If she had wanted to deny it before, now there was no room for doubt.
She was one of them - one of the Breed.
She felt that power living within her, a power that gave her strength to stand by without flinching as Chase stalked forward and chambered the last round in his pistol. He eyed the assassin with contempt, toeing the ruined head to expose a thick black collar that ringed the dead male's neck. Chase took aim on that collar and fired the final bullet at it, point blank.
A flash of light - impossibly bright - exploded all around them. Immediately Tavia felt Chase's body shielding her, his strong arms wrapped around her as the nimbus of pure white light shot out then vanished just as quickly. Chase's heat lingered only a moment longer than that, safe and comforting. Then it too was gone.
"Are you okay?" he asked, his voice rough, urgent.
She looked down at the head that was now severed from its body and smoldering. "I'm all right," she said, even though her throat felt raw, her voice a sandpaper growl when she tried to speak. "Wh-what about you?"
Her fangs throbbed at the scent of his spilling blood, which leaked from the stab wound in his side. Chase shrugged off his injury with little more than a grimace. "I'll survive." He grabbed her hand and steered her away from the carnage.
"That light," she said as she ran along beside him. "What did you do? What came out of that collar?"
"UV rays. Dragos makes his Hunters wear obedience devices around their necks. Any tampering or damage trips the ultraviolet detonator."
"Good to know," she said, still astonished and shaken by all she'd witnessed. She took one last glance behind them as Chase guided her into the corridor with him. "How many Hunters does Dragos have?"
Chase grunted. "Too damn many."
Gunfire sounded from somewhere near the back of the clinic, a rapid hail of shots that echoed all the way into Tavia's bones. "Mathias." Chase swore under his breath. "I won't leave him behind."
Tavia nodded. "I'm coming with you."
He didn't argue this time. Together they raced down the long corridor of the clinic.
They found Mathias Rowan limping out from a back room, fresh blood smeared in a trail behind him. His head was bleeding profusely, and his left leg dragged stiffly as he hobbled toward them. "Get out! Get out now! There's a bomb in the server room," he shouted, waving them back. "I killed the two Minions who set it, but the timer is counting down fast. We have to get out of here now!"
They ran for the front window of the clinic and had barely cleared the building before a low rumble stirred deep underground. It expanded, in both vibration and roar, growing stronger as the three hurried across the snow-filled meadow.
The blast that followed was bone-rattling.
Fire lit the night sky as Dr. Lewis's clinic - and all its decades of secrets and lies - erupted in a ball of flames and smoke and flying debris.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
THE ANTIQUE CHAIR in Dragos's island lair had been in his possession for more than a century. An uncomfortable monstrosity, it was a throne carved of six-hundred-year-old Wallachian hardwood and acquired from an old church in the southwestern Transylvanian Alps. Legend had it that the polished seat and dragon's-head arms had once held the weight of a bloodthirsty medieval ruler whose name instilled fear in most humans even to this day.
Dragos normally found such folklore amusing at best. Tonight, he envied the mortal dread the chair's former owner had inspired in his subjects.
Tonight, Dragos longed to mete out that kind of raw, unholy terror - not only on those who served him but on the world as a whole.
His rage had started earlier that day, when the vice president had failed to show at Senator Clarence's memorial service. A last-minute security concern had forced the human government official to cancel his appearance in Boston. As for Dragos, the wasted daylight trip and an hour lost waiting among the throng of human mourners hadn't done anything to improve his mood. Nor did the fact that now his calls to the politician's office were being routed to lackeys who politely brushed him off with offers to check the vice president's calendar for availability to meet again sometime later in the year.
Dragos snarled just thinking on it.
His fingernails dug into the wooden arms of the Impaler's throne as he watched the news coverage of a fire raging out of control in a private stretch of land in the rural town of Sherborn. It wasn't the loss of Dr. Lewis's clinic that had Dragos's fury escalating; the destruction of the building and its collected data had been on his command, an order issued soon after he'd been made aware of his Minion doctor's demise.
It was the fact that his dispatched Hunter had not reported back with Tavia Fairchild that had his temper simmering toward a full boil. He'd sent the assassin to fetch her at nightfall, suspecting that she'd end up back at the clinic sooner than later, curiosity about her true past certain to carry her right back into her creator's hands. Dragos had been so looking forward to schooling beautiful Tavia in all the ways she could please him, now that the facade of her mortal existence had been stripped away.
But the Hunter had failed to bring Dragos his prize.
One more failure on top of a day filled with setbacks and annoyances.
He'd abide no more.
His patience had reached its end and there would be no more delaying his birthright.
Dragos launched himself out of the chair on a violent curse, taking the priceless antique up in his hands as he rose to his feet. In a fit of rage, he flung the thing at the massive stone fireplace that filled one whole side of the room. The chair smashed to pieces as it hit the towering wall of immovable granite rock and mortar.