I especially liked the fact that Doc was giving Layla his healing potion. I wanted my huntress upright, breathing, and chasing my ass around a beach somewhere with our kids playing in the sand. Or her and me rolling around in bed, tangled together, fucking like bunnies. Or just sitting by a fire while I held her in my arms.
I hugged my sister. “Thank you, sis.” I also had to thank everyone in the OR.
She squeezed me before shrugging out of my hold, tears clouding her silver eyes. “No need, brother. It’s our job. I have to get back in there.” She tapped her chest twice. A signal we’d used since we were kids to let the other know we had each other’s backs and loved one another. Then she started to leave.
“Jo Mason London, you’re going to be an amazing doctor.”
She was close to finishing her studies in genetics and hematology. She’d always been curious and inquisitive about how things worked and ticked in this world. But she was fascinated with vampire genetics, and after the Edmund Rain and Patrick Mason era of genetic engineering, Jo had made it her mission to learn how humans differed from us. She would definitely be excited to study Carly.
She gave me a warm smile.
“Oh, and Jo—Carly Aberdeen is here and not human anymore. You and Doc might want to do some testing when you have a chance after we interrogate her.” Which I had time to do now since I couldn’t see Layla.
Her face lit up like a little girl’s on Christmas morning who had opened the biggest present under the tree. “Are you serious?”
“Maybe you can read her mind too,” I said.
“I’ll try, but I couldn’t read Fred Emery’s. I don’t know if Carly developed a blocking serum like Alia’s or if those at Intech learned how to keep someone like me out of their heads.” She stabbed a thumb at the doors leading to the new wing. “Layla and my nieces and nephew come first.”
“Damn straight,” I said. They would always come first.
Once she was gone, I slumped my shoulders, feeling numb from head to toe. It was five in the morning, and at least three hours had passed since Layla collapsed in the apartment. I swore she had because of her sister. If Jordyn hadn’t been trying to skirt past a prison guard, Layla might not have died. I shivered, knowing my wife had actually died—not once, not twice, but three fucking times.
It felt as though I’d lived a thousand years in that time, without any sleep. But I didn’t have time to rest. I was itching to find out why Carly was here, and I wanted to be sure I erased Vince and Letty’s memories of what they’d seen earlier. Plus, I was antsy to talk to Jordyn and ream her ass.
I turned on my heel to find my old man pacing at the other end of the lab with his phone glued to his ear.
Tension crawled up the wide aisle between the lab benches from him to me. He was furious about something he was hearing from his caller, and I would bet I was the topic of that conversation as well as the video Letty had taken of me using my elemental powers.
The hackles on my neck rose, and I zeroed in on his conversation when he yelled, “No fucking way.”
I might as well take my licks now. I marched in his direction like a soldier going to war. The closer I got to him, the more his anger scorched the fuck out of me. It seemed my empath ability had returned.
Nevertheless, I licked my dry lips, prepared to explain what had happened, when he lowered his phone and said, “We’re fucked.”
I held up my hands. “I’m sorry, Pops. The only way to stop Carly was to use my powers.”
He angled his head. “What are you talking about?”
“I guess I should ask you the same thing.”
“That was Webb on the phone,” he said. “Our tech team learned that Adam Emery called a press conference outside his companies in Chicago to announce a new project. The fucker is about to go live shortly.”
I didn’t have to speculate on what this new project entailed. I would bet my vamp ass it had something to do with a brain-to-machine interface or BMI device that could control a person. I would like to say the technology didn’t work, but I knew firsthand that it did. I’d almost killed my wife, gone temporarily blind, and lost my acute vamp hearing for a stint, and all because of that fucking chip.
Thank fuck we had Peter Landon in our court. The scientist had originally developed the chip for the handicapped community until Adam hired Peter under false pretenses. Still, Peter had been successful in removing the device from my skull.
“You think this new project of his is, what? Super soldiers with chips in their heads?”
Adam was salivating to build an army of super soldiers. In fact, he wanted me to lead the charge.
“Possibly,” he said. “But I have a bad feeling it’s more than that.”
My blood gelled as a conversation my father had had with Jack Aberdeen months ago brightened in my memory like spotlights on a black-as-sin night.
“Seems you have a ton of shit to handle with the media as well,” Jack said to my dad.
My father’s response was, “One of the reasons the war will be here faster than you think. Intech will use the media to its advantage.”
