A Hunger So Wild Read Online Free PDF Page A

Gracie.”
    “Help me find a cure, Vash. Help me save him and the others.”
    That’s why she’d come, the reason Syre had sent her. Reports of the illness were cropping up all over the country, the spread so swift it was quickly becoming an epidemic. “What do you need?”
    “More subjects, more blood, more equipment, more staff.”
    “Done. Of course. Just get me a list.”
    “That’s the easy part.” Crossing her arms, Grace shot another glance at King. “I need to know where the Wraith Virus first appeared. Which part of the country, which state, which town, which house, which room in the house. Down to the minutia. Male or female. Young or old. Race and build. I need you to find the very first person who got sick. Then I need you to find number two. How did they know number one? Did they live in the same house? Share the same bed? Or was the connection more tenuous? Were they blood relations? Then, find number three and four and five. We’re talking six degrees of separation gone wild. I need enough data to establish a pattern and point of origin.”
    Suddenly feeling suffocated by the hazmat suit, Vash strode toward the door. Grace met her there and typed in the code that released the seal to the antechamber.
    “You’re talking about a hell of a lot of manpower,” Vash muttered, following Grace’s example and standing on a painted circle on the floor. Something sprayed from the exposed piping over her head, surrounding her suit in a fine mist.
    “I know.”
    There were tens of thousands of minions, but their inability to tolerate sunlight seriously hindered their usefulness. The original Fallen had no such restriction, but there were less than two hundred of them. Far too few to provide the blood to minions that would grant them temporary immunity. Certainly not enough to manage the pavement-pounding necessary to carry out the requested task in a timely manner.
    Shrugging out of her suit, Vash rolled her shoulders back and set her mind. The initial reports of the illness had surfaced at the same time as Adrian’s lost love. Nailing down a timeline would help her to decide if the Sentinel leader had culpability or not. “I’ll make it happen.”
    “I know you will.” Grace paused in the act of ruffling her choppy blond hair and her gaze moved over Vash. “You still dress in mourning.”
    Vash looked down at the black leather pants and vest she wore and managed a shrug. After sixty years, the pain was still there, throbbing to remind her of the vengeance due her for Charron’s brutal slaying. One day she’d find a lycan who could give her the information she needed to pick up the trail of Char’s killers. She could only hope that happened before the ones responsible died of old age or on a hunt. Unlike Sentinels and vamps, the lycans had mortal expiration dates.
    “Let’s get that list,” she said crisply, ready to start on the monumental task ahead of her.
    *    *    *
    Syre watched the video to the end, then pushed to his feet in a burst of agile movement. “What are your thoughts on this?”
    Vash tucked her legs up beneath her on the chair that faced his desk. “We’re fucked. We don’t have enough people to attack this as quickly as the virus—the Wraith Virus, she called it…As fast as it’s spreading, we don’t have the resources to tackle it.”
    He shoved a hand through his thick, dark hair and cursed. “We can’t go down like this, Vashti. Not after all we’ve been through.”
    The Fallen leader’s pain was a tangible force in the room. As he stood before the windows that overlooked Main Street in Raceport, Virginia, a town he’d built from the ground up, it appeared as if the weight of the world was on his shoulders. It wasn’t just the problems they faced that pressed down on him. He was in deep mourning, grieving the loss of his daughter after centuries of praying for her return. And he was altered by that loss. No one else had noticed it yet, but Vash knew him