by J. R. Ward
Annnnnnnnd naturally that was when iAm showed up.
As his brother’s presence registered, Trez closed his eyes.
Great. Just fucking wonderful.
SEVEN
About ten blocks away from Trez’s bad-to-worse night, Xcor was wiping the blade of his scythe off with a chamois cloth that was soft as a lamb’s ear.
Across the alley, Throe was on his phone, talking in a low voice. He had been thus e’er since the third of the three lessers they’d found in this quadrant of the city had been discharged back to the Omega.
Xcor was not interested in any delay, cellular or otherwise. The rest of his Band of Bastards were elsewhere downtown, seeking out either or both of their two enemies—and he would prefer to be engaged thusly.
But biological needs must. Goddamn it.
Throe ended his call and looked over, his handsome face drawn in serious lines. “She is willing.”
“How kind of her.” Xcor sheathed his scythe and put his cleaning cloth away. “I am, however, less interested in her acquiescence than in the issue of whether she is able.”
“She is.”
“And how do we know this?”
Throe cleared his throat and glanced away. “I went to her last night and availed myself.”
Xcor smiled coldly. So that explained his soldier’s absence—and the reason for the departure was a relief. He had feared that the other male had…
“And how ever was she.”
“She was viable.”
“Did you sample all her charms?”
The gentlemale, who had once been a highbrow member of the glymera, but was now useful, cleared his throat. “I, ah…yes.”
“And how were they.” When there was no answer, Xcor tracked through the black-stained snow, closing in on his second in command. “How was she, Throe? Wet and willing?”
The male’s flush grew deeper on his perfectly handsome face. “She was adequate.”
“How many times did you have her?”
“Several.”
“And in varying positions, I hope?” When there was only a stiff nod, Xcor relented. “Well, you have then faithfully discharged your duty to your fellow soldiers. I’m quite certain that the others shall want to partake of both vein and sex as well.”
In the awkward beat of silence that followed, Xcor would never have admitted it to anyone, but he’d pressed for details not to deliberately goad his subordinate…but because he was glad Throe had lain with the female. He wanted distance between the male and what had happened back in the fall. He wanted calendars full of years, and countless females, and rivers of other females’ blood….
“There is but one stipulation,” Throe said.
Xcor thinned his mouth. As the female in question had not seen him yet, it couldn’t be more cash—besides, he did not need to feed as of now. Thanks to…“And that is.”
“It must be done at her abode. At first night tomorrow.”
“Ah.” Xcor smiled coldly. “’Tis a trap then.”
“The Brotherhood does not know who made the inquiry.”
“You identified six males, did you not.”
“I used not our names.”
“No matter.” Xcor glanced around the alley, his senses reaching out, searching for lesser or Brother. “I do not underestimate the king’s reach. Nor should you.”
Indeed, his own ambitions had pitted them all against a foe of worth. The assassination attempt on Wrath’s life back in the autumn had been his open declaration of war, and as expected, there had been a predictable fallout: The Brotherhood had found his Band of Bastards’ lair, infiltrated it, and left with the rifle pack that contained the weapon that had been used to put a bullet into the Blind King’s throat.
Undoubtedly, they were going for proof.
The question was, of what? He did not know as of yet whether the king lived or had died, and neither did the Council, from what he understood. In fact, the glymera knew not that the attempt had even occurred.
Had Wrath survived? Or had he been killed and the Brotherhood was at the moment busy trying to fill the vacancy? The Old Law was very clear about the rules of succession—provided the king had offspring, which he did not. So it would be his next nearest kin—assuming there were any.
Xcor wanted to know, but he made no inquiries. All he could do was wait until word presented itself—and in the meantime, he and his soldiers kept killing lessers, and he continued to shore up his power base within the glymera. At least both of those endeavors were going well. Every night, they stabbed slayers back to the Omega. And his limp-wristed contact on the Council, the not-particularly-venerable Elan, son of Larex, was proving quite naive and malleable—two characteristics very useful in a disposable tool.
Xcor was, however, growing tired of the information void. And indeed, this business with that female Throe had found was necessary but fraught with danger. A female capable of selling her veins and her sex to multiple users was certainly able to trade information for cash—and though Throe had kept their identities quiet, the number of them had been given. The Brotherhood must have appropriately guessed that none of the Band of Bastards were mated, and that sooner or later, in this new land, they would require what they had had a sufficiency of in the Old Country.
Mayhap this female was put up by the king and his private guard.
Well, they would find out on the morrow. Ambushes were easily set, and there was nary a more vulnerable moment than when a hungry male was at the throat and between the legs of a female. Yet it was time. His soldiers were willing to fight, but their faces were drawn, their eyes sunken, their skin stretched too tightly across their cheeks. Human blood, that weak substitute, was not providing enough strength, and his bastards had been living off of it for too long. Back in the Old Country, there had been enough females to be of service when needs must. But e’er since they had come to the New World, they had had to make do.
If this was a trap, he was willing to fight the Brothers. Then again, he had been properly serviced—
Dearest Virgin Scribe, he could not think of that.
Xcor cleared his throat as pain in his chest made it hard to swallow. “Tell the female, first darkness is too early. We shall come instead at midnight unto her. And arrange for human feedings as soon as the night falls. If the Brothers are there, we shall engage with them from a position of relative strength.”
Throe’s eyebrows rose as if he were impressed with Xcor’s thinking. “Aye. I shall do just that.”
Xcor nodded and looked away.
In the silence, the events of the autumn crowded in between them, cooling the frigid December air even further.
That sacred Chosen was always with them both.
“The daylight is coming fast upon us,” Throe said in his perfect accent. “It is time to depart.”
Xcor glanced over to the east. The predawn glow had yet to arrive, but his second in command was correct. Soon…very soon…the deadly light of the sun would rain down, and no matter that it was at its weakest, with the winter solstice so recently passed.
“Call the soldiers off the field,” Xcor said. “And meet them at base.”
Throe typed in some combination of letters into a message that Xcor would not have been able to read. And then the soldier put his phone away with a frown.
“Are you not coming back?” Throe asked.
“Go.”
There was a long pause. And then the other soldier said softly, “Wither thou goest?”
In that moment, Xcor thought of each of his fighters. Zypher, the sexual conqueror. Balthazar, the thief. Syphon, the assassin. And the other one who had no name, and too many sins to count. So he was referred to as Syn.
Then he considered fair, loyal Throe, his second in command.
Perfectly reared, impeccably blooded Throe.
Handsome, comely Throe.
“Go now,” he told the male.
“And what of you?”
“Go.”
Throe hesitate
d, and in the pause, that night when Xcor had nearly died came back to them both. How could it not have?
“As you wish.”
His soldier dematerialized, leaving Xcor to stand against the wind alone. When he was sure he had been left, he sent his molecules likewise unto the cold gusts, venturing forth to the north, to a meadow that was covered in snow. Taking form, he stood at the base of its gentle hill, staring up at the beautiful tree standing proud and lovely at the apex.
He thought of the soft rise of a female’s breast, of her elegant collarbones, of the most sublime column of a pale neck—
As the wind buffeted his back, he closed his eyes and stepped forward, drawn to return to the spot where he had met his pyrocant.
Where was his Chosen?
Did she still live? Had the Brotherhood taken her life for her kind, generous, unknown gift to the enemy of her king?
Xcor knew he would have died without her blood. Gravely injured during the attempt on Wrath’s life, he had been on the verge of expiration when Throe had take him out to this field and summoned the Chosen and the deed had been done.
Throe had engineered it all. And, in the process, embedded a curse within Xcor’s dark heart.
His ambitions remained as they had been: He intended to wrestle the throne from the Blind King and reign o’er the vampires. There was, however, a critical weakness that dogged him.
That female.
She had been wrongly drawn into the conflict among dagger-handed males, an innocent who had been manipulated and then used.
He sorely worried over her welfare.
Indeed, he had but one regret in his lifetime of evil deeds. If he had not sent Throe into the arms of the Brotherhood, his second in command would not have crossed her path and fed from her himself. And except for that intersection, Throe would not have then later called upon her service, and she would not have come unto them in that field…and Xcor would never have looked into those compassionate eyes.
And lost a part of himself.
He was but a filthy, malformed, sireless cur, a traitor of the order and protection she rightfully lived under. He had not deserved her gift.
And neither had Throe—and not because he had fallen from his previous high station within the glymera.
No mortal male was deserving.
Coming to a stop under the tree, Xcor stared at the spot where he had lain sprawled before her…where she had knelt over him and scored her wrist, and he had opened his mouth to receive the power that only she could give him.
There had been a moment when their eyes had met and time had stopped…and then she had slowly lowered her wrist to his mouth.
Oh, that too-brief contact.
He had been convinced she was but an apparition of his errant mind, but as Throe had driven him back to the lair, it had come upon his consciousness that she was real. Very real.
Weeks had passed. And then one evening, out in the city, he had sensed her, and followed the echo of her blood in his veins to see her.
In those intervening minutes and hours, she had found out the truth about him: She had looked into the darkness, directly at him, and her distress had been evident.
Thereafter, his lair had been infiltrated. Likely because of her direction.
With a gust of wind, snow started to fall again, the snowflakes thickening in the air, swirling around, getting into his eyes.
Where was she now?
What had they done with her?
Off to the east, the glow of the sunrise began to gather in spite of the cloud cover, and his eyes burned—so he was careful to keep them trained on the peach harbinger of daylight, just for the pain.
He had never before been pulled asunder by his emotions like this. All his life he had been solely trained in survival—first through his years in the war camp, and then during his aeons under the Bloodletter, and now in this current era as head of his band of fighters.
But she had cleaved him, creating a vital fissure.
Sure as she had given him his life, she had taken a part of it, and he knew not what to do.
Mayhap he would just stand here and allow himself to be incinerated. It seemed an easier plight than what he was living under the now….
What fate had befallen her?
He had to know.
It was as critical as his quest for the throne.
EIGHT
“So where did you dump the bodies?” V demanded as he strode out of the training center’s rear exit.
As Qhuinn waited for John and Blay to get out of the flatbed, he let one of them answer V’s question. He was too done to bother—matter of fact, as he glanced out the windshield and took a gander at the facility’s underground parking lot, he considered just stretching out across the truck’s front seat and going to sleep.
Too fucking tired to bother with anything else.
In the end, though, he followed John’s lead and shifted his sorry ass out the driver’s side door. He had to go check on Layla, and that wasn’t going to happen from here.
Roadside confron notwithstanding, at least he and John and Blay had worked well together on the way home. About ten miles before the cutoff to the Brotherhood compound, they had pulled off onto a lumbering road, stripped the two dead men, and launched the bodies into a natural sinkhole that had no bottom that anyone could see. Then it was a case of backtrack, K-turn out on the road, and ghost away, allowing the snow, which had started to fall in earnest once again, to cover their tracks, as well as the various leaks that had left a trail of bright red blood. By noontime, assuming the accumulation estimates were correct, it would be as if nothing had happened at all.
A perfect snow job. Har-har.
He supposed he should feel bad for the dead dudes’ families—no one was ever going to find those remains. But anecdotal evidence suggested the two guys had lived on the fringes, and not because they were hippies: guns, knives, a switchblade, weed, and some X had been found in their various pockets. And God only knew what was in those backpacks.
Violent lives tended to come to violent ends.
“—son of a bitch,” V was saying as he walked around the Hummer on its flatbed pedestal. “What the fuck did they run into? A cement barricade?”
John signed something, and V looked over sharply at Qhuinn. “What the hell were you thinking? You could have been killed.”
Qhuinn thumped his own chest. “Still beating.”
“Dumb-ass.” But the Brother smiled, flashing sharp fangs. “Meh, I would have done the same thing.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Qhuinn noted that Blay was quietly and unobtrusively drifting toward the door that opened into the facility. He was going to disappear in another second and a half, finished with the drama that had once again been dropped at his feet.
Qhuinn felt a sudden, striking urge to follow the fighter into the hall and away from prying eyes. But like he needed to take another go at—
Your cousin is giving me what I need. All day. Every day.
Oh, Jesus, he was going to throw up.
“So any more personal effects?”
Qhuinn snapped out of the bullshit and got his useful on. “I’ll get ’em.”
Hopping up onto the flatbed, he forced open the crumpled rear door of the Hummer and squeezed through a twelve-inch gap to the backseat. It felt good to jam his body into places it didn’t belong and didn’t fit—gave his mind something to do, and the little ouchies from his injuries were another fantastic diversion.
The two backpacks had been bounced around pretty damn good. He found the one they’d seen first in the wheel well behind the passenger’s seat, and the other was up in front on top of the brake and the accelerator. Weird luggage for those two as far as he could tell; the pedestrian vibe didn’t go with all the other kinds of urban tuff guy that the stiffs had been sporting.
Way more middle school than middleman in the drug trade.
Unless they needed a place to put their meth lab merit badges or some shit.
>
As Qhuinn crabbed his way back into the rear seat, he made an abrupt decision not to go out the way he came in. Twisting himself around, he lay out on the ruined leather and brought his knees to his chest. With a sharp inhale, he punched his shitkickers into the other side door and blew it open, the metal hinges ripping free with a scream, the panel bouncing with a crash on the concrete.
Satisfying.
While the sounds echoed through the parking garage, V lit one of his hand-rolleds and leaned into the hole Qhuinn had just made. “You know they have door handles for that, true?”
Qhuinn sat up—and realized he’d just kicked open the only side that hadn’t been wrecked.
Well, if that wasn’t a metaphor for his whole fucking life at this point.
Throwing the pair of packs out, he launched himself free, landing hard as John caught the payload and started to unzip.
Crap. Blay had left. The door into the training center was just closing.
Cursing under his breath, he muttered, “Any cell phones still gotta be somewhere inside—even though the windows are shattered, the glass is still intact, so there should have been no fly-out.”
“Well, well, well…” the Brother said on the exhale.
Qhuinn frowned and looked over at what John had found. What the…hell…“Are you kidding me?”
His best friend had just pulled out a ceramic jar—a cheapo one, like what you’d get from the housewares department at Target. And what do you know. The other guy had packed one, too.
What were the chances…?
“We need to find those phones,” Qhuinn muttered, jumping up onto the flatbed again. “Anyone got a flashlight?”
Vishous took off his lead-lined leather glove and held up his glowing hand. “Right ’chere.”
As the Brother hopped up on the thin edge of the bed, Qhuinn went into a tuck and got back in the Hummer’s rear compartment. “Don’t hit me with that thing, will ya, V?”
“It’d be a spanking you’d never forget, I promise you.”
Man, that hand was handy. As V put it inside, the whole interior was lit up bright as day, all the carnage inside throwing sharp, dark shadows. Crawling around, Qhuinn reached under seats, patting with his palms, stretching into corners. The smell was god-awful, a nasty combination of gas, burned plastic, and fresh blood—and every time he put a hand down, it fluffed up the residue from the air bags’ powder.
