“She’s right,” Aric agreed. The pieces were starting to fall in place now, painting a picture of cowardice and deception. “The delivery was a setup. It was the only way to get the Darkhaven door open with a minimum of effort.”
Mira’s face blanched. “At this hour, with the sun blazing over the lawn, there are few Breed who would risk exposure by opening the door to anyone.”
“Right,” Aric said. “And this dead fuck right here was counting on that fact. He wanted Jonathon Champlain’s Breedmate to answer the door because he needed to overpower her in order to get inside.”
Mira nodded. “But he came down to protect her. He would’ve been here in an instant. Less than an instant. Those wounds on the body are evidence enough of that.”
“There’s a lot of blood on the stairs,” Kaya pointed out. “It goes all the way up to the second floor.”
Aric nodded grimly. “It’s hers. I can smell it from here.”
Mira stepped away from the dead man and the mess surrounding his corpse. “So, where is Jonathon Champlain?”
Aric’s gaze fell to the strange spill of black dirt at their feet. A chill washed over him, settling in his marrow. “Ah, fuck. No.”
He crouched on his haunches and reached for the empty package, moving it to the side so he could have a closer look at what his instincts were telling him but his brain refused to accept as reality.
An acrid odor rose up as he moved the box out of his way. The odd stench was unlike anything he’d ever experienced before, yet every cell in his body recoiled as the smell of ashed Breed remains--not dirt--wafted into his lungs.
Something gleamed within the pile of black cinders. He retrieved it, holding the strange bullet casing up so he could examine it. The round was formed of silvery metal caged around a diamond-hard glass shell that would have contained something far more powerful than gunpowder. A specialized kind of round that served only one purpose.
Killing members of the Breed.
Mira gasped. “Is that what I think it is?”
“An ultraviolet bullet,” Aric answered woodenly. “Whoever came in behind the delivery man came in prepared to kill.”
Kaya’s gaze bounced between them, confused and stricken. “I don’t understand. A UV round? How can something like that exist? And since it obviously does, where the hell did it come from?”
“A few weeks ago, a scientist who pioneered major advances in ultraviolet technology was murdered by members of Opus Nostrum,” Aric explained. “Opus got their hands on his work and they quickly began developing it into weaponry.”
“Breed-killing weapons,” Kaya murmured, her hand coming up to her mouth. “Oh, my God.”
“The Order has kept all of this under wraps,” Mira added. “You know about the UV bomb that Opus tried to detonate at the GNC peace summit earlier this month?”
“Yes,” Kaya said. “If you and Kellan and the rest of the Order hadn’t killed the Opus member responsible for that bomb, hundreds of Breed diplomats and most of the Order would have been ashed in front of the entire world.”
Mira’s nod was understated, especially considering the magnitude of what she, along with her mate and the Order, had accomplished that night. “Killing Reginald Crowe and disabling his bomb only stopped one disaster from happening. By then, we’d also learned that Opus was manufacturing large caches of ultraviolet arms and ammunition.”
“The Order tracked down a large supply of both in Ireland,” Aric told Kaya. “We took out the Opus member who’d been stockpiling the shit and detonated all but a few samples of everything we found, but there was no guarantee that some of it hadn’t already leaked out to Opus operatives.”
Mira slanted a look at the dead human. “I guess we have an answer to that question now.”
Aric nodded, but his mind was already filling with further questions in need of answers. Opus Nostrum may have played some role in this killing, but the selection of a civilian Darkhaven seemed too random. Opus tended toward high-profile targets, not suburban families, Breed or otherwise.
Aric glanced at the stairs and the blood trail that Champlain’s Breedmate left behind. Although his senses told him he wasn’t going to like what he found up there, he headed in that direction, leading the way for Kaya and Mira.
His gut clenched at the sight of another pile of ashes at the top of the stairs. This one was considerably smaller than the one in the foyer. Aric tried not to picture a seven-year-old Breed boy racing out of his bedroom in terror as his parents struggled with the intruders downstairs.
Kaya’s strangled gasp behind Aric told him that she’d spotted the child’s remains too.
“Oh, God,” Mira whispered. “The mother’s bloody footprints lead all the way to the bedroom at the end of the hall.”
“Yeah,” Aric answered, his booted feet moving leaden beneath him as they approached the pastel-colored room that stood as silent as the grave ahead of him.
In his mind, the logical sequence of the attack played out in horrific detail. The morning delivery, used as a trap to lure Elena Champlain to the door alone. The first assailant pushes his way inside, dropping the ruse of a package and crushing it under his boot as he knocks the female down with his fist, splattering her blood on the wall.
Her mate flashes downstairs in that next instant, the blood bond and her likely screams alerting him to the danger. He kills the delivery man to give his Breedmate a chance to run for safety--but the assailant wasn’t alone. The others push inside now, at least one of them armed with ultraviolet weaponry. They ash Jonathon Champlain. Another ashes their young son, who would have been just old enough to be a threat to an unarmed human. To a man carrying an ultraviolet weapon? The child would be as inconsequential as a gnat.
