Phantom Shadows (35 page)

He took them, wondering why she was smiling at him. “Thank you.”

Lisette snatched one of the towels from him, gripped his chin in one deadly feminine hand, and began to wipe his face clean. And she wasn’t rough.

Sarah took the other towel and tossed it over his head. Rising onto her toes, she rubbed it over his hair, luring some of the blood and dust and other debris onto the towel and out of his thick locks.

Bastien stood there, feet rooted to the floor.

Yeah, this was
really
strange.

Everyone in this room scorned him. And yet they were doing their damnedest to make him presentable for Melanie. He knew it was for
her
, not him, but . . .

Was this what it felt like?

Sarah turned to Roland. “Sweetie, do you have a comb?”

Was this what it felt like to be one of them? To have friends who always had your back and were always there to help you with anything you needed? To be part of the immortal family in truth, not just in name?

Roland reached into his back pocket and drew out a comb.

“You carry a comb around with you?” Bastien couldn’t resist asking around the towel Lisette was using to wipe the blood from his nose and chin. The envy that stole its way into him left him uncomfortable.

“It’s for Sarah, asshole.”

The towel Sarah discarded was surprisingly filthy. She settled back on her heels. “Let’s switch, Lisette. I’m too short for this.”

Lisette, several inches taller than Sarah’s five feet, exchanged the towel—now soiled with pink blotches—for the comb and shifted to Bastien’s side.

Sarah ducked under Lisette’s arm and examined Bastien’s face. Her soft lips turned up in a small smile. “How’s the head?”

Bastien chuckled at the question he usually presented to her. “Pounding.”

Sarah wiped his face a couple of times, then drew the cloth down his neck. “I feel sort of bad now that I know why you picked the fight.”

“Don’t.”

Her smile widened. “That’s it? Just don’t?”

He nodded, wincing when Lisette tried to tug the comb through his tangled hair. “You would’ve done the same damage had we been sparring.”

She and Lisette finished spiffying him up and stepped back. Both grimaced.

“Roland, sweetie, come heal him.”

“Hell, no.”

“At least heal his face. It’s all swollen and gross.”

Well, hell.

“It’s for Dr. Lipton,” Lisette threw in.

Roland sighed. “Fine. But I reserve the right to bloody it up again after she recovers.” Nudging his wife aside, he palmed Bastien’s face with little care for the pain it spawned in the bruised flesh and broken bones.

Roland’s hand heated. The aches and pains faded as the many injuries on Bastien’s face healed, the tightness vanishing as swelling decreased. When Roland withdrew his hand (giving Bastien’s head a shove in the process), Bastien’s face felt normal again.

The rest of him still hurt like hell. But at least his other wounds weren’t visible.

“So?” he asked the women.

“Good enough,” Lisette said.

Sarah and Linda nodded their agreement.

“Bastien,” Melanie whispered again on the other side of the curtain.

He eyed the others, feeling awkward as hell. “Thank you.”

Roland shook his head. “It wasn’t for you.”

Right.

Chapter 14

Seth materialized in David’s home and followed the sounds of voices to David’s study.

Darnell was talking on the phone while typing furiously on the computer keyboard.

“What’s happened?”

Darnell jumped and spun around, dropping the phone. No relief swept his countenance as he hurried to pick it up. “The network was attacked.”

“By vampires?” How the hell had vampires found them?

“No, by Emrys’s men. No estimates yet on how many are dead.”

Seth teleported to the network . . . and had difficulty believing what he saw. Bright golden sunlight illuminated the destruction. Almost everything above ground had been obliterated. Even the paved parking lot bore large craters. A few jagged chunks of wall still stood, weary reminders of the building’s dimensions. Charcoal smoke stretched to the sky and formed dark, wispy clouds.

Seth could see the first sublevel through gaping holes in the foundation. Surrounding the building’s skeleton were two downed helicopters, several armored personnel carriers, and four Humvees. Bodies of the mercenaries formed piles around the places immortals had stood their ground. Damned near everything present bore scorch marks or bullet holes.
Large
bullet holes.

The scent of death clung to every surface.

A war had been fought here. With all of the casualties that went with it.

Sirens wailed in the distance.

Seth swore. A hasty inspection of the various vehicles revealed a few that were salvageable. Seth held his hand out and sent them to the field bordering the building Chris—if he lived—was no doubt already setting up as the new network headquarters. Teleporting something or someone without touching or accompanying it took a lot more energy (no other immortal could do it), but he had little choice with fire engines speeding toward him.

The other vehicles he sent to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, the deepest part of the world’s oceans. The dead soldiers he sent to the morgue at the new headquarters. Perhaps network employees could identify them.

A wave of his hand produced a breeze that scattered and dispersed the smoke.

Then Seth sped into the lower levels of the network.

The scents of blood and smoke burned his nostrils. Broken bodies lay amid the rubble. Seth listened hard for a heartbeat and found none. Not on Sublevel 1. On Sublevel 2. Nor on the remaining three. The damage Emrys’s men had done astounded him, reaching all the way down to the fifth basement level.

The wall at the end of the hallway had been blown, opening the escape tunnel for survivors.

The tunnel was a long one that led up to the basement of a single story home with no neighbors and no outward connection to the larger building.

How many had escaped through it?

The floor was red with blood that had dripped from the injured as they were helped to safety. He could smell the fear and pain of those who had passed through here.

The sirens grew louder, then stopped above his head. Seth raced up to deal with them, ready to erase memories and plant new ones. His strength was flagging, not from his battle earlier with the vampires in South Korea, but from the teleporting he had done to clean up some of the mess topside. By the time he finished dealing with the firemen and policemen who would likely follow, he would barely be able to put one foot in front of the other.

Three fire engines awaited him, parked, motors idling, lights flashing, sirens off. Seth strode forward as several firemen emerged and walked toward him.

“Mr. Seth?” one said.

Hmm
. “Just Seth.”

The man nodded. “Mr. Reordon sent us, sir.”

Seth sent a big
Thank you
Chris’s way. Even when all hell broke loose around him, Chris managed to get shit done. He was a good man.

“Did he have a particular explanation in mind?” Seth asked. Chris had a knack for making just about anyone believe anything.

“Gas leak.”

Tried and true.

The men made their careful way through the wreckage.

“Any chance you could block the view of the elevator shaft? This’ll go down easier if we don’t have to explain all of the floors below ground.”

Seth nodded.

It took some doing, but he managed to cover the shaft with large portions of toppled wall and other debris. It probably wouldn’t hold if some idiot jumped up and down on it, but lookers wouldn’t be able to tell there were five floors underground.

More firemen arrived, legitimate ones this time. Policemen followed. Seth discarded his coat and altered their memories of speaking with him so they wouldn’t remember the bloodstains on his clothing. He also removed any doubt they possessed regarding the cause of the fire and explosions some nearby claimed they had heard. When a news helicopter rumbled overhead, Seth directed the pilot and news crew away.

He didn’t know how much time passed before he succeeded in clearing the scene of anyone who wasn’t on the network’s payroll.

Fatigued pulled at him. He hadn’t slept in a couple of days and the various and assorted stunts he’d had to pull here to cover their asses had cost him a lot of energy.

“Sir?”

Seth turned.

The same mock-fireman who had spoken to him earlier approached, tucking a cell phone into his back pocket. “Something’s going on over at the new network headquarters. Something to do with Sebastien Newcomb. Mr. Reordon could use your help.”

Of course. Sebastien couldn’t seem to go a single day without spawning chaos somewhere. Seth was beginning to lose patience with him.

Thanking the faux fireman, he teleported to the new network building to see what Sebastien had done now.

Melanie had never felt so exhausted in her life. Just opening her eyes seemed a chore. “Bastien?”

The stark whiteness of the infirmary’s ceiling, floor, and walls met her gaze. What she could see of it. The privacy curtain had been drawn, blocking her view of half the room.

Confused, she took in the IV, the machines monitoring her. Felt the weakness that suffused seemingly every cell of her body.

Had she been injured again? She could think of no other explanation. But how? Had she gone hunting with Bastien and Richart? The last thing she remembered was Bastien bringing Stuart to the network.

She sensed movement on the other side of the curtain and could’ve sworn she heard someone call someone else an asshole.

“Bastien?”

The curtain slid back.

Melanie stared at Bastien as he stepped up to her bedside. His hair was slicked back. Behind him Linda, Richart, Étienne, Lisette, Sarah, and Roland stood. Étienne’s clothes were cut and torn and bloody as though he had been fighting. And he kept shifting uncomfortably as if he had sand in his underwear.

Sarah seemed to have some blood splatter on her face. And her knuckles were crusted over with drying blood.

They must have just returned from hunting.

Bastien took her hand, rubbed his thumb across her skin in soothing circles. His warmth infused her icy flesh and traveled up her arm to fill her chest.

Her gaze strayed to Roland. Why was
he
here? Roland and Bastien in the same room usually spelled disaster.

Wait. Was that a hole in the wall back there? It was hard to see around the towering men.

Bastien didn’t possess any visible injuries, though. Neither did Roland. So . . . what had damaged the wall and why was Roland here? Had he healed her again?

“What happened?” she asked Bastien. “Did I go hunting with you again?”

He shook his head. “Stuart was a pawn. Emrys got his hands on him before our rendezvous and injected a tiny electronic device beneath Stuart’s skin that allowed Emrys and his mercenaries to track him anywhere he went.”

They could track him? Alarm rushed through her. “Then they know he’s here. They’ll find him. They’ll find
us
, the network.”

He touched a hand to her shoulder to keep her from rising. “They already did. They attacked in force just before dawn.”

She took in the grave expressions of the others. That explained the hole in the wall. “You held them off? Is it safe here? Won’t they return?”

“We defeated them, but they were heavily armed.”

Richart nodded. “And their numbers were such that we could not begin to estimate them.”

“The network’s headquarters was reduced to rubble,” Bastien finished.

“I don’t understand.” She looked around the familiar infirmary. “We’re
in
the network’s headquarters.”

Linda stepped up beside Bastien and patted Melanie’s knee. “No, honey. This is another building. You know how Mr. Reordon takes every freaking precaution imaginable to the nth degree to ensure all of our safety?”

“Yes.”

“Well, one of those precautions included constructing an identical headquarters building in Greensboro.”

“This isn’t the building we worked in every day?”

“No. It looks exactly like it, doesn’t it? Just . . . newer and cleaner. There are even apartments across the hall for the vampires.”

The vampires.

Melanie met Bastien’s brown gaze. “Are Cliff and Joe okay?”

His grip tightened. “They’re gone. Everything was utter chaos. Joe chose to escape in the middle of it all.”

“And Cliff?”

“The mercenaries got him. We think they might have Joe, too.”

Horror filled her. Emrys would torture them. To learn about the virus. To get information. He would dissect them while they were still living and breathing. And the madness she had worked so hard to help Cliff and Joe stave off would claim them wholly as a result.

Her eyes began to burn. Tears spilled over her lashes. “We have to get them back.”

“We will,” Bastien said. “
I
will. I vow it. But . . . there’s more.” He sat on the edge of her bed.

Her heart began to pound painfully in her chest. “What? What is it?”

“At my urging, Chris let the vampires out to help evacuate the injured and fight off the mercenaries who infiltrated the building.” A muscle in his jaw twitched. His eyes began to glow, revealing the inner turmoil roiling within him. “Stuart was wounded. Pretty seriously apparently and . . . he bit you.”

“One bite won’t—”

“He infected you, Melanie. He claims he bit you to heal his wounds, then panicked when he realized he had unintentionally drained you and you were dying. He transfused you, infecting you on a massive scale. Dr. Whetsman and the others worked fast to replace the infected blood with human blood. But . . . the damage has been done. Your immune system has been compromised and they have no hope that it will recover.”

“Are you saying I have no immune system?”

“Yes.”

“I’m dying.” Their expressions told her they already knew that. But she needed to say it out loud to wrap her mind around it. She had no immune system. At all. She wouldn’t live another twenty-four hours.