Replica(21)

I didn’t answer, not wanting to know him for anything other than what he was. Food.

Three blocks down, I stopped and ducked into an alley. The Calvin lookalike smiled at me and tipped his head to the side. I took the invitation and yanked him to me, burying my fangs deeply into his neck. He moaned and wrapped his arms around my waist. The hair, the smell of Calvin still buried deeply in my mind, the intense need for blood, the sensations Ivan had aroused.

I couldn’t control myself, but to be honest, I wasn’t even sure I tried. I drank the lookalike all the way down. His death was a heady rush, the final beats of his heart the strongest, the last of his blood the richest and most vital. I ripped my mouth from his neck and tipped my head back, breathing hard.

My entire body was sensitized to the world, the humans around me, the feel of the wind along the back of my neck. I breathed out as the new vampire in my arms stirred. “Thank you, I’ve wanted this for so long. I thought I would never be turned after the other vampires left.”

He tightened his hold on me, as if to pull me into a hug.

I hadn’t given him my own blood, which meant he’d had vamp blood before. I’d found him in Victor’s club, so that shouldn’t have been a surprise. Instead it was a disappointment.

I pulled my silver stake out and rammed it into his heart. “You’re welcome.”





CHAPTER 10





RACHEL



I opened the envelope and dumped the contents onto the table. Several photos and a piece of paper. The photos were of a nondescript building in what appeared to be a desert.

One focused on an entrance with two armed soldiers standing guard. It was hard to see their faces, but the uniforms looked U.S. Army. On the back of one photo were numbers. 30.5 N 47.816 E. Latitude and longitude coordinates. I suspected Hades had just confirmed that the facility in Derrick’s notes was indeed where we needed to go. I opened the folded paper next and read a cryptic phrase.

What you found will not be what it was.

What the hell did that mean?

There wasn’t time to think about it, though. I needed to follow Hades and find out where he went.

I burst out the front door, searching the shadows across the street where Ivan was supposed to be hiding. My phone vibrated in my jeans pocket, and I pulled it out to read the screen.

I’m following the mad scientist. Meet back up with you later.

Should I leave Ivan to it? It wasn’t like I had much choice, not that I was happy about it. Hades had practically disappeared into the shadows. Sure, I had an initial fifty-fifty chance of going in the right direction to start, but he could have turned down any number of alleyways. And yet…how did Ivan know where to meet us later? Lea had told me to meet her where we’d met Sean the other night. Why would Ivan know where that was?

I didn’t trust the werewolf. That was probably grounded in the fact I no longer trusted men in general, but the timing of his appearance was a little too suspect. Even if he arranged for us to meet with the werewolves, it could be a trap. And for a brief moment, I wondered if Lea’s judgment of him could be trusted. I’d seen how he affected her. I knew firsthand how a man could make a woman behave like an idiot.

Never again.

I headed back to the subway station, pulling the jacket hood over my head. A light drizzle began to fall, which helped hide my face. I doubted anyone was looking for me here—I hadn’t been followed by anyone resembling the government drones who’d chased us in Midtown—but it couldn’t hurt to be too careful.

I headed down the steps to the station, my mind reeling with the Rubik’s cube of how to get into Iraq. We couldn’t just hop on a plane from New York to Baghdad. Even if flights were available, we’d never get an official visa. We’d have to take a more indirect route, and Turkey was probably our best bet.

We could fly into Istanbul, take a smaller flight to Diyarbakir, and then take a taxi across the border into Zakho, Iraq. I’d made that trip several times in my last years as a war reporter. I just needed to make sure it was still a viable route. And I’d have to reach out to my contacts to get under-the-table visas. There were a lot of variables in play, but we needed to get to that facility. I’d tunnel underground if it came to it.

The subway platform was quiet, making it simultaneously easy to notice if someone was following me and creepy as hell when a man descended the stairs from the opposite end of the platform. He waited at the other end, keeping his attention on the tunnel. He wore jeans, boots, and a leather jacket. His hair was in need of a trim, but his beard was very close cut. In fact, it looked more like a five o’clock shadow had been given a few days to grow. There was something about him that set me on edge, but I couldn’t figure out what. Was he human?