But he was not worried about his own personal safety.

Vents. More ductwork. Filters he was able to get through because there were no steel components to them.

He came out through a furnace, reestablishing his physical form in a pitch-black room that smelled like desert-dry air and motor oil. The instant he was corporeal, his presence triggered a motion-sensitive light and his eyes burned in the glare. Bracing for an alarm, he palmed one of his guns and sank down into his thighs in case someone threw open the door that was before him.

When no one came in, he glanced back at the industrial furnace, took a deep breath, and dematerialized through the thin seam under that door.

Re-forming again, he found himself in a break room. Two maintenance men in dark green uniforms had their backs to him, the pair of them sitting at a table and watching basketball on a black-and-white TV as they smoked.

“Pardon me, gentlemen,” he said dryly.

The humans jumped and whirled around. Before they could call for help, he reached into their minds and paralyzed them where they stood. Then he chose the one on the right, and started popping the tops off the man’s mental canisters, peering into all kinds of memories.

Okay … wow.

The guy was cheating on his wife and worried he’d caught a venereal disease from his girlfriend. He had tremendous guilt over the betrayal, but he couldn’t fathom his life without the other woman and he was obsessed with knowing who else the woman was sleeping with. Was it Charlie from Engineering—

Totally not what Murhder was looking for, but brains were not like a library full of books. There was no Dewey decimal system with a corresponding card catalogue to go by. Things came up in order of importance to the individual, not the temporal trespasser.

He switched to the guy on the left and hit the jackpot.

This one had just gotten promoted and was eager for the union-mandated break to be over so he could get back to work. He liked having some power around the place.

Much better, Murhder thought.

Moments later, he had the information he needed: Yes, there was a top secret laboratory, and it was not far.

Murhder wiped their memories clear of his interruption, and then inserted orders for them to sit back down and resume watching the game.

No reason to kick up complications until he absolutely had to.

Out in a corridor now, and there was no dematerializing anymore. He was way too hyped, his senses far too alive, and as a master would unleash a hound, so he released the most animalistic part of himself to carry forward: Ambulation was no longer a conscious coordination of limbs but an autonomic process serving the greatest good.

These humans had vampires imprisoned here. And they were doing unholy things to them.

He knew this down to his soul, and he was going to get it right this time. No distractions. No mistakes. No emotions.

All of which had led to his failure before.

When he rounded a corner and came upon two human males in white laboratory coats, he snapped their necks and left the bodies where they fell. Innocent victims? Not fucking hardly, and if time hadn’t been of the essence, he would have taken their death knell pain to new levels—and not stopped with just this pair.

He would murder every single living, breathing entity in this torture chamber.

Instead, he kept going, pounding down corridors, passing in and out of the views of security cameras mounted in the ceiling.

The alarms sounded just as he stopped before a door that was made of steel, the one metal that vampires could not dematerialize through.

And they’d sealed the walls of whatever was on the far side with steel mesh.

These humans knew how to keep their victims on their premises, he thought.

Thank fuck they hadn’t had the foresight to secure the entire facility that way—no doubt because they were more concerned with escape rather than rescue.

The explosives he carried were in his backpack, and he set up a quick wad of C4, shoved a detonator into its compliant form, and stepped back. Boom! was an understatement. And before the smoke cleared, the door fell away from its jamb, landing on the floor inside like a tomb slab.

Murhder jumped forward with his daggers palmed. No guns. He didn’t want to kill any captive victims with stray bullets—

It was a full-blown medical laboratory with shelves full of supplies, an operating table that made him want to throw up, and all kinds of microscopes and monitors on counters and desks.

He slaughtered the lab workers in seconds. Three of them, all men in white coats. They offered no coordinated resistance to his attack, wasting time screaming and trying to run, and he went for the one who picked up a phone first. As he slashed their throats, those lab coats turned red down the front, and the laminated ID cards they wore around their necks got a pink stain.

As he dropped the last of them, he wheeled around and confronted a pair of mesh-covered cages. They were some six feet wide, fifteen feet long, and six feet tall, and through the densely woven steel that had been wrapped around them top to bottom, he saw a male on the left, naked with a food bowl and a container of water like he was a fucking animal.

There was a female in the other pen—

Dearest Virgin Scribe, she was heavily pregnant.

And as her eyes, hollow and haunted, stared out at him through the weave of steel bands, her mouth opened in shock.

Reality warped on him.

The face in the sacred glass. From the seeing bowl.

This was the female!

“You can’t touch the bars,” the male said over the din of the alarms and through the dissipating smoke. “They’re charged.”

Murhder shook himself back to attention. The male was up on his feet, but so emaciated, he was probably going to have to be carried out. And the female with the young was in even worse shape—she was on her knees, and he worried that was all she could do.

“Over there,” the male said as he pointed to an electrical box mounted on the wall. “There’s the circuit breaker for the cages.”

No time to fuck around with fuses. Murhder traded one of his daggers for a gun and plowed six shots into the metal panel. Sparks flew and there was a minor explosion, more smoke with a metal bite to it released into the lab.

“Stand back,” he ordered.

The male knew what he was thinking, and the poor guy got his fragile body out of the way as Murhder pointed his gun at the locking mechanism on the cage. The bullet he discharged split the casing, releasing a set of mechanical internal organs onto the floor.

The prisoner pushed the door wide and stumbled out on pin-thin legs that trembled so badly, the knobby knees knocked together. His hair had been shaved and there were electrodes attached to his skull.

Murhder focused on the pregnant female. “We can’t leave her.” The sprinkler system came on, water raining down on them, triggered by the release of smoke. “I need to …”

But he couldn’t carry both of them and still have a hand free for a gun. And it went without saying that in their weakened states, neither one of them could dematerialize.

“I’m going to save her.” His voice didn’t sound like his own. “It is my destiny.”

As Murhder approached the cage, the female dragged herself over to the hinged panel in front. Behind the steel mesh, her hands clenched on the bars, her mouth moving, her voice too weak to register through the alarm, the sprinkler, that internal screaming inside his head.

Her hair had been shaved off, too. She had bruises on her shoulders. To spare her modesty, he didn’t look any further down.

“She won’t make it out alive,” the male said in a voice that cracked. “She’s about to give birth.”

“Fuck that,” Murhder said as he reached for the latch. “I’ll carry her out and then we’ll get her medical attention—”

Security guards skidded into the doorway, three men in blue uniforms who were armed with autoloaders. Murhder shot at them as he pulled the male behind his body and moved for cover. Flipping a worktable over, he yanked a portion of glass-fronted metal shelving on top of the thing, all kinds of beakers and test tubes crashing as the front panels broke open and let loose its contents. Changing clips, he kept shooting, but it was without aim.

The male let out a bark. “I’m hit!”

More security guards at the door. Murhder looked at the other cage, at the female. She had flattened herself in the far corner as best she could, her big belly out to the side, her eyes locked on him as if she knew he was her one chance to get out of a nightmare.

He looked at the male, and did the risk benefit analysis in his head. Twice.

There was no chance of getting her out of that cage safely now, and as long as he was in the lab, bullets were going to continue to fly.

“I’ll come back for her. I’ll bring the brothers with me. I swear on my honor.”

Another lead slug whizzed by his head. Two more went into the table and the shelving, the dull, metallic impacts belying the flimsy nature of their cover.

They both looked over at the female. She hadn’t been hit, yet, and it was clear she could read what was on their faces. That mouth of hers opened wide as she clawed at the bars, at the mesh, her frantic eyes revealing the depths of the hell she was in—

A car horn, set at the precise pitch of that terrified female’s scream, brought him back to the present. He had stopped dead in the middle of the snowy street, and as he turned toward the sound, he was blinded by headlights. His arm went up to shield his eyes, but he didn’t think to move—

The car hit him solidly, its tires locking on the snowpack, its mass times acceleration utterly unabated on the slippery road—and his body slammed into the hood and rolled up the windshield. He caught a quick passing survey of the clear winter sky as he passed over the roof, and then he hit the road on the far side facedown and in a jumble of limbs.

With a curse, he gave his body a second to register any complaints, and besides, the cold snow felt good against his hot cheek. Dimly, he noted the sound of car doors opening—three of them?

“Aw shit, my father’s gonna kill me—”

“You shouldna drive high—”