As she put it back, an odd clinking sound caught her attention. Opening the bag wider, she saw several large shards of china.
She reached in and pulled one out and pain wel
led up—pain greater than anything she’d ever felt before. She stared at the broken piece of the mug, her gaze suddenly blurred by tears. Everything she’d ever valued was gone. The bomb had destroyed the few precious mementos she’d had of her past, and now it had taken this—the very first Christmas present she’d ever remembered getting.
She flopped back on the bed and rolled to one side, raising her knees and hugging them close as she finally let go. Tears fell like hot rain down her cheeks to the sheets, slowly spreading out in an ever-widening circle of grief.
A SOFT KNOCK AT THE door jerked Gabriel awake. He pushed the hair back out of his eyes and glanced quickly around. Nothing had changed in the brief time he’d slept. Darkness still held court in the room, but through the windows, the bloody flags of dawn were beginning to stain the horizon. He rose from the sofa and walked over to the door.
“Yes?” he said, one hand on the knob, the other reaching for his weapon.
“It’s Karl. Open up.”
He would have recognized that gruff voice anywhere, but even so, caution prevailed. He switched on the security camera and looked out. The man standing on the other side of the door could only be described as a square—almost as wide as he was tall. Wearing baggy jeans that looked half a century old, a bright yellow Hawaiian shirt, and a red bandanna that barely restrained his wild brown hair, he looked more like an escapee from the circus than one of the country’s top herbal healers.
Gabriel unlocked the door. “I’m glad you could make it.”
“I didn’t know if I would,” Karl replied. “Stephan has some major problems.”
Something clenched in his gut. Stephan wasn’t just his brother; he was also the driving force behind the Federation. Destroy him, and you’d come damn close to destroying the organization. And yet, less than a dozen people knew who Stephan actually was, and only four had constant access to him.
“What sort of problems?” He relocked the door and moved across to the window. The street below was empty of traffic, and no one lurked in the shadows of the park across the road. They were safe from discovery, at least for the moment.
Karl slumped onto the sofa and propped his sandaled feet on the mahogany coffee table. “I won’t know for sure until I get the second round of test results, but it looks like someone’s been poisoning him.”
Relief eased some of the tension knotting Gabriel’s shoulders. Poisoning was better than some of the scenarios he’d envisioned. “How is the poison being administered?”
“The first tests indicate it’s probably through his drinking water.”
Gabriel frowned and moved across to a chair. “He told me last night that water was the one thing he could keep down.”
Karl nodded thoughtfully. “There are about a dozen poisons that are almost untraceable in water, and a few of those affect your system to a point where water is the only thing you can stomach.”
“Is it curable?”
“I think we’ve caught it before it got critical, so yes.”
“Thank the gods,” he muttered. He wasn’t ready to face Stephan’s death—not a real death, anyway. He’d certainly had to face the so-called death of a few of Stephan’s alter egos over the years as their usefulness came to an end, but that certainly wasn’t the same thing. Not that poisoning Stephan would actually kill him—it would only thrust him into life as one of the undead.
“Have you notified him yet?”
Karl shook his head. “Thought it best if you did it. Too much contact with me might raise the suspicions of whoever is poisoning him.”
The sound of a soft footstep made Gabriel look at the closed bedroom door. Surely Sam couldn’t be awake—not after all she’d been through in the last twenty-four hours. When no other noise followed, he glanced back at Karl.
“How long has the poisoning been going on?”
“At least four months.” Karl hesitated, and then lowered his gaze to his steepled fingers. “How many people have constant access to Stephan?”
“Myself, Martyn, Lyssa and Mary.” Two of those three he’d trust with his life. And it couldn’t be Martyn, simply because he knew poisoning Stephan would not truly kill him. It had been Martyn who’d helped Stephan perform the ceremony that would enable him to become a vampire after death.
“One of those three has to be your culprit,” Karl said.
Gabriel scrubbed a hand across his jaw. It made no sense. If one of the three had wanted Stephan dead, he or she could have found far easier ways than this. “When will you get the second lot of test results back?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Any chance of tracing the poison back to its source?”