bodies where they fell. Innocent victims? Not fucking hardly, and if time hadn’t been of the essence, he would have taken their death knell pain to new levels—and not stopped with just this pair.
He would murder every single living, breathing entity in this torture chamber.
Instead, he kept going, pounding down corridors, passing in and out of the views of security cameras mounted in the ceiling.
The alarms sounded just as he stopped before a door that was made of steel, the one metal that vampires could not dematerialize through.
And they’d sealed the walls of whatever was on the far side with steel mesh.
These humans knew how to keep their victims on their premises, he thought.
Thank fuck they hadn’t had the foresight to secure the entire facility that way—no doubt because they were more concerned with escape rather than rescue.
The explosives he carried were in his backpack, and he set up a quick wad of C4, shoved a detonator into its compliant form, and stepped back. Boom! was an understatement. And before the smoke cleared, the door fell away from its jamb, landing on the floor inside like a tomb slab.
Murhder jumped forward with his daggers palmed. No guns. He didn’t want to kill any captive victims with stray bullets—
It was a full-blown medical laboratory with shelves full of supplies, an operating table that made him want to throw up, and all kinds of microscopes and monitors on counters and desks.
He slaughtered the lab workers in seconds. Three of them, all men in white coats. They offered no coordinated resistance to his attack, wasting time screaming and trying to run, and he went for the one who picked up a phone first. As he slashed their throats, those lab coats turned red down the front, and the laminated ID cards they wore around their necks got a pink stain.
As he dropped the last of them, he wheeled around and confronted a pair of mesh-covered cages. They were some six feet wide, fifteen feet long, and six feet tall, and through the densely woven steel that had been wrapped around them top to bottom, he saw a male on the left, naked with a food bowl and a container of water like he was a fucking animal.
There was a female in the other pen—
Dearest Virgin Scribe, she was heavily pregnant.
And as her eyes, hollow and haunted, stared out at him through the weave of steel bands, her mouth opened in shock.
Reality warped on him.
The face in the sacred glass. From the seeing bowl.
This was the female!
“You can’t touch the bars,” the male said over the din of the alarms and through the dissipating smoke. “They’re charged.”
Murhder shook himself back to attention. The male was up on his feet, but so emaciated, he was probably going to have to be carried out. And the female with the young was in even worse shape—she was on her knees, and he worried that was all she could do.
“Over there,” the male said as he pointed to an electrical box mounted on the wall. “There’s the circuit breaker for the cages.”
No time to fuck around with fuses. Murhder traded one of his daggers for a gun and plowed six shots into the metal panel. Sparks flew and there was a minor explosion, more smoke with a metal bite to it released into the lab.
“Stand back,” he ordered.
The male knew what he was thinking, and the poor guy got his fragile body out of the way as Murhder pointed his gun at the locking mechanism on the cage. The bullet he discharged split the casing, releasing a set of mechanical internal organs onto the floor.
The prisoner pushed the door wide and stumbled out on pin-thin legs that trembled so badly, the knobby knees knocked together. His hair had been shaved and there were electrodes attached to his skull.
Murhder focused on the pregnant female. “We can’t leave her.” The sprinkler system came on, water raining down on them, triggered by the release of smoke. “I need to …”
But he couldn’t carry both of them and still have a hand free for a gun. And it went without saying that in their weakened states, neither one of them could dematerialize.
“I’m going to save her.” His voice didn’t sound like his own. “It is my destiny.”
As Murhder approached the cage, the female dragged herself over to the hinged panel in front. Behind the steel mesh, her hands clenched on the bars, her mouth moving, her voice too weak to register through