Scorched Ice (Fire and Ice #3)(75)

“Away from this place,” he replied as a loud crack reverberated through the air, and the hot wash of flames rushed up against his back.

The remaining vampires stepped out of his way as he carried her down the pathway they’d cleared across the minefield. Chris, Lou, and Melissa stayed by his side while the vampires followed him across the field. Once safely on the other side of the fence, he turned to watch as the flames consumed what remained of the building.

Something within the building exploded with a reverberating bang that echoed throughout the mountains and forest. The vampires around him took a step back, and Quinn jerked in his arms. Like lava erupting from a volcano, flames burst straight upward. They surged into the night in an inferno that illuminated the midnight sky and lit the trees around them.

Across the way, flames burst from the exit that some members of The Commission had just emerged from. A metal door shot high from the exit and into the air before crashing into the forest. Flames ate away at the skeletal branches of the trees surrounding the exit and spread across their barren tops.

On his left up in the mountains, another burst of fire erupted into the air.

“Luther, Dani,” Melissa whispered and took a step toward the woods.

“If they somehow managed to get inside, Luther would have gotten out by now,” Julian said. “The minute the fire started, he would have evacuated everyone from within, but I doubt they were ever able to gain entrance.”

Melissa’s onyx eyes shimmered with tears when they met his. “You can’t know that.”

“No, I can’t,” he said. “But Luther isn’t stupid, and look at what it took for us to get inside that building.”

It was true, Luther was one of the smartest men he’d ever met, and they most likely never would have gotten inside, but Julian couldn’t take his eyes away from the area where he knew Luther and the others had gone. He searched for some sign they were still alive up there, but there was no way for them to know, not from here.

Chris wrapped his arm around Melissa’s shoulders and pulled her close as a single tear spilled down her cheek. About a mile straight across from them, another fire erupted into the trees.

“What did they have in there?” Chris inquired.

“They most likely rigged something to destroy the place if they felt it was going to fall into enemy hands. They would seek to destroy all evidence of whatever they were doing here,” Julian replied.

From the corner of his eye, he saw figures coming toward them and turned to watch as the vampires neared. One of them had his hand around a woman’s neck. He carried the squirming woman relentlessly across the ground, ignoring her frantic movements.

“The only survivor from the ones who fled,” he said and dropped the woman.

She released a small umph when she landed on her ass before Julian. Her eyes rolled in her head as she gazed at all of them. There had been a time when he would have delighted in her terror; now he simply wanted this over with. Reluctantly, he lowered Quinn to the ground and set her on her feet. The woman scurried backward across the ground as he approached, but she came to an abrupt halt against the legs of the vampires standing behind her.

Kneeling before her, Julian rested the tips of his fingers on the earth.

“Don’t kill me,” she pleaded as tears streaked down her face.

“That’s not an option for you.” With lightning speed, he seized hold of her wrist and pulled it toward him. Unlike objects, which sometimes only revealed a secret or two, touching a human could sometimes be an influx of memories and knowledge. He often felt like he was trudging through mud when he tried to sort through everything in order to uncover what it was he wanted from another.

The woman tried to jerk away, but there was no escaping his hold or retaining her secrets. Screams resonated in his head, not her screams but those of the countless victims she’d tortured and experimented on over the years. She hadn’t done her experiments with the ruthless glee that many of The Commission had. She’d done them with a scientific, analytical mind that allowed her to distance herself from her victims. She’d been fascinated by her subject’s many bodily reactions to what was done to them.

He recalled encountering a few like her when he’d been held by The Commission. Despite the fact their faces had remained impassive while they’d tortured him and they’d seemed to take no pleasure in the act, they had unnerved him more than the ones who smiled while they sliced him open. He could understand taking joy in the torture, he certainly had over the years, but he couldn’t understand people such as her.

They were far more dangerous to him. The others would keep him alive to get off on what they did with him; she would gladly end it all to see what would happen and not be disappointed that she’d lost her toy when it was done. There would always be other toys for her, after all.

And this woman had played with many many toys over the years. Not all of them had been vampires; some had been Hunters and others human. Age had never been a factor to her. She was as curious about a five-year-old’s reaction to her methods as she was to a fifty-five-year-old’s.

Julian pulled his hand away from her, unwilling to see anymore. “And you call us monsters,” he murmured.

The woman frowned at him, not because she didn’t like what he’d said, but because she saw nothing wrong with anything she’d done over the years. Julian rose to his feet and wiped his hands on his jeans. No matter how hard he tried, he’d never be able to wipe off the filth of her memories, but he wanted to rid himself of the clammy feel of her skin.