by J. R. Ward
Oh, look, John was talking to him.
Right in front of his eyes, the guy’s hands were going through the motions, so to speak, and Qhuinn intended reply with some kind of update—
“Is this real?” he mumbled.
John looked momentarily confuzzled.
It had to be real, Qhuinn thought. Because the Honor Guard had come to him in the summer, and the air he was inhaling was cold.
Are you okay? John mouthed as he signed.
Shoving his hand into the snowy ground, Qhuinn pushed as hard as he could. When he didn’t budge more than an inch or two, he let that speak for itself…and passed the fuck out.
THREE
The sound of coke getting sniffed up a deviated septum made the man outside the door tighten his grip on his knife.
Fucker. What a fucker.
The first rule of any successful dealer was that you didn’t use. Addicts who funded your business used. Associates you needed to leverage used. Bitches you needed out on the streets used.
Management did not use. Ever.
The logic was so sound, it was fundamental, and nothing different than, say, going to a casino that had a six-million-square-foot facility, enough catered food for a small country, and goddamned gold leaf everywhere—and being surprised that you lost all your money. If taking drugs was such a hot frickin’ idea, why did people regularly die from the shit, destroy lives over it, get thrown in prison thanks to it?
Dumb-ass.
The man turned the knob and pushed. Of course the door was unlocked, and as he walked into the squalid room, the stench of baby powder would have overwhelmed him—if he hadn’t gotten used to the smell on himself.
That nasty nose-pincher was the only thing he hadn’t liked about the change. Everything else—the strength, the longevity, the freedom—he’d been into. But damn, the smell.
No matter how much cologne he used, he couldn’t get rid of it.
And yeah, he missed being able to have sex.
Other than that, the Lessening Society was his ticket to domination.
The sniffing stopped and the Fore-lesser looked up from the People magazine he’d made the lines on. Beneath the residue, some dude named Channing Tatum was staring at the camera, all hot as fuck. “Hey. What’re you doing here?”
As those beady, strung out eyes struggled to focus, the “Boss” looked like he’d given a blow job to a powered doughnut.
“I got something for you.”
“More? Oh, my God, how did you know? I only got two ounces left and I—”
Connors, a.k.a. C-Rider, moved fast, taking three steps forward, throwing his arm out wide, and swinging the knife in a fat circle—that terminated in the side of the Fore-lesser’s head. The steel blade went in deep, slicing through the softer bone of the temple, piercing the buzzed-up gray matter.
The Fore-lesser went into a seizure—maybe because of the injury…more likely because his adrenal glands had just pumped a million cc’s of holy-shit into his bloodstream and the stuff wasn’t mixing well with the cocaine. As the little shit flopped off his chair and shimmied his way down to the floor, the knife stayed with Connors, disengaging from the side of the skull, its blade marked with black blood.
Connors met the shocked stare of his now-former superior and felt really good about this promotion he had going on. The Omega himself had come to him and offered him the job, no doubt recognizing, as they all did, that a sk8tr punk was not who you wanted in charge of any organization bigger than a poker game. Yeah, sure, the guy had been useful in growing the ranks. But quantity was not quality, and it didn’t take the Army, Navy, Air Force or Marines to see that the Lessening Society was being overrun by lawless, ADHD juvies.
Hard to promote any kind of agenda with that kind of rank and file—unless you had a real professional running shit.
Which was why the Omega had put all this in motion.
“Wh-wh-wh—”
“You been fired, motherfucker.”
The final part of the forced retirement came with another stabbing motion, this one taking that blade and driving it right into the center of the chest. With a pop! and a show of smoke, the regime change was complete.
And Connors was the head of everything.
Supremacy made him smile for a moment—until his eyes went around the room. For some reason, he thought of that Febreze commercial, the one where they’d shit up some place, spray like madmen, and drag “real people, not actors” into the scene to sniff around.
Man, except for the food remnants—which were a no-show, because slayers didn’t require eats—everything fit: the mold on the ceiling, the ratty furniture, the dripping over at the sink…and especially the crap that went along with a multi-chemical addiction, like syringes, spoons, even the two-liter Sprite-bottle meth lab over in the corner.
This was not a seat of power. This was a common crack house.
Connors went over and snagged the little shit’s cell phone. The screen was cracked and there was some kind of sticky patch on the back. The thing was not password-protected, and when he went into the messages section, all kinds of kiss-asses had blown up the phone, the texts blah-blah-blahing congrats about the induction ceremony that was going on tonight.
But the Fore-lesser hadn’t known about it. Wasn’t his gig.
Connors wasn’t going to retaliate, however. Those brown-nosing douches were just trying to stay alive and would suck anyone’s dick to keep breathing: He fully expected the same list to be hitting him up, and he wanted them to. Spies had their purpose in the grand scheme of things.
And, man, there was work to be done.
From what he had figured out during his own blessedly short period of ass-kissing, the Lessening Society had few assets left in terms of weapons or ammo or property. No cash, because what did come in from petty robberies had gone up the little shit’s nose or into his arm. No master list of inductees, no troop organization, no training.
Lot of rebuilding needed to happen fast—
A cold draft shot into the room, and Connors turned around. The Omega had arrived from out of nowhere, the Evil’s white robes shining brightly, the black shadow underneath looking like an optical illusion.
The repulsion that went through Connors was something he knew he was also going to have to get used to. The Omega always enjoyed a special relationship with his Fore-lesser—and maybe that was why word had it they rarely lasted very long.
Then again, given who he picked…
“I took care of him,” Connors said, nodding to the scorch mark on the floor.
“I know,” the Omega replied, that voice warping through the fetid, chilly air.
Outside, a gust of wind blew snow against the windows, the gap on one sill letting some snowflakes in. As they entered the space, they fell to the floor in a shimmer, the temperature cold enough to sustain them, thanks to the master’s presence.
“He is back home now.” The Omega came forward like a draft, with no evidence that any kind of legs were moving him. “And I am very pleased.”
Conners told his feet to stay put. There was nowhere to run to, nothing to escape—he just had to get through what was going to happen next.
At least he had prepared for this.
“I got some new recruits for you.”
The Omega stopped. “Indeed?”
“A tribute, as it were.” Or more like a defined endpoint to this shit: He had to head out soon, and he’d carefully planned these two events close together. The Omega, after all, was into his playthings, but liked his Society and its purpose of eliminating vampires even more.
“You please me to no end,” the Omega whispered as he closed in. “I do believe we are going to get along just fine…Mr. C.”
FOUR
The Chosen Layla had existed in her own body without any physical compromise for the entirety of her existence. Born in the Scribe Virgin’s Sanctuary, and trained in the rarefied, preternatural peacefulness there, she had never known hunger, or feve
r, or pain of any note. Not heat nor cold, nor contusion, concussion, or contraction. Her body had been, as with all things in the mother of the race’s most sacred space, always the placid same, a perfect specimen functioning at the highest level—
“Oh, God,” she gulped as she shot out of bed and lurched into the bathroom.
Her bare feet skidded on the marble as she threw herself to her knees, popped the toilet seat, and leaned over to go face-to-face with the bowl’s epiglottal hole.
“Just…do it….” she gasped as the rolling nausea polluted her body until even her toes curled under and grabbed at the floor. “Please…for the Scribe Virgin’s sake…”
If she could just empty the contents of her stomach, surely the torture would relent—
Taking her fore- and middle fingers into her throat, she shoved them in so hard she choked. But that was the extent of it. There was no coordination of her diaphragm, no release of the greasy spoiled meat in her stomach…not that she’d actually eaten that—or anything else—for…how long had it been? Days.
Mayhap that was the problem.
Snaking her arm around her hips, she put her sweaty forehead on the hard, cool lip of the toilet and tried to breathe shallowly—because the sensation of air moving up and down the back of her throat made the impotent urge to throw up worse.
Mere days ago, when she had been in her needing, her body had taken control, the urge to mate strong enough to wipe out all thought and emotion. That supremacy had quickly passed, however, and likewise had the aches and pains from the relentless mating, her skin and bones once again resuming their backseat to her brain.
The balance was tipping back once more.
Giving up, she carefully repositioned herself, placing her shoulders against the blessedly chilly marble wall.
Considering how sickly she felt, her only extrapolation was that she was losing the pregnancy. She’d never seen anyone in the Sanctuary go through this—was this illness what was normal here on earth?
Closing her eyes, she wished she could talk to someone about it all. But very few knew her condition—and for the time being, she needed to keep things that way: Most were completely unaware that she had gone through her needing or been serviced. Autumn’s fertile period had hit first, and in response, the Brotherhood had scattered far and wide as there was no taking chances with exposure to those hormones—for good reason, as she had learned firsthand. By the time people had returned to their normal rooms in the mansion? Her own had passed, and any residual hormonal fluxes in the air had been chalked up by all and sundry to Autumn’s fading time.
The privacy in these two rooms of hers was not going to last if the pregnancy continued, however. For one, her status would be sensed by the others, especially males, who were particularly attuned to that sort of thing.
And two, after a while, she would begin to show.
Except if she felt this bad, how ever could the young survive?
As a vague sensation of tightness settled into her lower belly, like her pelvis was being compressed by an invisible vise, she tried to train her mind on something, anything other than her physical sensations.
Eyes the color of the night sky came to her.
Penetrating eyes, eyes that stared up from a face that was bloodied and distorted…and beautiful even in its ugliness.
Okay. This was not an improvement.
Xcor, leader of the Band of Bastards. A traitor against the king, a hunted male who was enemy to the Brotherhood and lawful vampires everywhere. The fierce warrior who had been born of a noble mother who did not want him because of his visage, and an unknown father who had never claimed parentage. An unwanted burden shuffled from home to orphanage until he’d entered the Bloodletter’s training camp back in the Old Country. A remorseless fighter trained therein to great effect; then, in his maturity, a master of death who toured the land with a band of elite fighters first aligned to the Bloodletter himself, and thereafter, to Xcor—and no one else.
The information trail at the Sanctuary’s library ended there because none of the Chosen were updating anything anymore. The rest, however, she could fill in herself: The Brotherhood believed the attempt on Wrath’s life back in the fall had been made by Xcor, and she had further heard there were insurrectionists within the glymera working with the fighter.
Xcor. A traitorous, brutal male with no conscience, no loyalty, no principle save to serve himself.
Yet when she had looked into his eyes, when she had been in his presence, when she had unknowingly fed this new enemy…she had felt like a full female for the first time in her life.
Because he had looked upon her not with aggression, but with—
“Arrest that,” she said aloud. “Stop that right now.”
As if she were a young getting into a cupboard or some such thing.
Forcing herself to her feet, she drew her robe around her and resolved to leave her room and make her way down to the kitchen. A change of scenery was needed, and so was food—if only to give her churning stomach something to expel.
On her way out, she did not check her hair or her face in the mirror. Did not fuss over the way her robe fell. Didn’t waste even a moment worrying which of her identical sandals to wear.
So much time she had wasted in the past over the minute details of her appearance.
She would have been much better served studying or training herself for a vocation. But that had not been permitted within the allowed prescription of activity for a Chosen.
As she stepped into the corridor, she took a deep breath, steadied herself, and started to walk in the direction of the king’s study—
Up ahead, Blaylock, son of Rocke, burst out into the hall of statues, his brows down tight, his body clad in leather from the tops of his shoulders to the soles of his tremendous boots. As he strode forward, he was checking his weapons one by one, taking them out of holsters, replacing them, buckling them in.
Layla stopped dead.
And when the male finally looked upon her, he did the same, his eyes growing remote.
Deep red of hair, and lovely sapphire blue of eye, the fully blooded aristocrat was a fighter for the Brotherhood, but he was not a brute. No matter how he spent his nights out in the field, he remained at the compound a mannered, intelligent gentlemale of fine comportment and schooling.
So it was not a surprise that even in his rush, he bent slightly at the waist in formal greeting before resuming his hurry to the grand staircase.
In his descent down to the foyer, Qhuinn’s voice came to her.
I’m in love with someone….
Layla exercised her new habit of cursing under her breath. Such a sad state of affairs between those two fighters, and this pregnancy was not of aid.
But the die had been cast.
And they were all going to live with the consequences.
As Blay hit the staircase, he felt like he was being chased, and that was nuts. Nobody who was any threat was behind him. There was no masher in a Jason mask, or sick bastard in a bad Christmas sweater with knives for fingers, or killer clown…
Just a probably-pregnant Chosen who happened to have spent a good twelve hours fucking his former best friend.
No prob.
At least, there shouldn’t have been any problem. The trouble was, every time he saw that female, he felt like he got punched in the gut. Which was another case of crazy. She had done nothing wrong. Neither had Qhuinn.
Although, God, if she was pregnant…
Blay booted all those happy thoughts to the background as he crossed through the foyer at a jog. No time to psycho-babble, even if it was just to himself: When Vishous called you on your night off and told you to be out front in your gear in five minutes, it was not because things were going well.
No details had been given during the phone call; none had been asked for. Blay had taken only a moment to text Saxton, and then he’d thrown on the leather and the steel, ready for anything.
In a way, this was good.
Spending the night reading in his room had turned out to be torturous, and though he didn’t want anyone in trouble, at least this pulled him into some activity. Bursting out through the vestibule, he—
Came face-to-face with the Brotherhood’s flatbed truck.
The thing was kitted out to look authentically human, deliberately painted with red AAA logos and the made-up name of Murphy’s Towing. Fake telephone number. Fake tagline of: “We’re Always There for You.”
Bullshit. Unless, of course, the “you” was one of the Brotherhood.
Blay hopped up into the passenger seat and found Tohr, not V, behind the wheel. “Is Vishous coming?”
“It’s you and me, kid—he’s still working on the ballistics testing of that bullet.”
The Brother hit the gas, the diesel engine roaring like a beast, the headlights swinging in a fat circle around the courtyard’s fountain and across the lineup of cars parked wheelbase-to-wheelbase.
Just as Blay checked out the vehicles and did the math about the one that was missing, Tohr said, “It’s Qhuinn and John.”
Blay’s lids dropped shut for a split second. “What happened.”
“I don’t know much. John called V for an emergency assist.” The Brother looked over. “And you and I are the only ones free.”
Blay reached for the door handle, ready to pop the thing and dematerialize the fuck out of there. “Where are they—”
“Calm down, son. You know the rules. None of us can be out alone, so I need your ass in that seat or I’m violating my own goddamn protocol.”
Blay slammed his fist into the door, punching hard enough that the sting in his hand cleared his head a little. Fucking Band of Bastards, cramping them all—and the fact that the rule made sense just pissed him off even more. Xcor and his boys had proven to be cagey, aggressive, and completely without morals—not exactly the kind of enemy you wanted to meet up with all by your little lonesome.
