To Dante, it seemed as though the countdown clock on a time bomb had been activated in that instant Kellan Archer had coughed up Dragos's tracking device. Everyone understood what it meant, and the anticipation of trouble on the horizon - the expectation of it slamming into them at any moment - had left no one unscathed.
But dread and inaction wouldn't stop the coming storm. They had to get more aggressive, plumb every corner, turn every stone, if it meant bringing them even one inch closer to getting their hands on Dragos. He had to be located, and he had to be stopped - now more than ever. That rationale, and the fury that followed on its heels, was the only thing that had given Dante the strength to leave Tess's side and go out on patrol with Kade that night. His heart was back at the compound, but his head was fully in the game, looking for even the most remote leads on the escaped Agent, Murdock, the presence of Dragos's assassins in the city ... anything at all.
And all night, part of him had been keeping an eye out for leads of another sort too.
"Hold up," he said to Kade, who'd just turned the Rover onto a seedy stretch of road down by the Mystic in Southie. "Did you see that guy over there?"
Kade slowed the black SUV and peered in the direction Dante was pointing. "I don't see anyone, other than a couple of overaged streetwalkers with a fondness for Lucite heels and Forever Twenty-One fashion. Classy."
Dante was unable to share the other warrior's humor even though he had a valid point about the hookers trawling the corner at the other end of the block.
"I think it might have been Harvard," he said, all but certain that the large shadowy figure that had disappeared around the other side of an old brick warehouse had been Breed. And by the way the male moved, the way he carried himself, even as he slunk into the gloom of the ratty industrial block, Dante was more than willing to bet it was Sterling Chase. "Stop the car."
"Even if it was Harvard, I don't think this is a good idea, man - "
"Fuck what you think," Dante snapped, concern for his AWOL friend trumping everything else. "Pull over, Kade. I'm getting out."
He didn't wait for the vehicle to cease rolling. He jumped out and started jogging toward the place he'd watched the vampire go. Kade was right behind him, cursing low under his breath, but prepared to have his back regardless.
They rounded the edge of the brick warehouse and found themselves staring at a low-rent rail yard just ahead. A line of orphaned boxcars sat on one set of tracks, the side of one rusted, graffiti-tagged car wedged open just wide enough for someone to squeeze past. A group of humans stood nearby, gathered around a metal drum that glowed and sparked from the rubbish burning deep inside it. They warmed their hands over the container, passing a small crack pipe to one another.
The stoners hardly looked up as Dante and Kade strode past them. Their faces were hollow, ghostly. They stank of narcotics, booze, and rotted clothing. Their hair was filthy, bodies ripe with the stench of the unwashed. Glazed eyes stared off unfocused, their minds decayed, lost to the seductive grasp of their addictions.
"Jesus Christ," Kade hissed, disgusted. "If Chase is slumming around down here in this shithole, he must really be f**ked up."
Unable to deny the truth in that statement, Dante felt his jaw tighten to the point of pain. Chase was f**ked up. He knew it as soon as he'd heard what happened in the chapel with Elise. The fact that he had skipped out on the Order was just another nail in a coffin of his own making. But Dante wasn't ready to give up on him.
He had to believe that Harvard wasn't lost completely. Maybe if he could find him, talk some sense into him. Give him a wake-up call about the shit that had gone down at the compound a few hours ago and let him know that he was needed.
And if all those options failed, Dante was ready and willing to kick Harvard's selfdestructive ass from now into next week.
"He went this way," Dante said. "He's got to be back here somewhere."
Kade lifted his chin, gesturing toward the open railcar. Dante nodded. It was about the only place Chase could be hiding, although Dante knew as well as anyone else in the Order that if Chase didn't want to be found, his talent for bending shadows would prove effective cover no matter where he'd gone.
Together, he and Kade approached the car. Dante walked up to the gap of darkness that spilled into the big metal box. The fetid stench of more forsaken humans wafted out at him as he hoisted himself up and took a quick look around the gloom of the place. His vision was flawless in the dark, as with all of his kind. He saw no sign of Chase among the sleeping men and women, nor with the small number that huddled under a shared blanket, staring up at him with vacant looks.
Chase wasn't there, not even in the deepest reaches of the shadows.
"Harvard," he said, trying to reach out to him anyway. Maybe if he heard a familiar voice ...
Nothing but silence.
He waited for a moment, a part of him saddened by the wasted lives that littered the dirty interior of the railcar and the ones smoking their wits away over the barrel of burning trash. They were strangers, humans, born to live and die in the span of less than a century. But in their lost, hopeless expressions, he saw his friend Sterling Chase.
Was this what lay ahead for Harvard if no one stopped his downward spiral? He didn't want to go there, didn't want to imagine that Harvard might be waging a war with demons of his own. He didn't want to believe that Tegan and Lucan could be right - that Chase might be falling into a blood addiction. There was no worse fate for one of the Breed than succumbing to Bloodlust and turning Rogue.
And once lost, there was hardly any hope of coming back to sanity.