Chapter Six
They made it back to Washington’s mansion an hour later. Meghan and Tye had come back hours ago, and Washington came out of the basement with the good news.
“The housekeeper arrived,” he said mildly.
A woman appeared with a smile on her face and a plate of sandwiches. “You must be hungry.”
“Reyna, this is Genevieve,” Washington said. “She’s a vampire and an excellent cook. She’s been taking care of the place on and off for me and agreed to come on fulltime while we’re here.”
“Nice to meet you,” Reyna said, tentatively taking a sandwich.
Jodie took the whole plate. “I’m famished.”
“Same,” Gabe admitted. “Nice to meet you, Genevieve. Welcome to the team.”
“How do you know Washington?” Reyna asked and then bit in her sandwich, which was toasted turkey and cheese with some kind of sauce, and it was unbelievable.
“We go way back,” she said with a shrug.
“Don’t interrogate, Genevieve,” Washington said, pushing up his glasses. “Just be glad someone can take care of the place.”
“Thank you, Genevieve,” Jodie said as she stuffed her mouth. “Now which room is mine?”
They went off together as if Jodie had never left and Genevieve had always been there.
Meghan and Tye came back downstairs to inform them that they’d checked out the bunker and it was destroyed.
They couldn’t even get through the main entrances.
They’d had to find another way in, and even then, it was clear from the heat coming off the place from the fire that nothing could survive.
No one knew what happened to the people.
To Drew and Laura, who had been inside. Or Everett, who had been imprisoned for turning Reyna in to Visage and acting as a spy for Harrington.
Or Sydney…their leader. The very person who had started Elle, who was Elle.
Everyone thought Elle had died, and in some ways she had.
They’d turned her into a vampire and when she’d come back, she’d no longer been Elle.
She’d become Sydney. Now it was possible that she was really gone.
Jodie integrated well. Maybe even better than she had when she’d initially joined Elle.
Back then, she had gotten her first real taste of what the world was like.
And now she realized the good that she could do working with Elle.
She still didn’t like Washington. He had been one of the doctors who had experimented on her when she had been kidnapped at a young age.
But he respected her space and worked hard to earn her trust, so she was coming around.
And it was good to see them all work together.
“Why don’t we have communication with the other safe houses?” Jodie grumbled. “It’s been a week since New Year’s. Shouldn’t someone be able to reach us?”
Tye sighed. “I wish I knew. Meghan and I have checked a lot of the safe houses. Some of them look like people were in them, but now they’re empty. They look abandoned.”
“Where could everyone have gone?” Jodie inquired. “Are there places other than the bunker?”
“Yes,” Washington said. He frowned. “But for safety reasons, we weren’t supposed to know where they all were. So much of the information that Elle had—what do you say?—went down with the ship?”
“If we had Tony, we might’ve been able to access it,” Meghan said. Tony was Elle’s resident techie, but he had been at the bunker on the day of the explosion.
“You think it might be on a server somewhere?” Reyna asked. “Or in the Cloud?”
She was still wrestling with these terms. After years without internet or phones, she was picking up all these new things as quickly as she could.
“The main servers were in the bunker,” Washington said.
“There had to be backups though, right?” Gabe suggested.
“But we don’t know where those are either,” Tye pointed out, crossing his arms and sitting back.
“We need a fucking break,” Jodie snapped. “Where haven’t we looked? What can I do? Do we not have phones or something? Technology should help.”
“We’ve called all the numbers we have. A lot of the phones were burners so they couldn’t be tracked. We really didn’t plan to be this disconnected from one another,” Tye said with a grimace.
Reyna leaned back in her chair and kicked her feet up on the antique dining room table. She ignored Washington’s pointed stare at her audacity. Getting Jodie back had been a win. Not only was she Reyna’s closest friend and a link to the Visage prison experiments, but Jodie had special blood too.
Reyna’s blood was the very rare Rh null negative with so few matches in the entire world.
And unfortunately, one of those was William Harrington.
But Jodie’s had the potential to unlock a possible blood antidote—which would make it so that vampires could drink anyone’s blood, not just their blood type match, and have the same benefits.
Yet, despite having Jodie back, they were still a pathetic crew of six now.
Six people to take on all of Visage.
A week ago, when she’d stepped out of the shower, she had felt so certain that they could do this. Now she was wondering what the hell she’d been thinking. It was still possible to stop Harrington, but was it hubris to believe that six people could succeed where an army had failed?
She shook her head. There was a link that she was missing. But she didn’t know what it was.
“What do you think, Rey?” Jodie asked. The nickname that her brothers used hit her like a punch to the gut.
“We need to think about this more. We’re missing something.” Reyna stood from her chair. “It’s almost dinner. Why don’t we all come back after that and plan our next moves? We can go from there.”
Reyna trudged from the room. Sitting around and talking in circles wasn’t helping her. She wanted to walk the grounds to clear her head, but what she really missed was her camera.
Beckham had given her a camera when she had first lived with him. He’d said it would give her perspective. And it sure as hell had. She could use a piece of that perspective right about now.
She walked up the steps and to the landing where Beckham’s bedroom was, but the familiar smell alone made it difficult to even be in there.
She hadn’t been sleeping much to begin with.
Nightmares haunted her every time she closed her eyes.
They made her want to scream like a teakettle to escape.
But no, she was trapped in a cage of her own making—a musky smell, fierce handwriting, black suits, an inexplicable presence.
Beckham was the other side of her coin. And now she was one-dimensional.
She went to the bookshelf and gently ran her hand along the leather bindings.
She’d already surveyed them, but she couldn’t get enough of it.
They smelled like fresh parchment and long days tucked away in alcoves devouring the material.
She kept hoping one of the books would reveal a trapdoor.
It would swing open and show all of Beckham’s secrets.
An easy way to fix everything. A deus ex machina.
But no.
There was just her.
She had to make it happen.
Reyna sat at the desk and pulled Beckham’s papers toward her. As she sat amongst his materials, she felt so connected to him. So close to him. A powerful emotion ripped through her. It started in her heart and expanded outward, encasing her entire body. This was Beckham.
Her Becks.
She coughed as tears came to her eyes. Why did the connection have to be so strong even when he was gone?
She didn’t want to lose it either though.
Feeling him like this was a grasp at the real thing.
It prolonged the inevitable. One day she would wake up and realize that there was no more connection.
That he was really and truly gone even from her.
A severed connection.
It struck her and she had to force herself from the chair before she collapsed into sadness.
This wasn’t helping. This wasn’t helping anything.
Reyna rushed from the room, desperate to be free of his ghost.
But as she raced down the stairs and outside into the brisk cold, the feeling only intensified. She wasn’t running from him. She was getting closer.
She clutched her chest. The sensation was so real. She’d felt it before but never this strong, not even when he’d been alive.
As if she could reach out and touch him, even though it was impossible.
She ran her hands back through her dark hair and lifted her eyes skyward. She missed him something fierce. She was strong. She was ready to take on the world. But she wasn’t ready to move past him. Her heart ached for him. It was actually beating fiercely in her chest.
She shook her head in confusion and started walking. Why was she having this reaction? A tear slipped down her cheek as she kept going down the gravel road. She was nearly to the gate when she picked up to a run. She didn’t even know what she was doing, but she couldn’t stop.
When she rounded the last corner, the gate was hanging wide open. Fear pricked at her. They surely had not left that open. None of them would be so careless. And yet the only way into Washington’s mansion was open for anyone to come in.
She stilled her feet as she approached. Her heart was still pattering away, and the feeling only intensified the closer she got to the gate. What was happening? Why was she walking right toward danger?
And then a figure appeared at her right. A vampire woman with ruby-red hair and two wicked-looking blades. Another vampire was beside her—a short, Black woman with a shaved head. The next two men she recognized on the spot—Beckham’s driver, Gerard, and Reyna’s bodyguard. Both also vampires.
Her stomach twisted at the sight of them. “What…what are you doing here?”
She felt him before she saw him. Reyna whirled around. Her heart was in her throat. The sense of rightness overwhelmed her.
“They’re with me, Little One,” Beckham said.