by J. R. Ward
Of course, the no-feeling thing had its benes. For example, when he banged his forehead into the steering wheel in another couple minutes, he was just going to see stars. The headache? No prob.
The vampire race’s stopgap clinic was about fifteen minutes past the bridge he was just getting on, and the facility was not sufficient for the needs of its patients, being little more than a safe house converted into a field hospital. Still, the Hail Mary solution was all the race had at the moment, a bench player brought in because the quarterback’s leg was snapped in half.
Following the raids over the summer, Wrath was working with the race’s physician to get a new permanent location, but like everything it was taking time. With so many places sacked by the Lessening Society, no one thought it was a good idea to use real estate currently owned by the race, because God only knew how many other locales had been leaked. The king was looking to buy another place, but it had to be secluded and…
Rehv thought of Montrag.
Had the war really come down to murdering Wrath?
The rhetorical, initiated by his mother’s vampire side, rippled through his mind, but triggered no emotion whatsoever. Calculation carried his thoughts. Calculation unencumbered by morality. The conclusion he’d reached as he’d left Montrag’s did not waver, his resolution only growing stronger.
“Thank you, dearest Virgin Scribe,” he muttered as the beater slid out of his way and his exit presented itself like a gift, the reflective green sign a tag with his name on it.
Green…?
Rehv looked around. The red wash had started to drain out of his vision, the other colors of the world reappearing through the two-dimensional haze, and he took a deep breath of relief. He didn’t want to go juiced to the clinic.
As if on schedule, he started to feel cold, even though the Bentley was no doubt a balmy seventy degrees, and he reached forward and cranked the heat. The chills were another good, if inconvenient sign the medication was starting to work.
For as long as he had been alive, he’d had to keep secret what he was. Sin-eaters like him had two choices: They either passed as normals or they got sent upstate to the colony, deported from society like the toxic waste they were. That he was a half-breed didn’t matter. If you had any symphath in you, you were considered one of them, and with good reason. The thing about symphaths was, they liked the evil in themselves too much to be trusted.
For fuck’s sake, look at tonight. Look at what he was prepared to do. One conversation and he was pulling the trigger—not even because he had to, just because he wanted to. Needed to, was more like it. Power plays were oxygen for his bad side, both undeniable and sustaining. And the whys behind his choice were typically symphath: They served him and no one else, not even the king who was a friend of sorts.
This was why, if an everyday, average vampire knew of a sin-eater who was out and about in the gen pop, by law they had to report the individual for deportation or face criminal action: Regulating the whereabouts of sociopaths and keeping them away from the moral and the law-abiding was a healthy survival instinct for any society.
Twenty minutes later, Rehv pulled up to an iron gate that was downright industrial in its function over form. The thing was without any grace whatsoever, nothing but solid shafts bolted together and topped with a curly wig of barbed-wire coil. To the left there was an intercom, and as he put down his window to hit the call button, security cameras focused on the grille of his car and the front windshield and the driver’s-side door.
So he was not surprised at the tense tone of the female voice that answered. “Sire…I was not aware that you had an appointment?”
“I don’t.”
Pause. “As a nonemergency walk-in, the wait time could be rather long. Perhaps you would like to schedule—”
He glared into the closest camera eye. “Let me in. Now. I have to see Havers. And this is an emergency.”
He had to get back to the club and check in. The four hours he’d blown already this evening were a lifetime when it came to managing the likes of ZeroSum and the Iron Mask. Shit didn’t just happen in places like those, it was SOP, and his fist was the one with Buck Stops Here tatted on the knuckles.
After a moment, those ugly-ass, rock-solid gates slid free, and he didn’t waste time on the mile-long driveway.
As he came around the last turn, the farmhouse up ahead didn’t warrant the kind of security it had, at least not if you took it at face value. The two-story clapboard was barely a colonial, and it was totally pared-down. No porches. No shutters. No chimneys. No plantings.
Compared to Havers’s old crib and clinic setup it was the poor relation to a garden shed.
He parked opposite the detached bank of garages where the ambulances were kept and got out. The fact that the cold December night made him shiver was another good sign, and he reached into the Bentley’s backseat to take out his cane and one of his many sable dusters. Along with numbness, the downside of his chemical mask was a drop in core temperature that turned his veins into air-conditioning coils. Living out his nights and days in a body he couldn’t feel or warm was not a party, but it wasn’t as if he had a choice.
Maybe if his mother and his sister hadn’t been normals, he might have Darth Vadered himself and embraced the dark side, living out his days fucking with the minds of his comrades-in-harm. But he’d put himself in the position of being head of his household, and that kept him in this stretch of neither here nor there.
Rehv walked around the side of the colonial, pulling the sable in close to his throat. When he came up to a nothing-looking door, he rang the button that was tacked onto the aluminum siding and stared into an electronic eye. A moment later, an air lock popped with a hiss, and he pushed his way into a white room the size of a walk-in closet. After he stared into a camera’s face, another seal popped free, a hidden panel shifted back, and he descended a set of stairs. Another check-in. Another door. And then he was in.
The reception area was every clinic’s patient-and-family parking lot, with rows of chairs and magazines on little tables and a TV and some plants. It was smaller than the one at the old clinic, but it was clean and well-ordered. The two females sitting in it both stiffened as they saw him.
“Right this way, sire.”
Rehv smiled at the nurse who came around the reception desk. For him, a “long wait” was always one in an exam room. The nurses didn’t like him spooking the folks in those rows of chairs, and they didn’t like him around themselves, either.
Worked for him. He wasn’t the socializing kind.
The exam room he was led down to was located on the nonemergency side of the clinic, and it was one he’d been in before. He’d been in all of them before.
“The doctor is in surgery and the rest of the staff are with other patients, but I’ll have a colleague come take your vitals as soon as I can.” The nurse left him like somebody had just coded down the hall and she was the only one with paddles.
Rehv got up on the table, keeping his coat on and his cane in his palm. To pass the time, he closed his eyes and let the emotions in the place seep into him like a panoramic vista: The walls of the basement dissolved away and the emotional grids of each individual emerged from out of the darkness, a host of different vulnerabilities and anxieties and weaknesses exposed to his symphath side.
He held the remote to all of them, instinctually knowing what buttons to push on the female nurse next door who was worried that her hellren wasn’t attracted to her anymore…but who had still had too much to eat at First Meal. And the male she was treating who had fallen down the stairs and cut his arm…because he’d been into the booze. And the pharmacist across the hall who up until recently had been lifting Xanax for his personal use…until he’d found the hidden cameras put in place to catch him.
Self-destruction in others was a symphath’s favorite reality show to watch, and it was especially good when you were the producer. And even though his vision was now back to “normal” and his bo
dy was numb and cold, what he was at his core was just banked, not spent.
For the kind of shows he could put on, there was an endless source of inspiration and funding.
“Shit.”
As Butch parked the Escalade in front of the clinic’s garages, Wrath’s mouth did some more pull-ups on the curse bar. In the headlights of the SUV, Vishous was spotlit like some frickin’ calendar girl, all sprawled out on the hood of a very familiar Bentley.
Wrath unclipped his seat belt and opened his door.
“Surprise, surprise, my lord,” V said as he straightened and knocked on the sedan’s hood. “Musta been a short meeting downtown with our buddy Rehvenge, huh. Unless that guy’s figured out how to be in two places at once. In which case, I need to know his secret, true?”
Mother. Fucker.
Wrath got out of the SUV and decided the best course was to ignore the Brother. Other options included trying to reason his way out of the lie, which would suck because of all V’s failings, none were intellectual; or in the alternative, instigating a fistfight, which would be only a temporary diversion and would waste time when they both had to get their Humpty Dumptys put back together.
Going around, Wrath opened the rear door of the Escalade. “Heal your boy. I’ll deal with the body.”
As he lifted the civilian’s lifeless weight up and turned, V’s stare locked on a face that was beaten beyond recognition.
“Goddamn it,” V breathed.
At that moment, Butch stumbled out from behind the wheel looking like a hot mess. As the smell of baby powder wafted over, his knees went loose and he barely caught the door for support in time.
Vishous flashed over and took the cop into his arms, holding him close. “Shit, man, how you doing?”
“Ready…for anything.” Butch clung to his best friend. “Just need to be under the heat lamp for a bit.”
“Heal him,” Wrath said as he started for the clinic. “I’m going in.”
As he walked off, the doors of the Escalade shut one after the other, and then there was a glow like clouds had broken free of the moon. He knew what the two were doing inside the SUV, because he’d seen the routine once or twice: They were wrapped around each other, the white light of V’s hand suffusing them both, the evil that Butch had inhaled leaching out into V.
Thank God there was a way to cleanse that shit out of the cop. And being a healer was good for V, too.
Wrath came up to the first door of the clinic and just stared up into the security camera. He was buzzed in immediately, and the instant the air lock had resealed, the hidden panel to the stairs popped open. It took no time at all to get down into the clinic.
The king of the race with a dead male in his arms wasn’t stopped for a nanosecond.
He paused at the landing as the last door lock was sprung. Looking into the camera, he said, “Get a gurney and a sheet first.”
“We’re coming right now, my lord,” said a tinny voice.
No more than a second later, two nurses opened the door, one turning a sheet into a privacy curtain while the other rolled a gurney right up to the bottom of the stairs. With strong and gentle arms, Wrath laid out the civilian as carefully as if the male had been alive and had every bone in his body fractured; then the nurse who’d handled the gurney flapped another sheet out of its folded square. Wrath stopped her before she draped the body.
“I do that,” he said, taking it from her.
She gave the thing over to him with a bow.
Speaking sacred words in the Old Language, Wrath turned the humble cotton sheath into a proper death shroud. After he was done praying for the male’s soul and wishing it a free and easy carry unto the Fade, he and the nurses had a moment of silence before the body was draped.
“We don’t have ID on him,” Wrath said quietly as he smoothed out the edge of the sheet. “Do either of you recognize his clothes? The watch? Anything?”
Both nurses shook their heads, and one murmured, “We’ll put him in the morgue and wait. It’s all we can do. His family will come looking for him.”
Wrath hung back and watched as the body was rolled away. For no particular reason, he noticed the wheel on the front right wiggled as it went along, like it was new on the job and worried about its performance…although this was not because he saw the thing clearly, but rather from the soft whistle of its miscalibration.
Out of whack. Not pulling its weight.
Wrath could so relate.
This fucking war with the Lessening Society had gone on too long, and even with all the power he had and all the resolve in his heart, his race wasn’t winning: Holding steady against your enemy was just a case of losing by increments, because innocents kept dying.
He turned around toward the stairs and smelled the fear and awe of the two females sitting in the plastic chairs of the waiting area. With a mad shuffle, they got to their feet and bowed to him, the deference resounding in his gut like a kick in the balls. Here he was delivering the latest, but far from the last, casualty in the fight, and these two still paid him respect.
He bowed back to them, but couldn’t marshal any words. The only vocabulary he had at the moment was full of George Carlin’s best, and all of it was directed at himself.
The nurse who’d been on shield duty finished folding up the sheet she’d used. “My lord, perhaps you would have a moment to see Havers. He should be out of surgery in about fifteen minutes? It appears you are wounded.”
“I have to get back to the—” He stopped himself before the word field slipped out. “I’ve got to get going. Please let me know about that male’s family, okay? I want to meet with them.”
She bowed at the waist and waited, because she wanted to kiss the massive black diamond that rested on the middle finger of his right hand.
Wrath squeezed his weak eyes shut and held out what she was seeking to pay homage to.
Her fingers were cool and light on his flesh, her breath and her lips the barest of brushes. And yet he felt flayed.
As she righted herself, she said with reverence, “Fare thee well this night, my lord.”
“And you with your hours as well, loyal subject.”
He wheeled around and jogged up the stairs, needing more oxygen than there was in the clinic. Just as he hit the final door, he ran into a nurse who was coming in as fast as he was busting out. The impact knocked her black shoulder bag off, and he barely caught her before she hit the ground along with it.
“Oh, fuck,” he barked, dropping to his knees to get her stuff. “Sorry.”
“My lord!” She bowed deeply to him and then obviously realized he was picking up her things. “You mustn’t do that. Please, let me—”
“No, it’s my fault.”
He shoved what seemed to be a skirt and a sweater back into the bag and then nearly cracked her with a head butt as he shot to his feet.
He grabbed onto her arm once more. “Shit, sorry. Again—”
“I’m fine—honest.”
Her bag changed hands in a messy scramble, going from someone who was in a rush to someone who was flustered.
“You got it?” he said, ready to start begging the Scribe Virgin to get outside.
“Ah, yes, but…” Her tone shifted from reverent to medical. “You’re bleeding, my lord.”
He ignored the comment and took his hand away from her experimentally. Relieved that she stood steady on her feet, he bade her good night and farewell in the Old Language.
“My lord, shouldn’t you see—”
“Sorry I plowed into you,” he called out over his shoulder.
He punched open the last door and sagged as the fresh air seeped into him. Deep breaths cleared his head, and he allowed himself to lean back against the aluminum siding of the clinic.
As the headache started up behind his eyes again, he popped his wraparounds up off his face and rubbed the bridge of his nose. Right. Next stop…the addy that had been listed on the lesser’s fake ID.
He had a jar to
collect.
Dropping the glasses back into place, he straightened and—
“Not so fast, my lord,” V said, materializing smack in front of him. “We’ve got to talk, you and me.”
Wrath bared his fangs. “Not in a conversating kind of mood, V.”
“Tough. Shit.”
FIVE
Ehlena watched the king of the species turn away and nearly break the door in half on his way out.
Man, he was big and scary-looking. And nearly getting mowed down by him put the final frazzle candle on the drama cake.
Smoothing her hair and dragging her shoulder bag up into place, she started down the stairs after passing the interior checkpoint. She was only an hour late to work because—miracle of miracles—her father’s nurse had been free and able to come early. Thank the Virgin Scribe for Lusie.
As bad attacks went, her father’s hadn’t been as horrible as it could have been, and she had a feeling it was because he’d downed the meds right before it hit. Before the pills, the worst of his spells had lasted all night long, so in one sense, tonight had been a sign of progress.
Still broke her damn heart, though.
As she came up to the final camera, Ehlena felt the weight of her bag grow heavier. She’d been prepared to cancel her date and leave the change of clothes at home, but Lusie had talked her out of it. The question the other nurse had asked struck deep: When was the last time you were out of this house for anything except work?
Ehlena hadn’t answered because she was private by nature…and drawing a complete blank.
Which was Lusie’s point, wasn’t it. Caregivers had to take care of themselves, and part of that meant having a life beyond whatever illness had put them in their role. God knew Ehlena told this to the family members of her chronically sick patients all the time, and the advice was both sound and practical.
