Bloodshot - Cherie Priest [148]
“Look who’s talking,” Adrian murmured.
Something about the tone of my wayward SEAL’s voice actually penetrated the major’s smug reserves. He said, more softly now, “You’re going to kill me, aren’t you?”
“Tell me what happened to my sister. We know she escaped when Jordan Roe was destroyed.”
“No. I don’t know.”
Adrian said, “You sure do say that a lot for someone who wants to survive until dawn.”
“I don’t know!” he insisted. “She was just one more thing we lost in the storm. The roof came off, the walls fell in, and the subjects who didn’t die, disappeared.”
“You didn’t kill her?”
“No! We just told her family she’d died so you’d lay the fuck off! You were keeping her name in the papers, enlisting missing persons organizations, and drawing too much attention to her! We didn’t need the scrutiny!” He was talking in exclamation points now. I noticed it, and I liked it.
“So she’s still out there.”
“As far as I know, yes!”
As far as he knew. But there was a lot he didn’t know, like maybe the House had gotten hold of her—though my phone call to Atlanta implied she hadn’t gone home to roost. But they still knew of her, and they knew more than they were willing to tell me, which was going around a lot lately. The entry-level ghoul whom I’d finally badgered into talking … he was the one who told me she’d gone deaf, but that’s all he could be persuaded to say. If he knew where she was or what she was doing these days, I couldn’t pry it out of him over the phone.
Of course, it was always possible she’d been caught and killed by something or someone else. Or she might’ve ended it all herself—which was a distinct possibility. Not every young vamp is cut out to go it alone, much less with a significant disability and a House that had turned on her. With all that stacked against her … some people would give up.
“Well?” Bruner asked, since I’d been quiet while pondering these things.
“Well what?”
“Well, are you going to leave me alone now, and get the fuck out of my house?” Ooh. Fake bravado. Almost as obnoxious as real bravado.
“Well, I’ll tell you what,” I said slowly.
Then, faster than he could blink (no, literally), my hands were on his throat and my knee was on his chest. He’d leaned back so far that the chair nearly buckled under both our weight—and he was gasping, more with surprise than the pressure I was not yet applying.
In the next moment Adrian was at my side. He reached into the back of my belt, where I’d stashed the major’s knife. He did it fast, but not so fast that I couldn’t have stopped him if I wanted to.
I didn’t want to. I let him slash at Bruner’s throat just beneath the place where I held him, and together we let him bleed. Bruner’s eyes bulged, and he struggled to speak.
But he didn’t say anything. And we didn’t, either.
When we were sure he was dead, and that no one would reasonably expect a vampire to have done it (yes, I know how that sounds), we torched the place and left. Bruner wasn’t the beginning and end of the program, no. But he was a big, nasty part of it; and without him, it wouldn’t be half so effective.
And there was one more thing I hoped Bruner’s death might accomplish.
I hoped it might force the mysterious Jeffery Sykes to emerge from whatever hole he was hiding in. After all, we’d now killed two of his lead researchers and one of his parkour recruiters. He’d need more people. He obviously needed more vampires, too—because he’d put me on the shopping list. Oh, sure, first he’d wanted to help me find that paperwork, because he needed it, too—but once I had it in hand, he didn’t just want the files. He wanted me. So he came after me. And I believe the record will reflect, that was a huge fucking mistake.
But I had time, and now