Page 168 of Golden Eagle

It took most of her sandwich, and a second cup of coffee, but she found them, all three. They were in a separate section of files, ones marked “on hold.” They’d applied to the trial, filled out all the paperwork, but put on a wait list for a future round of drug testing.

“They didn’t get the drug,” she said, and leaned back to ease the tension in her spine. “So why kill the ones who hadn’t received it, but not the ones who did?”

Lanny said, “Do we know what happened to the ones who did?”

No. No, they didn’t.

“If I may?” Will said, and when she nodded, pulled the laptop over in front of himself. He started scrolling. “I don’t know that this is true of all of them, but I do recognize these two. Well, I know of them, based on what Red told us.”

Back up near the top, he found two profiles: Sergeant Adela Ramirez, and Major Jake Treadwell.

“These are two members of the team who accosted Red and Rooster in Wyoming. The ones who took her into custody.”

“They employ the ones who get the drug,” she said. She was starting to feel numb, a faint buzzing in the back of her head. This was all just so…convoluted. Unnecessarily so.

“Still doesn’t explain why they’d kill the others,” Lanny pointed out.

“What does it matter?” Much said. “They’re evil and stupid. They don’t need a reason.”

He was probably right. But, creeping numbness or not, Trina still wanted to knowwhy.

~*~

When Seven finished his day’s lessons – private, today, with Dr. Severin, working on the elasticity of his power, shooting flame and drawing it back again, quicker and quicker, learning to dampen it and then send it soaring a moment later – he forwent the usual “social time” he and his siblings were allotted and went down to the basement labs. The guards stationed there allowed him through, but they sent him nervous glances; some had sweat at their temples. One spoke softly into a crackling radio.

He wouldn’t have long, then.

No one trusted him, here. Dr. Severin was his favorite, but even he had wild-eyed moments, those times when he looked on Seven not as a pupil, but as something he feared.

He’d learned what fear looked like in the films they were allowed to watch, and he’d realized that was how most of the people here in this place – in his home – looked at him.

The basement lab ran perpendicular to the regular basement: the place where Seven and the others practiced, encased in concrete, and steel, with industrial sprinklers in the ceiling and fire extinguishers bolted to the wall every few paces. It was made of the same white-painted concrete, but the lights were kept lower, the overhead tubes only half-installed to preserve energy; they droned and hummed, and all the shadows had a strange gray cast to them.

He went through a set of windowless steel doors with his keycard, and continued forward through two more sets, past furtive guards, until he reached the main part of the lab. A few doors and glass-walled offices lined the edges, but the center was an open space, studded with steel examination tables, OR-quality light rigs positioned at the head of each, and a drain and sink at the foot. Each table came equipped with rails designed to allow for restraints.

Beyond that lay a row of beds on wheels, with thin, hard mattresses that could lie flat or elevate the sleeper’s head. That was where the vampire Gustav lay, his eyes closed, his breathing shallow, whistling through his broken nose, his face a patchwork of mostly-healed bruises.

Vampires healed quickly – quicker than Seven himself did. He’d tested this once, with a scalpel he’d pulled off a doctor’s tray. Sliced hard and clean through the skin of his wrist, and watched the blood spill down, thick as syrup, the color of hot coals, onto the floor. There had been much swearing, and yelling. Someone had stabbed him with a needle, and someone else had clapped a wad of gauze over the wound he’d made.

It had hurt. He’d lost consciousness. And for the next few days he watched the slow progress of his knitting flesh, from an open place like a red mouth to a smooth, pink line; the doctors admonished him for peeling off the bandages to look, but he’d been curious.

It hadn’t scarred.

Gustav wouldn’t scar, either, but even now, with his vampiric body working to make him whole again, he could tell that the vampire called Nikita Baskin had wrought incredible violence on his fellow immortal.

Seven stared at him a long moment, and out in the hallway, he heard the crackle and hiss of radios as the guards talked to one another – radioed for help, for some doctor to come and take charge of him. He didn’t have much time, then.

He moved to stand by Gustav’s head. His eyes seemed sunken below the closed lids, and the healing bruises around them bore a sickly green cast.

Seven reached out with one finger and touched the very tip of the vampire’s nose.

Gustav’s eyes slammed open like window shutters. He sucked in a breath that stuck wetly in his throat, and his bloodshot gaze pinged wildly before landing on Seven. His tension eased only a fraction, then, and he started to cough. It sounded like his ribs were still in the process of knitting.

“Why were they here?” Seven asked.

Gustav coughed a few more times, torso lifting off the bed, which left him wincing and gasping. He cleared his throat and asked a garbled, “What?”

“Nikita Baskin and his allies. They came here. Why?”

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