"Is it dangerous?" The crystal seemed so harmless, almost pretty.

"Not dangerous, no. Do you want to keep it?"

"Not particularly." The way he was looking at it, I expected it to spontaneously combust. "Why's it so special? Is it worth something?"

"That depends." He closed his eyes for a moment and, when he opened them again, he looked even more grim. "If it could help Soraya, would you want it to?"

"To help her recover?" I perked up at that, though I had no idea what he was talking about. "Yes, of course."

"Bring it here, then."

He steered me toward Soraya. Thurston sat back, one hand pressed to the gouges he'd made in his other arm. His lips were turned down into a thin, pained line.

"Thurston?" I asked.

He raised his head, then blinked slowly.

"Go. Feed," Mal said sharply. "You gave too much."

Thurston glanced at me and I shook my head. "When it comes to the bathtub boys, I'm not objecting to anything. Do what you need to do."

With effort, Thurston shoved to his feet and plodded into the bathroom. He politely closed the door. Unfortunately, his sacrifice didn't seem to have done anything. Sora was so still, the gray creeping outward in a few places, unhealthy veins driving into the rest of her flesh. Malcolm knelt, pulling me down beside him. Then he pointed to the sh.e.l.l that remained of Soraya's arm.

"Set it here."