Finally, he thought. I’ve found you.

There was no one walking around outside.

Nowhere to walk around, really.

The forest surrounding the remote site crowded in tight, another unbroken stretch of wall, the pines bough-to-bough blockers of access. There was a perimeter fence as well, the concrete barrier some twenty feet high with a curl of barbed wire at the top and a single gatehouse that appeared to be fitted with bulletproof panels of glass.

If you were a human, and you didn’t have the right credentials? You weren’t getting on the property much less inside the place.

Fortunately, he had other options.

Closing his eyes, he concentrated on calming himself, his respiration slowing down from the fast-pump of his impending attack to a far more steady, easy rhythm. As soon as he was able, he dematerialized, proceeding forward in a scatter of molecules. His entry point was an HVAC exhaust fan on the flat roof of one of the spokes, and in his invisible, mostly-air-state, he easily penetrated the aluminum mesh that covered the chute and continued through the duct work.

The interior layout was unknown to him, and that made re-forming dangerous. If he chose the wrong environment to materialize into, he could do damage to himself on things that weren’t going to grow back.

But he was not worried about his own personal safety.

Vents. More ductwork. Filters he was able to get through because there were no steel components to them.

He came out through a furnace, reestablishing his physical form in a pitch-black room that smelled like desert-dry air and motor oil. The instant he was corporeal, his presence triggered a motion-sensitive light and his eyes burned in the glare. Bracing for an alarm, he palmed one of his guns and sank down into his thighs in case someone threw open the door that was before him.

When no one came in, he glanced back at the industrial furnace, took a deep breath, and dematerialized through the thin seam under that door.

Re-forming again, he found himself in a break room. Two maintenance men in dark green uniforms had their backs to him, the pair of them sitting at a table and watching basketball on a black-and-white TV as they smoked.

“Pardon me, gentlemen,” he said dryly.

The humans jumped and whirled around. Before they could call for help, he reached into their minds and paralyzed them where they stood. Then he chose the one on the right, and started popping the tops off the man’s mental canisters, peering into all kinds of memories.

Okay … wow.

The guy was cheating on his wife and worried he’d caught a venereal disease from his girlfriend. He had tremendous guilt over the betrayal, but he couldn’t fathom his life without the other woman and he was obsessed with knowing who else the woman was sleeping with. Was it Charlie from Engineering—

Totally not what Murhder was looking for, but brains were not like a library full of books. There was no Dewey decimal system with a corresponding card catalogue to go by. Things came up in order of importance to the individual, not the temporal trespasser.

He switched to the guy on the left and hit the jackpot.

This one had just gotten promoted and was eager for the union-mandated break to be over so he could get back to work. He liked having some power around the place.

Much better, Murhder thought.

Moments later, he had the information he needed: Yes, there was a top secret laboratory, and it was not far.

Murhder wiped their memories clear of his interruption, and then inserted orders for them to sit back down and resume watching the game.

No reason to kick up complications until he absolutely had to.

Out in a corridor now, and there was no dematerializing anymore. He was way too hyped, his senses far too alive, and as a master would unleash a hound, so he released the most animalistic part of himself to carry forward: Ambulation was no longer a conscious coordination of limbs but an autonomic process serving the greatest good.

These humans had vampires imprisoned here. And they were doing unholy things to them.

He knew this down to his soul, and he was going to get it right this time. No distractions. No mistakes. No emotions.

All of which had led to his failure before.

When he rounded a corner and came upon two human males in white laboratory coats, he snapped their necks and left the 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.