The Beast

by J. R. Ward

  "Alas, Throe is not in this evening." She turned about in Assail's arms and drove her ass into his pelvis. "I am by myself."

  "Where has he gone?"

  She glanced over her shoulder, a sharp look in her eyes. "Why e'er do you focus on him so?"

  "I have appetites that you cannot service, my dear. Much as your wares appeal."

  "Then mayhap you shall call your cousins in?" She resumed rubbing herself against him. "I should like to welcome them again."

  "I do not fornicate with my blood relations. However, if you should like to?"

  "They do have a way of filling a female up. And mayhap I am too much for you to handle alone."

  Doubt it, he thought. But his cousins herein was a good idea.

  Keeping an arm around her, Assail spun her back to face him, took his phone out, and a split second later, a discreet chiming sound from the front of the mansion was heard on the far side of the closed study doors.

  "Ask and you shall receive," he murmured as he kissed her hard and then disengaged her from him, giving her a push toward the exit. "Answer that yourself. Welcome them properly."

  She hurried off with a giggle, as if she liked being told what to do--and God, he couldn't help but think of Marisol. If he had ordered his lovely cat burglar around like that? She would have castrated him and worn his balls for earrings.

  A burning in the center of his chest made him reach for the vial of coke in the inner pocket of his Brioni suit jacket, but it wasn't actually his addiction calling his hand to home for once.

  The extra dose made his head hum, but that was going to work for him.

  He had a lot of ground to cover tonight.

  *

  "Okay, where are you, where are you . . ."

  As Jo drove ever deeper into Caldwell's main, mostly failing, industrial park, she leaned into her VW's windshield and wiped the sleeve of her jacket on the glass to clear the condensation. She could have cranked on the defroster--except the damn thing wasn't working.

  "I need another month before I can pay for that," she muttered. "Until then, I'm not going to breathe."

  As she thought about Bill confronting her on her parents' wealth, she had to laugh. Yes, it was true that principled stances were laudable. They rarely paid the bills, however--or fixed broken blowers that smelled like an electrical fire when you turned them on.

  You did tend to sleep better at night, though.

  When her phone started ringing, she grabbed for it, checked the screen, and tossed the thing back to the seat. She had other stuff to worry about other than Bryant's after-hours demands. Besides, she had left his dry cleaning right where he'd told her to, on the front porch of his condo.

  "Okay, here we are."

  As her headlights illuminated a flat-roofed, one-story building that was long as a city block and paneled in gray metal siding, she entered its empty parking lot and continued down toward its unadorned entrance. When she pulled up to the glass doors and the sign that had the name of the factory blackened out with layers of spray paint, she hit the brakes, killed the engine and got out.

  There was yellow police tape in a circle all around, the fragile barrier whistling in the wind . . . a seal plastered on the door crack with the words CRIME SCENE in big letters on it . . . and evidence of a lot of foot traffic having been in and out, a path carved in the leaves and debris by shuffling feet and equipment that had been rolled or dragged along the ground.

  Man, it was dark out here. Especially as her headlights turned themselves off.

  "I need to get that carry permit," she said out loud.

  When her eyes adjusted, the graffiti on the building became visible again, and the pitted parking lot reemerged in her field of vision. There was no ambient city glow going on out in this part of Caldwell; too many abandoned buildings, the business park having failed when the economy went into the crapper seven years before.

  Just as she was getting antsy and thinking of calling Bill, a car came over the rise and entered the lot as she had.

  As Bill pulled up next to her, he put his window down and leaned across some other man. "Follow me."

  She gave him a thumbs-up and got back in her car.

  Around they went, down the long front and the shorter side of the building. The facility's rear door was even less fancy than the front; it didn't even have a sign. The graffiti was thicker here, the signatures and angled line drawings layering one upon another like people talking over each other at a party.

  Jo got out and locked her car. "Hey."

  The guy who emerged from Bill's car was a little bit of a surprise. Six feet, maybe taller. Prematurely gray hair, but the hot kind, like Max's from Catfish. Dark heavy glasses, as if being ocularly challenged and having a sense of style were prereqs for hanging with Bill. The body was . . .

  Well, very good. Broad shoulders, tight waist, long legs.

  "This is my cousin, Troy Thomas."

  "Hey," the guy said, offering his hand. "Bill's told me about you."

  "I can imagine." She gave him a shake and then nodded over at the rear entrance. "Listen, you guys, there's a seal on this door as well. I'm not feeling good about this."

  "I have clearance." Troy pulled out a pass card. "It's okay."

  "He's in the CSI unit," Bill explained.

  "And I need to pick up some equipment, so this is authorized. Just please don't touch anything, and no pictures, okay?"

  "Absolutely." Jo dropped her arm when she realized she was about to swear, palm-to-heart.

  Troy led the way, cutting through the seal with a box knife before inserting his card in a CPD electronic padlock.

  "Watch your step," he said as he opened the door and flipped on the lights.

  The shallow hall had two-toned carpet: cream on the outsides of the footpath, a mucky gray/brown where work boots had trodden. Streaks of dishwater gray grit lined the wall vertically, denoting leaks in the ceiling. The smell was something between moldy bread and sweat socks.

  And fresh copper.

  As they walked forward, there were cans of drooling paint to step over, some tools, and a couple of drywall buckets, all of which seemed to suggest the old owners, or maybe the bank that had repossessed the place, might have taken a stab at some renovation--only to give up when it proved to be too costly.

  There were two offices, a reception area, a unisex bathroom, and a pair of steel doors, next to which were hard hats covered in dust hanging on hooks.

  "Let's go through over here. It's easier."

  Heading to the left, Troy led them to a third option, standing aside once again as they went through a much narrower door. On the far side, he hit not a light switch, but something that looked like a fuse-box pull.

  With a series of bangs, huge panels of lights came on one after another in a cavernous manufacturing space that was mostly vacant, nothing but empty brackets bolted into the floor and great grease shadows on the concrete indicating where machines had been.

  "The massacre happened over here."

  Jo popped her eyebrows. Yes, it most certainly had, she thought as she caught sight of the pools of coagulated blood, once bright red, now browning with time's passage. There were more of those drywall buckets here and there, and when she walked across and got a closer view of everything, she put her hand over her mouth and swallowed hard.

  "It's just like the farm," Bill commented as he wandered around.

  "Like what farm?" Jo said as she shook her head at the gore. "God, this was so violent."

  "You remember--almost two years ago? There was a scene just like this one only ten times more blood."

  "No bodies," Troy interjected. "Again."

  "How many people do you think died here?" Jo asked.

  "Ten. Maybe twelve?" Troy came around and crouched down next to a series of swipes through the blood on the floor--as if someone might have tried to escape but had slipped and fallen. "We can't be sure. This place has been on the market for a year or two. The bank stopped using the sec
urity cameras five months ago when a lightning strike knocked them out during a spring storm. We've got nothing."

  "How do you get rid of that many bodies?" Jo wondered. "Where do you take them all?"

  Troy nodded. "The homicide division is looking into all of that."

  And as for the vampire angle? she thought to herself. Those types usually took blood, right? They didn't leave it behind in five-gallon lots.

  Not that she was about to pose that one to Troy. Way too crazy.

  She glanced over at Bill. "How many other mass murders or ritual whatevers have taken place in Caldwell in the last ten years? Twenty years? Fifty?"

  "I can find out," he said as their eyes met. "I'm thinking the exact same thing you are."

  FORTY-THREE

  "It's so peaceful out here. So beautiful."

  As Bitty said the words, Mary glanced over at the girl. The pair of them were strolling down one of Pine Grove Cemetery's miles of paved lanes. Overhead, the moon was giving them more than enough illumination to see by, the silvery glow landing on the tops of fluffy pine boughs and also the elegant bare limbs of maple and oak trees. All around, headstones, statues, and mausoleums dotted the rolling lawns and shores of man-made ponds, until you could almost imagine you were walking through a stage set.

  "Yes, it is," Mary murmured. "It's nice to think that all this is for the ghosts of the people buried here, but I believe it's more for the folks who come to visit. It can be really hard, especially in the beginning, to come visit a family member or a friend who's passed. I mean, after my mother died and I put her ashes in the ground, it took me months and months to come back. When I finally got here, though, it was easier in some ways than I'd thought, mostly because of how lovely it is--we're going over there. She's right there."

  Stepping off onto the grass, Mary was careful where she trod. "Here, follow me. The dead are in the front of the markers. And yes, I know it's weird, but I hate the idea of trampling anyone."

  "Oh!" Bitty looked down at a beautiful headstone inscribed with a Jewish Star of David and the name Epstein. "I beg your pardon. Excuse me."

  The two of them wended their way in farther, until Mary stopped at a rose-colored granite marker with the name Cecilia Luce carved upon it.

  "Hi, Mom," she whispered, getting down on her haunches to pick a fallen leaf off the front the headstone. "How are you?"

  As she ran her fingertips over the engraved name and the dates, Bitty knelt down on the other side.

  "What did she pass from?" the girl asked.

  "M.S. Multiple sclerosis."

  "What's that?"

  "It's a human disease where the body's immune system attacks the coating that protects your nerve fibers? Without that sheath, you can't tell your body what to do, so you lose the ability to walk, feed yourself, speak. Or at least, my mom did. Some people with it have long periods of remission when the disease isn't active. She wasn't one of them." Mary rubbed the center of her chest. "There are more options for treatment now than there were fifteen or twenty years ago when she was first diagnosed. Maybe she would have lasted longer in this era of medicine. Who knows."

  "Do you miss her?"

  "Every day. The thing is . . . I don't want to freak you out, but I'm not convinced you ever get over a death like that of your mother's. I think it's more that you get used to the loss. Kind of like getting in cold water? There's a shock to the system in the beginning, but an accommodation happens so you don't notice the chill as much as the years pass--and sometimes, you even forget you're in the tub at all after a while. But there are always memories that come back to you and remind you of who is missing."

  "I think of my mom a lot. I dream of her, too. She comes to me in dreams and talks to me."

  "What does she say?"

  As a cold breeze rolled through, Bitty tucked some hair back behind her ear. "That everything is going to be okay, and I'm going to have a new family soon. That's what got me thinking about my uncle."

  "Well, I think that's lovely." Mary let herself sit back on her butt, her thigh-level coat a barrier to the damp ground. "Does she look healthy in your dreams?"

  "Oh, yes. I like that most. She's with my baby brother, the one who passed as well."

  "We gave your mother his ashes."

  "I know. She put them in her suitcase. She said that she wanted to make sure they came with us if we were told to go."

  "It might be nice to put them together at some point."

  "I think that's a really good idea."

  There was a long pause. "Hey, Bitty?"

  "Mmm?"

  Mary picked a little stick off the ground and bent it up and down to give her fingers something to do. "I, ah, I wish I'd known how worried your mom was about the resources at Safe Place. I would have worked really hard to reassure her." She glanced over at the girl. "Are you worried about any of that?"

  Bitty put her hands in her coat pockets and looked around. "I don't know. Everyone's really nice. You especially. But it's scary, you know."

  "I know. Just talk to me, okay? If you get scared. I'll give you my cell phone number. You can call me at any time directly."

  "I don't want to be a burden."

  "Yeah, I guess that's what worries me. Your mom didn't want to be one, which I can absolutely respect--but the end result was that things were much harder on her, and you, than they had to be. Do you know what I mean?"

  Bitty nodded and fell silent.

  After a while, the girl said, "My father used to hit me."

  *

  Deep in the grungy heart of downtown, Rhage ran through an alley, his shitkickers landing on the asphalt like thunder, his autoloader up, his rage in check so that it was an engine that drove him on, not a disaster that flipped him out.

  As his target darted across another street, he stuck to the fucker like glue, that sickly sweet lesser smell like the vapor trail of a jet across the night sky, easily trackable.

  It was a new recruit. Probably from out at that abandoned factory.

  He could tell because the thing was all panicked, tripping and slipping before scrambling away in a mess of arms and legs, no weapons on him, no one coming to his rescue.

  He was a lone rat without a mischief.

  And as the slayer fell for the umpteenth time, his feet knocked out from under him by what looked like a carburetor, he finally didn't get up again. He just held his leg to his chest and moaned, rolling onto his back.

  "No, p-p-p-please, no!"

  As Rhage pulled up to his prey and stopped, for the first time in recorded history, he hesitated before the kill. But he couldn't not stab the fucker. If he left the damn thing on the streets, it was just going to heal up and find others of its kind to fight with . . . or it was going to get discovered by a human and end up on some fucking YouTube video.

  "Nooooooo--"

  Rhage shoved the thing's arms out of the way and buried his black dagger right in the center of that now-hollow chest.

  With a flash and a pop!, the slayer disappeared into thin air, nothing but a greasy stain of the Omega's blood on the pavement and an acrid burn left behind--

  Rhage jerked around, switching his dagger for an autoloader. Flaring his nostrils, he sniffed at the air and then let out a growl.

  "I know you're there. Show yourself."

  When nothing moved in the shadows at the far end of the alley, he took three steps back so that he had cover in the doorway of an abandoned tenement building.

  In the distance, sirens howled like stray dogs, and on the next block over, some humans shouted at one another. Closer by, something was dripping off the fire escape behind him, and there was a rattling higher up, as if the gusts coming from the river were agitating the scaffolding's tenuous hold on the brick.

  "You fucking pussy," he called out. "Show yourself."

  His natural arrogance told him he could handle whatever this was all by himself, but some vague unease he couldn't put a name to had him signaling for back-up by triggering a beacon lo
cated on the inside of his jacket's collar.

  It wasn't that he was frightened--fuck, no. And he felt stupid the second he'd done it.

  But there was another male vampire hiding over there, and the only thing he knew for sure? It wasn't Xcor.

  Because they knew where that bastard was.

  The rest of those sonsabitches were an open question.

  FORTY-FOUR

  Naturally, getting Naasha naked was the work of a moment.

  In fact, she volunteered for it.

  As soon as Assail and his cousins stepped into that sex dungeon of hers, she began peeling herself out of her red dress, kicking the haute couture out of the way as if the thing were worth nothing more than a paper napkin. She left her high heels on, however, and her basque.

  Ehric's and Evale's arousals were instantaneous, a one-two punch of sexual aggression that made the female laugh in that husky way of hers.

  She didn't go to either of them, however. She approached Assail.

  Leaning in, she pressed herself against his chest and put her arms around his neck. "I am in need of you first."

  Silly female. She confessed too much, transferring her power to him.

  But that was a good thing.

  Setting her aside, he tugged at the knot of his Hermes tie, loosening the silk. As he removed the length, she did a little spin and went across to one of the bedding platforms, lying out flat and stretching her arms over her head. With her body forming an erotic S-curve on the mattress, one breast popped out of its cup and her bare sex gleamed as she parted her legs.

  Assail prowled over to her, all-fouring up her body until he sat on her pelvis, trapping her. Stretching the tie out between two fists, he stared down at her.

  "You are so trusting," he murmured. "What if I did something bad with this? No one would hear you scream or struggle, would they."

  For a moment, fear flared in her eyes. But then he smiled.

  "It is a good thing I am a gentlemale, is it not." He leaned down with the silk. "Close your eyes, my darling. And not to sleep, no, not to rest."

  He covered her eyes with the tie, knotting the silk into place. Then he looked over his shoulder and nodded for his cousins to descend upon her. They were, as ever, more than obliging, ridding themselves of shirts and slacks, getting naked before they reached out to touch and lick, stroke and penetrate.

  As Naasha began to moan, he dismounted, grabbed the nearest wrist--Ehric's, as it turned out--and scored it with his own fangs. Drawing the welling blood to Naasha's mouth, the female gasped and latched on, nursing at the vein as her body began to writhe in ecstasy.