LITMIR.BIZ

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was a half-breed vampire, you say?”

      The woman nodded.

      “I think you’re lying. There’s no such thing. You’re making up tales to distract me from my purpose here. Everyone knows vampires are infertile.”

      “Only the males. The females seem to ovulate for the first few months after being transformed. I thought—I thought you already knew. I thought all of you knew about all this.”

      Her eyes were adjusting to the darkness now, he thought. She was staring at him as if she could see his face. “Why don’t you pretend I don’t and fill me in?”

      Nodding rapidly, she seemed to search her mind. “There was a mortal, one of the Chosen. You know about them—the only humans who can become vampires. They all have the same rare Belladonna antigen in their blood.”

      “And they all tend to die young if they aren’t transformed. I know all that, go on.”

      She nodded. “Well this mortal, a male, was mated with a newly transformed vampiress, and X-1 was the resulting offspring.”

      He pursed his lips. “This was a DPI experiment, I take it?”

      She nodded. “Yes. It all took place before the Division of Paranormal Investigations was dismantled. Stiles worked for them then. I believe he was directly involved with the experiment. But a group of vampires attacked the research facility—”

      “Research facility.” He snorted. “Extermination camp, you mean.”

      “The parents escaped with the child.” She lowered her head. “That’s all the background I was given on her.”

      He nodded slowly. “So even though DPI was never restored as a functioning government agency, Frank Stiles continued the work on his own. And part of that work included hunting and capturing this half-breed child who’d escaped them years before?”

      “Apparently so. But she was hardly a child by then.”

      “No?”

      She shook her head. “Eighteen when he held her in Connecticut.” Her eyes shifted, downward and then left. “I did my best to protect her while he kept her. And she was still alive when the vampires came and broke her out.” She met his gaze again and maybe saw the doubt in it. “They didn’t kill me when they came for her, surely that should tell you something.”

      “As a rule, my kind tend to get squeamish about coldblooded murder—even when it’s deserved. That they left you alive tells me nothing other than that they had weak stomachs.” He shrugged. “I’m something of an exception to that rule, myself.”

      She sat very still, holding her breath.

      “Stiles held the girl for how long?”

      “I … don’t remember exactly. A few days. No more.”

      “And he performed experiments on her?”

      She lowered her head. “Yes.”

      “Details, Kelsey. I need details.” He reached for her chin, tipped her head up so she faced him. “And I’ll know if you’re lying. I know you were lying about trying to protect her. You were as cruel to her as any of them. Fortunately for you, I don’t give a damn about that. My interest is in Stiles. So tell me—and tell me everything.”

      The woman licked her lips, and he knew she believed him. She should.

      “He wanted to know what kinds of powers she had. Whether she was immortal or not. What could kill her. That kind of thing. He kept her drugged, though, so she wasn’t aware of most of the experiments. She probably didn’t feel a thing.”

      “Really.” His belly knotted just a little. “And what kinds of things didn’t she feel, Kelsey?”

      She drew a breath, had the decency to look ashamed. Her voice a bare whisper, she said, “Electric shock, enough to stop her heart, just to see if it would start again. Drowning, to see if that would kill her. Various toxins introduced into her bloodstream at fatal doses. Blood letting. Blows to the head.”

      “Jesus,” Edge muttered.

      “She revived every time, and she was long gone before he could try things like bullets to the brain or wooden stakes to the heart.”

      Edge rolled his eyes. Stakes indeed.

      “She seems to age like a human. At least, she had the appearance of a normally aging eighteen-year-old, but she revivifies like an immortal.”

      “And what else?”

      She shrugged. “He took the usual samples. Blood, lots and lots of blood. Tissue, hair, bone marrow.”

      “What did he do with them?”

      She looked at him hard. “I don’t know. I thought he was trying to map her DNA, but he kept a lot of his work secret. Used to lock himself in a private lab for hours on end. One of the others who worked for him thought he had two sets of notes, one we could see and the other for his eyes only.” She shrugged. “I caught him once, injecting himself with something. But I never knew what it was.”

      He pursed his lips. He suspected that Stiles had been trying to imbue himself with whatever it was that made the girl immortal—trying to steal her immortality, and whatever other powers she possessed, for himself. And it looked as if his suspicions were true. The bastard wanted to find a way to live forever without becoming a vampire, without being one of the Chosen, possessing the antigen. And maybe, Edge thought, he’d succeeded.

      “In all the experiments, did Stiles ever find the girl’s weakness? Did he ever find out what would kill her?”

      She closed her eyes. “Not to my knowledge, no. If he had, she wouldn’t have been alive to escape.”

      It didn’t matter, Edge thought. He would. He would find Amber Lily Bryant, and when he did, he would find her vulnerability. Her poison. Her kryptonite. Because whatever it was, it would be the weapon he needed to kill Frank Stiles.

      And for more than four decades, his one goal in life had been to kill Frank Stiles.

      No half-breed vampiress was going to stand in his way. Not even the so-called Child of Promise.

      He dropped the burned out butt of his cigarette onto the carpet, ground it under his heel as he got to his feet. “You’ve been very helpful, Kelsey.”

      She closed her eyes, sitting very still. “And now you’re going to kill me, aren’t you?”

      “Thanks, but I’ve already eaten.” He smiled at his own joke, but she didn’t seem to pick up on the humor. “You’re no threat to me, Kelsey Quinlan. You’ve told me what I need to know, and I doubt you’re stupid enough to try to warn Stiles, even if you knew where to find him, which you do not. I’ve been reading your thoughts all evening. So given all that, why do you think I would kill you now?”

      “For my crimes against … your kind.”

      He shook his head as he strode toward the door. “I don’t give a damn about my kind.”

      Amber pulled her low-slung black Ferarri into the driveway of her parents’ palatial home—no matter where they lived, it was always palatial—at midnight. This one was a Georgian red-brick mansion in an isolated little inlet of Lake Ontario’s Irondoquoit Bay. It had come complete with secret passages and hidden escape routes and was one of their more recent acquisitions. The house on Lake Michigan had had to be sold five years ago. Secretly, Amber loved it here far more. Maybe because, for the first time, she’d begun declaring her independence.

      “So what do you suppose this ‘family meeting’ is about?” Amber asked, glancing across the seat at Alicia. “Another reasoned attempt to get us to move back in with them?”

      Alicia released her seat belt and opened her door. “So far they’ve kept their promise not to pressure us on that.”

      “Yeah,

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