Lover Awakened (Black Dagger Brotherhood #3)(68)

He patted his jacket pockets until he found the glass vial of the neuromodulator dopamine. He put the thing on the dash.

It took two tries to open the hypodermic’s sterile packet, and then he nearly broke the needle off getting it through the rubber top on the dopamine lid. When the syringe was loaded, he wrapped the rubber tubing around his biceps using one hand and his teeth; then he tried to find a vein. Because he was working in a flat visual field, everything was complicated.

He just couldn’t see well enough. All he had in front of him was…red.

Red…red…red… The word shot around his mind, banging on the inside of his skull. Red was the color of panic. Red was the color of desperation. Red was the color of his self-hatred.

Red was not the color of his blood. Not right now, at any rate.

Snapping himself to attention, he fingered his forearm and looked for an internal launching pad for the drug, a superhighway that would bring the shit up to the receptors in his brain. Except his veins were collapsing.

He felt nothing as he pushed the needle in, which was reassuring. But then it came…a little sting at the injection site. The numbness he preserved himself in was about to end.

As he hunted around under his skin for a usable vein, he started to feel things in his body: The sensation of his weight in the car’s leather seat. The heat blowing on his ankles. The fast air moving in and out of his mouth, drying his tongue.

Terror had him shoving the plunger down and releasing the rubber tourniquet. God only knew if he’d had the right place.

Heart pounding, he stared at the clock.

“Come on,” he muttered, starting to rock in the driver’s seat. “Come on…kick in.”

Red was the color of his lies. He was trapped in a world of red. And one of these days the dopamine wasn’t going to work. He’d be lost in the red forever.

The clock changed numbers. One minute passed.

“Oh, shit…” He rubbed his eyes as if that might bring back the depth in his vision and the normal spectrum of color.

His cell phone rang and he ignored it.

“Please…” He hated the pleading in his voice, but he couldn’t pretend to be strong. “I don’t want to lose me….”

All at once his vision returned, the red draining from his visual field, the three-dimensional perspective returning. It was like the evil had been sucked out of him and his body numbed up, its sensations evaporating until all he knew were the thoughts in his head. With the drug, he became a moving, breathing, talking bag that blessedly had only four senses to worry about now that touch had been medicated to the back burner.

He collapsed against the seat. The stress around Bella’s abduction and rescue had gotten to him. That was why the attack had hit him so hard and fast. And maybe he needed to adjust the dosage again. He’d go to Havers and check about that.

It was a while before he was able to put the car in drive. As he eased out from behind the strip mall and slipped into traffic, he told himself he was just one more sedan in a long line of cars. Anonymous. Just like everyone else.

The lie eased him somewhat…and increased his loneliness.

At a stoplight, he checked the message that had been left for him.

Bella’s security alarm had been turned off for an hour or so and had just come back on. Someone had been in her house again.





Zsadist found the black Ford Explorer parked in the woods about three hundred yards away from the entrance to Bella’s mile-long driveway. The only reason he’d run across the thing was because he’d been scouring the area, too restless to go home, too dangerous to be in the company of anyone else.

A set of footprints in the snow headed in the direction of the farmhouse.

He cupped his hands and looked in the car’s windows. The security alarm was engaged.

Had to be those lessers’ ride. He could smell the sweet scent of them all over it. But with only one set of tracks, maybe the driver had dropped his buddies off, then hidden it? Or maybe the SUV had had to be moved from somewhere else?

Whatever. The Society would be back for its property. And wouldn’t it be sweet to know where the hell it ended up? But how could he trail the damn thing?

He put his hands on his hips…and happened to look down at his gun belt.

As he unclipped his cell phone, he thought fondly of Vishous, that tech-savvy son of a bitch.

Necessity, mother, invention.

He dematerialized under the SUV so he left a minimal amount of tracks in the snow. As his weight was absorbed by his back, he winced. Man, he was going to pay for that little trip through the French door. And for the knock on the head. But he’d survived worse.

He took out a penlight and looked around the undercarriage, trying to pick the right spot. He needed somewhere fairly large, and it couldn’t be near the exhaust system, because even in this cold, that kind of heat could be a problem. Of course, he’d have much preferred to get into the Explorer and tuck the phone under a seat, but the SUV’s alarm system was a complication. If it were tripped he might not be able to reengage it, so the lessers would know someone had been in the car.

As if the punched-out window wouldn’t be a clue.

Goddamn it… He should have gone through those lessers’ pockets before stabbing them into oblivion. One of those bastards had had the keys. Except he’d been so pissed off, he’d moved too fast.