Chapter 27
CHAPTER 27
M ario mounted the ladder to his recess, then wrapped his strap around his wrist, tugging slightly to make certain it was secure. He was glad that the show was going so well, but he just wanted it to be over and done, since he and Ilya had a lot of work to do. Now that they knew what they were up against, it would be far easier to narrow down the list until they identified the vampire. He was still certain that the vampire was on the board, unknown to the rest of the members, probably attending meetings only through video and claiming to be in a foreign country to explain any question about not being available when it was inconvenient. Vampires craved control. They were almost addicted to it, like some drug that fed their egos, which only grew more massive as they aged. That meant it would be someone high up, someone rich who wove their web and pulled their strings in the darkness. Someone who didn’t come out in the daylight.
That was a vampire’s biggest weakness, and it was also the way they could finally discover who was behind everything. He knew the images from Derek’s well-attended funeral pained Ilya to look at, but Mario had studied them when Ilya was busy with something else, since it was one of the few keys they had to finding their friends. He’d matched up the faces of those who’d come to pay their respects with the name and pictures on the board’s webpage, not because he’d suspected that their enemy would be an undead, but simply to see who had come to show respect. His original suspicion had been that like the obnoxious Gordon Everley, a board member who didn’t want to stand out would have attended Derek’s funeral in order to project the appearance of being a team player. But now the circumstances had changed; it was everyone who hadn’t been at the sunny graveside service who came under suspicion.
Out in the theater, the crowd was going wild with enthusiastic applause and cheers for every group of performers, making enough noise that it seemed like the huge auditorium was filled to capacity rather than more than half empty. As he listened, he heard the music for the segment just before their entrance play, and he reached out mentally, as he had before the performance, using the blood bond to feel for Ilya’s solid, reassuring presence on the opposite side of the stage.
But Ilya wasn’t there.
Mario froze, and in that moment, the rigging above him engaged, lifting him from the platform and swinging him out over the stage and into the light. Applause thundered, but he never registered it. Ilya’s empty strap swept toward him, and Mario kept flying across the stage, not stopping as his momentum kept him moving toward the opposite wing of the stage.
Operating on pure instinct and a desperate need to find Ilya, he continued on across, out of sight of the audience, before releasing the strap and letting himself fall, feet first, toward the stage twenty feet below.
He landed with a bare flex of his knees, an impossible feat which garnered gasps and shouts from the backstage crew, but he didn’t care. He scanned desperately for Ilya, whose presence had become alarmingly faint. It didn’t make any sense, but since Mario had never had a blood bond with anyone before, he wasn’t certain what could have happened. If Ilya had somehow been injured, or if he was going to miss his cue, the crew would have quickly reworked things or even stopped the show. But Mario didn’t have time to wonder how it had happened or why. The thread that connected them was growing thinner; Ilya was moving away, and Mario was sure of one thing.
Ilya, like his other friends, had been taken.
He reached the back of the theater, where the double doors of the exit gave out into a loading dock. People shouted in alarm and scattered as he burst through the door, dashing across the platform and leaping at least twenty feet to the concrete when he reached the edge where trucks backed up to make deliveries. Landing easily, he sprinted for the access road that looped behind the Elysium and several other casinos, dodging through the traffic. Whoever had taken Ilya must have planned this well and had a vehicle waiting, since they couldn’t have had more than three minutes head start before Mario had noticed. Now he was on the hunt, as he followed the blood connection that bound him inexorably to Ilya.
Cars honked and tires squealed, echoing in a cacophony around him as he cut through traffic, weaving his way among the speeding cars. He didn’t care that his features had shifted, fangs flashing in the glare of headlights, the rictus of his snarl hidden by the elaborate makeup of his costume. He was almost hit by one car as he crossed two lanes of traffic, but he braced himself with one hand on the hood, claws raking through the metal as though it were tissue paper as he vaulted over it.
He gained the other side, then sprinted along the median. He was running flat out now, as the ring road paralleled the freeway with much faster moving traffic. He didn’t care about the screech of metal that rent the night behind him as startled drivers braked hard and swerved into other cars.
The link to Ilya slowly grew stronger, and he knew he had to be gaining on the vehicle. Ahead there were flashing lights, and a siren wailed urgently. The traffic going in the same direction he was running had slowed, and he snarled, hoping the bastards who had taken his lover had been pulled over by the police, since it would make it easier to catch them. But as he drew nearer, the vehicle with the lights suddenly sped through an intersection, dodging two cars and gaining the entrance ramp to the freeway. He felt the link grow fainter again, and he realized to his horror as the lights and siren faded that they’d used an ambulance for the abduction. An ambulance that could speed with impunity toward its destination. Mario was fast, but there was no way he could keep up with them now.
He kept running, letting out a primal scream of rage and hate, a sound louder than the traffic. Giving over to his dark side completely, he now had only one purpose: to find Ilya.
Mario Gallier was on the hunt, and at the end, everyone who stood between him and the man he loved was going to die.