Nowhere to walk around, really.
The forest surrounding the remote site crowded in tight, another unbroken stretch of wall, the pines bough-to-bough blockers of access. There was a perimeter fence as well, twenty feet high with a curl of barbed wire at the top and a gatehouse that appeared to be fitted with bulletproof panels and glass.
If you were a human and you didn’t have the right credentials? Your only chance to get in was to blow a hole in one side.
Fortunately, he had other options.
Closing his eyes, he concentrated on calming himself, his respiration slowing down from the fast pump of his impending attack, his heart stepping off its pounding race-pace. As soon as he was able, he dematerialized, proceeding forward in a scatter of molecules. His entry point was an HVAC exhaust portal that, had he been fully corporeal, would have required him to have a blowtorch handy. As it was, he easily penetrated the aluminum mesh and continued through the duct work.
The interior layout of the facility was unknown to him, and that made the dematerialization dangerous. If he chose the wrong place to reform, he could do damage to things on his body that weren’t going to grow back. But this was a Hail Mary, so he couldn’t worry about his own personal safety.
Vents. More ductwork. Filters he was barely able to get through.
He came out through an industrial furnace, reestablishing his physical form in a pitchblack room that smelled like desert-dry air and motor oil. His presence triggered a motionactivated light, and his eyes burned in the glare as the thing did its job. Bracing for an alarm, he palmed one of his guns and sank down into his thighs in case someone threw open the door that was in front of him.
When no one came in, he glanced back at the furnace, took a deep breath, and dematerialized out the thin seam under the door.
Break room. With two uniformed maintenance men who had their backs to him, the pair sitting at a table, watching basketball on a black-and-white TV.
Murhder left them right where they were. No reason to kick the hornets’ nest until he absolutely had to, and his instincts told him which way he had to go.
Xhex was nearby. Not next-room-over close, but somewhere in the facility.
Her blood had blazed the trail for him, bringing him to the site after he had crisscrossed hundreds of miles of upstate New York searching for her: That which he had taken from her vein to sustain himself was going to save her, the debt repaid.
Provided he saved her life.
Out in a corridor now, and there was no dematerializing anymore. His senses were too alive, her location marked by the blinking-light siren call of her blood—and as a master would unleash a hound, so he allowed the most animalistic part of himself free to find her. Ambulation was no longer a conscious coordination of limbs but an autonomic process serving the greatest good of bringing his body to the female.
When he rounded a corner and came upon two human males in white laboratory coats, he snapped their necks and left the bodies where they fell. Innocent victims? Not fucking hardly, and if time hadn’t been of the essence, he would have taken their pain to new levels, not just with this pair but with every single living, breathing entity in this torture chamber.
Murhder kept going, pounding down corridors, passing in and out of the security cameras mounted in the ceiling.
The alarms sounded just as he stopped before a door that was made of steel—the one metal that vampires could not dematerialize through—and this time, there was an interior seal that he could sense.
These humans knew about the mesh, he thought. They had taken care to protect that which they had kidnapped with a fine weave of steel. Thank fuck they hadn’t had the foresight to secure the entire facility as such—no doubt because they were more concerned with escape than rescue.
Months of prayer and searching and panic were finally over, but now the hardest part.
The explosives he brought with him were on his utility belt, and the alarms were drowned out as he detonated the charge on the C-4. The door felt back from its jamb, landing on the floor like a tomb slab.
Murhder jumped through the smoke with his daggers out. No guns. He didn’t want to kill Xhex with stray bullets—
It was a full blown medical laboratory with shelves full of supplies, an operating table that made him want to throw up, and all kinds of microscopes and monitors on counters and desks.
He slaughtered the laboratory workers in seconds. Three of them, all men. They offered no coordinated resistance, wasting time screaming and trying to run, and he went for the one who picked up a phone first. As he slashed their throats, those coats turned red down the front, their laminated IDs likewise covered with blood.