Weaken the Knees (The Immortal World Book 6)

by Shannon A. Hiner

  Much to her mind’s chagrin, her body was still frozen when the crack of bone rent the air and Smart yelled in startled agony. The stake dropped from his hand as he went down on his knees cradling the arm previously holding it. His forearm stuck out at an odd angle as he howled.

  Over the human’s bent form, Will met her stare with one of his own. Questions, that’s what that look meant. He was going to hound her later. Her body was finally starting to loosen and she took a deep breath to try to steady her nerves. From behind Will, Faber and Megan stepped into the room.

  “It wasn’t me they saw,” Megan was arguing.

  Faber scoffed. “No, but it was you they heard. And they never would have noticed me if they hadn’t heard you.” He stepped forward and wrenched Stephen Smart up by the collar of his coat. “Oh look. For us?”

  Rene rolled the remaining stiffness from her shoulders and strode forward, careful not to look closely at Smart in case she froze again. He was still keening over the broken bone, but the vampires collectively ignored him. His pain was little more than that of a gnat buzzing about their ears. “What happened? I told you to stay out of sight. We’re just supposed to have been observing.”

  “Well,” Faber said, side-eyeing Megan. “Someone had a little temper tantrum.”

  “Me? You just walked by that human like one of them!”

  “He never would have known the difference if you hadn’t hissed at me!”

  Rene rubbed her eyes. “All right, I get it. Stop it.”

  They continued to argue.

  “Oy!” Rene snapped her fingers between their faces. “Enough! That plan is ruined. Ship has up and sailed with tide. Move on. New plan.”

  They both glared at her, though Faber’s expression cleared within a few seconds. Megan was clearly going to nurse her animosity.

  “We can use this, right?” Faber lifted Stephen Smart a little higher. The movement jostled the human and he swore at them. In Faber’s enormous hands, he looked little more than an overgrown child.

  “We can,” Rene said. “We have that and more. So let’s get going.” She pulled out her phone and dialed Wade Elliot’s number. It rang twice before the younger vampire picked up.

  “Yes?”

  “Hey, it’s Rene. Do we have any sort of holding cells in Abandon?”

  “That depends,” he said slowly. “What type of creature are you attempting to hold?”

  “Human.”

  “Oh. Yes. Of course.” His voice had risen in surprise and what might have been relief. Good grief, what had he thought she would say?

  “Wonderful, I’ll need one in five minutes.”

  “Am I to assume that this is a lawful holding?” Hadrian’s Laws would not let allow the human to leave Abandon again, not alive. He had to be either dead or undead, and Rene sure as hell wasn’t going to be making him a vampire. Though, a certain amount of poetic justice did arise from the idea. Still, she hated him far too much to do him that favor.

  “Yep.”

  “It will be ready for you, then.”

  She hung up and turned to the others. “Wade Elliot is securing a cell for him. Go straight to Abandon and see Serena.”

  Faber and Megan shimmered out with Stephen Smart immediately. Will, of course, did not. Turning away, Rene moved toward where the man, Mirsad, had disappeared before.

  “You froze again,” Will said softly, following her.

  “I’m fine.”

  “You aren’t. What happened?”

  She sighed in irritation. Why did he always have to question her? Always look too deeply? “Nothing ‘happened.’ I was hoping he would reveal something before you burst in.” She moved into the dark hall, opening her senses wide. The narrow hall coupled with the ninety-degree turns would be an excellent way for someone to sneak up on her. Especially if William continued his overly loud grousing. “Shh,” she said.

  “Rene, you know you can trust me.”

  A scent tickled her nose, faint and fading fast. Familiar and unwelcome.

  “Why do you insist on hiding things?”

  She rounded on him. “Would you kindly shut up? I am working here.”

  Will’s deep chestnut eyes narrowed on her as he loomed over her from his superior height. Only the knowledge that he was the last person who would ever purposely harm her kept her from being uncomfortable. That, and she knew his insides were stuffed full of nothing more than cotton candy and angel clouds. Even though the outside of him was disarmingly hard, and broad, and leaning over her. Rene backed up a step without realizing it, but it wasn’t fear that sent the curl of heat through her middle.

  Before she could deliver a proper set down, something foul wafted past her nose. Rene went still and inhaled deeply, facing away from Will again. Werewolf. Definitely werewolf. What was a wolf doing with a group of vampire hunters?

  “No good,” Will whispered. “Absolutely no good.”

  Had she spoken aloud? Or did they merely have the same thought? Didn’t matter. He was right.

  “Did you get any sense of that Mirsad guy?”

  He shook his head. “No, you—” he stopped.

  She had distracted him with her mental breakdown. Damn. Rene nodded to show she understood what he hadn’t said. Megan might have an attitude problem (and yes, it amused Rene to no end to be pointing that particular finger) and Faber was clearly reckless, but Rene was turning out to be the group’s biggest liability. Whatever was going on with her mind needed to stop.

  “He’s gone, whatever or whoever he is. So is the wolf,” she said. “Let’s get back to the others and decide the best way to use Smart.”

  Chapter 10

  “Yo, K, where you going?”

  Kendra winced and stopped outside the door of her friend’s Genocide apartment. Had he seen her exit? “Hey,” she said, turning while trying to keep her face open and honest. “There you are.”

  “Here I am,” Faber said with a smile and tilt of his head. “You knew I was with the others.”

  “I thought maybe you guys got done early and hadn’t checked in yet.” The lie slid off her tongue easily. As if she’d been doing it all her life. She had, at least all her second life. All six months of it. She hated spying on Faber. He was so open and trusting. If he ever found out . . . Inwardly Kendra quailed at the thought. He wouldn’t react well, that much she was sure of.

  “Aw, poor sprite, are you feeling left out of the action?” He unlocked the door and held it open for her.

  She smiled back at him, but didn’t enter. “No, of course not. I know where my talents lie. I actually can’t come in now. I need to go home and take care of a few things before we all meet up again.” Poor simple man, he didn’t question why she had been there in that case. It didn’t even seem to occur for an instant that she might be lying. It would never cross his mind that she’d been inside only minutes prior, searching the room top to bottom for valuable information.

  “No time to hear about our escapades raiding a warehouse full of vampire hunters, huh? Don’t even want to hear about the hostage we took and our plans to pump him for information?”

  “You took a hostage?” Kendra couldn’t help it, she was shocked. Rene hadn’t planned a full scale raid, only reconnaissance.

  “Oh, and you were right about Money Bags being there. Rene and Will apparently got a look at him.”

  “What?” Kendra stepped forward. “What did he look like? Who’s the hostage?”

  “Well, they didn’t get a great look at him. And the one and only Stephen Smart. He’s in holding in Abandon.”

  An eventful night indeed. Now she absolutely had to return to the castle before their pre-dawn meeting. Her master was going to want an update immediately. “Wow, Fabe. Did anything else happen? Did you guys manage to tear down the entire organization and expose the hunters to the other humans as crazies?” She joked purposefully, knowing that Faber was so open he’d brag about anything and everything that took place that night.

  He laughed. �
�Not quite. But I’ll tell you what, I wish you were out in the field with us instead of Megan. It’s true what they say about the Madrassi. I didn’t want to believe it, but if that stick gets any farther up her—”

  Kendra’s phone started buzzing loudly from her pocket. She pulled it out to see her sire’s phone number. “I’m sorry, Fabe, I’ve gotta run. But I’ll see you in a couple of hours. Way to go tonight, big guy.” She smacked him on the shoulder with a smile and started jogging down the hall, wanting to be out of earshot when she took the call.

  “Sire?” she said into the microphone.

  “Kendra, are you coming in?”

  “Yes, I have updates for Master.”

  “When will you be here?”

  “Five minutes.”

  “Good.”

  ∞∞∞

  Straps held the human’s wrists and ankles tight to the chair. One more around his middle. It was pitiful, really, how little it took to immobilize the mortal. Will looked down at the sweating, huffing man and felt sorry for him. Not for his current predicament—that was entirely his own making—but for his extremely insignificant and terribly short life. Twenty-nine years of living, and he would die unremembered, uncelebrated, unknown.

  Rene sidled around the back of the human’s seat, a lithe angry cat. Her fingers trailed over the human’s bare arm, seeking out the break in the bone and pressing into it.

  The mortal sucked in a pained breath, tears flowing from the corners of his eyes, retracing well-worn tracks, but he laughed. “You can’t do anything to me he hasn’t done already.”

  “Who?” Will demanded.

  The human turned his cold gaze on Rene. His eyes drilled into her with singular intent. Will saw her stiffen slightly, but she met the human’s eyes. What game did these two have going that he wasn’t privy to? First the human nearly killed her with his poisoned blood, then she froze when he held a wooden stake on her. She could have killed him in less than a second, snapped his neck and been done with it. Rip out his heart and place it still beating in Smart’s own hands before the human even fell. Why did she hesitate with him?

  “You know who.” Smart spoke directly to Rene.

  She raised her brows, with that cocky smirk of hers. “Voldemort?”

  “Mirsad.” His mouth caressed the name. The sound slithered forth and writhed across the floor, filling the room with its presence, its evil.

  “Nope.” Rene shrugged one shoulder blithely, continuing past the human to the other side of the sterile white room. “’Fraid I haven’t made his acquaintance. For all my many years, never met a lad by that name.”

  Smart wasn’t buying it, not by the smirk of his split lip or the sardonic gleam in his red eyes. Neither was Will. He watched Rene closer than he did the human. She knew more than she was letting on. Something was making her freeze up, something had scared her out of her mind. And anything that could scare Rene Kaplan that thoroughly should frighten the daylights out of a normal person.

  Why wasn’t she telling him, though?

  “Tell me about this Mirsad fellow,” she said, swinging back around to the human. “What’s his big beef with vampires?”

  Smart licked his bottom lip and spat blood at Will’s feet. “Aside from the fact that you’re unnatural, parasitic, creatures of death?”

  “Unnatural?” Rene laughed. “We’ve been around for millennia, how are we unnatural? You must be a religious nut, right? Tell me I’m right.”

  “If there were a God, how could He suffer such beings as you to live?”

  She grinned, toothy and merciless. “Will,” she said, laughter evident in her voice. “You want to tell him, or shall I?”

  He couldn’t help but smile back—hey, he’d take his smiles from her however he could get them. “Oh please, let me be the one.”

  Bowing, she indicated the floor in front of the human with a Shakespearean flourish.

  He didn’t move from his spot behind the human, instead resting his elbows on the back of the chair and leaning over Stephen Smart with a conspiratorial air. “Bad news, bud, there is a God, and these days he’s a lot more Old Testament. Angels? Demons? Lucifer and his Fallen? All real, friend.”

  “Tell him the best part.” Rene snickered.

  “We’re not granting you a final confession, deathbed baptism, or even burial rites.” Will shrugged. “I guess you’ll just have to roll the dice with Saint Peter and see how his list looks when you get there.”

  Regarding them with a dark expression, Smart said, “I’m not stupid enough to think begging for my life will do any good. Kill me when you’re done with the theatrics, and we’ll see how my soul is sorted. Personally, I think taking down your kind has got to be good for it.”

  “So if you weren’t doing it for the sake of your soul,” Will turned the chair, human and all, “accidentally” jostling the broken arm, “someone must have killed a family member, right? Mother? Sister? Brother?”

  “Inbred Aunt-Sister-Cousin?” Rene quipped, examining her fingernails.

  “In order to kill predators of my species, I have to have a sob story?” Smart laughed, then choked on it when Will squeezed the cracked bone in his forearm. “Bastard,” he said through clenched teeth.

  “Nope, fully legitimate, sorry.”

  Rene sighed. “We’re getting nowhere with this line of questioning.”

  Will raised his brows at her.

  “I literally could not care less about his back story. And he’s not going to talk with a broken arm.”

  Smart snorted. “I wouldn’t talk without one either.”

  “Excuse me,” Rene said. “I meant to say he’s not going to talk with only a broken arm.” She bent down to her boots and removed a thin stiletto knife. “You may want to leave, Will.”

  “You think I’m too squeamish?”

  “I think you’re too nice.”

  “Isn’t that the same thing?”

  “Not at all. There’s a difference between mercy and a weak stomach.”

  Was that a compliment? He’d take it. Yet . . . he couldn’t leave her alone with the human. “I’ll stay.”

  Her indigo eyes met his across the room, filled with a whole host of warnings. She really didn’t want him to stay. He wanted to leave even less now.

  “I’ll stay,” he repeated.

  She raised her chin. “Suit yourself. But don’t get in my way.”

  He sighed. If that wasn’t the tagline for every one of their interactions . . .

  ∞∞∞

  The shower. If someone asked Rene what she liked best about her apartment in the city, the answer would always be the shower. Spacious, walk in, multiple nozzles and alternating sprays. The bathroom itself wasn’t brightly lit like so many were. Low, warm lights suffused the opposite wall and made the dark bronze fixtures and granite glow.

  Piping hot water steamed from every surface of her body as she scrubbed. Scrubbed at her hard, impenetrable skin until the loofa tore apart in her hands. Scrubbed until the soap bottle was empty. Scrubbed until she could only see the blood on her skin through memories.

  Nothing took away the look in his eyes. The realization that he was dealing with a true monster.

  Folding in on herself, Rene leaned her cheek against the warm shower wall, letting the water stream down her face and neck. Closing her eyes, all she could see was his expression. He tried to hide it. He tried to pretend it was okay. That he understood. He would never understand.

  She was a monster. Always had been. She’d just been waiting for him to see it. Now, he had.

  And still, they got nothing out of the human. Stephen Smart was locked up tighter than the crown jewels of England. More and more she was persuaded he really didn’t know more about Mirsad, whoever the bastard was. She didn’t consider herself an expert on torture, but she knew how to make men talk. What pieces of their anatomy to not only threaten, but score wide open. Threats weren’t enough. A person would say anything if they thought you might dissect their family-
making bits. They would tell you the truth if you were halfway through and it was the only way to make you stop.

  That had been Will’s breaking point. Actually seeing the blood—not the kind he was used to—and seeing she had no intention of stopping. He didn’t say anything, but his eyes wrote her an entire novel. Every ounce of strength Rene possessed had to be channeled into not flinching. Into letting him see exactly what she was. He couldn’t say he hadn’t asked for it.

  And the human talked. Blathered on and on, really. About everything and anything. She knew his entire life story. He would never smirk at her again. His poisoned blood filled the air with the scent of sour apples, stained the floor of the cell, stained her fingers, stained her mind and soul.

  The water started to run cold. A relief after the stifling heat that echoed her shame. Rene opened her eyes again, briefly wondering how long she had been in the shower. Was it morning yet? Could she fall into the oblivion of sleep and forget about this, at least for a few hours?

  On the counter, her phone lit up. Rene stared at the caller ID through the rivulets of water pouring down the glass. Serena was calling. She closed her eyes again and let the cool water rinse the last vestiges of soap from her body.

  Time to face reality.

  Neither her hands nor her soul would ever be clean. She’d been sullied at the tender age of eight. Nothing and no one could ever change that.

  ∞∞∞

  “. . . What?”

  “Rene, can you hear me?”

  “Yes, I just don’t believe you. One more time for the ones in the back.”

  “Your hostage is dead.”

  Shit.

  No, it wasn’t possible. Nothing she’d done to him had been life-threatening. At least, not for a young, relatively healthy man. Sure, the pain would have been a strain on his heart, but—

  “Rene? Still there?”

  “I don’t understand,” she said into the phone. “How?”

  “Really?” Serena’s voice rose with incredulity. “I need to lay this one out for you?”