Chapter 2
Daxen
Night settles over the compound. The buzz of monitors, flickering of fluorescent lights, and the hum of air conditioning act as a soundtrack to the War Room, where I’ve been posted up for hours, going over data.
I lean back in my chair to stretch out the kinks in my back. The movement causes the leather to creak loudly in the still room.
The air stinks of blood. Half-empty bags and vials are strewn haphazardly around the table—all that remains of my meals over the last few days.
Now that the sun has finally set, my brothers will start filtering in, joining me for our nightly meeting before Gav assigns patrols.
And I still don’t have any concrete explanations to provide them.
I’ve been watching the patterns shift for months, but every new idea leads me right back to the same dead end.
My eyes burn, but I stop myself from pressing my palms into my sockets for the twentieth time this hour. The muscles in my jaw throb from hours of grinding my teeth while I stare at screens, watching names and dates and numbers blur.
No matter how hard I try, I can’t rearrange the pieces into something that makes sense. Nothing irritates me more than unanswered questions, but especially when those questions pertain to the Severed.
Those twisted assholes have been running the same bullshit plays and routines for centuries. The fact that they’re shifting tactics now means something big is happening that I can’t see.
If I can’t see the big picture, then I’m working blind.
If I’m working blind, then not only my two packmates, but the dozens of other teams working with us are at risk.
And that’s unacceptable.
“Don’t think too hard,” a familiar voice drawls. “You might pop a blood vessel, and I’m not cleaning that shit up.”
I don’t bother looking up. I already know who it is by the snarky tone.
“You don’t even clean up your own messes, Vae. I spend half my time doing it for you.”
Vaelenor throws himself into the chair across from me and proceeds to spin in a lazy circle.
At first glance, you’d think a male who looks like Vae—all perfectly symmetrical features, mussed dark auburn hair, and piercing green eyes—spends hours on his appearance. You’d be wrong. The asshole wakes up looking like he belongs on a billboard.
“Yeah,” he flashes a dimpled smirk that I know better than to trust. “You do such a good job, though.”
I grunt. If the ability to irritate the shit out of me were a combat skill, Vae would be the most decorated warrior in the compound.
“Who kicked your puppy tonight, Dax?” He stills his chair, studying me across the table.
I scrape a frustrated hand across my jaw, the stubble rasping against my palm. “How long have we been fighting the Deadwalkers, Vae?”
His brow furrows, and he kicks his boots on top of the oak table.
“Hundreds of years. Why?”
“Just… thinking out loud,” I mutter.
I grab my trash and throw it in the garbage can across the room, unable to stand the unorganized workspace any longer.
Vae looks like he wants to say something, but before he can, the door creaks open. Gavran enters, his heavy footfalls echoing as he crosses the room and lifts his chin in greeting.
He takes his seat at the head of the table with the same silent stoicism of leadership we’ve all grown to appreciate over the centuries.
Caelan, my second packmate and the anchor of our triad, follows right on Gav’s heels. His onyx eyes flick toward me, taking in the maps, ledgers, computers, and notes I’ve been buried under for the last seven hours.
His frown deepens.
Vae might have immediately picked up on my shitty mood, but Caelan dissects it. He wields his ability to read a room the way he wields a blade—precise, fast, and oftentimes cutting deeper than I like.
Sometimes he’s too intuitive.
He’d feel better if he punched a few more things like the rest of us.
Before Caelan can start an interrogation, the rest of our crew filters in. Silas’ laughter carries through the room ahead of him, probably antagonizing someone before we’ve even called the meeting to order. He’s followed by his two packmates, Ford and Evander.
Ford, as usual, saunters in looking like someone gave James Dean a sword, fangs, and the looks and skill to handle both.
In contrast, Evander moves like a male who knows he towers over everyone in any room—almost self-consciously aware of his muscled bulk, and terrified of accidentally injuring anyone smaller than he is.
Seven warriors. Seven brothers. By choice if not by blood.
Two Fated and Bonded packs, and our leader, a lone Alpha who’s as stoic as he is brave.
This is the core team of Bloodbound’s main headquarters.
We’re vampire warriors—an organization that’s existed for over fifteen-hundred years. On paper, we answer to the Council of Nine, but in reality, we answer to no one but Gavran. He’s not only the leader of the main HQ here in Massachusetts, but he’s the head of the entire global organization.
His official title, Last Shield, is more than ceremonial.
As an organization, we’re dedicated to hunting the Severed and protecting our kind. Some call us cops, some call us military, and a small minority even have the balls to call us antiquated—but never to our faces.
Honestly? We’re whatever we need to be to get the job done.
With thousands of seasoned warriors across the globe, it’s getting harder and harder for vampires involved in criminal acts to outwit or outrun us.
If we didn’t have to deal with the fucking Severed, the vampire race as a whole wouldn’t dare step out of line. As it stands, those undead assholes take up the majority of our time and resources, which allows piece of shit vampires to slip through the cracks more often than we’d like.
Then again, the Severed were once vampires, so it’s not like they wouldn’t exist if they never made the transition. They’d just be normal vampires instead of psychopaths warped by ancient blood magic they don’t understand and can barely use.
Gav flicks his amber gaze at me. “What have you got tonight, Dax?”
Clearing my throat, I prepare to lay out my discoveries, hoping someone will see what I’m missing.
“Something’s off with the Severed’s patterns recently,” I inform the team, pulling a stack of papers out of my mess on the table.
“Around March of this year, I began flagging anomalies. Alexander, a Severed leader in the area, started visiting a human Alpha’s estate outside the city.”
Shuffling through my papers, I find the dossier and pass the copies around the table. I gesture to the photo in Vae’s hands.
“This is the owner of the property. Jonathan Varenthrall. Human, Alpha, works in acquisitions. Public records show his family has lived on that land for decades. His parents were killed in a Severed attack when he was seven. He had a wife who died almost a decade ago. I also found a birth record for one child. A daughter, who would be in her early twenties.”
“So, his parents were killed by Severed, and now he’s entertaining one at his home?” Gav asks, perplexed.
“So it would seem,” I reply, dispersing estate photos pulled from drone footage.
Ford raises a brow. “Deadwalkers don’t interact with humans.” He frowns, twirling his favorite brass lighter through dexterous fingers. “What changed?”
“That’s what I’m struggling to figure out. I’ve found no communication outside of in-person visits,” I admit, retaking my seat. “I’ve hacked his cloud, phone, and email. There’s nothing.”
“So we don’t know what’s going on in those meetings.” Evander’s deep baritone rumbles through the room like thunder.
“The human must have reached out to Alexander another way. The question is, what the hell are they discussing?” Caelan narrows his eyes. He’s barely shifted since sitting down, still as a blade waiting to be drawn.
“Right. Deadwalkers don’t have allies. They take what they want, deal with the bodies, and move on.”
“Maybe this one’s the exception,” Ford mutters. “Some kind of friendship.”
“Nah, Deadwalkers don’t do friends.” The words come out garbled around the hair tie clamped between Silas’s teeth as he wrangles his blonde hair, which he usually wears in a long mohawk, into a knot on the top of his head.
He leans back and props his boots up on the table, causing specs of dirt to fall off the bottoms and cover the thick oak.
Evander reaches over and shoves his feet off with a grunt.
Silas glares and flips Evander off, but his packmate doesn’t even glance up from the dossier in his hands.
Sometimes, I wonder if Ford feels more like a babysitter than a brother in that pack.
Ford shakes his head. “Severed are self-contained. They hunt quick and strike more quickly. They don’t deliberate and plan. That kind of coordination is so far outside their style it’s like watching a dog try to play piano.”
Ford’s sort of an anomaly in our world. Ninety-nine percent of vampires are born, but they can be made. It’s just extremely dangerous and doesn’t usually work.
Ford is the last known turned vampire. The last of his kind, in fact. He left his human life in 1953 and, for reasons unknown, has never quite moved on from that decade. He once called a Severed “a real chucklehead,” to his face during an interrogation, and fucking meant it with his whole chest.
“There’s something else.” I lean forward, propping my forearms on the table. “There’s been a nearly twenty-five percent uptick in missing Omegas within a ninety-mile radius since the Severed started meeting with Varenthrall.”
The room stills.
“How many?” Gav’s jaw ticks, and I know what he’s thinking.
Omegas are rare enough as it is. Trafficking them is abhorrent, but it’s an unfortunate part of our world.
There are always greedy assholes out there who will buy and sell anything they can get their hands on to get rich—living beings included.
“Fifteen in the last three months,” I answer.
Despite bracing myself for the explosion of angry Alpha Pheromones, I still wince when the full force of six pissed-off warriors detonates in a small area.