Blood Oath (33 page)

As for Cade and Zach, she had her own blunt instruments to solve the problem right here, sitting in the chairs across from her.

“Cade will be coming here,” she told Ken and Reyes. “Tonight. I’m depending on you to eliminate him.”

Ken just nodded. Reyes’s face didn’t betray a single thing, but in his eyes Helen could see the panic. He wasn’t as dumb as he looked, she reminded herself.

“We have the tools,” she said. “You will be able to take him out.”

She took out the weapons she’d ordered made when Konrad first told her that she’d have to eliminate Cade. R&D said they might work. Maybe. During the day, with a lot of luck.

But Ken and Reyes didn’t need to know that.

She handed them across the desk to the men.

“Here’s how it will go down,” Helen said. “Ken, you will engage Cade first, with the holy water.”

She pointed to the plastic pump-spray in Ken’s hands now. It would shoot a jet of blessed water, taken directly from the font of a Catholic church. Vampire tear gas.

“While he’s distracted and in pain, Reyes, you will approach from behind and fire the punch into Cade’s back, staking his heart.”

Reyes’s weapon was only slightly more sophisticated. A blank shotgun shell would fire a bolt from the barrel. The bolt was tipped with a hardened graphite point—basically, it would be like stabbing Cade with a wooden stake moving at the speed of sound.

Reyes looked at the bolt-gun, then at Ken, then back at Helen. “Question?” Helen asked him.

“Yeah,” he said. “Are you fucking kidding me? You want us to go up against that thing with a squirt gun and a sharp stick?”

“You questioning my orders?” Helen’s voice was cold.

“Come on, Helen, this is just nuts—”

“Are you requesting reassignment, Agent Reyes?”

That shut him up. “No. No, Agent Holt.”

“Good. Get some rest. Cade will be here at sunset. You’ll want to be sharp.”

“How are we supposed to know when he’s here?” Reyes asked, still surly.

“Man the security cameras. Wait for the bodies to pile up,” Helen said. “Cade’s not particularly subtle.” She stood.

“Wait, what are you going to do?” Reyes demanded.

It was over the line, but Helen figured she’d already pushed him pretty far. “I’m going to deal with the problem in the cell downstairs. Ken? Come with me.”

Reyes sat in his chair and sulked. But Helen knew he’d follow orders. What the Company could do to him was scarier than Cade, at least for now.

 

 

SHE AND KEN WALKED to the elevators, down to the subbasement.

Cade would kill Reyes and Ken tonight, she had no doubt. If, by some miracle, they got lucky and the weapons actually worked, it wouldn’t matter. Not to her anyway. Either she’d be long gone or her plan was blown anyway.

That only left Zach. The annoying little prick. Still in the interrogation room. On camera, and in the Company’s records now. No way to change that.

Fortunately, she had a much simpler answer for him: Ken.

Ken was strange. Even Helen could see that, and she was well aware of the kinks in her own personality. On the surface, he was perfect. Tall. Broad shoulders. Blue eyes. Good hair, white teeth, clear skin, the whole package.

But if you spent enough time with him, you’d swear you could hear an echo. There was an emptiness where the rest of a human being was supposed to be. He smiled at jokes, but you always wondered if that was just a learned reflex.

On paper, Ken was equally perfect. Upper-middle-class family, decent grades in college, accepted into CIA in a heartbeat. That’s where he met Helen.

He locked onto her the first day of training. She noticed him, too, but she could admit it was just animal lust for such a healthy specimen.

Ken was old-fashioned, like he’d learned to date from watching movies. He sent her flowers, for Christ’s sake.

Underneath that, there was something more robotic. He seemed to regard her as a missing component, and he was going down a checklist to procure her.

Helen figured out a way to use that, of course.

She spent most of the training course just out of his reach. Then, right before graduation, she stole into his dorm room at the facility and fucked his brains out.

He called, sent e-mails, even letters. She didn’t answer a single one.

But when she joined the Shadow Company and was given her own team, Ken was her first choice. She kept him at arm’s length, never explaining, never mentioning their history.

He’d follow her anywhere; do pretty much whatever she asked. When he got too frustrated, she would arrange for some relief—but only enough to keep him loyal.

She’d pretty much broken him. Whatever emotional deformity he had inside, Helen fit into it perfectly. Someday there would be a bill to pay for that, but for now, he was a good tool.

They stopped outside the interrogation room. She gave Ken a look.

“This is important to me,” she said. “Do you understand? I absolutely do not want him harmed. He’s special.”

Ken nodded, even though she could see the confusion in his eyes.

They entered the room together.

Zach lifted his head off the table but didn’t speak.

Ken took a position by the door. Helen walked around behind Zach.

“Zach, I have a few errands to run, so I’m going to leave you in the hands of Agent Blaylock. He’s going to ask you a few questions. I want you to cooperate with him.”

“I’ll have to check my schedule,” Zach said.

She laughed, and let her hand linger on Zach’s shoulder.

Ken focused on that, then his eyes flicked away.

Good.

“I know you’re going to do the right thing, Zach. There might even be a place for you on our team,” she said.

Zach glared. “I’m positively moist with anticipation.”

Anger clouded Ken’s chiseled features. Helen just laughed again and tousled Zach’s hair.

“Aren’t you cute?” she said. “Be smart, Zach. You want to be on the winning side.”

She walked back to the door. From the corner of her eye, she saw Ken’s attention was completely on Zach now.

She leaned in and whispered into Ken’s ear, just loud enough for the hidden mikes in the room to pick up, “Remember: do not harm him.”

Ken gave her a slight nod.

Helen walked out of the room and went to the security station down the hall.

Inside were monitors for all the cameras in the holding cells. She checked number four, Zach’s room.

She was just in time to see Ken unplug the camera from the wall. The screen went dark.

Helen smiled as she left the building. Ken would do just as she expected. God, what a big dumb animal.

Unfortunately, Konrad wouldn’t be as easy to fool. She just hoped Cade hadn’t gotten to him first.

T
he opulent room was so far removed from the cheap motel Cade and Zach used as to be on another planet. The bellman saw they had no luggage, saw the difference between Tania’s designer clothes and Cade’s rags, and gave them a knowing wink and smile.

Tania paid for all of it with a black AmEx card in someone else’s name. The desk clerk was perfectly obsequious as he handed over their keys.

Tania pulled the blackout drapes, sealing the room completely. It could have been high noon or midnight outside. There was no way to tell.

Cade felt better instantly, out of the light.

So did Tania, clearly. A layer of tension and irritability dropped off her like a cheap coat. The approaching daylight had been getting to them both.

She stretched back on the fifteen-hundred-thread-count sheets of the bed, revealing the tight band of pale, flat skin at her navel.

There was an inevitability gathering in the air, like smoke. Hanging there between them.

She rolled to one side, her hair hanging slightly over her face. “You want to sleep? Or shower?”

Cade thought about it. “No,” he said.

 

 

MOST VAMPIRES do not have sex. They consider it human and therefore degrading. But Cade and Tania weren’t like most vampires. They still remembered some of the good parts of being alive.

He pulled off his cheap T-shirt and went to her. She peeled off her top and arched her back up. He pinned her arms above her head.

She locked her legs around him and bit him, hard, on the neck. He pulled free, his blood spilling over her breasts. He lapped it up, licking the salty taste from her nipples, her skin. She latched again, sucked hard, pulled more blood from the wound, let it run out the sides of her mouth and down her neck.

She pulled him down closer to her and then flipped him over onto his back, yanking away his pants.

Then she clasped her legs around him again, hips rocking back and forth, riding him down to the bed.

Cade’s body tensed and shook like he was plugged into high-tension wires. He ran his hands over her, greedy for her feel, her touch. His fingers traced their way down, began working there.

She rode him harder. Her back arched. She tossed her head forward, her hair flying.

Cade’s hand moved faster, thrusting upward, lifting her off the bed. Tania sat on top of him, still sticky with his blood, writhing like the sacrifice on an altar from some long-dead religion.

Their nerves, exquisitely tuned, thrummed and burned, back and forth between them, the moment stretching out, seeming like it would never end—

Until she sang, like a flock of birds moving swiftly by in flight.

Cade shuddered and bucked, and then they both stopped moving, suddenly as still as the grave. They lay there, piled on each other, instantly in the comalike state that passed for their sleep, dead to the sunlit world outside.

Z
ach never considered himself a tough guy—he would complain if a restaurant overcooked his eggs—but he’d always held a secret belief that he could hold up well under torture. He’d spent days on his feet, working with no sleep, eating practically nothing. In that place in his mind where he starred in his own action movies, Zach thought he could handle it, at least for a little while.

He was wrong.

Ken made a phone call. Reyes arrived in a few minutes. Together, they stripped Zach naked, barely looking at him.

Zach made a joke about how this was further than he usually went on a first date.

Reyes, with the same bored look on his face, punched him hard enough to make his nose bleed.

They went back to tearing his clothes off.

They found the duct tape Cade had wrapped over Zach’s ribs and cut that away, slicing skin.

When Zach was naked, Ken cuffed his hands behind him and pulled them up to the level of Zach’s shoulders. Zach doubled over from the pain. Ken yanked him over to the wall and hooked the cuffs over a peg. Reyes put a hood over Zach’s head.

He stood there, his knees bent, his ass hanging out, his arms behind him and higher than his head.

He waited for another punch, or something worse.

He heard the door slam. They were gone.

He didn’t know how long they left him like that. His legs began cramping immediately. His fingers went numb. His knees wobbled, but every time he started to lean forward, the pain in his shoulders brought him back up.

He tried not to make a sound. He really did. But after a while, he heard something. A low-pitched noise, almost like a growl of an animal in pain. For an instant, he wondered if they had put someone else in the cell with him.

Of course, it was him. He was singing out in pain.

The door opened, and light flooded back into his eyes as the hood was snatched away.

Zach blinked and looked up at Ken. Ken smiled back.

“That didn’t take long,” Ken said. He pulled the cuffs off the peg—Zach thought his shoulders would separate completely—and then dropped them. Zach collapsed on the concrete floor.

Tears of relief welled up in his eyes.

Ken gave him a full ten seconds of lying like that—the blood rushing back into his limbs, the nerves waking up with urgent messages of pain—before dragging him back to his feet.

Ken looked into his eyes. Zach blinked away the tears.

“I’m not going to talk,” Zach said.

Ken laughed. “Who cares?”

He knocked Zach flat on his back with a hard slap.

“Let’s get to work,” he said, as he kicked Zach in the side of the head.

KEN NEVER asked him a question. Not once.

Not when he went to work with the Taser, shocking Zach over and over again on his bare skin.

Not when he beat Zach with the baton. Or when he poured a Diet Coke—a frigging Diet
Coke
—down Zach’s nose, causing more pain than Zach thought possible, nearly drowning him in the process.

Or when he brought the dog in. Or when he just punched him.