Dave grunted. “And I don’t want his, but here we are anyway.”
So saying, he accepted the knife from Bones and knelt next to Madigan. Instead of undoing buttons, he sliced through Madigan’s shirt, exposing the older man’s pale, gray-furred torso.
“Any trick to this?” Dave asked, resting the sharp tip over Madigan’s chest.
Bones let out a slight snort. “No, this is the easy part. Putting it back properly is where you need delicacy and precision.”
Dave drove the blade through the center of Madigan’s chest. Then he hacked away a section of rib cage, exposing the former operative’s heart. A few slices later, and Dave was holding it up like a grim trophy.
“Would’ve sworn it would be black,” he muttered.
If evil left a stain, it would have been, but Madigan’s heart looked like everyone else’s. That didn’t mean I wanted closer contact with it, yet when Dave extended it to me, I took it. As unsettling as this was, it didn’t compare with what was coming.
Dave handed the bloody knife to Bones and visibly braced.
Bones didn’t hesitate. He shoved it to the hilt under Dave’s rib cage. Then, just as quick and brutal, he cut a space wide enough for his hand and plunged that in next. Harsh noises escaped Dave’s tightly closed lips, but he didn’t scream. I would have, if it were my heart being cut out of my chest. Repeatedly, yet those ragged sounds were the only indication Dave gave of how much it hurt, let alone the mental trauma of seeing Bones withdraw his heart from his chest.
“Now, Kitten,” Bones said in a clipped tone.
I handed him Madigan’s heart and took Dave’s, placing it in Madigan’s open chest cavity. Then I wiped my hands on my borrowed lab coat, which was now more red than white. In the short time it took to do that, Bones finished with Dave, who staggered as he backed away.
“You need to eat,” Bones told him. “There’s plenty here, so have at it, and remember—raw will mend you faster.”
He wasn’t referring to a ghoul’s usual meal of uncooked butcher cuts. I chided myself for my instant flash of nausea as Dave left to follow those instructions. He couldn’t help what he needed to survive, and as Bones had pointed out, there were lots of dead soldiers to choose from. Besides, Dave’s part in this might be finished, but ours wasn’t.
“Bring me two,” Bones said. He knelt next to Madigan’s body, arranging the parts inside with skill born of practice.
I left the elevation shaft and went to the other room, where the compound’s employees waited with obedient silence. Then I selected two of the healthiest-looking and led them from the group. Before they saw the interior of the elevation shaft, I stared into their eyes with my gaze lit up.
“Don’t be afraid,” I told them in a resonant voice. “You won’t be harmed.”
If I hadn’t done that before I led them inside the circular room, they would have been pants-pissing terrified at seeing a body with its chest carved open and a vampire leaning over it while cutting his own throat. Hell, it made me antsy, and I’d seen the same years ago when Bones raised Dave as a ghoul. Changing someone into a vampire was downright prissy-looking by comparison.
Once Bones had drained a couple pints of his blood into Madigan’s chest cavity, he sat back. Quickly, I led the man and woman over. He drank from each of them and returned to his grisly task of forcing more blood out of him and into Madigan’s gaping chest. Since he didn’t need my help for this, I led the two donors back to their group. They’d be a little woozy, but otherwise fine.
Before I could return to the elevation platform, I ran into Tate.
“We have a problem,” he stated.
I glanced around warily. “More guards?”
“No, we took care of the stragglers,” he said in a dismissive way. Then his tone hardened. “I’m talking about software. Turns out the Dante machine wasn’t the only self-destruct mechanism.”
I groaned. “You don’t mean . . .”
“That Madigan had an emergency kill switch that flash-fried every memory stick and hard drive in here?” Tate supplied darkly. “Yeah, I do. Not even cell phones and tablets escaped. Everything’s toast.”
I fought the urge to bang my head against the nearest wall. No wonder the smug bastard had said that if he killed himself, we’d never discover his secrets! Incineration machines. Laser nets. Software self-destruct devices. Madigan had been paranoid to a fantastic degree to install all of these safety measures in this facility. Who, or what, had he been trying to protect?
At least we might still be able to find out.