Free Blood Oath by Christopher Farnsworth

from recalling pain or severe trauma. For a vampire, the memory of an injury is just as fresh as the actual wound.
    Which is why Cade could still remember the agony of the early morning of September 11, 2001. He had trailed his target into the parking garage of a vacant building.
    Then the man vanished. The next thing he saw was a sword—literally, a flaming sword—fire actually dancing on the blade—pierce the darkness and slam through his gut.
    Something stopped him instantly, and he was pinned. The sword, still burning, rammed right through him and deep into the steel-reinforced concrete pillar behind him.
    His feet dangled from the floor. His blood began to pool under him.
    His target stood a mere five feet away. An impossibly handsome man, his face a mask of contempt. He appeared to consider Cade, to measure the danger he posed against the effort of finishing him off.
    With a smirk, he turned away and walked off. The message was clear: Cade wasn’t worth another moment.
    Cade was trapped. He couldn’t call Griff for help: the sat-phone was useless this far underground. There was only one thing he could do. He grabbed the blade and began pulling.
    It took him nine hours of slicing and burning his hands, writhing and struggling, before he could finally dislodge the sword from the pillar.
    As soon as the blade hit the concrete floor, the flames went out, like they were never there.
    At least another thirty minutes passed before he could gather enough strength to get up and find the stairwell.
    Still bleeding heavily, he made his way to the lobby of the building.
    A TV was at the reception desk, left on by a security guard or whoever had abandoned it.
    The sound was off. A news anchor was talking fast, his face strained. Then a shot of the Manhattan skyline. Smoke. And something missing.
    His phone rang. Griff. Screaming at him, with rage and frustration.
    Cade wasn’t paying attention. He realized what was missing.
    The towers were gone. They’d been gone for hours by then.
     
     
     
    THE LOOK ON CADE’S FACE made Zach very aware that he was trapped in a metal box going seventy miles an hour with a creature that could eat him.
    He wondered if he’d gone too far, and how much it would hurt if he threw himself out of the car.
    Cade’s mouth twitched. He seemed to take pity on Zach.
    “I was hung up,” Cade said.
    The tension drained out of the air between them. Zach said, “Part of the secret history, I guess.”
    “That’s right,” Cade replied.
    They drove in silence after that.

SEVEN
    The commonly held belief that vampires are capable of mes- merizing their prey does not appear to be true, at least with Cade. But there is a very real—if not easily measured—psychological and biological response triggered in humans by Cade. Research- ers meeting him for the first time reported extreme anxiety, verging on panic attacks. (The fear response is probably height- ened by the person’s encounter with a species long assumed to be mythical.) This can cause a person to “freeze,” much like a mouse will stop all movement when stalked by a snake. However, like the mouse, this is not because the person is hypnotized. It seems to be a result of an ingrained human reaction to a preda- tory species, rather than any inherent ability on Cade’s part. The response grows weaker upon repeated encounters with Cade, set- tling down eventually to a generalized unease in his presence.
     
—BRIEFING BOOK: CODENAME: NIGHTMARE PET
     
     
     
     
    PORT OF BALTIMORE, BALTIMORE, MARYLAND
     
     
    T he two ICE agents, a man and a woman, had clearly been waiting for a while. And they were not happy about it.
    Employees of ICE—Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the catchall investigative arm of Homeland Security—tended to be a little surly anyway. After 9/11, every agency in the country got swept into new, terrorist-fighting duties, with the plum assignments going to the big names at the CIA and FBI. Customs got new