Page 1 of Vein & Vow (The Bouchers #1)

I ’d seen a lot of dead people. Conservatively, I’d seen thousands. They’d died in war, natural disasters, accidents, suicides, murders, and plain old age. I’d long ago stopped being shocked or feeling much of anything when I came across one.

But nothing had prepared me to see my baby brother laid out on a stainless-steel table.

I reached desperately for the usual detachment, but I couldn’t find it. I couldn’t actually hold on to any single emotion or thought beyond the fact that they’d obviously tried to spare us by placing his body parts close together to give the illusion that he was all in one piece.

He wasn’t.

The sheet dipped ominously between his torso and head. His thighs and knees. The ball of his shoulders and most of his arms. His wrists and hands.

I swallowed down the bile in the back of my throat.

“You know who did this?” my father rasped, his eyes flickering between the normal blue and a deep red.

“Strike team three eliminated all of them,” Arthur assured him. The Commandant of the United States Vampire Command looked almost as sick as I felt. “It took them less than a day to get back into the compound.”

“Why weren’t we informed?” Ambrose, my eldest brother, stared at the commandant.

“It was a fluid situation.”

“Bullshit.”

“How much less than a day?” my brother, Chance, asked derisively. “A fucking hour? You can’t tell me this didn’t take a while.”

I forced myself not to flinch. I refused to think about all that Zeke had gone through before the end. Not now. Maybe not ever.

“It took them twelve hours.”

“We should’ve been there,” Danny murmured. “We should’ve known.”

“We did know.” I swallowed hard. “All of us knew.”

I’d known the moment Zeke was hurt. There was always a low vibration of connection between the five of us. When one of us was worried or injured, all of us felt it to some degree. Sometimes we didn’t know which of us was in danger, and it became a process of elimination game, each of us reaching out to the others until we knew who was in trouble. Zeke had been the only one we hadn’t been able to contact.

“You’re sure this was some small group and not part of a larger?—”

“They were locals who noticed that the team didn’t get injured like they should’ve,” Arthur replied, cutting our father off. “They knew what we were, and when given the opportunity…” He grimaced and shook his head.

“How the hell did they even have the opportunity?” Ambrose asked. “How the fuck did they keep him down?”

“That, we don’t know,” the commandant confessed.

“And no one thought to ask?” Chance snapped in disbelief.

“I give you my word?—”

“Fuck your word,” I said flatly, staring at the man who’d been like an uncle to us.

Our brother had been cut into pieces, and Uncle Arthur hadn’t even called to let us know he’d been captured. We’d spent the last two days trying to find out what the fuck was going on. Our mother was frantic. We’d barely been able to convince her to stay home while we came into headquarters, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if she came through the doorway at any moment.

He’d fucked us.

“Bjorn,” my father snapped in warning.

“It’s all right, Erik,” Arthur said, shaking his head. His eyes met mine. “This is unprecedented aggression.”

“What the hell did you all expect when you went public?” Danny spat.

“We went public sixty-four years ago, Daniel,” Arthur reminded him. “And since that time, targeted assaults have been minimal. The benefits of no longer having to hide our species from the rest of the world far outweigh the consequences of living openly.”

Danny scoffed. “Tell that to our brother.”

“We’re doing everything in our power to make sure that this is an isolated event,” Arthur replied quietly. “And not part of a larger plot.”

I didn’t think a single one of us believed that some random local group in the middle of the jungle had the means and opportunity to hold my brother captive for any length of time, not without outside resources.

Our father stared at his friend. “You have all that you need from him?” he asked quietly, reaching out to brush Zeke’s hair back from his forehead.

“We do,” the commandant confirmed.

“I’ll expect him back home by dusk tonight.”

“I don’t know if it’ll be possible to?—”

“Tonight, Arthur,” my dad ordered, reaching into his pocket. “No later.”

The commandant held our father’s stare for a long moment before nodding. “I’ll see it done.”

With a nod, my father flipped open the pocketknife in his hand and reached out to cut a lock of Zeke’s hair. My throat tightened painfully as he cupped it into his palm for a moment before closing his fist.

As everyone began to file out of the room, I looked down at Zeke again. His face was slack, and there was mottled bruising around his jaw and eyes, but he still looked like the little brother who had followed us around, trying to be a part of anything and everything we’d ever done. It was almost as if, at any moment, his eyes would open, and he’d tell me to get my shit together.

I wondered where he was now that he was no longer here.

“If she’s there,” I murmured quietly. “Send her my love.”

“Let’s go,” Chance ordered from the doorway.

I nodded and followed him out of the room.

The flight home was silent. It wasn’t until Danny had set us down on the property that our father finally spoke.

“Your mother never knows,” he ordered quietly.

“Of course,” Ambrose replied.

“Do we really believe that this wasn’t a targeted blow?” Chance asked, looking around the cabin at each of us.

“Fuck no,” I replied. “They knew what they were doing.”

“They were trying to figure out what would kill him,” Danny added, standing in the door to the cockpit. “Worked their way through?—”

“Enough,” our father snapped, slashing his hand through the air. “That’s enough.”

“Fuck,” Ambrose muttered, looking out the window. “Mom’s coming.”

We were still lowering the stairs when our mom’s ravaged face came into view. She stared up at the doorway, her eyes roving over each of our faces as we stepped off the plane. Chauncey, Ambrose, me, Daniel. When our dad stepped off last, her knees buckled.

We’d all known that Zeke was gone before we’d left the house that morning, but some part of her must’ve held on to hope while she waited for our return.

I froze, my eyes closing in pain as a horrific wail split the quiet of the forest.

“Dad’s got her,” Chance murmured, setting a hand on my shoulder. “Come on. Let’s give them some privacy.”

I followed my brothers down the trail toward the house, the sound of our mother’s sobs ringing in our ears.

“How long do you think they’ll keep us grounded?” Danny asked, glancing back at us.

“Probably a while,” Ambrose replied. “Arthur will want to give Mama some time with us.” He paused. “And he’ll want us out of the game while they try to figure out this clusterfuck.”

“Two teams down seems excessive,” Chance muttered.

“They won’t be down,” I argued. “They’ll merge our teams until we’re back.”

“Right.”

“Why the fuck didn’t he get out of there?” Danny muttered. “No way in hell they could’ve kept him there if he was trying to get out.”

“Drugged?” Ambrose said.

I let out a huff of humorless laughter. There wasn’t a single drug ever developed that worked on us for long. Our metabolisms flushed everything so quickly that I’d never even been able to get a buzz, and I’d tried everything.

“Cinderblock room,” Chance said quietly. “Steel door.”

“They had to enter the room at some point,” Ambrose said, shaking his head.

“Maybe he was anemic,” Danny murmured.

“No way in hell,” I argued. Every one of us carried blood on us at all times. In all my years working for the command, I’d never been sent into any situation without being fully hydrated. It was nonnegotiable.

“I need a shower,” Chance grumbled as we reached the porch. “I smell like the fucking morgue.”

We went our separate ways as we entered the house, and I slowly followed Ambrose up the stairs toward our wing.

“He shouldn’t have been on his own,” he said without looking at me. “I should’ve taken that team spot.”

“He wanted it.”

“I’m the oldest,” he shot back, his shoulders tight as he stopped at the top of the stairs. “He should’ve been on Team Two with Danny.”

“They would’ve killed each other,” I replied without thinking.

“Instead, someone else killed him.”

“We’ll find them,” I called as he strode toward his room. He didn’t bother answering.

All of us needed a few minutes to ourselves, and we took them, but it wasn’t long before each of us wandered back down to the main part of the house. I felt numb. The world was still turning, but I felt outside of it like I was looking in a window, and I couldn’t quite figure out what was going on inside. I’d felt that way only once before, and I dreaded the moment when I stepped inside, and everything hit me at once. I knew it would happen. I just wasn’t sure when.

“I will not send another son to fight their battles,” my mother shouted from the kitchen as she and my father stepped inside the house.

“We have a treaty?—”

“Goddamn the treaty and goddamn the Vampire Command,” she spat back.

“You know the rules.”

“Those rules are ridiculous, and you know it,” she argued. “You never fought for them.”

“I fought.”

“Not for some arbitrary command that doesn’t even keep us safe.”

“Matilda—”

“No,” my mother shouted. “No! I will not give them another one of my sons.”

“You know how tentative this balance is.”

“I know that they allowed my son to be murdered and didn’t even have the fucking respect to inform us that he’d been captured.”

“And what would we have done?” my father bellowed. “Do you think that we would’ve fought any harder than the men he was with? I’ve been in their shoes, Mattie. I know those bonds. Those men were his brothers in every way but blood.”

“They were not his brothers,” our mother shouted. “His brothers would’ve never allowed him to be captured in the first place!”

She entered the living room almost at a run and stopped short when she realized that all of us were in the room. Chance and Ambrose were in a couple of chairs by the unlit fireplace. Danny and I were on the couch. All of us were silent.

“You’re not going back,” she ordered, her hand shaking as she pointed at us. “Not a single one of you.”

“Matilda,” my father said, walking in behind her. “You know they don’t have a choice. What are you doing, my love?” His hand slid around her waist, and for the first time in my life, she didn’t relax against his chest. “Ordering them not to fulfill their commitment will only make them feel disloyal to their mother when they do.”

“Find your mates,” my mother hissed, her voice breaking. “Find your mates so we can be done with this.”

“We’re trying,” Ambrose replied quietly. “You know that we are.”

“Well, try harder.” With a shuddering breath, Mom finally rested back against our father, her shoulders curling forward as she hung her head.

I curled my hands into fists, the weight of her words like an anvil in my gut. The order hadn’t been directed at me specifically, but everyone in the room knew that the chance of me finding my mate again was staggeringly low. It was more likely that I’d spend another hundred years or more in command. I just hoped that my brothers would be lucky enough to find their own mates so they could be done being whored out to the human forces.

Our baby brother’s body arrived just as the sun began to set. Ignoring the pilot and co-pilot, we unloaded his plain wooden casket in silence and carried it to the clearing behind the house. There had been few Vampire funerals during my lifetime, and I’d never attended one, but we all understood the steps to take. We didn’t celebrate the way humans did. There was no one but family in the half circle around Zeke’s coffin. No music or words to commemorate my brother’s life. Each of us was silent as we set the coffin on the pyre our father had built that afternoon.

We were silent as my mother lit the fire. We were silent as it licked up the sides of the coffin. We were silent as ash floated into the air and tears rolled down our cheeks.

We burned the youngest of us, my baby brother, Ezekiel Boucher, as twilight filled the trees.