Bonded by Blood

chapter SEVENTEEN

MACKENZIE HEARD A light tapping on the cabin door.

“Good morning. Or should I say, good afternoon.” Shirl stood on the top stair dressed in army green hip-wader boots. She held two empty buckets in one hand, two rakes pinched under her arm, and a to-go mug in the other, which she held out to Mackenzie. “It’s a two-percent mocha with extra whip. Sorry, it’s not nonfat. We don’t do skinny around here.” She laughed. “Thought maybe you could use some company, since I heard Dom freaked out and split.”

“Thanks. He called you?” Mackenzie pulled the lid off to dip her finger into the whipped cream. Dom must’ve told Shirl how she liked her espresso drinks. She would’ve been touched by his thoughtfulness if she hadn’t been so pissed off.

“Yeah, I can’t believe he left. He knows he could’ve come up to the main house and we’d have gotten him another room if he was so worried about hurting you. Hey, open the hall closet there and grab a pair of boots, will ya? I’m taking you clamming. It’s a minus tide and the water will be out at its farthest point soon.”

“I’m not really—”

“Nonsense,” Shirl said. “Let’s get going. The tide’s only out for another half hour or so. It’s not often we get such a low tide during the daylight hours, so we gotta take advantage of it. It’s usually in the middle of the night, so I send Chuck.”

One mocha and ten minutes later, they were raking the rocky beach for butter clams.

“I was so mad at Chuck when he came to bed this morning. He and Dom had a long talk before Dom left for Seattle. For Pete’s sake, if I had known he was leaving, I’d have gone out there and talked him out of it.”

“Chuck is a…” Mackenzie still couldn’t say the word.

“Vampire, dear? Yes, he is. That’s why he didn’t come down to the car to greet you last night, being that you’re of the sweetblood. He’s actually very charming. He and Dom are very close, almost like father and son, and he wanted to meet the girl who swept Dom off his feet. I sort of think that’s why Dom brought you all the way here.”

Even in the chill of the sea air, Mackenzie’s cheeks flared hot as she plucked several pale gray clams from the overturned sand and placed them in her bucket. “You’re obviously not a…a vampire. How…”

“How did that happen? How do we make it work?”

Mackenzie nodded. She told herself she was curious just for the sake of being curious. Like a detached reporter interviewing a witness, gathering information for a story.

“We met and fell in love. Just like two regular humans do. We talked about having me go through the change. You know, to convert me over to a vampire? We got married and even obtained Council permission. But when it came to the commitment ceremony a year later, I still couldn’t do it. I’ve got this huge blood phobia. As in psychiatrist-and-support-group phobia, and I couldn’t do it. The conversion process involves…”

Shirl stopped and wiped her forehead with the back of her hand. “Well, let’s just say I couldn’t bear to go through it. But boy, did I consider it. A vamp and a human can’t conceive, but a vamp and a changeling can. I’d always seen myself with a whole brood…but I guess it wasn’t in the cards for me. God sure does have a sense of humor. Me with my blood phobia, falling in love with a vampire? Go figure.”

Mackenzie stooped down to turn over a rock and watched as a few tiny crabs skittered away to find another hiding place. A sense of humor? Like me being a sweetblood and Dom being a vampire?

The older woman meandered across the beach, which was sandier at the low tide mark than up at the top, her eyes glued to her shuffling feet. Mackenzie followed. They walked toward a large gathering of seagulls that flew off in unison, cawing their irritation into the wind. Evidently finding what she had been searching for, Shirl began raking the sand again.

“Is it hard for you and Chuck to think about? I mean, that you’ll…I mean…he’ll live so much longer…”

“That I’ll kick the bucket before he does? That I’ll age while he stays young?” Shirl held her hand up to her mouth as if she were going to tell a secret. “Thank God, I fell in love with an older man. Much older. Way older.” She snorted and slapped her thigh. “Can’t imagine what we’d have done if he were younger when we met.”

“If you were to do it all over again, would you still choose not to convert?”

“I don’t know, honey, but all I can say is that if I wasn’t so averse to blood, I’d be a grandmother by now.”

“WHAT HAVE YOU found?” Dom watched as Cordell’s dark, slender fingers flew across the dual keyboards and his head cranked left and right, scanning the huge monitor. He was vaguely aware that Lily had just entered the room behind him.

“I haven’t been able to hack into their main site. Their security is pretty tight. But from what I can tell, they’re stepping up their capture efforts. Look here. They’ve got several laboratories here in the States. Atlanta, Dallas, Orlando.”

Jackson elbowed Dom in the ribs. “Your buddies in the Orlando field office will be thrilled to hear this from you. Are you still not speaking?”

“Shut up, Jacks,” Lily said, as she came up behind him, a little out of breath. “Dom, I just got off the phone with my contact.”

“And?”

“It’s a breeding operation. Darkbloods are setting up a goddamn breeding operation.”

He felt his pupils dilate and the blood pounded between his ears. “With sweetbloods?”

“Yes, they’re capturing them to breed them. They’re keeping them alive, hoping they can successfully mate two sweetbloods to create more.”

“That’s whacked,” said Jackson. “I knew they were a bunch of freaks, but that’s just twisted.”

“And it’s set to commence soon,” Dom reminded them. “We need to find these facilities—as in yesterday. Cordell, you said you couldn’t hack into their system. How do you know the labs are in those cities?”

“Those losers must’ve copied these reports from the main Darkblood site that we can’t break into.” Cordell paged down to the next screen. “Phoenix, San Diego.” He craned his neck around and looked at Dom. “And Seattle. They’ve got one clear up here.”

Panic knotted his gut as an overwhelming sense of protectiveness came over him. Mackenzie. Dios mio. He took a half-step backwards and grabbed the edge of a table. A piece of it crumbled under his fingers.

She wasn’t on their database up here, though, he told himself. They didn’t know about her—the information he’d downloaded to his phone proved that. But then what about last night? Those DBs sure as hell knew about her. Could they have run across her by chance?

Cordell’s fingers flew across the keys. “I can’t find exact locations for any of the facilities.”

“Send out an alert to all the regions letting them know about Lily’s new information and what you’ve discovered. Maybe someone’s turned up something that can help us locate the sites.” Dom twisted his thumb rings as he paced.

“Look,” Lily said, pointing to the screen. “There’s a spreadsheet of names of the family lines they’re seeking. Can you pull up that document?”

“Sure.” Cordell clicked open the file. They all leaned over his chair as a detailed chart popped up on the screen.

“Holy shit,” Lily said. “Looks like they’ve captured a few of them already.”

Dom cursed under his breath and began pacing again, unable to get it out of his head that Mackenzie was on the island and not under his immediate protection.

“We’ve got to change our focus from tracking DBs to locating this facility,” Jackson said. “If we find that, we hamstring their whole operation.”

“I agree,” Dom said. They needed manpower for a widespread search, but with Stryker still not a hundred percent, they were seriously short-staffed. “Cordell, contact Portland and Vancouver. See if they can spare any Guardians. Lily, we’ll need a few more Class-A scent-trackers. Can you—”

“I’m on it,” she said.

Good. They’d mobilize as many—

“Um, Dom?”

He stopped pacing and turned around. Lily was pointing to the screen. “What’s Mackenzie’s last name?”

His blood turned icy in his veins. “Foster-Shaw.”

“According to this spreadsheet, those guys who were after her were looking for a Mackenzie Shaw.”

The vise around his internal organs tightened further. They didn’t just happen upon her last night? They’ve been looking for her? “But the database I downloaded onto my phone showed no Fosters or Shaws.”

“Dunno, love. That was a couple weeks ago. The name’s there now,” Lily said.

“Lemme see,” Cordell said. “Maybe it’s not the same person.”

“Yeah, what are the chances of that?” Jackson said.

The tech lab felt eerily quiet except for the clicking of the keyboard. While Dom paced, the seconds slipped by as if they were large grains of sand in a too-small hourglass.

Finally Cordell spoke. “Does she have something to do with the University of Washington? Wait. Is this her website?”

Dom snapped his head around to see an artist’s website pop up on the screen and Mackenzie’s picture smiling back at him.

The sudden roar in his ears numbed his whole body and he stumbled backwards. They know about her. Darkbloods know about Mackenzie. What in hell was he thinking leaving her on the island? How could she possibly be safe without him?

“Jackson, Lily, I want you each to lead a search unit,” he yelled as he ran for the door. “Cordell, you coordinate things from here. Put together a list of the most probable places for them to locate such a facility. I’ll contact Santiago. Have him send as many Guardians as the other field teams can spare, using Daytrans vehicles if necessary. We’ll have a tactical at 2:00 p.m. tomorrow and be ready to hit the streets by nightfall.”

He glanced at his watch. He could make it to the resort by late afternoon. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”