Page 26 of A Hunter Born
Curious about what, if anything, might be in the small, overturned crates, Morgan moved to the nearest one and toed it with her boot. The crate moved several inches before she met with resistance. Something was underneath. Flipping the crate up, she and Kane both jumped back when they saw what the wooden box had hidden.
A head. More specifically, the head of a vampire. The leathery, dehydrated skin was sunken tight to the skull, the lips withered, having pulled back from dirty, fanged teeth. What hair remained on the head had gone white, only wisps remaining to cover the scalp.
Suddenly, the eyes popped opened, revealing cloudy blue orbs and both Morgan and Kane let out a shout of startlement. “Christ! It’s the fucking Crypt Keeper!” Kane bellowed, quickly covering the head once more with the discarded crate.
“Shit,” Morgan breathed, still trying to get her rapidly beating heart back under control. “He buries them out here in this oven, starves them…” Shaking her head to clear it, she stiffened her spine. “We need to find Jamie.”
With renewed purpose, Morgan and Kane began lifting crates off of heads in varying stages of starvation and degradation. “There’s so many of them,” Kane whispered in a small voice.
“We’ll find her.” Moving to one of the large crates just in case some of them carried more than just illegal goods, Morgan spotted a heavy door toward the back that looked like it led to a walk-in cooler. “Keep going with this,” she threw over her shoulder as she strode toward the door. “I’m going to check out that room, see if Rodolfo stashed Jamie in the back.”
“Be careful.”
Oh, absolutely. Just because all the exterior guards had run toward the battle didn’t mean there weren’t one or two or ten that had decided to hide and chill out back here. Literally.
Pulling her gun free of the waistband of her jeans, Morgan pulled hard on the door, the seal breaking with a hiss. Her breath fogged as soon as she stepped into the frigid temperatures of the room. Leaving the door propped open so she didn’t end up locked inside with whatever might be in here, Morgan attempted to sniff the air but her nasal passages were still too aggravated by the assault they had suffered in the main portion of the greenhouse. In here, all she could sense was cold.
Finding the light, she flipped it on to reveal an almost empty room. In the center, however, there was a huge, meticulously sculpted statue of a dragon. The magnificent piece was carved from black stone, perhaps obsidian, and stood over ten feet tall. Moving closer, Morgan took in the incredible attention to detail. Whoever had carved this was an amazing talent though why Rodolfo would hide it back here in cold storage, Morgan had no clue. Granted, the sculpture was a bit dark in its depiction, with one of the dragon’s wings torn, its body wrapped in silver barbed wire, its posture that of a beast writhing, attempting to escape capture, but she’d seen Rodolfo’s art collection and dark certainly wasn’t a problem for him.
Noticing that the sculptor had even used what looked like might be rubies to represent blood from numerous wounds, Morgan was about to touch one of the frost-coated gems when she heard Kane shout her name, followed by his pain and rage-filled wail. Morgan raced out of the freezer, the dragon sculpture forgotten.
Kane had found Jamie and Morgan stumbled to a halt as she saw her friend’s head sticking out of the ground, lolled to one side, unconscious. Jamie’s eyes looked like they’d been cauterized shut, her lips sewn together with heavy black wire, her face swollen and bruised nearly beyond recognition.
“Death is too good for that son of a bitch,” Kane snarled, rising from his crouch in a murderous rage, his eyes demonic red and his fangs fully elongated in preparation to kill.
Morgan felt the same but she somehow managed to push her rage down deep. Revenge would come later, but only once Jamie was safe. “We need to get her out of the ground. She’ll need to feed immediately so she can heal.”
They had only managed to dig a quarter way down when Jamie came awake and attempted to scream, the effort only serving to tear at her sewn lips. Kane quickly wrapped his arms around her, his big hand petting the lank and dirty strands of her hair as he whispered soothing words in her ear. “We’ve got you, Jamie. We’re here. We’re going to get you out of here, I promise.”
It took longer than Morgan would have liked, but they managed to finally move enough earth to pull Jamie free. She was naked, filthy, her body covered in seeping knife slashes where the bastard and his thugs had bled her before putting her into the ground.
“Take the SUV, get her out of here. Go to Travis’s apartment, you’ll be safe there.” Giving him the address, Morgan added, “And feed her with your blood, Kane. Human blood might be too weak. She’ll heal fastest if she’s fed from a Born.”
“What about you?”
“I need to go get Travis, he’s searching the house. We’ll be right behind you.”
Chapter Twenty
The property was lit with flashing blue lights as New Orleans finest descended on the scene. How this mess was going to be explained, Morgan had no idea, but if Rodolfo had managed to survive the encounter with Jourdain, she was sure he’d be using his compulsion and whatever other tricks he had up his sleeve to make this little disaster disappear.
Utilizing her preternatural speed to avoid detection, Morgan made it into the villa and quickly called Travis. “We found Jamie,” she assured him as soon as he answered. “Kane is bringing her to your place here in the city. Where are you?”
“Rodolfo’s trophy room,” was snarled with disgust. “He is one sick bastard let me tell you.”
After seeing the horror of the greenhouse, Morgan wasn’t surprised, yet she still felt a shudder race down her spine. “We need to go. The police are here.”
“I am the police,” Travis reminded her. “And I can’t leave yet. Sophia…”
“Understood,” Morgan quickly cut in. “Rodolfo’s office. If we have to, we’ll take everything he has in there and bring it to your place to go through. I’ll meet you there.”
It didn’t take long for Morgan to reach the office and while the locks on the door were heavy-duty, intended to keep out nosy vampires, a couple of well-placed kicks with a booted foot had the door crashing open. The brute force method was a little noisier than she would have liked, but she didn’t have time for stealth or subtlety. Cops she could easily avoid with her speed, Rodolfo or any of his thugs was another matter entirely, and right now, she had no idea how many might still be lurking about.
With her gun at the ready, she entered the dark interior to find it unoccupied and immediately moved to Rodolfo’s desk to begin rifling through the drawers. Travis joined her a minute later and though they had a mission to complete, she took a moment to grab the back of his head and pull him down for quick, hot, much-needed melding of their mouths. “I’m glad you’re okay,” she murmured against his lips and felt his answering smile before he whispered, “I’m glad you’re okay too.”
A heartbeat later, they were back to business, Travis moving to the file cabinets to wrench them open, his fingers skimming over the files inside. “Some of this I’ll leave for the responding officers to find,” he commented, “though I doubt there’ll be much in here that’s incriminating. Rodolfo doesn’t strike me as being that stupid.”
“We’ll take his computer, though,” Morgan added, crouching under the desk to unplug the tower and disconnect it from the components, silently wishing Rodolfo had a nice, lightweight laptop rather than this heavy desktop unit.
