actually. Oddly, the man keeps recovering.”
The hand that had been rubbing at her throat went still, and the woman’s face paled in the darkness. “That’s … not possible.”
“That’s what I thought. But I killed him really well the second time. Honestly. He was very, very dead. And then … well, then he just wasn’t.” He shrugged. “So what I need to know from you is just what kind of research he was doing when you worked for him?”
Her eyes shot wider. He smelled her fear.
“I’m not going to punish you, Kelsey. I already told you that.” Again he shrugged. “Unless you’re into that kind of thing, in which case—” As he said it, he reached for her.
“I didn’t do anything to the girl! It wasn’t me. It was all Stiles. I swear it.”
He didn’t touch her, lowering his hands slowly now that he had her talking. The taps were turned, the pump primed. The information would flow now. “What girl would that be?”
She blinked slowly. “The captive he held five years ago. The half-breed vampire.”
He nodded slowly. This was in keeping with what the soldier-for-hire who’d worked on Stiles’s security force had told him—after a lot of persuasion.
“Did this … half-breed have a name? Or did you just assign her a number?”
“She called herself Amber Lily Bryant. In the files she was Subject X-1.”
Amber Lily. The Child of Promise. Then she did exist. He’d heard stories, of course. What vampire hadn’t? But he’d pretty much dismissed them as legends. And the soldier he’d questioned had been ill-informed about what went on inside the old house in Connecticut where Stiles had conducted his “research.” Still, he needed to test his witness, to make sure.
“This girl—she was a half-breed vampire, you say?”
The woman nodded.
“I think you’re lying. There’s no such thing. You’re making up tales to distract me from my purpose here. Everyone knows vampires are infertile.”
“Only the males. The females seem to ovulate for the first few months after being transformed. I thought—I thought you already knew. I thought all of you knew about all this.”
Her eyes were adjusting to the darkness now, he thought. She was staring at him as if she could see his face. “Why don’t you pretend I don’t and fill me in?”
Nodding rapidly, she seemed to search her mind. “There was a mortal, one of the Chosen. You know about them—the only humans who can become vampires. They all have the same rare Belladonna antigen in their blood.”
“And they all tend to die young if they aren’t transformed. I know all that, go on.”
She nodded. “Well this mortal, a male, was mated with a newly transformed vampiress, and X-1 was the resulting offspring.”
He pursed his lips. “This was a DPI experiment, I take it?”
She nodded. “Yes. It all took place before the Division of Paranormal Investigations was dismantled. Stiles worked for them then. I believe he was directly involved with the experiment. But a group of vampires attacked the research facility—”
“Research facility.” He snorted. “Extermination camp, you mean.”
“The parents escaped with the child.” She lowered her head. “That’s all the background I was given on her.”
He nodded slowly. “So even though DPI was never restored as a functioning government agency, Frank Stiles continued the work on his own. And part of that work included hunting and capturing this half-breed child who’d escaped them years before?”
“Apparently so. But she was hardly a child by then.”
“No?”
She shook her head. “Eighteen when he held her in Connecticut.” Her eyes shifted, downward and then left. “I did my best to protect her while he kept her. And she was still alive when the vampires came and broke her out.” She met his gaze again and maybe saw the doubt in it. “They didn’t kill me when they came for her, surely that should tell you something.”
“As a rule, my kind tend to get squeamish about coldblooded murder—even when it’s deserved. That they left you alive tells me nothing other than that they had weak stomachs.” He shrugged. “I’m something of an exception to that rule, myself.”
She sat very still, holding her breath.
“Stiles held the girl for how long?”
“I … don’t remember exactly. A few days. No more.”
“And he performed experiments on her?”
She lowered her head. “Yes.”
“Details, Kelsey. I need details.” He reached for her chin, tipped her head up so she faced him. “And I’ll know if you’re lying. I know you were lying about trying to protect her. You were as cruel to her as any of them. Fortunately for you, I don’t give a damn about that. My interest is in Stiles. So tell me—and tell me everything.”
The woman licked her lips, and he knew she believed him. She should.
“He wanted to know what kinds of powers she had. Whether she was immortal or not. What could kill her. That kind of thing. He kept her drugged, though, so she wasn’t aware of most of the experiments. She probably didn’t feel a thing.”
“Really.” His belly knotted just a little. “And what kinds of things didn’t she feel, Kelsey?”
She drew a breath, had the decency to look ashamed. Her voice a bare whisper, she said, “Electric shock, enough to stop her heart, just to see if it would start again. Drowning, to see if that would kill her. Various toxins introduced into her bloodstream at fatal doses. Blood letting. Blows to the head.”
“Jesus,” Edge muttered.
“She revived every time, and she was long gone before he could try things like bullets to the brain or wooden stakes to the heart.”
Edge rolled his eyes. Stakes indeed.
“She seems to age like a human. At least, she had the appearance of a normally aging eighteen-year-old, but she revivifies like an immortal.”
“And what else?”
She shrugged. “He took the usual samples. Blood, lots and lots of blood. Tissue, hair, bone marrow.”
“What did he do with them?”
She looked at him hard. “I don’t know. I thought he was trying to map her DNA, but he kept a lot of his work secret. Used to lock himself in a private lab for hours on end. One of the others who worked for him thought he had two sets of notes, one we could see and the other for his eyes only.” She shrugged. “I caught him once, injecting himself with something. But I never knew what it was.”
He
