Page 64 of A Touch of Crimson
“I just talked to Aaron. He went to Louisiana on the hunt for a rogue we’ve been tracking. They were ambushed by Vash and two of her captains. Aaron was wounded enough to put him out of commission for a while. He has no idea what happened to his lycans while he was regenerating. He’s been searching for them for three days.”
Looking at Jason and Damien, who could easily hear what was being discussed, Adrian saw the despair he felt reflected on their faces. Too much. Too fast. Like dominoes, everything was toppling in rapid, unstoppable succession.
“You sent a team to retrieve him?” Adrian asked.
“Yes. But after Phineas and the attack on you, I thought you should know it was the lycans Vash was after.”
“Is it possible they’re the ones responsible for Charron’s death?”
“I thought of that. Too young, both of them.”
“Keep me posted.” Ending the call, Adrian started forward again, spurred by the driving need to get back home, where he could regroup and take the offensive. He could only hope that compiling all the information he’d obtained over the past week would lead to an understanding of what the fuck was going on and why everything had gone to shit in a matter of days.
“Let’s get this done,” he said to Jason and Damien.
As they neared the cabin, he freed his wings. The metallic odor that teased his nostrils was instantly recognizable. No light shone from the unit, intensifying Adrian’s foreboding. He raced the final distance to the door, disengaging the lock with a thought before he reached for the knob. The stench of congealing blood hit him with enough force to rock him backward a step. He willed the lights on, even though he didn’t require illumination to see.
With a curse, he averted his gaze from the carnage that was more horrifying under the harsh glare of flickering fluorescent lighting.
Jason stepped into the cabin and froze. “Fuck me,” he gasped, before pivoting and stumbling out the door.
Damien entered next. His sharp inhale betrayed his shock and dismay, but he remained at Adrian’s side, his gaze darting around the room as he took in the entirety of the grisly tableau before them.
Knowing he needed to provide strength to the two Sentinels, Adrian scrubbed both hands over his face and rolled his shoulders back. He turned his head forward again, breathing through his mouth. The sight of a wing lying on the floor blurred, then cleared as tears coursed down his face. The other wings were scattered about the room as if they’d been tossed away like so much trash. One hung off the end of the bed, the soft pink and gray feathers now stained with blood. They’d been clawed from Helena’s back, leaving two rows of three stumps protruding from her graceful spine.
The fallen Sentinel lay prone on the bed, her sightless eyes trained at the door, her golden hair plastered to her cheeks and back with dried sweat and blood. Her lycan lay sprawled on the floor at the foot of the bed. Two unsealed punctures in his neck explained the sickeningly white pallor of his skin. Adrian doubted there was a drop of blood left in Mark’s body.
“This is hell,” he said gruffly, shaken to his soul by the waste—the wrongness—of it all.
Damien looked at him. “Why didn’t it work?”
“Why would it have? She wasn’t punished. Her wings were taken by her lycan lover, not a Sentinel. He was bitten by a—” Adrian walked over to Helena’s body and peeled back her upper lip. He stared for a long moment. “Her canines aren’t elongated.”
“Maybe they retracted when she didn’t fall completely.”
Adrian’s gaze lifted skyward, corrosive grief burning through his veins. His fingers sifted through the once glorious strands of Helena’s hair. She’d been more than a friend. She had been proof that failure was not inevitable, that it was possible, if they were strong enough, to serve their mission without forfeiting their faith in the process. Now that hope was lost, withering in an agonizing death along with a seraph whose heart had been so pure that only love could destroy it.
For the first time, he thought perhaps the Sentinels hadn’t been tested so much as served as test subjects to answer the question: Was the Watchers’ fall unavoidable?
“You’re right, Captain,” Jason said, remaining on the porch. “This can never get out.”
Damien ran a shaking hand through his dark hair. “We need to clean this place.”
His hands fisting at his sides, Adrian continued to survey the damage. More than two lives had been lost here. A seraph had willingly mutilated herself in an attempt to fall. Then she’d tried to turn her lycan. If they’d succeeded, they would both be vampires now—a new class of vampire. And they would have opened the door to others to try the same. The mere knowledge of what they’d done held immeasurable power.
“Something went wrong here,” Adrian thought aloud.
“Maybe ingesting lycan blood affected her fall. Maybe he could have Changed if she’d fed him her blood sooner. Maybe there was no way for them to succeed. We can’t know unless it’s tried again. Perhaps again and again. Whatever possibilities this desperate act might inspire in others must die here, with them.”
Although he spoke as if it could be contained, Adrian knew the idea would merely lie dormant for a time, waiting for another fertile mind to conceive of it.
He knew, because the idea had once been his, long ago.
And not so long ago.
16
“She’s here in Anaheim.” Torque shielded his eyes against the headlights of a car pulling into the parking spot in front of his ground-floor motel room. “But Adrian’s been gone almost a month, barring a one-night visit over a week ago when he was seen out with her.”
