Four a.m., he decided. It was probably close to four given the lunar position in the sky full of stars.
Soon enough, he’d have to go down underground with the others, and that was why he always came up here before the dawn locked him away. The wolf in him needed to breathe, had to be free—and this was the best he could do to honor that side of his bloodline.
So that it didn’t consume him.
But maybe it had already.
Trying not to think about the madness, he refocused on his promenade. There was one particular patient room that he felt drawn to, even though he couldn’t say that it was any different from any of the others. It had become a talisman of sorts, though, and as he approached it, he tracked the numbers on the doors: 511. 513. 515—
517.
It was a bad-luck number, violating all his rules. He liked even numbers, with his favorites being 2 and 4.
But 517 it was.
As he paused in the doorway, it was as if there were someone inside and he was waiting to be invited in. Which was fucking nuts. And yet as he threw a leg over the threshold, he felt like apologizing for intruding.
Just like all the spaces on the floor, the room was about ten feet square, and the set of rusty bedsprings strung between their rusty head-and footboards took up most of what open area there was. The only other furniture a small table and a stool. Both had been upside down, and about two weeks ago, he’d righted them and arranged the pair so that if there had been somebody in the room, they could have written a letter home. Or maybe read a letter from their loved ones.
And then he’d moved the empty, decaying bed support so that if someone had been lying on a mattress on the setup, they could have looked out of the flap doors and through the porch’s open-air arches, to the sky.
Fucking sap that he was. But there had been suffering here. Great, unimaginable suffering and sorrow, humans dying long, protracted deaths, surrounded by others doing the same. He’d never been a big fan of the other species, but something about this place, about the sheer magnitude of the numbers of those who had died here, gave him a shot of sympathy.
He knew what it was like to be doomed by something outside of your control.
Stepping past the table and stool, he pushed his way out onto the porch. The loggia was fairly shallow, but long as the entire wing, and as he went to the rail and looked out over the sanatorium’s hill of skeletal trees and dead grass, he imagined the humans who had lain here, knowing they had something incurable in their bodies, aware that people just like them were disappearing from the rooms beside their own—and not because they were being cured and leaving healthy.
They had been prisoners here, isolated from the general population, through no fault of their own.
As he leaned over the drop, he glanced down the building’s elevation. From this vantage point, the enormity of the structure really struck him. Although not that tall off the ground, with its enormous, embracing wings, it seemed to stretch as far as the eye could see, like an ocean.
And yet for all the floors, and all the porches, there was nobody else staring out like he was.
No one but him, and maybe Mayhem and Apex, ever came up here. The prison camp’s operation was underground, in the vast subterranean rabbit warren of spaces in the basement levels.
The sanatorium was literally the perfect location for a bunch of solar-avoiding vampires running a drug-processing business. Much better than that happy-hands-at-home system of tunnels they’d been in before. Not that the move had gone well. About two hundred prisoners had died soon after arrival, something about the new environment being the last domino to fall in their miserable existence, their strained hearts and bad lungs giving out.
Good thing they had the chute for the bodies here.
Just like when the place had treated humans with a terminal disease, the dead had been sent down a thousand-foot-long shaft that bottomed out at the base of the rise the building sat on. But unlike when those humans had been removed, the vampire bodies didn’t need to be carted away on the railroad tracks down there. All that was required was a little sunlight, and then the ash was so fine, it blew away like snow in a subzero wind.
“It’s a beautiful night,” he said to all the nobody around him.
And that was when he thought of the woman. Rio.
The wolf in him was called to her, sure as if she knew his soul’s name and spoke it in a pitch only he could hear . . . sure as if she saw deeply into him and forgave him for his sins, his bad breeding, his worse choices since he’d been imprisoned here.