CHAPTER 5
Micah took one last, long pull from the blood Host’s wrist before sweeping his tongue over the punctures to close and heal the human’s skin.
Shuddering as the thin red cells coursed down his throat, he sagged back onto his infirmary bed and waited for the blood to start doing its work on his depleted body. His father and Lazaro Archer had caught him up to speed on how Tegan had found him in a nomad’s tent on the Kazakhstan wilderness after nights of searching, and the coma that had slowed his metabolism just enough for him to cling to life until Lazaro had arranged for his medevac to Rome.
His outburst in the mansion’s foyer a short while ago had cost him precious strength, but already the blood he’d taken from his Host was knitting him back together.
He could have drunk more. Christ, he needed the nourishment and then some. But if he’d been allowed to take his fill right now, he might’ve drained the pleasant, yet forgettable, woman Lazaro had brought in from the city to feed him.
Eyes closed, he listened over the drum of his strengthening heart and bloodstream as the human accepted her payment, then slipped back into her coat and was escorted out of the room. Her footsteps faded up the corridor outside, accompanied by the heavier tread of the warrior who’d been tasked with returning her to the city.
“You scared the poor female half to death.”
Micah lifted his eyelids and slid his gaze toward his father, who stood frowning at him beside the narrow cot. Groaning, he let out a slow breath, still waiting for his body to fully recalibrate. “I was as gentle with her wrist as I could manage.”
Tegan shook his head. “Not the blood Host. Phaedra.”
“The Atlantean?” Micah scoffed, recalling her startlement in the foyer. Unfortunately, he also recalled how soft and feminine she looked in her simple summer dress and delicate flats. “She ought to be scared. She’s got to answer for the blood of five good men on her hands.”
“We don’t know that yet.”
“Like hell we don’t. She was there that night. It’s not like I’d forget that face.” Fuck, not even if he wanted to. Even before he saw her today, those wide, long-lashed golden eyes had been branded into his memory for good.
Not even the coma that had claimed him for the past week had been dark enough or deep enough to erase the vision of her delicate oval face, thick waves of glorious chestnut-brown hair, and ethereal, almost regal, beauty.
Sure, she was pretty, but that only made her more dangerous.
He pushed himself up to a sitting position, letting out a low curse as every cell and fiber in his body complained in protest. “I’m telling you, I saw her. I was close enough to touch her.”
“I know what you said, son. And she says she wasn’t there.”
“Not physically, anyway,” added Lazaro Archer.
The leader of the Rome command center and Tegan had waited alone with Micah as he fed. The pair of Order elders were still grim-faced and sober, but neither one seemed to share his mistrust of the female. Were the two seasoned warriors actually going to give the immortal’s denial the benefit of the doubt?
Micah scowled. “I don’t care if she was there in the flesh or projecting herself into those woods using some kind of Atlantean magic. She was the only one there besides me and my team in the instant before the whole damn sky lit up. That demands an explanation. Hell, it demands a full interrogation.”
“Agreed,” his father acknowledged gravely. “Now that you’re back among the living, there are a lot of questions that need to be answered. Maybe we should start with the reason you and your team went AWOL after the mission in Budapest?”
Micah felt his jaw tense, a tendon jerking in his cheek. He glanced away from the shrewd, gem-green hold of his father’s stare.
“That’s what it was, am I right? Not missing in action, as we’d all been left to assume. You were absent without leave.” When Micah glanced up, Tegan blew out a harsh breath. “Christ. It’s true. Where did you go? What happened out there that night?”
“I fucked up.”
As far as explanations went, it wasn’t much, but it summed up the situation succinctly enough. Still, he knew he owed his father—and the Order—more than that.
Exhaling, he recounted his team’s last movements. “We were on a covert assignment. For several weeks, we’d been surveilling the head of an emerging terror group that was stirring up trouble in the region. Real asshole. Seemed to get off on spilling as much innocent blood as he could.”
“Igor Nagy.” His father made the name sound like a curse. With good reason. It was rare that members of the Breed bothered with mass violence on their human neighbors, but every once in a while a sadistic piece of shit like Nagy decided to throw a grenade into the tentative, all too fragile, peace between man and Breed.
Under normal circumstances, it would be up to the Joint Urban Security Taskforce Initiative Squads to round up Nagy and his followers, but the wheels of JUSTIS moved too slowly for the Order’s liking, and Nagy was proving to be more than a nuisance. Elusive, surprisingly well-funded, and apparently insatiable in his need for violence, the bastard had to go.
“He’d been next to impossible to track down, but our intel placed his hideout somewhere in the Siberian interior. We got the bastard, along with about a dozen of his soldiers.”
“We’re aware of the black ops mission to eliminate Nagy, and your team’s success,” Tegan said. “That’s why you were chosen to lead the operation.”
The flat statement of fact might have passed as praise from anyone else. Maybe it was. Either way, it should have felt welcome, coming from a warrior of his father’s renown. Instead, it only made Micah’s guilt weigh even heavier on his conscience. The men he’d served with, fought beside as brothers, deserved all the praise. Not him.
