Moira Rogers - Wilder’s Mate

He found a way to make me.

Wilder shivered, torn between fascination and revulsion. Lowe had abducted Nathaniel from his home, brought him here and turned him into a vampire—except that wasn’t all. It couldn’t be. “You smell like a hound.”

“I wasn’t strong enough to survive the change.” The words were blank. Numb. “So instead of giving me human blood, they gave me Hunter’s.”

Wilder’s skin prickled, and a cold knot formed in the pit of his stomach. “You can’t do that. It doesn’t—it doesn’t work.”

“It never has before,” Nate agreed. “But Hunter wasn’t created by the Guild.” The knot grew until Wilder thought he might vomit. “Archer did it.” Nathaniel didn’t answer. Instead he reached out a shaking hand. “You can’t let me finish this weapon, and you can’t bring me with you. I’ve been starving myself. Getting as weak as I can, but Lowe will work it out soon enough and order me to eat. He’s already ordered me not to kill myself. You need to do it for me.”

Fuck that. “Back up and tell me why we can’t take you with us.”

“Lowe’s powerful, Wilder. The border isn’t far enough. He made me. I’ll do whatever he commands, no matter how much I don’t want to.” Nate’s gaze slid past him, toward the hallway where Satira waited.

Rage roared up. “Not if I send him to hell where he belongs.” Satira’s voice came from the hallway, steady but more than a little tense. “Wilder? I think you should come out here.”

He kept his gaze riveted to Nathaniel’s face as he backed toward the door. When he turned to face the tunnel, he stopped short, a growl rising before he could stop it. “Archer.” His former colleague stood just beyond Satira, both hands upraised. She had one of her pistols pointed at his chest. A tiny frown tugged at her lips, and she looked more perplexed than afraid. “Ashamed as I am to admit it, he could have grabbed me. He didn’t.”

“Because I didn’t join up for this,” Archer muttered. “Untrained hounds and half-vampires?” Wilder pulled one of his own revolvers. “You joined up for kidnapping Nate.”

“No, I didn’t.” He held his hands a little higher. “I had nothing to do with that. The deal I struck with Lowe was only for Clear Springs. He’d already run everyone out, and he told me he wouldn’t kill anyone else if I let him have it.”

Satira’s hand dipped toward the floor, then snapped back up, this time a little lower. “If you hurt Nathaniel, I’ll blow your balls off. I might do it anyway for sending Wilder into a trap.” Even at gunpoint, he was contrary enough to argue. “I tried to warn you two away from it.”

“Enough.” Wilder was in no mood to discuss it. “You really want to help? Start now, here. Help me take down Lowe.”

Nathaniel’s voice came from behind him. “The weapon he’s had me working on—it kills vampires. I can’t turn it against him…but Satira could.”

Wilder’s first—and second and third—instinct was to get Satira as far away from the fight as possible.

“And you could show me how, right?”

“If he could, he would be doing it already.” Satira holstered her gun and turned to Wilder. “Nathaniel wouldn’t put me in harm’s way if he had any other choice.”

He made a concerted effort to relax his clenched fists. “Maybe. How long will it take?”

“Nathaniel?”

“Twenty minutes, with both of us working together.”

Wilder stalked up to Archer, not bothering to hide the challenge in his glare. “Want to go see if this new hound you turned is ready to kill some fucking vampires?” Archer’s jaw tightened. “Ready.”

“Just so you know, if he wants to take a few shots at you, I’m not stopping him.”

“Wouldn’t expect you to.”

Satira brushed her fingers over Wilder’s shoulder. “Don’t let anyone bite you. I’m possessive.”

“That goes double for you, sweetheart.”

Wilder and Archer navigated the darkened tunnel without any extra light, and it didn’t take them long to reach the young bloodhound’s cell. “You ready to get out of there yet?” The man stared at Archer, teeth bared, eyes wild. “Are you here to kill me?”

“No.” The other hound returned the stare without flinching. “We’re here to free you.”

“Can’t trust myself, being free. Can’t control it. Can’t control me.” Wilder closed one gloved hand around the padlock, testing it with a hard tug. “What’s your name?” he asked, though he already knew.

“Nate said I needed a new one. That all bloodhounds get new names.” He stepped away from the bars.

“He named me Hunter.”

“Hello, Hunter.” With Archer’s help, Wilder twisted the lock until the metal gave way with a snap.

“I’m Wilder, and I came here to kill Lowe. Want to help?”

Hunter’s gaze fixed on the broken padlock. He sucked in a heaving breath, then nodded once, jerkily.

“I can kill vampires. I think I’m good at it.”

“We all are, even him.” Wilder jerked a thumb at Archer. “Think you can wait ’til this is all over before you kill him?”

Archer watched Hunter. Hunter watched Archer. A quiet understanding seemed to pass between them before Hunter nodded. “He made me. But they made him do it.” A surprising concession that belied his feral appearance. “Then we’ll fight together, and the two of you can settle your scores later.”

“Later,” Hunter agreed. When Wilder pulled the cage door open, the younger man stepped into the hallway and flexed his fingers. “The ballroom.”

“That’s where Lowe’ll be,” Archer elaborated. “Used to be the common room. He sealed off the windows and tore down the floor above, damn near turned it into a crypt. They spend the days there, with ghouls guarding the doors.”

Thaddeus Lowe would have enough ghouls to guard against one bloodhound, perhaps even two, but he wouldn’t be prepared for three. “Let’s go.”

Nathaniel was a vampire.

She wasn’t supposed to know, but Satira had never been stupid. She’d also never been as obedient as Nathaniel might have liked, not when obedience fought curiosity—or concern.

So she’d eavesdropped, and she wasn’t ashamed. Oh, perhaps she was a bit ashamed that her focus on the conversation inside the lab had allowed Archer to all but ambush her, but it didn’t alter her conviction that she’d done the right thing. Now she knew how desperate Nathaniel was. How ready to die.

Now she knew how hard she’d have to fight to save him.

The bloodhounds had disappeared back the way they’d come, and Satira walled off her heart and her worry about Wilder and turned her attention to the oddities on the workbench in front of her.

A large glass sphere dominated the center of the table. A second sphere was suspended inside by thin metal rods, and filled with a hopeless tangle of copper wires that obscured whatever mechanism must lie inside. Sloppy, crowded work that looked nothing like Nathaniel’s usual neat and orderly inventions. A sign of his fracturing mental state or a subtle attempt at self-sabotage—it could be either. It could be both.

She touched the surface, sliding her fingers up to the top, where a metal plate had been fixed. It held an indent where one could affix a crank handle to wind…something, and two small openings just large enough for the end of a funnel. Something that required a chemical addition, perhaps.

“A weapon?” she asked, not looking at Nathaniel. It was easier not to. His voice was the same, but he appeared younger. Closer to thirty than fifty, and the effect was unnerving at a time when she needed every bit of nerve she had.

“A weapon, yes.” He sounded distracted. Tired.

A glass sphere. A chemical reaction. Satira froze, then lifted her head, so startled she forgot to keep her gaze averted. “You solved the sustainability problem. You solved it, didn’t you?” For a moment, his eyes sparked like they always did, and he leaned forward. “It’s the charge created by the copper coil. Do you see?”

She rocked up on her toes to get a better angle. Beneath the wires and coil sat a delicate, miniature version of the same mechanism that provided power for the reading lights Nathaniel had built several years ago. “You must have altered the chemical ratio, though. A charge run through the composition we have in our rounds would cause an explosion.”

“Mmm, not through these.” It was odd to see his strangely youthful hands trace over schematics and formulas. “I’ve added a stabilizer.”

It was elegant, for all the awkwardness of its construction. Whatever they’d done to Nathaniel, they hadn’t taken his mind.

They had taken something else, though. Satira let her fingers fall away from the sphere and met his gaze squarely. “I heard everything, you know.”

He nodded. “You didn’t go far enough not to have.”

“Oh, I did at first. Until I thought of all the things you’d only tell Wilder if I wasn’t around.” She gathered her courage about her. “Do you have fangs?”

“Yes.” Nathaniel hesitated. “I’ve never bitten anyone, though.” It might explain why he looked so exhausted in spite of his sudden, explicable youth. “But they gave you blood. They must have, to transform you.”

“They did.” Nathaniel turned away. “There’s a hound here, a new one. I named him Hunter.” The man in the cage. A hound’s blood should have been toxic to a vampire—it was one of the founding principles of the Guild, and why Archer’s defection was so unbelievable. Never create a weapon the vampires can turn against you. If drinking from a hound provided youth and vigor, they’d be handing their enemies too much power.

But the Bloodhound Guild hadn’t created Hunter. Archer must have, presumably as a side effect from an attack during the full moon. The Guild claimed that the bloodhound’s curse couldn’t be passed along through infection, but it was true only because the infection tended to kill a human quicker than a mortal wound.