Chapter Eight
The last few weeks had been a typhoon of disaster and confusion that led to Jessie’s brother’s death. Now, after losing the one person she loved most in the world she found herself with real vampires and human women who didn’t seem to have the slightest worry for their own safety.
She sensed something from Ricard. It was a feeling she’d never experienced, and one she found difficult to comprehend.
There were sensations of worry and anger, but they were not her own. This sense of angst was separate from an internal desire to get even with the men who’d destroyed her family.
“To go against Panthera or Rollins one must have an army behind her,” Ricard said.
“And we have an army.” Hunter smiled.
“A damn good one,” Alice said.
“You’d help me? You don’t even know me.” Jessie watched the three people she’d met in the last couple hours and wondered why they had any interest in her situation.
“We’re strangers with no connection.” A flare of pain moved along her body, then quickly subsided.
Without a thought Jessie reached for Ricard’s hand. Instinct told her to comfort him. “You’ve said we’re mates, but look at it from my perspective. That’s an odd thing for a woman to hear from a complete stranger.”
He nodded. “I am aware of that point.”
She did not pull her hand away. Something about touching him felt right. In his presence she felt safe. Yet, the whole idea of this was too strange for her to focus on. “I can’t think about this…thing.” She shook her head. “I feel something, but I don’t…it’s not…normal. I’m sorry.”
Alice snorted. “Sorry! That slipped out. But she is right. This whole mating thing is weird.”
“What?” Hunter sneered. “I thought you liked being my mate, woman.”
“I never said I didn’t like it. I like it. I like it a lot. But, it’s weird. Humans meet each other. Talk on the phone or text.”
“Oh, yeah, like Gabe and Selene.” Hunter laughed.
Jessie frowned.
“Sorry, that’s an inside joke. You know that whole on-line dating thing humans and some idiot vampires are into,” Hunter said.
Alice elbowed him. “We date. We decide if we want to see each other again. Maybe we hook up. Maybe we don’t. We go through this whole courting thing before we decide to spend the rest of our lives together.” Alice tilted her head to the side and smiled at Hunter.
“You vampires are hit by some invisible bolt of crazy that makes you want to throw yourselves into traffic, takes bullets on our behalf, and kill anyone or thing that comes near us.”
“Yeah.” Hunter watched her with an amused look on his face. “You never seemed to dislike that before.”
“I didn’t say I disliked it. But I am saying it’s weird.” She kissed his lips. “It’s just plain weird, and you can’t expect a woman who probably never knew vampires existed until tonight to jump on the bandwagon of vampire love.”
“You might have a point, but to confirm, you do like it, right?” Hunter pulled her into his arms and kissed her neck.
“Yesssss.” She giggled and squirmed.
Ricard cleared his throat. “You are making this situation more awkward for us, at least you are for me.”
Jessie felt her cheeks heat and wanted nothing more than to change the subject. As much as she’d love to understand the entire idea of someone falling madly in love with her at first sight, her heart was broken by the loss of Joshua and this was not the time for selfish interests.
“I’m still confused about how you even knew where to find Joshua and why so many of you were there. Why were you following him? How did you know of him? Something about that isn’t right.” She sipped her now cool coffee.
Nothing was ever right in Central City. For more than twenty years there hadn’t been a truly right thing in this hellhole. Not since that damn fire at Panthera had anything in life been right.
“You’re correct. Many things are wrong in Central City, and every last one of them points to Panthera Laboratories and Raymond Tyrone.” Ricard poured hot coffee into Jessie’s cup. “We tracked Joshua from Panthera to your apartment. Our intelligence told us Tyrone had upped his game and that his experiments were getting more dangerous. We’d been waiting for someone to exit the lab for four nights when we saw Joshua leave. We had hoped to capture him alive.”
“What’s even stranger is that after he left and we followed, Tyrone went to your apartment to wait for him,” Hunter said.
She had more questions than she thought she could ask in one night.
“What were you going to do with him?” She stared at Ricard, not wanting to miss any bit of emotion that might cross his face.
“Study him. We need to understand what Tyrone was, and I suspect Rollins will continue, doing to these victims. What is causing them to change? We must find a cure.”
“Would you have hurt him?”
Ricard looked at Jessie, holding her gaze for several seconds before responding. “Yes. It would have hurt him had we captured him.”
She couldn’t stop tears from building in her eyes or the tightness that clenched her throat. She fought not to break down again. “He had suffered so much already.”
“I will never lie to you, Jessica. I’m sorry hearing this information has hurt you, but I cannot tell you something that is not true. The Guard does not want to hurt anyone. But, what your brother had become was something logic and reason could not stop. The only way for us to gain control of these…victims has been through painful force.” Ricard handed her a tissue.
“Tyrone’s drive to create something super-human has made him a madman. He will stop at nothing until he achieves his sick goals. I’ve tallied more than three hundred affected humans in the last four months. We must learn what he’s doing in order to fight him, and part of learning is painful.”
“I’m pretty sure whatever Tyrone and Rollins did to all these people was just as painful,” Hunter said.
“Agreed. Jessica, Tryone was trying to unlock the key to how vampires exist. What genetic changes occur that make us what we are? If he could unlock that information, he could make his own.”
“Joshua drank blood,” Jessie said. The idea of it revolted her. The memory of him throwing up passed through her mind. “He wanted mine. He tried to bite me and Dr. Tyrone didn’t seem upset by that.”
Ricard came around the table to kneel before Jessie. “I know he did. I promise you, as long as I breathe, no vampire or revenant shall harm you.” His eyes were darker than before. His jaw set to a hard line. “No one.”
Jessie nodded, knowing as sure as she had heard the words, this man would kill for her safety.
“He always talked of vampires, but I never believed. I thought he was crazy.”
“What did Joshua tell you?” Ricard asked.
“Nothing. It wasn’t Joshua. Years ago our father told us of vampires living in the city and working at the lab.” She nuzzled Canella. “He talked of you as if you were heroes.”
Jessie remembered nights of her father peering from behind a heavy curtain to look out the window, watching and hoping for a savior to arrive.
“On his deathbed he promised you’d come. He’d been delirious for days, talking about experiments on vampires and the genetics of vampire bloodlines. I thought he’d lost his mind, but apparently he knew the truth. Vampires are real.”