Page 87 of Edge of Darkness (Night Prowler 4)
Like the Ikati. Creatures he knew were not just the stuff of local legend, but real.
He’d found enough proof over the years to convince him of their existence.
So he funneled the considerable resources available to him into his ultimate goal—capturing one of these supernatural creatures and learning exactly what made them tick. He had his very personal reason for his goal, of course, but the Chairman was also a businessman, so naturally there was another reason: money.
The profits that might be made from the medical and scientific breakthroughs garnered from the study of such creatures would undoubtedly be huge.
But the Chairman needed a certain type of hunter to pull off such a feat. A hunter who was not only smart, dedicated, trained in medicine, unsqueamish about conducting experiments on live, sentient subjects, but most importantly…loyal.
Money can buy a whole lot of loyalty, but it can’t buy the best kind. The strongest kind of loyalty is only found in those who have dedicated themselves, heart and soul, to a cause.
A cause like killing cats. And saving people.
So Maximilian Reiniger was an ideal recruit for the Chairman, and a man he met in a dusty El Paso bar one sultry summer evening didn’t hesitate to tell him so. He’d overheard the story a half-drunk Reiniger was telling his friend: the story about what made him go into medicine and the army.
The story about his mother, mauled to death by a tiger under the big top, in front of his very eyes.
“Join us,” said the man, whose name was Doe, “and get your revenge.”
Reiniger had never heard six more beautiful words in his life.
So he quit the Special Forces Command and joined the Chairman’s organization as the head of Section Thirty, in charge of investigating supernatural phenomenon in Western Europe. He and each of the leaders of the other twenty-nine sections around the world—all called Doe, as in John—were fanatics to the cause and unquestioningly loyal, but only he had actually caught one of the creatures they’d all been searching for.
He’d experimented on her, too.
That had surprised him a little—that the creature was female. Also that it looked so…well, human. Probably because he had such tender memories of his mother, he’d imagined these vile creatures would be male, or even non-gendered, like some kind of alien life forms that procreated through osmosis or mind-melding. Either way, he’d been laughably wrong. For all intents and purposes, when these creatures were in their human form, they were human.
That was probably what angered him the most. Filthy copycats.
The creature he’d caught had managed to escape, but not before Reiniger had sustained a few injuries in the process. He’d lost his left eye, and now wore a patch. His left leg didn’t work well, either—there’d been an explosion, and unfortunately he hadn’t gotten away unscathed.
His devotion was unscathed, however. So when the news came that these creatures had been sighted again, this time in Barcelona, he was tagged to go.
He had the cooperation of the local police because the Chairman had greased many, many palms. Unfortunately, the Chairman didn’t waste money on things like luxurious lodging, so he’d been ensconced in a budget motel not far from the Sagrada Família. It was late by the time he arrived, so he didn’t bother to begin that first night. He would wait until morning, after he’d had a good sleep.
And then Reiniger—aka Thirteen, Agent Doe and the Doctor—would begin the hunt once again.
He knew just where to start.
The bedroom Ember had chosen in Christian’s mansion in the woods was on the second floor, with a view over the rambling, unkempt rose garden in the back of the property that led right up to the thick, dark line of the trees.
The trees were tall and old, the forest very dense. When she looked out the window on a night like tonight, awoken as she had been by some st
range noise she couldn’t identify, even the moon that hung like a great shining pearl in the black dome of the sky didn’t cast enough light to penetrate the thick canopy of branches. All she could see as she gazed into the dark line of trees was…the dark line of trees, opaque as obsidian.
She could see, however, the naked figure striding slowly through the rose garden.
“Christian.”
She whispered his name. Her hand rose to rest against the cold panes of beveled glass.
For the last three days since she’d arrived, he’d been careful and courteous, almost solicitous, inquiring how she’d slept—poorly, though she didn’t admit it—what she wanted to eat—nothing, but he insisted—and what he could do to make her more comfortable. She wasn’t uncomfortable, exactly, but she still hadn’t quite gotten her head around the situation.
She was here—in Christian’s house—because someone wanted to kill her.
Or him. Or, in all likelihood, both of them.
They’d skirted around that terrible fact during the long conversations they’d had during what was becoming their habitual morning walk. Ember arose early, almost always by six. Christian, due to the nightly excursions that took hours and hours, and sometimes longer than that, arose much later, groggy and handsome with a shadow of beard on his jaw, and a tired, dull look in his eye.
