“So you were counting on my offer to help?”
“Yup.”
“You could have just, you know, asked.”
“Asked?” Riker snorted. “And turn in my male card?”
Riker ignored Myne’s string of curses as he made his way down the embankment, moving toward the mansion he’d been staking out for the last week. Myne followed, his footsteps as light as a cat’s despite his massive size. At six-foot-five and a born vampire, Myne was one of the tallest males in the clan, save Hunter.
Not that Riker was short, but Myne seemed to enjoy flaunting his extra three inches and twenty pounds.
Riker would just smile and claim extra brains and an extra three inches on another part of his anatomy.
“So what’s my job?” Myne dropped his hand to the dagger at his hip and skimmed his thumb along the hilt. “It better involve fighting.”
“It does.”
“And feeding?”
“If you want.” Riker crouched behind a fir tree to avoid the sweep of a security spotlight sitting atop the mansion’s north wall.
“And fucking?”
Riker shot Myne an are you kidding me? look over his shoulder. “Even if there was time for that, I didn’t think you were into humans.”
“I’ll dive into any lake in a drought, man.”
Myne was full of shit. He might be stuck in a perpetual sex drought, but Riker knew damned well the guy went for vampires. He’d gotten his fill of human sex a long time ago, and Riker only knew that because the guy had gotten so shitfaced once that his tongue had loosened. The next morning, Myne had been practically suicidal—and homicidal—over what he’d revealed, and Riker had probably saved both of their lives by lying to him, telling him that whatever Myne imagined he’d said had been all in his drunken head.
Thank God. Riker wasn’t sure who would win in a contest of hand-to-hand, but he knew who’d win a fang free-for-all.
Myne’s titanium chompers could rip limbs from bodies and heads from necks with the messy ease of a chain saw.
“So.” Myne’s fingers caressed the dagger hilt like a lover. The guy had carved it himself from the thigh bone of a poacher decades ago. The thing was so smooth from his touch that it practically shone in the moonlight. “What do we do first?”
Riker effortlessly leaped to the top of the twelve foot stone fence that circled the mansion and surrounding grounds. “See the northwest fence corner? Where the stone is built up into the tree?” Riker peered into the branches. “That’s a sniper station. Built after my mate died. We need to take the sniper out, or he’ll smoke-check us before we get halfway across the lawn.”
“Cool.” Myne had always preferred a stealthy stalk-and-kill over a full-blown battle. Said it was a measure of skill and patience and a more honorable way to hunt an enemy. Riker figured dead was dead, but whatever. “You really think this Charles guy is just going to hand over a captive vampire because we tell him to?”
“Charles? No. That’s why we’re not bothering with that asshole.” He scanned the property, taking one last inventory of the cameras, the dogs, and the security detail, all of which he’d been familiar with for two decades. “I’m after much more . . . sensitive . . . prey.”
Myne landed in a crouch beside him, whisper-soft.
“Who?”
Ahead, through one of the mansion’s giant windows, a figure moved. A ginger-haired female. Tall. Curvy. Enemy.
“Dr. Nicole Martin.”
Riker felt Myne’s eyes boring into him. “She’s alive?”
“Apparently.” A shiver of hatred slithered up Riker’s spine. Until last week, when he’d seen a newspaper article glorifying the return of the Martin heir, he’d believed only one member of the godforsaken immediate family, Charles, was alive. “After the rest of the Martins were slaughtered in the rebellion, she was sent to Paris to live with her mother’s relatives until she was old enough to work in Daedalus’s French division as a vampire physiologist.”
The mere mention of the infamous Seattle Slave Rebellion made Myne’s voice degenerate into gravel.#p#分页标题#e#
“And she’s here now?”
Riker nodded at the female in the window. “Right there and all grown up. And if you’re done jacking off your dagger, we’ll go have a chat with her.”
“You think she’ll cooperate?”
Hell, no. She was a Martin, after all, current CEO of the company that revolutionized vampire slavery and used vampires like lab rodents to advance human medicine. Daedalus went through vampires like a slaughterhouse went through cattle, and Riker doubted the company held to any kind of “humane” standards.