"I scrubbed the memories of their whole captivity and sent them home," Brock said. The big male spared only the briefest glance at the body before arching a brow at Kade. "How about you? Did you manage to get anything out of Homeboy?"
"Turns out he wasn't actually much of a dog person," Kade said around the continued shrieks coming from the direction of the office.
Brock's mouth quirked at the corner. "So I hear. Anything else?"
"Yeah, unfortunately. Asshole's been trafficking Breedmates, just as our intel suggested. His client was a Minion, but he didn't know anything more than that. Never saw the mind slave up close and couldn't describe him at all."
"Shit," Brock said, running a big hand over the top of his head. "So I guess Homeboy was a dead end, huh?"
Kade cocked his head as the last of the howls cut short behind him. "He is now." Brock exhaled a rueful chuckle. "Let's get this place cleaned up and shut down. Got a text from Gideon, asking us to call in when we can. Something about a situation up north."
"Up north, as in upstate?"
"No, man. Farther north than that." Brock met his gaze and held it for longer than was comfortable.
"Something's evidently gone down in Alaska. He didn't say what exactly, just said that Lucan wants you to report in to headquarters ASAP."
Chapter Three
Kade understood even before he and Brock arrived at the Order's compound that the news he was about to get couldn't be good. As the founder and leader of the warriors, not to mention a first-generation Breed somewhere in the vicinity of nine hundred years old, Lucan was hardly an alarmist by nature. So the fact that he saw fit to call Kade in specifically was a major clue that whatever the so-called situation was in Alaska, it was something seriously f**ked up.
Speculation swirled in Kade's gut, one disturbing scenario after another, awful things that were far too easy for him to imagine and burned like bitter bile in the back of his throat. He kept his dread to himself as he and Brock parked the Rover in the fleet garage behind the heavily secured estate at ground level, then took the hangar's elevator down some three hundred feet to the subterranean nerve center of the Order's operations.
"You cool, my man?" Brock asked as he and Kade stepped out of the elevator and into the white marble corridor that connected the labyrinthine compound's many chambers like a central artery. "You know if this had anything to do with your kin back home, Lucan would have said so. I'm sure that whatever went down, everything's good with your family. No worries, yeah?"
"Yeah. No worries," Kade replied, but his mouth was on automatic pilot. He'd left his family's settlement in Alaska roughly a year ago to join the Order in Boston. It had been an abrupt departure, one spurred by the urgent summons he'd received from Nikolai, a warrior of the Order whom Kade had met decades past when his travels had taken him from Alaska's frozen tundra to that of Niko's Siberian homeland.
There were things Kade had left unfinished in Alaska. Things that haunted him still--worse, for the time and distance that had kept him away all these long months.
If anything had happened and he hadn't been there to step in ... Kade pushed the thought from his head as he and Brock turned down one of the corridors that would lead them to the tech lab.
Lucan, the dark-haired Gen One, was waiting there in the compound's glass-walled war room with Gideon, the blond, deceptively disheveled-looking resident genius who ran the Order's extensive collection of technology. The pair stood together in front of a flat-screen monitor. Lucan raked his fingers over his sternly set jaw just as the lab's transparent doors whisked open to permit Kade and Brock inside.
"How did the lead work out tonight in Roxbury?" he asked when the two warriors had entered the room.
Kade gave a brief rundown of what they found out from the skin trader, which wasn't much. But as Kade spoke, he couldn't keep his attention from drifting to the monitor behind Lucan. When the big male started to pace in that way he always did when he was either pissed off or deep in thought, Kade got his first good look at the image filling the computer screen.
It wasn't pretty.
A blurry photo--or maybe it was a freeze-framed video image--splashed garish red and white across the monitor. Blood and snow. A brutal killing in the frozen wilds of Alaska. Kade knew it instinctively, and the knowledge cut through him like the edge of a blade.
"What happened?" he asked, his voice so wooden it sounded apathetic, wholly undisturbed.
"Nasty bit of video showed up on the Internet today," Lucan said. "From what we can tell, this was captured by a cell phone camera a couple of days ago and uploaded from a Fairbanks ISP to a website that caters to crime-scene gawkers and other sick bastards who get off on viewing the dead." He gave a look to Gideon and with a click of the computer mouse, the frozen image onscreen came to vivid life. Over the excitable breathing and crunching footsteps of the person holding the camera, Kade watched as the crudely shot video showed the scene of what must have been a very brutal slaying. A bloodied body lay dead on a snow-covered, gore-stained patch of land. The lens's focus was shaky, but the operator managed to zoom in tight on the victim's wounds. Shredded clothing and skin. A number of unmistakable tears and punctures that could only have been made by some very sharp teeth. Or fangs.
"Jesus," Kade muttered, struck by the savagery of the killing--the totality of it--as the video played past the four-minute mark and moved on to document no less than three more dead in the snow and ice.
"This looks like the work of Rogues," Brock said, his deep voice as grim as his expression. It was a sorry but unavoidable fact of life that there were members of the Breed population who could not--or simply would not--control their thirst for blood. While the majority of the vampire nation abided by laws and reasonable good sense, there were others who gave in to their hungers with no thought for the consequences. Those of the Breed who fed too much, or too frequently, soon found themselves addicted, lost to Bloodlust, the disease of the Rogues. Once a vampire tipped that scale, there was little hope for him to turn himself around.