Page 37 of Fanged Embrace
Leyore headquarters had never felt so small.
The bottom floor buzzed with witch healers and every off-duty sentinel Jordan could pull in. Cots filled the grand hall, each occupied by someone whose life had been cracked in half:blank-eyed humans, half-starved vampire fledglings, and supernatural hybrids the likes of which I’d never seen before.
All of them traumatized, confused, and desperate to go home.
Getting them out had been the simple part. Putting them back together again would take every faction in Jordan’s coalition working double shifts for weeks.
I left the hum of triage behind and stepped into Jordan’s office, where the core group was waiting.
Hunter was already leaning against the shutters, arms folded and brows cinched. Dylan and Amara occupied the corner. Sky and Addison were pacing circles around the desk and Ethan perched on the edge of a filing cabinet, worry etching lines too old for his face.
The only ones missing were Leah and Maxine, the latter of whom was getting patched up and the former committed to hovering around her beloved and bickering with the healer about the best way to lay the stitches.
Jordan looked up as I entered, fingers steepled beneath her chin. “How’s our shooter?”
“Quiet.” I shrugged, though the word barely covered it. White-gray, like frostbitten glass. That was the color of Laurie’s aura bleeding through the wall behind me—tense, splinter-thin. “She’s waiting outside. I think she’s still in shock.”
Iknewshe was still in shock.
I had no doubt that, had Laurie been in her right mind, she would have made her escape out of one of the windows by now.
Instead, she’d sat quiet in my arms throughout the drive, and when I propped her up on a bench outside Jordan’s office and promised to be back soon, she’d simply stared off into the middle distance and offered a vague nod to show that she’d heard me.
Jordan sighed and gestured at a mess of papers spread outon the desk. “We’ve confirmed the numbers: twenty-seven humans, eleven newly turned vampires, and six hybrids.”
Addison made a small sound of distress, shaking her head at the madness that had been going on right under our noses. No doubt there were more facilities like the one we’d cleared out. Which meant we’d all have our hands full tracking down the rest of them.
Ethan cleared his throat. “From what we’ve gathered, most were lured—scholarships, fake clinical trials, debt relief. And of course, Mr. Mysterious coercing barflies.”
I stared at the scrawled list of names. “The hybrids…”
“Purposely built.” Jordan’s tone was grim. “Selkie blood mixed with ours, Lycan marrow, the list goes on. The facility’s notes are harrowing. They’ve been splicing traits and mashing them together again. Frankenstein reads like a fairytale compared to what they’ve been up to.”
“They’re engineering living weapons,” Hunter muttered from the window.
“Looks that way.” Jordan drummed her fingers on the desk, wild red hair tumbling over her shoulders.
I swallowed the bile building in the back of my throat and planted my palms down on the desk. “So what do we do with them? We can’t turn a bunch of hybrids out into the city. We don’t even know what they’re capable of.”
“They’ll need supervision.” Jordan rubbed her temples. “Healers on rotation, psychic monitoring—for the hybrids and the freshly-turned. As much as I’d like to let them go home, we cannot let this leak to the public.”
Her gaze knifed over to me. “Which brings us to the human who saved your life. You said her name was Laurie—how does she fit into all of this?”
Laurie’s aura flared suddenly, sharp red spikes punching through the wall. The force of it left me winded and I tried not to let it show on my face. I should have given her more credit.
She was listening through the goddamn door.
Even in a state of lingering shock, she still had the awareness (and the spine) to keep tabs on a room full of vampires. Fragile, yes, but definitely not spent.
I forced myself to answer. “She’s seen things first hand. She knows this organization better than we do. But she’s… she’s brittle. Push her now and she’ll shut down completely.”
Dylan raised a brow. “You trust her?”
“She shot my attacker at point-blank.” I folded my arms. “Trust isn’t the question. Duty is. She’s ours to protect until her enemies are dead.”
“Uh, yeah—about that gun,” Hunter piped up, tightening her grip on her forearms. “That thing is designed to take out vampires and she’s been carrying it around this whole time. What else could she be hiding?”
“She’s on our side,” I insisted, raising my voice slightly to get the point across to Laurie herself.I trust you. You’re safe here.“And she has information. She can help us root out these people and take them down for good.”
