by J. R. Ward
You must answer the call and pick your way. And there is no reverse.
Of course, the problem was, navigating a moral landscape was something he’d had to teach himself to do to fit in with the vampires. The lessons he’d learned had stuck, although only to a point.
And his drugs only kind of, sort of worked.
Abruptly, Montrag’s pale face became cast in variations of pastel pink and the male’s dark hair went magenta and his smoking jacket became the color of ketchup. As a red wash tinted everything, Rehv’s visual field flattened out so it was like a movie screen of the world.
Which perhaps explained why symphaths found it so easy to use people. With his dark side taking over, the universe had all the depth of a chessboard, and the people in it were pawns to his omniscient hand. Every one of them. Enemies…and friends.
“I’ll take care of it,” Rehv announced. “As you said, I know what to do.”
“Your word.” Montrag put forward his smooth palm. “Your word that this shall be carried out in secret and in silence.”
Rehv let that hand hang in the breeze, but he smiled, once again revealing his fangs. “Trust me.”
TWO
As Wrath, son of Wrath, pounded down one of Caldwell’s urban alleys, he was bleeding in two places. There was a gash along his left shoulder, made by a serrated knife, and a hunk out of his thigh, thanks to the rusty corner of a Dumpster. The lesser up ahead, the one he was about to gut like a fish, had been responsible for neither: The asshole’s two pale-haired, girlie-smelling buddies had done the damage.
Right before they’d been reduced to a matched set of mulch bags three hundred yards and three minutes ago.
This bastard up ahead was the real target.
The slayer was hauling ass, but Wrath was faster—not just because his legs were longer, and despite the fact that he was leaking like a corroded cistern. There was no question the third would die.
It was an issue of will.
The lesser had chosen the wrong path tonight—although not in picking this particular alley. That had been the only right and just thing the undead had probably done for decades, because privacy was important for fighting. Last thing the Brothers or the Lessening Society needed was for human police to get involved in anything so much as a nose blow in this war.
No, the bastard’s I’m-sorry-that’s-not-the-correct-answer had happened when he’d killed a male civilian about fifteen minutes ago. With a smile on his face. In front of Wrath.
The scent of fresh vampire blood had been how the king had first found the trio of slayers, catching them in the act as they tried to abduct one of his civilians. They’d clearly known he was at least a member of the Brotherhood, because this lesser up ahead had killed the male so he and his squadron could be hands-free and fully focused for the fight.
The sad part was, Wrath’s arrival had spared his civilian a long, slow, tortured death in one of the Society’s persuasion camps. But it still burned his ass to see a terrified innocent sliced open and dropped like an empty lunch box onto the icy, cracked pavement.
So this motherfucker up here was going down.
Eye-for-an-eye-and-then-some–style.
At the alley’s dead end, the lesser did a pivot-and-prepare, spinning around, planting his feet, bringing up his knife. Wrath didn’t slow. In midstride, he slipped free one of his hira shuriken and sent the weapon out with a flick of his hand, making a show of the throw.
Sometimes you wanted your opponent to know what was coming at him.
The lesser followed the choreography perfectly, shifting his balance, losing his fighting form. As Wrath closed the distance, he winged another throwing star and another, driving the lesser into a crouch.
The Blind King dematerialized right on the motherfucker, striking from above with fangs bared to lock into the back of the slayer’s neck. The stinging sweetness of the lesser’s blood was the taste of triumph, and the chorus of victory was not long in coming either as Wrath grabbed onto both of the bastard’s upper arms.
Payback was a snap. Or two, as it were.
The thing screamed as both bones popped out of their sockets, but the howl didn’t travel far after Wrath clapped his palm over its mouth.
“That’s just a warm-up,” Wrath hissed. “It’s important to get loose before you’re worked out.”
The king flipped the slayer over and stared down at the thing. From behind Wrath’s wraparounds, his weak eyes were sharper than usual, the adrenaline cruising along his highway of veins giving him a shot at visual acuity. Which was good. He needed to see what he killed in a way that had nothing to do with ensuring the accuracy of a mortal blow.
As the lesser strained for breath, the skin of its face sported an unreal, plastic sheen—as if the bone structure had been upholstered in the shit you made grain sacks out of—and the eyes were popping wide, the sweet stench of the thing like the sweat of roadkill on a hot night.
Wrath unclipped the steel chain that hung from the shoulder of his biker jacket and unwound the shiny links from under his arm. Holding the heavy weight in his right hand, he wrapped his fist, widening the spread of his knuckles, adding to their hard contours.
“Say ‘cheese.’”
Wrath struck the thing in the eye. Once. Twice. Three times. His fist was a battering ram, the eye socket below giving way like it was nothing more than a pocket door. With every cracking impact, black blood burst up and out, hitting Wrath’s face and jacket and sunglasses. He felt all the spray, even through the leather he wore, and wanted more.
He was a glutton for this kind of meal.
With a hard smile, he let the chain uncoil from his fist, and it hit the dirty asphalt on a seething, metallic laugh, as if it had enjoyed that as much as he had. Below him, the lesser wasn’t dead. Even though the thing was no doubt developing massive subdural hematomas on the front and back of its brain, it would still live, because there were only two ways to kill a slayer.
One was to stab it in the chest with the black daggers the Brothers wore strapped to their chests. This sent the POS back to its maker, the Omega, but was only a temporary fix, because the evil would just use that essence to turn another human into a killing machine. It was not death, but delay.
The other way was permanent.
Wrath got out his cell phone and dialed. When a deep male voice with a Boston accent answered, he said, “Eighth and Trade. Three down.”
Butch O’Neal, a.k.a. the Dhestroyer, descended of Wrath, son of Wrath, was characteristically phlegmatic in his response. Real middle-of-the-road. Easygoing. Leaving so much room for interpretation in his words:
“Oh, for fuck’s sake. Are you kidding me? Wrath, you have got to stop this moonlighting shit. You’re the king now. You’re not a Brother any—”
Wrath clipped the phone shut.
Yup. The other way to get rid of these sonsabitches, the permanent way, was going to be here in about five minutes. With his mouth riding shotgun. Unfortunately.
Wrath sat back on his heels, re-coiled the chain on his shoulder, and looked up at the squat box of night sky that was visible above the rooftops. As his adrenaline ebbed, he could only slightly differentiate the rising dark torsos of the buildings against the flat plane of the galaxy, and he squinted hard.
You’re not a Brother anymore.
The hell he wasn’t. He didn’t care what the law said. His race needed him to be more than a bureaucrat.
With a curse in the Old Language, he got back with the program, going through the slayer’s jacket and pants, looking for ID. In an ass pocket, he found a thin wallet with a driver’s license and two dollars in it—
“You thought…he was one of yours….”
The slayer’s voice was both reedy and malicious, and the horror-movie sound triggered Wrath’s aggression once more. In a rush, his vision sharpened, bringing his enemy into semifocus.
“What did you say to me?”
The lesser smiled a little, seeming not to notice that ha
lf its face had the consistency of a runny omelet. “He was always…one of ours.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“How…do you think”—the lesser took a shuddering breath—“we found…all those houses this summer—”
A vehicle’s arrival cut off the words, and Wrath’s head shot around. Thank fuck it was the black Escalade he was hoping for and not some human with a cell phone cocked and loaded with a 911 call.
Butch O’Neal stepped out from behind the wheel, his gum-flapping in full swing. “Have you lost your damn mind? What are we going to do with you? You’re gonna give…”
As the cop kept riding the Holy Hell Trail, Wrath looked back at the slayer. “How did you find them? The houses?”
The slayer started laughing, the weak wheeze the kind of thing you heard out of the deranged. “Because he’d been in them all…that’s how.”
The bastard passed out, and shaking him didn’t help bring him back. Neither did a palm slam or two.
Wrath got to his feet, frustration triggering the rise. “Do your business, cop. The other two are back behind the Dumpster on the next block.”
The cop just stared at him. “You’re not supposed to fight.”
“I’m the king. I can do whatever the fuck I want.”
Wrath started to walk away, but Butch grabbed onto his arm. “Does Beth know where you are? What you’re doing? You tell her? Or is it only me you’re asking to keep this secret?”
“Worry about that.” Wrath pointed to the slayer. “Not me and my shellan.”
As he pulled free, Butch barked, “Where are you going?”
Wrath marched up into the cop’s grille. “I thought I would pick up a civilian’s dead body and carry it to the Escalade. You got a problem with that, son?”
Butch held his ground. Just one more way their shared blood showed. “We lose you as king and the whole race is fucked.”
“And we got four Brothers left in the field. You like that math? I don’t.”
“But—”
“Do your business, Butch. And stay out of mine.”
Wrath stalked the three hundred yards back to where the fighting had started. The beaten slayers were right where he’d left them: moaning on the ground, their limbs at wrong angles, their black blood seeping out into filthy slush puddles beneath their bodies. They were no longer his concern, though. Going around behind the Dumpster he looked at his dead civilian and found it hard to breathe.
The king knelt down and carefully brushed the hair back from the male’s beaten-to-shit face. Clearly, the guy had fought back, taking a number of hits before getting stabbed through the heart. Brave kid.
Wrath cupped the nape of the male’s neck, slid his other arm under the knees, and slowly rose. The weight of the dead was heavier than the pounds of the body. As he stepped away from the Dumpster and started for the Escalade, Wrath felt as though he held his whole race aloft in his arms, and he was glad he had to wear sunglasses to protect his weak eyes.
His wraparounds hid the sheen of tears.
He passed Butch as the cop jogged off toward the broken slayers to do his thing. After the guy’s footfalls halted, Wrath heard a long, deep inhale that sounded like the hiss of a balloon slowly deflating. The retching that followed was much louder.
As the suck and gag was repeated, Wrath laid the dead out in the back of the Escalade and went through the pockets. There was nothing…no wallet, no phone, not even a gum wrapper.
“Fuck.” Wrath pivoted around and sat on the SUV’s back bumper. One of the lessers had cleaned him out already in the course of the fighting…and that meant that as all the slayers had just been inhaled, the civilian’s ID was ashed.
As Butch came weaving down the alley toward the Escalade, he was like an alkie on a bender and the cop didn’t smell like Acqua di Parma anymore. He stank of lesser, as if he’d lined his clothes in Downy dryer sheets, taped a pair of fake-vanilla car fresheners under his armpits, and done a dog roll in some dead fish.
Wrath got up and shut the Escalade’s back.
“You sure you can drive?” he asked as Butch carefully eased himself behind the wheel, looking like he was about to throw up.
“Yeah. Good to go.”
Wrath shook his head at the hoarse voice and glanced around the alley. There were no windows going up the buildings, and having Vishous come right away to heal the cop wouldn’t take a lot of time, but between the fights and the cleanup there had been a lot going on here for the last half hour. They needed to get out of the area.
Originally, Wrath’s plan had been to take a picture of the slayer’s ID with his camera phone, enlarge it enough so he could read the address, and go after the jar of that fucker. He couldn’t leave Butch on his own, though.
The cop seemed surprised when Wrath got into the Escalade’s shotgun seat. “What are you—”
“We’ll take the body to the clinic. V can meet you there and take care of you.”
“Wrath—”
“Let’s fight on the way, shall we, cousin mine?”
Butch put the SUV in gear, reversed out of the alley, and turned around at the first cross street they came to. When he hit Trade, he took a left and headed for the bridges that stretched over the Hudson River. As he drove, he white-knuckled the steering wheel—not because he was scared, but because he was no doubt trying to hold down the bile in his gut.
“I can’t keep lying like this,” Butch mumbled as they got to the other side of Caldwell. A little gag was followed by a cough.
“Yeah, you can.”
The cop looked over. “It’s killing me. Beth needs to know.”
“I don’t want her to worry.”
“I get that—” Butch made a choking sound. “Hold on.”
The cop pulled over onto the iced-up shoulder, popped open the door, and dry-heaved like his liver had received evacuation orders from his colon.
Wrath let his head fall back, an ache setting up shop behind both his eyes. The pain was so not a surprise. Lately he had migraines the way allergy sufferers had sneezes.
Butch reached back and patted around the center console, his upper body still arched out of the Escalade.
“You want the water?” Wrath asked.
“Ye—” Retching cut off the rest of the word.
Wrath picked up a Poland Spring bottle, cracked it open, and put the thing in Butch’s hand.
When there was a break in the throwing up, the cop glugged some water, but the shit didn’t stay down.
Wrath took out his phone. “I’m calling V now.”
“Just give me a minute.”
It took more like ten, but eventually the cop got himself back in the car and put them on the road again. They both were silent for a couple miles, Wrath’s brain racing while his headache got worse.
You’re not a Brother anymore.
You’re not a Brother anymore.
But he had to be. His race needed him.
He cleared his throat. “When V shows up at the morgue, you’re going to say you found the civilian’s body and did the nasty with the lessers.”
“He’ll want to know why you’re there.”
“We’ll tell him that I was on the next block meeting with Rehvenge at ZeroSum and I sensed that you needed help.” Wrath leaned across the front seat and locked a hand on the guy’s forearm. “No one is going to find out, understand?”
“This is not a good idea. This is so not a good idea.”
“The fuck it isn’t.”
As they fell silent, the lights from cars on the other side of the highway made Wrath wince, even though his lids were down and his wraparounds in place. To cut the glare, he turned his face to the side, making like he was staring out his window.
“V knows something is up,” Butch muttered after a while.
“And he can keep wondering. I need to be out in the field.”
“What if you get hurt?”
Wrath put his forearm over his face in hopes of blocki
ng out those goddamn headlights. Man, now he was getting nauseated.
“I won’t get hurt. Don’t worry.”
THREE
You ready for your juice, Father?”
When there was no response, Ehlena, blooded daughter of Alyne, paused in the process of buttoning her uniform. “Father?”
From down the hall, she heard over the dulcet strings of Chopin a pair of slippers moving across bare floorboards and a soft waterfall of tumbling words, like a deck of cards being shuffled together.
This was good. He was up on his own.
Ehlena pulled her hair back, twisted it, and put a white scrunchie on to hold the knot in place. Halfway through her shift, she was going to have to redo the bun. Havers, the race’s physician, required his nurses to be as pressed and starched and well-ordered as everything in his clinic.
Standards, he always said, were critical.
On the way out of her bedroom, she picked up a black shoulder bag she’d gotten from Target. Nineteen bucks. A steal. In it was the shortish skirt and the knockoff Polo sweater she was going to change into about two hours before dawn.
A date. She was actually going on a date.
The trip upstairs to the kitchen involved only one flight of stairs, and the first thing she did when she emerged from the basement was head over to the old-fashioned Frigidaire. Inside, there were eighteen small bottles of Ocean Spray CranRaspberry in three rows of six. She took one from the front, then carefully moved the others forward so that they were all lined up.
The pills were located behind the dusty stack of cookbooks. She took out one trifluoperazine and two loxapine and put them in a white mug. The stainless-steel spoon she used to crush them up was bent at a slight angle, and so were all the others.
She’d been crushing pills like this for close to two years now.
The CranRas hit the fine white powder and swirled it away, and to make sure the taste was adequately hidden, she put two ice cubes in the mug. The colder the better.
