“It can take years to cultivate a city into a well-running machine,” Raphael says from where he stands in the dining room. “In our city, we’ve always made sure the Order had no foothold, and that the blood banks and willing humans were in good supply. We don’t overfeed, and we don’t stick our heads up to get noticed.”
“Nikolaos is probably intentionally keeping the city this way,” I say, and nod out the window. “New Elysium is such a central location in the nation that it would be a boon to all if it was running well.
“He’s behind this shit,” Raphael snaps out of nowhere, his voice full of rage. “She’s fucking here. I can feel her in my very bones. Each and every fiber of my sinew is screaming she’s here.”
“Father,” Andrei says quietly as we watch Raphael storm out of the room. “It has to be the girl from the club. Two is improbable… but three?”
“How?” I ask. “Raphael would have felt her at the club when we were there.”
“He never came inside,” Andrei says.
Those four fucking words start a cascade of dominos falling into place. My brain seeing dots I wasn’t able to connect before.
The Order found a way to mask a soulmarked better than we thought…
The one in the club, she was Raphael’s.
Perhaps the reason Nikolaos isn’t as drawn to the girl he has now is because she’s masked in some special way Chloe wasn’t…
A way that also prevented Raphael from sensing her.
“Andrei, have you ever heard in any of your research of a soulmark happening at birth?” I ask, looking directly at Chloe.
“It’s beyond rare. The mark usually doesn’t appear until after puberty, when the woman is grown and ready. I’ve read tomes, scripts, books… writings on cave walls, for fuck’s sake.” He throws his hands in the air. “Never heard of it.”
“What would it take to mask a soulmarked, Chloe?”
“You can’t…” she says with a quiet sigh. “God knows I tried. I used cinnamon oil, I wore someone else’s dirty laundry, I moved around every few months. I ate fish… So much fish…”
“Fish?” I look to the guys around us. “What the fuck would fish do?”
“I was taught vampires are repelled by the vitamin oils in fish,” Chloe says with a shocked expression.
The room filling with laughter seems to wound Chloe in some way.
“Mother,” Ambrose dances around, his feet barely touching the floor as he sings to her, “I still enjoy a bluefin tuna once a year.”
Eyes burning with anger, Chloe looks furious as she rants. “All those years of fish and more fish. I’m going to murder them all. Just the thought of it now makes my stomach sick. I didn’t eat a piece of meat until I was fourteen! It was always fish. Do you know how long it was until I had my first piece of pepperoni pizza? Do you know how guilty I felt after eating it? The guilt of being weak and giving into temptation plagued my thoughts for weeks!”
Slamming herself back into my side, I can feel the rage simmering inside her. Her emotions are still maturing and her hormones are adjusting to becoming a vampire. She’ll go through these things, but she has a point.
“Everything you’ve just listed is a nonissue for us,” I say simply. “We’ve been onto those tricks for decades, if not centuries. Or, at least, my coven has.”
“Do they know that?” Andrei asks with half a smile. He’s connecting the dots as well. “Chloe, I need to ask you something… and I can’t be delicate with it.”
“Go ahead,” she grouses, “but if it’s about fish, I’ll have your father eat you.”
Chuckling, Andrei shakes his big head and leans toward us. “When we found you, you were running, weren’t you? You were running away from us, but you couldn’t go to them. The hunter was coming because you called, not because he was sent for your protection.”
Chloe freezes up in my arms, her rigid posture giving us all the answer we need. “He’d still be alive if it wasn’t for me. He’s only here because I called him.”
“Maybe so,” I say, “but they were preparing him for your call anyways.”
“You were bait,” Andrei says. “They were testing out their new toy—Isaac.”
“What do you mean?” she asks, but we can all see it in her eyes, the realization of the truth.
“You were an experiment,” I say. “They wanted to see if they could make soldiers with a soulmarked’s blood.”
“And they did,” Andrei says.
Chloe whispers, “Oh God.”
“They’re developing new methods to combat us. Trying to see which one works the best. They fed a hunter blood because they wanted to see his capabilities. Which were…” I trail off.
“Not good,” Matthias says. “But this is trial and error for them right now. He could have also been too bent on saving Chloe. Not following protocol. We’ll have to question Isaac when he gets through the frenzy. He’s going to be a wealth of information.”