“I don’t even have a cell phone. I’m sorry—”

The door swung open, and Xhex strode in. His first thought was she looked hassled.

“Do you have a phone?” Sarah asked the female.

Xhex blinked as if she were translating the English in her head letter by letter. “Ah, yeah, sure.”

She took the thing out of her back pocket, put in the code, and met Sarah halfway. “Help yourself—Murhder, can I talk to you?”

Frowning, he nodded and followed her back out into the hall. “What’s going on?”

“You see John anywhere down here?”

“No, but I’ve mostly been sitting with Nate in his room. I know that Sarah and the doctor met with your hellren a while ago, but they’ve been down the hall on the computers ever since, I think.”

“I don’t know where he is.” Xhex pushed a hand through her short hair. “After I talked to you, I went into his room and sat with him. I guess I fell asleep at some point. When I woke up about fifteen minutes ago, he was gone. I went up to the big house, figuring he would have gone there for First Meal, but no one’s seen him. I checked our bedroom and I just went through the gym and the weight room down here. He’s not anywhere.”

Murhder leaned back into the break room. “Sarah, when was the last time you saw John?”

She looked up from the phone in her hand. “It was about an hour ago, maybe longer. He said he was going to the big house, as he called it, to get a change of clothes?”

“Shit,” Xhex muttered.

“What’s going on?” Sarah asked as she walked over.

“I think he’s gone.”

Sarah was worried as she handed the phone back to John’s mate, as they called their spouses. The woman—female, rather—took it and seemed to be checking for texts. Then she typed out a message and the swooshing sound of something being sent rose up from the device.

“What condition was he in?” Xhex asked.

“He was as he’d been.” Sarah shrugged. “I mean, the infection hasn’t improved, but he didn’t seem to be in any distress—certainly not medically speaking, at any rate. He did seem—well, it’s not like I know him, but he was distracted and with good reason.”

Xhex stared at her phone as if she were waiting for a text back. When one didn’t come, she put the phone away. “He’s off rotation. They won’t let him fight.”

“So the Brothers won’t be looking for him,” Murhder added.

“No, they won’t.” Xhex turned to walk away. “No one will be looking for him.”

As the female strode off, she moved with purpose, her boots pounding across the concrete floor. It was obvious what she was planning on doing. She was going to search for him herself.

Murhder stared after her, his arms down at his sides, his fists tightened, his jaw hard.

“Go,” Sarah told him softly. “I’ll be fine here.”

“It’s okay—”

“You want to go, and she needs the help. Plus I feel totally safe. Jane is supposed to be coming down again after she eats, and we’re going back to work.”

He looked over at her. Pulled a hand through his long hair. Shifted his weight back and forth.

“Go on.” She patted his chest. “I’m not leaving—hell, I don’t even know where I am, and no one’s looking for me, either. Xhex really needs a friend right now—and I don’t blame her for being concerned.”

Murhder started to shake his head. Then he cursed, dropped a hard kiss on her mouth, and said something really fast.

Before Sarah could decode the syllables, he ran down after the female. Xhex had made it quite a distance, so that when she paused as he came up to her, there was no hearing what they said.

As the two stood together, it was clear they had known each other for a long time: There was trust between the pair of them, even as they started to argue, arms being crossed, brows going down, faster words getting traded.

And then Xhex rolled her eyes and shrugged in a classic suit-yourself kind of way.

After which the two disappeared through a glass door.

Sarah went back into the break room and helped herself to a Snickers bar, a bag of Snyder’s of Hanover pretzels, and a Coke. She ate the calories systematically, and thought about all the times she and Gerry had wolfed down bad choices between classes and seminars and stints in university labs …

Back during their schooling years, he had been so young and full of ideals and ideas. So had she.

Now, she was alone in a subterranean, vampire-run clinical environment.

Having had the sex of her life with another species.

Over on that sofa. Like, right. Over. There.

As she glanced at the couch they’d made love on, it was impossible not to note that one arm and part of the back made things look as if it had been in a car accident. The poor thing was bent off whatever frame held the cushions together, all cockeyed and crooked.

She checked the TV again. Wheel of Fortune was just coming on and she muted Pat and Vanna.

She couldn’t believe that there was nothing on the news or online about what they had done in Ithaca the night before. Kraiten had been yelling about criminal trespassing. His own car had been stolen, for godsakes. But maybe he had realized that getting the authorities involved would be tricky. You’d have to explain why they were needed, and experimenting on a human subject—

Nate wasn’t human, she reminded herself.

As she thought about the billions and billions of dollars that Big Pharma competed for, she had to wonder if Kraiten would want the details of his company’s secret experiments kept quiet not because of any criminal implications—did human laws even cover non-human species? Was this an ASPCA issue, for godsakes?—but because then the other for-profit research corporations would try to get their own vampires for testing.

It was a sick way of looking at it, but drug breakthroughs were worth incalculable amounts of money, and BioMed’s CEO was that greedy—

Wait. His memories had been scrubbed, hadn’t they?

She slowly turned back to the TV. What if the man didn’t even know the raid had happened? Except how would that work? Did Murhder erase Kraiten’s recollections of everything, including the secret lab? In that case, what was going to happen when the researchers in Gerry’s department showed up to work on something that the CEO didn’t believe existed?

Jeez, the implications were like an LSAT test that strained the capacity of the human mind.

Where did the memories start and stop?

She thought of Gerry’s death. And that of his boss, Dr. McCaid.

Kraiten had done many things wrong, and she had the proof. Plus the vampires were back in their own world now, safe and sound. When she returned to her side, she needed to go to the authorities with—

Once again, that blazing headache pounded through her skull on steel horseshoes, the pain eclipsing all thought about where she needed to go with that she knew. Rubbing her face, she abruptly remembered why it wasn’t a great idea to eat boatloads of sugar, salt, and caffeine on a oner once you were out of your late teens and early twenties.

“You okay?”

Sarah jumped as someone spoke up, and it was miraculous. As she opened her eyes and focused on Jane, the headache essentially disappeared.