UNCONTROLLED BURN by Nina Pierce Page A

shaking her from her stupor.
    Hope turned, sprinting through the barn, praying she wouldn’t be too late. She had no idea what Glenn knew or how he could help Alex, but Hope damn well understood there was nothing she could do to save her friend. Her fingers brushed the door handle of her Bug at the same moment a shadow materialized from the darkness, slamming her head against the roof of the car. A hand covered her mouth, trapping her cry for help.
    “I didn’t want to do this, but you’ve seen too much.”
    The whispered words barely cut though the haze of pain as her head was wrenched back by her hair and agony radiated from her throat. Heat burned over every nerve. The metallic odor of blood filled the air and the sickly sound of slurping echoed in her ears. Hope’s world became a dizzying cacophony of disjointed thoughts and sensations that tripped over one another, tumbling her into a sleepy confusion.
    Her body became a weightless entity. Limbs and vocal cords unable to function, she wasn’t sure if the motion she felt was real or imagined. It really didn’t matter. Whatever her attacker was doing to her—she wasn’t going to survive.
* * *
    Glenn pulled the truck around the dirt drive and parked in front of his farm house. Though he’d driven well over the speed limit from the bus station straight home, darkness had beaten him here. Night and its shadowed secrets now reigned over the farm. A full moon hung eerily over the trees, its blood red color a harbinger of death. Glenn refused to acknowledge the cold weight of fear pressing in his gut.
    He stared at the battered leather briefcase sitting on the passenger seat. Though the search had taken him to three different bus stations, this discovery seemed almost too easy. He wondered now if he’d been set up. Pulling the key from his pocket, Glenn examined the thin slip of metal hanging from a pink numbered fob.
    A bus locker had held a boat load of the professor’s research.
    No doubt, Dr. Paul Morgan, dear friend and colleague of Alexandra Flanagan, had given his life protecting research that had taken Glenn nearly an hour to sort through. The chemical formulas and scientific theory made no sense to him. But there was no denying Alexandra Flanagan was up to her dimpled little chin in this deadly crap. He wondered if she also knew about the fires the professor had documented. Glenn hoped like hell she’d had nothing to do with burying evidence in the ashes of those fires. It was one of the things that worried him the most.
    As he’d read through each piece of evidence against her, the fog surrounding her late night excuses and mysterious illness had lifted, and he saw with absolute clarity who’d she’d become. The fact that she’d done it all under his nose and without talking to him, broke his heart. How could her existence have been so narrowly focused that she only thought about the research?
    Questions swirled in his thoughts, but had no clear place to land. Without the professor, everything was just a jumbled mess of conjecture rolled in speculation.
    Glenn had a clear picture now of the earlier fires. But what the hell was happening now? He was beginning to suspect they somehow centered on someone’s knowledge—and hatred—of the professor’s dirty experiments. The information contained in the leather satchel on his seat would, without a doubt, blow the RISEN investigation wide open, which was exactly why the tribunal couldn’t get their hands on it until he’d purged Alexandra’s involvement from the pages.
    On the one hand, Glenn wanted to protect the impish woman who held his fatherly heart captive. But what Alex had done was unethical even by vampire standards. If only she’d told him, perhaps he could’ve helped before it had gone this far. She hadn’t.
    On the other hand, he wanted to help Reese and his RISEN operatives avenge the needless executions of the vamps and, more recently, the innocent humans. And he wanted to do both