Total pages in book: 94
Estimated words: 92043 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 460(@200wpm)___ 368(@250wpm)___ 307(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 92043 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 460(@200wpm)___ 368(@250wpm)___ 307(@300wpm)
I looked away.
It was all my mother would have left of her baby.
I couldn’t leave that room fast enough. That body on the table was no longer Ezekiel Boucher. It was a shell, nothing more. My baby brother was gone.
TWO MONTHS LATER
My stomach churned as I stood in the center of the room, spinning in a slow circle. We’d followed every lead and chased every piece of information and come up with nothing. Someone had paid for this facility—there was no doubt in my mind—but I still had no idea who it was.
The huts in the middle of the jungle looked like nothing from the outside. An abandoned village that hadn’t been occupied in a long time. It wasn’t until you looked closer that you saw the little things that didn’t fit. A door with a dead bolt. A lone antenna on one of the roofs. Clear paths that hadn’t become overgrown with the passage of time.
We’d come here when we realized that our investigation was getting nowhere, hoping to find anything that the other team had missed.
I hadn’t realized how viscerally it would affect me.
My brother had been held in this room with the moldy blanket and the bucket in the corner. How long had he looked at these walls, waiting for his team to rescue him? Had he thought that his brothers knew and hadn’t come for him? I couldn’t believe that.
He must’ve been waiting for us, sure in the assumption that we’d reach him in time.
I swallowed against the bile rising in my throat and moved to the wall, running my fingers over the rough cement. There had to be something in that room. Anything that could point us in the right direction. We’d hit wall after wall, and if I hadn’t known better, I would’ve thought that command was actively trying to keep us running in circles.
That didn’t make any sense, though. They had as much stake in finding out how the hell these people had captured Zeke as we did. Their soldiers were all over the world, entering into conflicts that command agreed to support. If there was a group out there targeting Vampires, all of us needed to know about it.
Crouching down, I moved along the walls, staring at the lower section as I went. My fingers caught on something that I hadn’t immediately seen, and I pulled them away, reaching for my flashlight.
It was bright enough in the room to see easily, but the symbol wouldn’t have been noticeable if I hadn’t felt it.
It felt like the wind had been knocked out of me when it came into focus.
When Zeke was young, he’d been obsessed with becoming a rancher. It was all he talked about for a solid year. At one point, he’d even packed up his belongings, fully expecting my parents not to notice that he’d run away to play cowboy. He’d begged them for a pair of spurs.
He’d also designed his own crude brand for all the cattle he was going to buy someday. An intertwined Z and B.
I traced my finger over the letters.
“Boucher,” someone called from outside. “You about done? It’s going to take us a couple of hours to get back.”
“I’ll be out in a minute,” I called back.
None of them had wanted to spend more time in the room than they had to. I didn’t blame them. It stunk of blood and fear.
Leaning closer, I fanned out my fingers and lightly scraped them along the concrete. There had to be a reason Zeke had left his brand there. It wasn’t anywhere near where the blanket had been discarded—there.
There was a little lip. Taking out my knife, I carefully slid it alongside the piece I’d caught my finger on. Almost immediately, a small crude rectangle of cement fell to the dirt floor, leaving a small hollowed-out space in the wall.
My heart pounded as I reached inside. It stopped when I felt the little objects beneath my fingertips.
Slowly, I pulled the first one out. It was a St. Christopher medal, tarnished with age and dirty with blood and who knew what else. I didn’t recognize it, but I knew someone would. I reached into my vest and pulled out the plastic bag that came with my travel blood. It was double wrapped to protect from spillage, and I’d never found a use for the extra bag before, but I always saved them. Gently, I dropped the medal inside and reached for the next item.
It was a piece of light pink ribbon about three inches long that had once been silky but had been worn down over time, probably by someone smoothing it between their fingers.
Next was a silver ring with some kind of crest on it that I couldn’t read. Very old. Someone’s family heirloom.
I gritted my teeth and pulled out a small lock of hair next, the memory of my dad cutting Zeke’s weighing on my chest like a boulder. It was very dark, almost black, and tied together with thin string.