"You can't harm anyone. Not anymore." Reichen's glance bounced from point to point on the control panel. Circuits crackled, shooting off sparks and bitter, electronic smoke. Roth had to duck out of the way of the small explosions, the fallout of Reichen's searing gaze driving him deep into the corner of the room in a cower. Roth snarled, infuriated to have been sent to his knees, particularly by this male, whose death he had craved and sought for far too long. As Reichen stepped closer, murder blazing from every pore of his body, Roth made an abrupt lunge for one of the gauges on the control panel. He understood the fact that he wasn't going to walk away from this fight now, but damn if he would accept defeat alone. With a grunt of determination, Roth smashed his fist onto the panic switch that would activate the lab's emergency detonation sequence. Sirens immediately began to wail overhead. The alarms sounded from every direction, signaling the start of an irreversible countdown. Roth chuckled. "My God. It's almost worth it--knowing that I am about to die down here alongside you and the bulk of the Order. Seeing that look on your face right now... your defeat is palpable, Reichen. So is the horror and outrage--the raw, emotional pain--it's all there, in your eyes." He sighed, knowingly dramatic. "I only wish I could take Claire along with us when this whole goddamned place blows to kingdom come in the next five--ah, make that four minutes and forty-nine seconds."
Chapter Thirty-One
Claire wanted it to all be a dream. A terrible nightmare that she could simply wake from and the world would go back to normal. She wanted to go back to three nights ago, when she and Andreas had been alone at the house in Newport, making love, walking along the wharfs, embracing under the moonlight. But the sound of Wilhelm Roth's cruelly animated voice--the realization of what he had just done to Andreas, to the warriors inside the abandoned lair with him... to the women who would be mourning their mates in mere minutes--sank into Claire's soul like a poison. "I can't stay in here another second," she murmured, meeting Dylan's ashen look. "We can't leave, Claire. Can't you hear the gunfire out there by the entrance?" Claire heard it. Rio had been gone for only a few minutes. He and Renata and Hunter were still engaged with the Gen One assassins who'd come up to ground level. It was dangerous outside the vehicle; Claire knew that. But as she stared anxiously out the tinted windshield at the forest that surrounded her, she knew a deeper sense of dread.
"Oh, my God... no. This cannot be Mira's vision." She opened the door and slid out of the Rover, realizing just now that the premonition she'd seen in the little girl's eyes was about to come true. Right here, within the next five awful minutes. Dylan came out of the vehicle and circled around to grab her by the arms. "Claire, please, get back inside. You can't--" "This is the same woods I saw in Mira's eyes," she cried, sick with certainty. The same location where she'd felt the anguish of losing Andreas in that pile of smoking rubble and ash. "The explosion, Dylan. This is exactly what Mira showed me. It's really going to happen. Oh, my God... no!" Tearing loose of the other Breedmate's hold, Claire raced into the darkened woods, her heart breaking, about to burst from her chest, and Andreas's name a desperate prayer on her lips.
Every cell in Reichen's body screamed for him to unleash the full power of his fury on Wilhelm Roth. It would be the matter of an instant to render the bastard nothing but ashes to be trampled under his boots. But incinerating Roth with a single blast of rage was far too merciful. Evil like him deserved to suffer, especially after the cowardice he'd just shown in activating explosives that none of the warriors trapped in the UV cage below had any hope of escaping. His friends should not have to die as part of this bad blood between Roth and himself. It was that thought, more than any other, that gave Reichen the ability to ignore his hatred of Roth and loose his rage on the control panel that encompassed the entire back wall of the viewing room. He threw one bolt of flame after another at the gauges and monitoring devices, until finally there was a loud pop and the entire space went dark. He didn't see Roth moving until the son of a bitch had managed to scramble through a side door. Reichen pivoted to the blown- out window and glanced down at the warriors leaping off the cell's deactivated platform. "Reichen!" It was Tegan's deep voice calling up to him, although Reichen's vision was swamped with amber and rippling with the heat that was escalating ever hotter inside him.
"Reichen, come on! Leave the son of a bitch. He's dead if he stays in here." True enough, Reichen thought. But the way his body felt now, the way his veins were seething lava and his mind fixed on one thing--destruction--he realized that the moment he'd dreaded for so long had finally arrived. He was too far gone. The fires were intensifying within him, no longer his to control. "Reichen, goddamn it!" Tegan shouted, hesitating when the rest of the warriors were wisely rushing to evacuate. "Forget Roth and let's haul ass out of this place before it f**king blows!" "Take care of her for me," he somehow managed to say, his throat feeling as dry as kindling, scraping with each syllable. "Get her somewhere safe... do that for me, Tegan." He didn't wait to hear the dark curse that shot up from the room below. Reichen took off after Wilhelm Roth, trusting the warrior--his friend--to carry out his request.
If he could be certain of Claire's safety, he didn't need anything else. Nothing but the knowledge that Wilhelm Roth was dead. He stalked through the anterior hallway where Roth had run, hearing the bow of metal bending, the steel and concrete reinforcements of the underground bunker protesting his presence. Empty metal supply carts sagged as he passed them, glass windows in doors and offices shattering from the sheer intensity of the white-hot flames that ringed his limbs and torso like an impenetrable, living cocoon of energy. "Wilhelm Roth!" he roared, coming up on the vampire from a few dozen yards away. Roth had been running like the vermin he was, but now he slowed, then stopped. No doubt he sensed the futility in trying to escape the death that was coming to him, either by Reichen's hand or his own, when he'd smashed that detonator switch some three minutes ago. Roth slowly turned around to face him. "You surprise me, Reichen. I would have thought your love for my faithless mate was stronger than your hatred of me."