Dread settled in Dylan’s stomach like a stone. “Do you know what building?”
“Nah. One of the high-rises on 108th Street.”
Oh, fuck. Oh, holy Christ…
Dylan jumped out of the car without even killing the engine. She had her cell phone in hand, dialing her mother as she headed at a dead run up the sidewalk toward all the commotion near the intersection a couple blocks away. As she got closer, cutting into the gathered crowd, her feet slowed of their own accord.
She knew.
She just…knew.
Her mother was dead.
But then her cell phone went off like a bank alarm. She stared down at the display and saw her mother’s cell number on the lighted screen.
“Mom!” she cried as she picked up the call.
There was silence on the other end.
“Mom? Mom, is that you?”
A heavy hand landed on her shoulder. She whipped her head around and found herself staring into the cruel eyes of a man she’d seen only recently in a photograph from her mother’s office.
Gordon Fasso held her mother’s pink cell phone in his other hand. He smiled, baring the tips of his fangs. When he spoke, Dylan heard his deep voice vibrate in her ears and in her palm, as his words carried through the speaker of her mother’s phone into her own.
“Hello, Dylan. So good to finally meet you.”
CHAPTER
Thirty-Four
S omewhere in Connecticut, a couple of hours into the drive from Boston to New York, Rio’s chest felt like it had been yanked open by ice-cold hands. He was on speakerphone with the compound, trying to find out if Gideon had been able to uncover any intel about the dead Breedmates Dylan reported seeing at the runaway shelter. The Order had the pictures she’d sent from her cell phone, and Gideon was searching for further missing persons information from the Darkhavens and human populations.
Rio heard the other warrior talking to him now, but the words weren’t penetrating his skull.
“Ah, fuck,” he groaned, rubbing at the tight blast of cold that seemed to have moved into the region of his heart.
“What’s going on?” Gideon asked. “Rio? You still with me?”
“Yeah. But…something’s wrong.”
Dylan.
Something was very wrong with Dylan. He could sense her fear, and a sorrow so profound it nearly blinded him.
Not a good thing when he was speeding along I-84 at roughly ninety miles an hour.
“I’ve got a bad feeling, Gideon. I have to get ahold of Dylan right now.”
“Sure. Be right here when you’re done.”
Rio clicked off the call and dialed Dylan. It rang into voice mail. Repeatedly.
That bad feeling was getting worse by the second. She was in real danger—he knew it by the sudden frantic drum of his pulse, his blood bond with her telling him that something terrible was happening to her.
Right now, while she was easily three hours away from him.
“Goddamn it,” he growled, stomping on the gas.
He speed-dialed Gideon again.
“Any luck reaching her?”
“No.” A deeper chill went through him. “She’s in trouble, Gid. She’s in pain somewhere. Goddamn it! I should never have let her out of my sight!”
“Okay,” Gideon, the calm one, said. “I’m going to run a track on the Volvo’s GPS, and I’ll run one on her cell phone too. We’ll locate her, Rio.”
He heard the keyboard clacking on the other end of the line, but the dread in his gut told him that neither device was going to bring him any closer to Dylan. And sure enough, Gideon came back a second later with bad news.
“The car’s sitting on Jewel Avenue in Queens, and the cell phone tracks to a location one block away from that. There’s no movement coming out of either one.”
As Rio cursed, he heard Nikolai’s voice in the background, barely audible over the speaker. Something about Director Starkn and one of the photographs Dylan took.
“What did he just say?” Rio demanded. “Get Niko on the line. I want to know what he just said.”
Gideon’s voice was hesitant…and the vivid oath he swore an instant later did nothing to reassure Rio either.
“Damn it, what did he say?”
“Niko just asked me what Starkn was doing in the background of one of Dylan’s pictures…”
“Which one?” Rio asked.
“The one from that charity cruise her mother was on. The one Dylan ID’d as being the runaway shelter’s founder, Gordon Fasso.”
“That can’t be,” Rio said, even while a voice inside of him was telling him the exact opposite. “Put Niko on.”