Up From the Grave

Seven

The RV smelled like an Italian restaurant that had been overrun by stoners. Needless to say, I didn’t want to speak to my uncle at the moment, so if Don had any intentions of traveling to Charlottesville, he was doing it by ley line. We had enough garlic and weed to hold off an ethereal army.

Tyler also wasn’t going with us to investigate Madigan’s former compound. The medium stated that he and Dexter were sitting this one out—a wise choice. It also gave me a trusted person to leave Helsing with. My cat had probably run through eight of his nine lives from the other battles he’d been a part of. I wasn’t about to drag him along on what might turn out to be our most dangerous one ever.

We didn’t go straight from New Orleans to Charlottesville, though. We stopped by Savannah, Georgia, first. Knowing the person we were picking up, I expected the address he gave us to end in either a grand house or a strip club, but we pulled up to a modest town house near Forsythe Park instead.

“The nav system must’ve gotten us lost,” I muttered.

Then the door opened, and a tall, auburn-haired vampire sauntered out. He paused to blow a kiss at the disheveled-looking blonde who lingered in the doorway despite only wearing a towel.

“Have that spatula ready when I return,” Ian sang out to her.

“I don’t even want to know what that means,” were my first words when he climbed into the RV.

Ian clucked his tongue as he settled into the seat behind us.

“You don’t? Shame on you, Crispin. Married how long, and you haven’t spanked your wife with a metal spatula yet?”

I’d gotten used to Ian’s assumption that everyone was as perverted as he was, so I didn’t miss a beat.

“We prefer blender beaters for our kitchen utensil kink,” I said with a straight face.

Bones hid his smile behind his hand, but Ian looked intrigued.

“I haven’t tried that . . . oh, you’re lying, aren’t you?”

“Ya think?” I asked with a snort.

Ian gave a sigh of exaggerated patience and glanced at Bones.

“Being related to her through you is a real trial.”

This time, Bones didn’t attempt to conceal his grin. “That’s why you can pick your friends but not your family, cousin.”

An emotion flashed across Ian’s face before he covered it with his usual I’m-a-pain-in-the-ass-and-proud-of-it smirk. If it were anyone else, I’d swear it was childlike joy at hearing Bones call him “cousin.” Recent events had revealed their long-lost human connection, making Ian both Bones’s vampire sire and his only living blood relative.

That meant I was never getting rid of him. Then again, considering what my blood relatives had done, Ian was almost a saint by comparison.

“You didn’t say much when you rang me, so what’s the crisis this time?” Ian drawled, sounding bored.

Bones outlined Madigan’s plan to create supersoldiers by blending vampire, ghoul, and human DNA. When he was finished, Ian no longer looked as though he were fighting a yawn.

“Soon as I heard that humans were cloning sheep, I expected this day to come. Figures you’d be hip deep in it, Reaper.”

“Our priority is eliminating the program while also minimizing collateral damage,” I said, fighting a pang as I added, “And rescuing our friends, if they’re still alive.”

Ian grunted. “That’s not all. If Madigan was successful, you’ll also have to destroy any fruits of his labor.”

I was glad Bones was driving because that made every muscle in my body freeze. I’d been so worried about the consequences of potential species merging that I hadn’t considered how awful the fallout would be if it had already happened. If vampires or ghouls found out that their strongest attributes could be synthesized, then added to any member of the human race, their reaction would be brutal. It wouldn’t be World War III—it would be World War V and G.

“You’re right.” My voice was a croak. “If he’s already made genetically blended soldiers, they’ll have to be eliminated before the vampire and ghoul nations realize it’s possible.”

Or other governments try to do it themselves.

I didn’t say it out loud, but it hung in the air nonetheless. Suddenly, Marie’s sixty-day deadline seemed generous.

“It might not come to that, Kitten,” Bones said, expanding his aura to wrap a soothing band around my emotions. “Likely Madigan’s still at the lab rat stage.”

“I hope so,” I murmured.

If not, I’d be setting myself up to execute people for the crime of being genetically different—a charge I’d been guilty of since the day I was born. Could I really do it? I wondered.

The more troubling question was, what would happen if I couldn’t do it?

Charlottesville, Virginia, reminded me of a bigger version of the town Bones and I lived in. It, too, was located in the Blue Ridge Mountains, and the sight of their cloud-coated peaks caused a pang of longing in me. I grew up among the gently rolling hills of rural Ohio, but since the very first time I saw the mountains, they’d felt like home to me.

That’s where I wished I were right now. Home with Bones, surrounded by mountains that seemed to hold the rest of the world at bay. The past months of relative uneventfulness had introduced me to what most people called a normal life, and to my great surprise, I’d loved it. At home, the only sharp metal objects I handled were for the new garden I’d put in, and the only screams I heard was Helsing yowling if the kitty felt he wasn’t getting enough attention.

I used to get a rush from going on a hunt, but as much as I wanted Madigan dead, if I could have traded killing him myself for all of this being over, I would. In a hot second.

Maybe this was what people called getting older. Or maybe, after so many years of “hunt, kill, regroup, and repeat,” I realized I had nothing left to prove, either to myself or anyone else. Hatred of vampires—and myself—had put me on this lethal track at sixteen. Thanks to Bones, all that hatred was long gone, and existing had been replaced with actually living.

I wanted to get back to that life, and only one thing stood in my way. Madigan. My jaw tightened. Thanks to him, I wasn’t done hunting and killing yet.

We left the RV in a wooded area and rented an average-looking sedan for our reconnaissance. Then we waited until after dark to circle Garrett Street, driving past the former plumbing supply factory as slowly as we could without looking suspicious. As Don had predicted, the building appeared to be deserted. No cars in the parking lot, no lights inside, and the security cameras weren’t operating. That, or someone should be fired since the lenses on two of them were cracked to the point of being useless for surveillance.

“Looks like no one’s used this place for years,” Ian stated.

Just as Don had said. Disappointment filled me. Now what?

“We don’t have time to wait until Madigan eventually leaves your old compound,” Bones said. “Much as I’d enjoy grabbing him and torturing the truth out of him, we’re on a deadline, and it might be weeks before he leaves the safety of that facility.”

“Even if we got lucky and he left it tomorrow, it would be obvious who kidnapped him if Madigan ‘disappeared’ shortly after we came to see him,” I added.

We also couldn’t storm my old compound to capture him for that same reason. If we did, we’d be tipping our hand to whomever else Madigan was involved with, thus giving that person a chance to switch their base of operations. Or to increase its security. No, the element of surprise was our only advantage. Thank God Madigan didn’t know that Don had turned into a ghost. As far as Madigan was concerned, there was no way we could find out about his species-merging agenda, giving him no reason to be any more paranoid about protecting it than he already was.

Until the day I showed up to kill him, that’s how we intended to keep it.

“We can try some of the other bases Don and I used as safe houses,” I began, only to have Bones’s sudden “Shh!” silence me.

I glanced around, gripping a silver knife. Nothing rushed toward us, and my senses hadn’t picked up any supernatural energy, so what was it?

Ian also glanced around before shrugging as if to say, Beats me.

I looked back at Bones. A frown stitched his brows, and his head was cocked to the side.

“You hear that?” he asked softly.

I sent my senses outward. Noise from nearby traffic competed with sounds from the restaurants and other businesses across the street, but none of it sounded threatening.

“I hear nothing out of the ordinary,” Ian murmured.

“Not you,” Bones said with a hint of apology. “You, Kitten.”

Me? What could I hear that Ian couldn’t . . . oh, right. I pushed back the audible sounds to concentrate on the lower hum of thoughts beneath. After a moment, snatches of sentences crept into my mind. Most came from the populated areas across the street, but a few seemed to be transmitting from somewhere else.

Underneath the derelict building we’d been scouting.

Bones began to smile.

“They didn’t close Madigan’s old facility. They moved it lower.”