Chapter 26
Twenty-Six
Ethan was shaking when he pulled up to the strangely modern house with lots of fucking windows.
It looked like the last place a person would find a vampire.
The building struck Ethan as more to Rafe’s taste than what he’d expect from Bel.
But then Rafe was all about defiance, even of his own nature.
He would not be stopped by a severe allergy to the sun.
For Bel, Ethan wondered if it was more about camouflage.
Fuck, he didn’t care. As long as he was safely at the house of one of Marcus’s brothers.
Stumbling out of the car, Ethan ran to the front door and pounded on it.
His heart was racing in his chest. He hated leaving Marcus, but he could only hope that he and Bel could get a hold of Winter and Rafe.
Maybe even find Aiden. They could form a fucking posse or something to rescue Marcus.
The door was suddenly jerked open, and he was greeted with a frazzled looking Bel on the other side. His blue eyes swept over Ethan and then past him.
“Where—”
“They got him! Those motherfuckers attacked the house and they got him!” Ethan burst out.
Bel grabbed Ethan’s arm and roughly pulled him into the house before slamming the door shut again. Bel turned to Ethan, his expression intense. “Who grabbed him?”
“Marcus called one of them Zale. There were so many vampires. They just sort of flooded the house.” Ethan shook his head. “He made me run. He kept fighting them and he was screaming for me to run.”
“You did the right thing, but you’ve got to help me.” Bel released him and jogged through the house with Ethan following on his heels. Ethan didn’t see much of Bel’s home. The rooms they passed by seemed to be filled with boxes even though Bel had been in his new place for close to two weeks.
At the back of the house, Bel reached a room and waved for Ethan to quickly follow. When Ethan stepped into what turned out to be a lab, Bel placed his hand against an electronic panel. A thick metal door slid into place. There were the sounds of other metal plates slamming down around the house.
“Holy shit! Did you turn your lab into a panic room?” Ethan said. He turned around, taking in the long table loaded with glassware, microscopes, burners, and equipment he couldn’t even begin to name. It looked a hell of a lot like those labs from the CSI shows he would occasionally watch.
“The Ministry has been against my work almost as long as I’ve been a vampire,” Bel grumbled.
“They keep perpetuating this myth that we’re some kind of magical beings, and it’s utter bullshit.
They’re afraid that if I find a way to treat vampirism like a disease, they’ll have to actually act like civilized creatures instead of mini gods.
Every time we move, I have to reinforce my house, especially my lab.
I’ve always been sure that one day they’d just attack. ”
Ethan gave Bel a wobbly smile. “Marcus has had his hands full with his family. Rafe the rebel. Bel the mad scientist.”
Bel sighed heavily and nodded. “And then Julianna.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No, you’re right. Marcus has always been the calm, collected go-between for our family and the Ministry, keeping us all from being executed for treason or whatever the hell they wanted to call it.
” Bel rushed around the large table in the center of the room.
He was picking up things and shoving them into his pockets.
“And he ends up with a guy who claims to love him but abandons him.”
“Ethan, those were vampires. You were not equipped to deal with them. If you had stayed, you would have put Marcus in even more danger. We both know he’d do anything to save you.” Bel held up a matte black handgun and gave Ethan a smile that was wicked to its very core. “I say we equip you better.”
Ethan slowly walked around the table and came to stand next to Bel. He watched as the vampire pulled on a pair of latex gloves before he started shoving bullets into a magazine. “What…what are you talking about?”
“I made a discovery quite by accident, not that the Ministry would believe that,” he muttered at the end.
“I’ve designed a formula that attacks the blood.
Specifically, vampire blood. It spreads very quickly through the blood…
and well, the end result is that it turns the blood in the vampire to an acidic goo. Quite disgusting.”
“Wow, that’s an insane discovery.”
He wrinkled his nose as he finished loading the magazine and shoved it into the butt of the gun.
“I’ve coated the bullets with the substance.
There are ten in the magazine and one in the chamber already.
I’ve also got a spare magazine. That’s twenty-one bullets.
The good thing is that I think this would be most effective if you hit center mass.
” He turned toward Ethan and held out the gun.
“You do know how to use this thing, right?”
“Are you just assuming that all humans know how to use a gun?”
“Pretty much.”
Ethan groaned and took the gun from Bel. “You’re lucky one of my foster fathers was big into guns. Took me to the shooting range when I was a teen. Thought it would keep me out of trouble.”
“Never warned you against vampires, did he?”
“Yeah, for some reason, it never seemed to come up.” Ethan checked that the safety was in place before snatching up the spare magazine and shoving it into his pocket.
He was still in the damn suit when he’d much rather be in jeans and a T-shirt.
“So, what’s the plan? Do you have any idea who this Zale is?
Where he might take Marcus? Do we even know if Marcus is still alive? ”
“I know he is,” Bel said firmly. He grabbed his cell phone and a set of keys off the table. “I got this text from Rafe just a couple of minutes before you arrived on my doorstep.” He held up the phone and Ethan only saw “Williwaw” typed there.
“What the fuck does that mean?”
“It’s the name of a cold, stormy wind that blows down through the Alaskan mountains. It means trouble. Run.”
“You and Rafe have a secret code?”
“Most of the time he just sends me ‘Zephyr,’ which is a light and playful breeze. That means he’s gone to wander for a bit.
Don’t worry. But when Williwaw came up, I knew Rafe had been attacked.
I’d been pulling my things together when you arrived, so I’m guessing they are going after all of us.
Assuming they’ve got Rafe and Marcus, I believe they will keep them alive until they have me and Winter. ”
Returning to the electronic panel, Bel typed something in and a panel in the wall across the room slid open. Ethan walked over to it to find a ladder leading downward into total darkness.
“Who the fuck are you?” Ethan demanded. “Why doesn’t Marcus’s house have all this cool shit?”
“Because Marcus didn’t spend ten years building his house. Start going down. Lights will kick in when you reach the bottom, I swear.”
Shoving the gun into the pocket of his jacket, Ethan took a fortifying breath and gripped the metal ladder.
It was cool to the touch but solid. He kept his eyes straight ahead as he started descending, cursing himself the entire way for ever believing that Bel was the boring one.
There was no “boring one” in the Varik clan.
Sure, Marcus was the most straitlaced and normal-appearing but get him behind a closed door, and the vampire was sexually insatiable.
And absentminded professor Beltran with his cello and distracted gaze had a secret escape tunnel and blood-destroying bullets. Why not?
As Bel had predicted, lights flickered on near the floor when Ethan reached the bottom two rungs of the ladder.
The hard soles of his shoes hit the concrete floor, the resulting sound echoing through the open space.
He stepped back and looked up to see Bel climbing down the ladder.
He was still wearing his white lab coat, which only made Ethan smile.
“I’ve got a car this way,” Bel said, motioning down what looked to be a long, narrow tunnel. “We have to assume that Winter has already been grabbed. I haven’t been able to reach him, and he seems to think that Aiden is in Europe.”
“So, we’re on our own,” Ethan murmured.
“Not quite. We still have Rafe’s friends.”
Ethan kept his mouth shut. He didn’t know what to expect when it came to Rafe’s friends. His first thought was that they were a bunch of lazy, fun-seekers who took nothing seriously and certainly wouldn’t know how to handle themselves in a fight.
But then, he didn’t expect Bel to have a secret tunnel or weapons. It didn’t matter to him. If it got Marcus safe and sound and back in his arms, he didn’t care if they invited a bunch of Navy SEALs to the party.
An hour after escaping Marcus’s house, Ethan found himself pulling up in front of a…yarn store. Ethan rubbed his eyes and blinked a couple of times, but the vision didn’t change. It was a large boxy building with the big sign in pink script that read, Knitters’ Paradise.
“You’re fucking with me,” Ethan said, ending the silence that had stretched in the car.
“What?”
“I thought we were meeting with Rafe’s friends. The same Rafe who owns nightclubs and spends his evenings drinking and fucking. You just pulled up in front of a craft store.”
Bel gave a little shake of his head. “I couldn’t go to Rafe’s club. It’s the first place they’d look for us.”
Killing the engine, Bel got out of the car and Ethan had no choice but to follow.
God, it was like Marcus had slipped him something with his dinner and he’d fallen down Alice’s drug-induced rabbit hole.
Bel raised his hand to knock on the glass door, but someone was already there unlocking it.
They were both waved inside, and the door was closed behind them.
Ethan glanced at the woman dressed in leather and chains like she’d stepped out of some sub’s wet dream. He wasn’t sure if she was dressed for a night out or a rescue. Guess it really didn’t matter.
“Ethan, this is Lola. An old friend of Rafe’s,” Bel introduced. “She moves with Rafe and is his partner in the nightclubs.”
“You’re a Varik, then,” Ethan said, extending his hand to her.
Her beautifully arched eyebrows lifted nearly to her hairline and she slowly took Ethan’s hand. “If Rafe ever asked me, I would be. You’re Marcus’s not-pet pet.”
“Boyfriend also works,” Ethan said with a smirk.
They continued into the dark store past aisles of different types of colored yarns, needles, hooks, pattern books, artificial flowers, and fabric.
It definitely looked like a crafters’ paradise.
At the rear of the store, there was a long table that was probably used to cut fabric.
Four other people were standing around, watching them approach.
Introductions were made, though Ethan didn’t catch all the names.
Including Lola, there were two women and three men prepared to rescue Marcus and his brothers.
But he did take notice that one of them had the name Arsenault.
Marcus had mentioned them recently as a clan that could help with bringing a more peaceful order to the vampire world.
He was hopeful that his assistance meant that they were open to Marcus’s initial overtures.
On the table, Ethan found what looked to be blueprints for a very large house and grounds.
“I was just telling them that I saw that useless bitch Roland with the group that dragged out Rafe,” Lola spat.
“Ethan said that Marcus called one of them Zale. It confirms that this strike was headed up by the Black Wolf clan,” Bel said and then looked over at Ethan.
“They’ve argued for the death of one or more of my family on several occasions over the years.
They’ve accumulated a great deal of wealth over the centuries and seem to believe that it alone is enough to buy their wishes on the Ministry. ”
“And when it didn’t, what? They started killing off members?”
“Quite possibly.”
“Have you heard from Winter?” Lola asked.
Bel shook his head. “Nothing. But we can’t wait. If Winter is still free, he’ll be working his own angle and will possibly join us later.”
“Tonight, we get Marcus and Rafe, and we end the Black Wolves,” Arsenault snarled. From his bloodthirsty tone, Ethan was willing to guess that the Arsenault clan had suffered their own run-ins with the Black Wolf clan.
Ethan wasn’t sure Marcus would approve of the scorched-earth approach this vampire was planning, but Ethan wasn’t going to argue with him.
They were very likely outnumbered and heading into hostile territory.
These bastards had taken the man he loved, and Ethan was willing to do whatever it took to get his lover back in one piece.