lock yourself in the bathroom. Pray I don’t break down the door or vapor through the cracks. Go. Go now.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“SIR, A NEW capture team in Seattle is on to something.”
A tall, slender man floated over to the monitor, his feet barely touching the floor, and he placed a bejeweled hand on the computer programmer’s shoulder. It lingered a moment longer than necessary as he bent down until he was eye-level with the screen. Maurice tried to keep from shivering but wasn’t having much luck. The Overlord’s breath reeked with the stench of his all-blood diet. Maurice hadn’t completely reverted to the old ways. He still enjoyed fast food. Maybe all those French fries would keep him from smelling this bad.
“What did they discover?” the Overlord asked.
“We’ve been checking and cross-checking our Sangre Dulce database against census reports and internet search engines, trying to track down other family members of known sweetbloods. The researchers think some families may carry the recessive gene that they can isolate in the lab.”
“I’m liking the sounds of this already.” The vampire’s thick, yellowed nails dug into Maurice’s shoulder. “So instead of mating two sweetbloods, they may be able to mate two non-sweetbloods who have the recessive trait and still get Sangre Dulce offspring? Is that what you’re saying?”
Maurice nodded, but he doubted the Overlord would like what he was going to hear next.
“So what has that Seattle cell discovered?”
“Remember that prolific family, the Shaws from Southern California, the one that produces several sweetbloods each generation?” He pushed his glasses up higher. They slipped down his nose when he sweated. And he always sweated when the Overlord was this close.
“Yes. I know them very well indeed. Let’s just say I’ve had a personal relationship with quite a few of them over the years.”
“Our boys were playing around on their new computer and accessed our database. Seems one of them has some internet sleuthing abilities, as he traced a Shaw female to the Seattle area. She had hyphenated her last name so she wasn’t flagged by our system.”
“A Shaw female there? Two new team members found a human with one of the most sought-out bloodlines? I’d call that an egregious oversight.”
“Yes, I agree, sir. We’ve put a patch into the code so our spiderbots are looking for hyphenated names, as well.”
“How did they find her?”
“She recently set up a website and her About Me page mentions San Diego. We would have found her eventually, sir. We did locate her brother—he doesn’t have a hyphenated last name and he’s not Sangre Dulce.”
The Overlord cursed quietly under his breath, halting the movement of air in Maurice’s lungs. “And you’re just figuring out now he has a sister? Do we know if she’s Sangre Dulce yet?”
“Yes, she is. They believe she has the sweetblood.” Maurice took off his glasses and mopped his forehead with a tissue.
“You believe?” The stench rose off the Overlord like a mist.
“She actually hasn’t been captured yet. The team had her cornered, but somehow before they could bring her in, one of them was staked and the other one ran.”
The pungent smell intensified and bile bubbled into Maurice’s esophagus, burning away at the lining. He could hardly keep his glasses perched on his nose.
“Who staked them and where is the female?”
“Agency operatives, sir, and we think one of them has her.”
The sound Maurice heard next surprised him a little. He’d figured death would hurt, but he hadn’t expected it to have a sound. It was rather like a juicy thud, a watermelon sliced in half with a sharp blade.
EVERY NERVE IN his body had frayed like ends of an unraveled rope by the time Dom pulled into the parking garage. If it hadn’t been dawn, he’d have walked the streets of Seattle looking for a fight. Any fight. It wouldn’t have mattered whether he ran into a Darkblood or not, as any confrontational being would’ve served the same purpose. His body itched with aggressive energy and he needed to unload it somehow.
A short time ago a willing female would’ve provided the necessary outlet for his pent-up aggressions. But it didn’t hold much appeal now since all he could think about was Mackenzie. He would not lie with another woman. If he were to be with someone else, he had to assume she’d do the same. And the thought of Mackenzie underneath another man, those emerald eyes looking up into a face other than his own, her lips swollen from another man’s kisses, another man’s name