Eric Lustbader - Blood Trust

“Well, I reminded her.” Jack sighed. “Not that it did any good. She was determined. No one and nothing was going to get in her way.”

ALLI CARSON was pulled from sleep, roughly and without warning.

“Get up, Ms. Carson. Please be good enough to rouse yourself.”

Alli turned over, opened her eyes, and was almost blinded by the fierce glare from the overhead light. Who had turned it on, who was barking orders at her? Her mind, still fuzzed with the dream of Emma’s face glowing in the light of—what?—a streetlamp, a full moon, an unearthly luminescence?

“What is this? I don’t under—”

“Please do as I say, Ms. Carson, quickly, quickly!”

“Commander Fellows?”

“Yes,” Brice Fellows said. “Come, come, there’s no time to lose!”

She sat up. The oversized T-shirt she slept in was black, covered in white silk-screened skulls. Though twenty-three, she looked more like sixteen or seventeen. Graves’ disease had interfered with her growing, so that she was slight, almost pixieish, just over five feet in height, her tomboy figure more suited to an adolescent than an adult.

“Can you please tell me—?”

“Hurry, Ms. Carson. The police are outside.”

Fellows glanced around the dorm room, pointed to a chair on which she had casually tossed the clothes she had been wearing during dinner. Beyond was an empty bed with the covers pushed back.

“Where—where is Vera?” Alli asked.

“You don’t know what happened to her?”

“No, I don’t.” Beneath her anger at this treatment, she felt a wave of fear rising inside her. “She fell asleep before I did. She was there when I turned off the light.”

A catch in the commander’s voice. “Well, that, at least, is a relief.

“Now, please, Ms. Carson, get dressed.”

“Where is Vera?”

“She’s in the infirmary.”

A clutch in the pit of Alli’s stomach. “Is she okay?”

“At the moment I can’t say.”

“Commander, you’re scaring me.”

“Please, Ms. Carson, just do as I ask.”

Crossing to the chair, she drew on a pair of black jeans and a thick turtleneck sweater of the same color. She always dressed in black. Sitting on Vera’s bed, she placed her palms against the bottom sheet as if to make certain that Vera wasn’t there. Then, drawing her shoes over, she stepped into them.

“Here, you’ll need this.”

He passed her her leather jacket. She swung it around and zipped up.

“Come with me.”

She stood up, silently, with a fiercely beating heart.

Beyond her door, the hallway was only dimly lit, so as not to awaken the other recruits on the floor, she assumed. She saw two police detectives, a three-man forensics team, and a pair of Secret Service agents, one of whom, Naomi Wilde, had been the head of her mother’s detail. Cops and the Secret Service? What in the world had happened?

All at once, her heart skipped a beat. “Naomi, is Vera all right?”

“Keep your voice down.”

She turned to see three forensics techs snapping on latex gloves before they stepped into her room. Turning on the lights, they began to methodically go through it.

“What are they looking for?” Then Alli turned back to Naomi. “Please,” she begged. “Just tell me if Vera is okay.” But Naomi’s face was as blank as a field of snow.

“Ms. Bard is in the infirmary,” Naomi said.

“I already know that,” Alli said. Something in her voice had spoken of a forced detachment, which caused Alli’s stomach to clench in anxiety. If Naomi wasn’t in control of the situation …

“She’s been drugged. She was disoriented, sick to her stomach. She went out into the hallway without, apparently, knowing where she was, and collapsed. A security guard found her.”

“What?” A chill ran through Alli. “My God, how … who would do such a thing? I want to see her—!”

“Ms. Carson—”

“Hey, Vera’s the only one here who gives a damn about me.”

A member of the forensics team emerged from Alli’s room holding a plastic evidence bag with something in it. Approaching one of the Metro detectives, he handed over the bag and whispered in the detective’s ear, before disappearing back inside the room.

The Metro detective cocked his head. “Interesting you should say that now.”

Alli turned on him, her cheeks aflame. “What the hell does that mean?”

He held up the bag. “This bottle contains traces of Rohypnol. Roofies in common street parlance, the date-rape drug. It was found under your bed.”

“What?”

“You deny it’s yours?”

“Of course I deny it.”

“So it’s your claim that you didn’t drug your roommate?”

“What the what? Why on earth would I?”

“Please keep your voices down,” Commander Fellows interrupted.

“Ms. Carson,” the detective said in a steely voice, “I must insist you come with us now.”

She looked around. “Just let me find my cell phone.”

“The academy is in lockdown. You know the rules.” The commander gestured to the doorway. “This way, Ms. Carson.”

She knew better than to argue further with Fellows. He ran Fearington like an Army boot camp, and talking back would only get her into deeper trouble. Fearington was one of only a couple of elite academies that fed the government secret services. Like its brethren in other regions of the country, Fearington was a closely guarded secret. Its cadets were the cream of the crop, exhaustively vetted and tested before being chosen to fill its ranks. The courses were rigorous, both physically and intellectually. It had taken all of Jack’s skills to get Alli accepted into the examination phase; following Jack’s intensive tutelage, she had done the rest. But from the very first day, she had been acutely aware of the fact that she didn’t fit the traditional Fearington mold.

As she was marched down the hallway and out onto the grounds, she wondered dazedly why she was in trouble. Her legs were shaking and the core of her felt cold. Nevertheless, she had no choice but to take her first step into the nightmare.

“GENTLEMEN, WHAT a surprise finding you here.”

This was how Henry Holt Carson, oldest brother of the late president, announced himself as he walked through the door into his sister-in-law’s room. Immensely wealthy and influential, he wore a silk-and-cashmere made-to-measure suit that Jack estimated must have cost at least five thousand dollars. On his feet were John Lobb shoes, mirror-shined, but not, Jack was certain, by Carson himself. His cold blue eyes, huge as an owl’s, studied them both, but failed, Jack noted, to even glance at Lyn’s corpse. But then, she was dead, Jack thought, and of no use to him.

“Interlopers to the end, I see.” His lopsided smile failed to blunt the barb of his remark.

He was in every way his brother’s polar opposite. A hard-nosed businessman, he distrusted and detested politicians, especially the ones he couldn’t buy off. He owned mining interests in the Midwest, for which he was forever buying pollution credits so he could continue pulling ore out of the ground and refining it. More recently, he had bought up a number of regional banks at bargain basement prices, merging them into one, InterPublic Bancorp. He had been married and divorced four times that Jack knew of. He had children, but, according to Edward, could neither remember their names nor what they looked like. He was an empire builder through and through. But, somehow, possibly because of his affection for all things familial, Edward had forgiven his brother his peccadillos and loved him as one ought to love a brother. It was anyone’s guess how the elder Carson felt about Edward. A rock might reveal more of its personal nature.