Blood and Fire (McClouds & Friends #8)(155)

She started trying doors. She had no choice.

She couldn’t leave this place until she found him.





“Holy shit.” Sean’s eyes were wide as they peered into the monitor. The object of his amazement was the guy who was now forcing the lock on their storage unit. “That’s . . . no, that can’t be—”

“No, it’s not,” Kev cut in. “It can’t be, and it’s not.”

Sean shook his head, bewildered. “But he looks exactly like—”

“No,” Kev said. “Look again. He’s too young. Twenty, maybe. And too pale. His hair’s ash blond. And he’s not tall enough, and his shoulders don’t have the bulk of Bruno’s. And his eyes are set closer.”

But Sean’s head could not stop shaking. “This is so f*cked up. So this is one of the lost siblings Petrie was going on about. But how about the other guy? He doesn’t look like Bruno at all. But he could be the guy that Aaro and Zia described from the hospital.”

Kev shrugged, indifferent. It was eerie, yeah, but he didn’t care whose siblings they were or weren’t. DNA be damned. They worked for the guy who was f*cking with Bruno. That made them walking dead men.

Getting dead, of course, only happening after they performed the last and possibly only useful task ordained for them on this earth. Which was to lead Kev to wherever Bruno was. Please. If there was a God, he begged for this much grace. The rest he’d take care of himself.

“I still think we should have tagged her,” Sean fretted. “We could have remote activated a dummy tag as soon as they got on the road.”

“They’re not stupid,” Kev repeated. “They’d have found it. That’s what they’re doing right now. Searching her. Not just sweeping her, but physically searching her. That’s why they’re not already on the road.”

Agonizing minutes passed. Kev stared at the screen, desperate to move. Air rushed back into his lungs when the young Brunoesque dude poked his head out. He backed out, holding monster chick by the shoulders. Mr. Bland had her by the legs. She was still wrapped in the tar but less tightly now. They heaved her into the back of their vehicle without gentleness or ceremony. The Bruno look-alike slammed the door and headed for the wheel, like he was done with an unpleasant but necessary job of work.

“Huh,” Sean murmured. “I am not feeling the love here.”

“Maybe monster chick is tough to work with,” Kev surmised.

“Ya think? But still someone ordered them to pick her up. Maybe they’re short on staff. A lot of them got dead recently.”

“Good,” Kev said darkly. “Dead is good.”

The vehicle was on the move. Sean fired up the van’s engine and nudged it to the end of the street so they could see when the black SUV poked its nose out of the storage facility’s main entrance.

It turned away from them, thank God. If it had turned right, the Butthead Brigade would have had a dead-on close-up view of Kev’s and Sean’s mugs behind the old van’s windshield. Their first stroke of luck.

Sean hung back, let a car or two get in front of them on the busy street, and pulled out after them.





“Melanie? Melanie! Respond immediately!”

What in the hell? King tossed the com device down and swung around to click open the monitor that showed Lily Parr’s room. Still those legs were stretched out, the bare feet looking pale and cold. The video played on; nothing had changed. Melanie had not yet arrived.

His blood pressure rose. Useless bitch. Unable to perform the simplest task. She’d been too fuddled by the intense orgasm he’d so unfortunately granted her. God knows, she didn’t deserve it.

He had never felt so irritated, so exposed. Every last one of his elite cadre of personal operatives was either dead or trying to cope with these irritants and tormenters. Leaving him alone to take care of all the myriad details of his enterprise—personally.

And they were extensive. Currently, he was monitoring the young ones in the programming room, who had been scheduled today for the eight-hour sessions of combat programming. He’d considered canceling it, but it had annoyed him to think of his smoothly running machine being disrupted by these hooligans. So he’d ordered Hobart and Melanie to retrieve the teens from the satellite dormitory facility and set them all up this morning, right on schedule, as if nothing were amiss.

So at this moment, ten of his trainees, aged thirteen to eighteen, were hooked up to the programming consoles, their senses and brain functions augmented by King’s own brilliant drug cocktails, processing massive amounts of information at accelerated rates. With each of them, he came closer to his ultimate dream of plumbing the vast realms of untapped human potential. And using it for his own ends.

But he’d been forced to spend the last half hour checking their vitals, their brain waves. Eight of them were fine, but two of them, A-1423B, also known as Annika, and F-1684C, also known as Fallon, looked destined for the cull. The stressful DeepWeave and drug combination was provoking something like epileptic seizures.

Pity, but still. This crop’s 80 percent success rate was statistically quite good. A steady improvement. In the beginning, back when he started with Zoe and her vintage, he’d enjoyed a 30 percent success rate. Indeed, if Zoe appeared to him now, with all her obvious flaws, he’d have culled her before she reached the age of eight.