women as you can buy. And the kind of lifestyle few men can afford.”
“What. The. Fuck. Do. You. Want?”
He sighs. “I want to give you an opportunity. There was a certain blonde female recently acquired by your club. A woman with some value to me. If you and your brother bring her to me, out off Highway 10, the 250 mile marker, we’ll exchange her for a giant suitcase of money.”
“Like hell!”
He laughs. “A very smart man in your club made a similar deal with us and hasn’t fulfilled his end of the bargain yet. I thought I’d give a more capable person the chance. Don’t turn me down, Mr. Hale.”
“I’m not giving you Dani, and I don’t want any of your blood money.”
“Dani? Interesting. I’m not the kind of man to learn the names of my prisoners, but apparently you are. Don’t let that pretty face of hers trick you. Beneath her innocence is so much danger that it’ll end the lives of anyone who gets mixed up with her.”
“You mean you plan to kill anyone who gets in the way of you getting her back, right? No doubt you’re a member of the The Necron Order.”
This time when the man speaks, the calmness in his voice is replaced with an edge. “Believe me, that experiment is far more dangerous than anything we could do to you. Don’t ignore my offer. Tonight at midnight.”
I want to ask more, but the call ends. Sitting down slowly on the edge of my bed, I stare at the phone. My pulse races in my ears, and I contemplate everything the man said. No, I’m not going to consider his offer. If he’d known anything about the Immortal Hunters, he’d know we can’t be bought, which is why I wanted to doubt his talk about working with someone else in our club. And yet, I can’t ignore the fact that someone had slipped Dani demon blood.
Setting my phone down, I dress in a shirt and jeans, pulling on my cut last, fully intending to do a little investigating before Striker and Dragon return. I go to the restricted cell down in the basement where the Prez had put the computers and info from our last mission. When I swipe my card, and the door opens, I’m surprised to find a younger member in the room. Did he have permission?
He looks up at me and pales. He has shoulder-length blond hair, pale brown eyes, and a nervous energy. I’d seen him around, but never quite caught his name. Guys at his level often ended up dead, so it got tiresome to learn all their names.
“Phoenix, uh, sir.” He struggles for the words, rising from the computer chair. “Uh, what are you doing here?”
“A better question is what are you doing here?” I say.
He fidgets. “Prez knows I’m good with computers. I went to MIT before I got thrown out for fighting. He asked me to check out the computers.”
I’m not sure I trust him, so I make a mental note to ask the Prez about it later. “Did you find out anything good?”
He seems to relax when he realizes I’m not about to put a bullet in his chest. “Yeah, actually. Most of it is bits and pieces. Someone erased most of the hard drives, so I was only able to recover some of it. The files were corrupted, so there are a few pictures, half pictures, experiment logs with sentences and paragraphs missing, etc. I’m trying to put it all in a document to get a complete picture.”
I enter the room and circle behind the desk. “Show me what you’ve found out so far.”
He sits down and eagerly begins to pull up a file. There are normal pictures, ones that remind me somewhat of prison pictures. People lined up in front of a screen, a front image, side images, and back image of each person. But then images pop up of people who look mutated. Who look wrong. Most are dead on the floor of cells. Some look like their insides have been pulled out. Others have bubbled skin like liquid had been trying to escape from beneath their flesh. And then there’s a corrupted image. One of a person with…wings? But the person is ash, and the wings are black and sickly.
“Fuck.”
“Yeah,” he says. “They were doing some twisted stuff with a substance called SeraphX26. There were earlier substances called SeraphX…25 to 1, so I’m guessing they had twenty-five studies before this