There was no animosity in the statement, but the warrior's point was clear enough. Order business. And Chase had no place in the discussion anymore.
"Unless you're calling because you want to come back in," Tegan continued. "If you do, fair warning: You'll probably have to put those fancy Harvard lawyering skills to work if you want to talk Lucan into it. Same with Dante - he's more pissed off at you than anyone else over here."
Eyes closed at the well-deserved rebuke, Chase hung his head and exhaled a long sigh. The last thing Dante needed was to be dealing with this bullshit when his mate was just a few weeks away from delivering their son. "How are he and Tess doing?" Chase murmured. "They settle on a name for that baby yet?"
Tegan was quiet for a long moment. "Why don't you come back to headquarters and ask them yourself?"
"Nah," Chase replied, his mouth on automatic pilot as he lifted his head and glanced out at the drug addicts and prostitutes - losers, all - who loitered around the rundown street in the armpit of Boston's low-rent district. "I'm not even in the city right now. Not sure when I'll be heading back - "
Tegan cut him off with a low curse. "Listen to me, Harvard. You're f**ked up. We both know what's going on, so word of advice, don't try to bullshit me. You've got a serious problem. Maybe you're in deeper than you know how to get out, but the fact that you're talking to me right now - the fact that you're standing there, debating whether you're still sane or past the brink of caring, tells me that you've still got a chance to turn your shit around. You can come back in, but you've got to do it before it's too late to set things right."
"I don't know," Chase murmured. Part of him wanted to grab the offered olive branch with both hands and not let go. But there was another part of him that balked at the need for kinship or forgiveness. That part of him couldn't stop looking at the young, all-too-willing woman who had now parked her miniskirted ass against the red brick wall of the building next to him. She'd been watching him too, no doubt experienced enough to read the note of interest in his hooded eyes.
"Chase," Tegan said, voicing his name like a demand as the seconds ticked by without further response. "You've got a serious choice to make, my man. What do you want me to tell Lucan?"
The hooker gave him a nod and started slinking her way over. Chase felt a growl curl up the back of his throat as she drew nearer. The hunger that lurked so close to the surface of his consciousness came alive despite his best effort to tamp it down. His gums throbbed with the emergence of his fangs.
"Goddamn it, Chase." He was already pulling the receiver away from his ear when Tegan's deep voice vibrated through the plastic. "You're digging your own f**king grave."
Chase put the phone back in its cradle, then stepped around to take the young woman into the shadows with him.
Hunter sped through New Orleans on foot, his head still buzzing with the barrage of memories he'd drawn from Henry Vachon's blood. He'd seen unbelievably foul things. Horrible acts carried out on Dragos's approval and through Vachon's own sick will as well. It took all of Hunter's learned discipline to keep from reliving the worst of those memories - the ones involving innocent young Corinne, the violation and torment she'd suffered at the hands of both Breed males on the night she'd been abducted. Hunter trained his focus instead on a different memory siphoned from Henry Vachon in the final moments of the vampire's life.
As he'd breathed his last, a moment Hunter had made sure was spent in supreme agony, Vachon gave up the location of a storage facility in neighboring Metairie - the facility where, within the past few months, Vachon had delivered some of the contents of Dragos's hastily disassembled lab.
The white brick building sat on a flat corner lot near the freeway and the railroad, a block of two-story condominiums across the street and a vacant corporate headquarters next door. Hunter moved silently over the moonlit, cracked concrete of the storage facility's adjacent fenced-in parking lot, past the handful of rental trucks and stored RVs sharing the thin yellow light of a single pole-mounted security lamp. The place was closed for the night, glass doors at the front shuttered from the inside by a metal curtain.
Hunter circled around to the side, flashing past the closed-circuit camera that watched from the upper corner of the building. Halfway around the building, a metal door marked "No Entry" gave him simple enough access to the facility. Hunter grasped the handle and bent it until the lock mechanism broke loose. He slipped in, and headed for the unit number Vachon's blood memories had provided.
It was located at the far end of the facility's interior hallway. Hunter made quick work of the industrial-strength padlock, breaking it free with a firm yank. He opened the corrugated metal door and stepped inside the ten-by-fifteen-foot box. As he crossed the threshold, he felt a faint vibration in his inner ear and glanced down to see that his foot had tripped a motion sensor's silent alarm. He wouldn't have much time before someone responded to the alert. Fortunately, there wasn't much to see inside the unit. A fireproof safe sat just past the entrance. Toward the back stood a pair of squatty, round stainless-steel drums capped with a hydraulic vacuum seal that looked like a polished metal steering wheel. He recognized the containers from the memories he'd gathered from Henry Vachon, but he would have known their purpose even without the help of his talent.
Cryogenic storage containers.
They were plugged into a large portable power supply, their internal temperature gauges reading negative 150 degrees Celsius. Hunter unscrewed the seal of the container nearest him and lifted the heavy lid. Icy clouds of liquid nitrogen frothed out of the open top. Hunter waved it away and looked inside at the countless vials stored within the deep freeze. He didn't have to pull any of them up to understand they would contain cell and tissue samples, all of them originating in Dragos's secret laboratory.