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spew what little lunch we’d had. She wasn’t looking like she could tolerate much more of this. If she collapsed, she’d never stop beating herself over it. I hoped the next room would hold less gruesome displays.
    At the end of the rows, the rest of the lab emerged, looking much like a regular chemistry lab I ’d had in high school. Long black tables with shiny tops filled the room. Some had stacks of test tubes, clean and ready to be used. Others had sinks in the middle of their surfaces next to Bunsen burners sitting under glass vials with bubbling fluids of every color. Cabinets filled with all kinds of chemicals and refrigerators with packs of blood and bits of other non-mentionables lined one side of the room. It was well stocked and a lot bigger than the lab in Blaze’s hive. I wondered just how many people had been destroyed in the confines of this place. Studied to bits, literally. It was the last place my mother had entered before losing her grip on reality, and I was pretty sure she hadn’t been the first or the last to meet their fate here.
    Her loss left an icy sliver of my heart empty and growing even harder as time went on. How do you let go of such pain? I hadn’t, and doubted I’d ever be able to. Maybe by removing Rick’s head from his body would I find some kind of peace. I was looking forward to it, more so than anything else I planned for the future.
    Did I even have any plans beyond that? I brushed the thought away because I couldn’t answer that question. I had no answers beyond the now. There was no future for me or anyone else like me. My desolation held its grip on me and wouldn’t let go, but I’d think more on it later.
    Speaking of Rick, the man sitting at one of the tables had whirled around in his chair to observe us with his studious eyes as we filed into room, filling it up well enough. He didn’t look anything like I’d thought he would. He wore glasses, had sandy blonde hair and a lanky, thin body that looked ill-suited for fighting. His blue eyes twinkled with a hardened light of knowledge, eyeing each one of us up and down as he satisfied his own curiosity. Tiny lines were etched across his face from the corners of his eyes and into the chiseled line of his cheeks. There were no halos, no perfectly smooth and uninterrupted coloring to his skin which fitted the unnatural look of the hybrids so well. In fact, the signs of aging and slight discoloration to his skin marked him as only one thing.
    He was human.
    This revelation felt disjointed as I stared at him with sharpened daggers emerging from my glare. Okay, so what if he was human? It didn’t brush away all the evil he’d done and was probably still getting at in the middle of this God-forsaken desert. Hell, it probably made him even more dangerous to still be in possession of his human traits, more in control of his insanity than the vampires whose cravings overwhelmed them without regard to life. Maybe he was a hybrid human like me, but that conclusion quickly faded as I heard Rye whisper the answer to me.
    “He ’s not infected. Pure human, no hybrid to him. Not a hint of infection or mutation.”
    Great.
    I’m not sure if Rick heard him, but his sudden smile told me he most certainly knew who I was and what we were talking about as well. “I wondered how long I’d have to wait to meet you, April.” He stood up but didn’t approach me. It made me wonder if he could possibly fathom the amount of hatred coursing through me at this very moment. No, he couldn’t even imagine how much distain I harbored within my mind for this pathetic man. It was so strong it had sucked away at my life, bit by little tiny bit every day since my mother had killed herself. Each moment he breathed in life was a second my mother would never have ever again.
    “The pleasure is not mine.”
    His smile didn’t waver. Even in the presence of vampires, he seemed cocky, untouchable even. There was nothing more I wanted to do than to adjust