by J. R. Ward
McCordle’s shoulder piece went off with a squawk. As a bunch of 10-Mary somethings came out of the little speaker, he tilted his mouth down and made a response in code.
“I gotta go.” He leaned in toward her, as deadly serious as a Boy Scout could get. “Don’t reach out to Gigante again, and I’ll tell Bill directly that he shouldn’t do that, either. That old man doesn’t value human life, and he is not afraid of anything. He’ll put a hit on you without blinking an eye.”
“Don’t shut me out, then. I promise not to go near Gigante, but you’ve got to keep me in the loop.”
McCordle walked off toward his patrol car. Given the way he was shaking his head, she had a feeling he was regretting the whole damn thing. Sure he wanted to snag the bad guy, but if he could have run a rewind on getting involved with civilians with laptops and bylines, clearly he would have preferred to make better choices.
“Sorry, not sorry,” Jo muttered as she looked over the notes she had made on her pad.
Considering the blue lights that started flashing and the sound of McCordle’s siren firing up, the cop had been called in on something serious, and sure enough, she heard the rhythmic thumping of a police helicopter overhead.
Maybe the drama would get his mind off things.
So he would take her call when she touched base with him at the end of the night. And then first thing in the morning.
Someone running down the alley brought her head up and she took a step back. The man who went by her was going fast and checking over his shoulder like he was being chased by something with a knife. He paid no attention to her, but he was a good reminder that she should remember where she was—
“Oh, God, what is that smell…”
The instant the sickly sweet stench burrowed into her nose, a piercing pain tore through her head and she took another step back, the cold, damp flank of the building catching her and holding her upright.
Roadkill and baby powder. It was a bizarre combination, but she’d smelled it before. She had smelled this before in… somewhere dark. Somewhere… evil. Glossy oil on a concrete floor. Buckets of… blood…
A moan rode up her throat and came out of her mouth. But then she wasn’t thinking about the stink or the pain. Something else was coming down the alley, heavy footfalls. Thunderous footfalls. A huge body propelled by incredible strength. In pursuit of the thing that smelled so foul.
It was a man, dressed in black leather and wearing a Red Sox cap. And as he looked over at her, his eyes widened in surprise, but he didn’t stop. He’d recognized her, however. Even though he was a stranger, he saw her.
And she saw him.
As her head ached even more, she wanted to run after him and ask him exactly what it was about her that was familiar to him—
Jo stiffened and looked to the left. Suddenly, the alley seemed darker, somehow. More isolated. The shift came instantly, sure as if the only light in the world had been turned off by the hand of God.
Fear shaved through her.
“Who’s there?” she said as she put her hand on her gun.
It was a stupid question to ask. Like whoever it was would answer her?
Up above, the police helicopter came around again, and she wanted to yell up at it to shine a light down to her.
As her heart began to pound, she thought of McCordle’s advice about not contacting Gigante. In a wave of paranoia, it felt like she wasn’t going to live long enough to take advantage of the sound counsel—
There. In the darkness. Over on the left.
There was a second man dressed in leather.
CHAPTER NINE
Syn stopped where he was, not through conscious thought, but because his mind was too busy taking stock of the female to do anything else with his body. She was tall and she was well-built, dressed in civilian clothes that were of no note except for the fact that they were on her. Her hair was long, or at least he assumed it was. The lengths of what appeared to be red and auburn were tucked into the collar of her windbreaker, the waves ballooning out as if they wanted to be free to flow down her back. Her face was makeup-less, her brows arched in surprise—no, it was more like fear. Indeed, her lips were parted as if she were about to scream, and her eyes, locked on him, were wide, the whites setting off a color he couldn’t pin down.
Everything was in a haze, and not just because of the lack of light.
She somehow blinded him. Even as he took careful note of so much about her, his eyes couldn’t seem to take all of her in.
And then he realized what she was doing.
He shook his head as he stepped out of the cover of shadow he had found without meaning to, exposing himself to the ambient light that bathed the alley in a glow that might have been romantic had it been in a forest or a field.
“No,” he heard himself say. “You’re too high.”
The female blinked in confusion, and he had a thought that she might not be aware that she was pointing a gun at his face.
“What?” she mumbled.
The sound of her voice went through him as if she had touched him with a tender hand, the simple word rebounding inside his skin and changing his internal temperature—though he would have been hard-pressed to say whether she was cooling his temper, or heating his lust. Actually, it was both.
Syn walked up to her, his eyes locked with her own, some internal warning system telling him to move slowly and try to look smaller than he actually was. He didn’t want to spook her, but not because of that nine millimeter she had in her hands. He didn’t want to frighten her because, for once in his violent life, he did not want to be who he actually was.
This stranger with the parted lips and the wide eyes made him want to be different. Better. Improved from the base beast that he had been since his transition.
“I’ll shoot,” she said.
He closed his eyes briefly as the syllables she spoke went into him. And then he felt compelled to respond. “Lower.”
When his lids reopened, he was standing right before her, his body having made its own decision about where it wanted to be.
“What?” she breathed.
Syn reached out and took the trembling end of the muzzle, putting it in a better position for her. “Not the head. The chest. You want to aim here. It’s a bigger target and the heart is where you can do the most effective damage.”
With her gun properly set, he took a step back. “There. Now you can kill me properly.”
As he waited with patience for her to pull the trigger, there was such great peace in his capitulation that he was only vaguely aware of a gathering noise above him, some kind of rhythmic thumping sound.
It did not matter. Nothing mattered.
He was hers to command, and if she wished to take his life here and now, he would willingly give his mortal coil unto her. No matter how much it hurt or what his suffering was, it would be a good death, one he had long deserved.
Because this female, who captivated his black soul as surely as if she held his beating heart in her palm, would be the one killing him.
* * *
On Jo’s list of things to do for the night, shooting another human being was not in the top five. The top ten. It wasn’t even on her list.
Especially not one that smelled like this. Jesus, what was that cologne of his? It was nothing she had ever run across before. Then again, the same could be said for the man himself. He was enormous, positively gargantuan, and the black leather he was wearing did absolutely nothing to make him seem smaller and less imposing. With a tremendous shoulder span and thick arms, his lower body was likewise developed, heavy thighs holding him upright, big boots covering his feet.
But his face was what really got her attention. It was lean, the hollows under his high cheekbones giving him an austere look, the intelligent eyes sunken in deep, the jaw hard cut and unforgiving—as if he was into punishment over reformation. His hair was mostly shaved, nothing but a three-inch-high Mohawk picket-fence’ing his skull from front to back, a
nd there were no tattoos showing. She was willing to bet he had them under his clothes.
Or maybe he was just acres of smooth skin over all that hard muscle—
Stop that right now, she thought.
Bottom line, the fact that he seemed unconcerned with the gun she was pointing at him made sense. By sheer presence alone, he could have turned a bazooka into a BB gun.
“Leave me alone,” she said. “I’m going to shoot.”
“So shoot.”
Neither of them moved. Even as the rest of the city continued on, its felonies and misdemeanors proceeding apace, its night traffic of deliveries still streaming on the bridges and stop-and-go’ing on streets, its people living and breathing in whatever crammed square footage they rented, between Jo and the big man with the Mohawk, all was still, some kind of fulcrum created between them, around which the world tilted and whirled.
“I’m serious,” she whispered.
“So am I.”
His big hands went to his biker jacket and he pulled the two halves apart, revealing a vicious pair of steel daggers strapped, handles down, to his broad chest. Then, in a gesture that made no sense at all—not that any of this was in contention for the Yes-this-is-actually-happening Prize—he let his head fall back on his neck, the muscles that rode up the sides of his throat popping out in sharp relief, the jut of his chin the summit to the mountain of his towering body.
It was as if he were submitting himself to her totally.
Giving himself over.
To her—
Up in the sky, the police helicopter made a circle and came in their direction, its icy-bright light skimming down the alley, illuminating the colon created by the buildings that were squeezed in tightly side by side and across from each other. The beam hit the man in his pose of inexplicable supplication, bathing him in what appeared to be, for a brief moment, a sanctification from heaven, as if he were an altar painting of a saint about to be sacrificed for the good of humanity.
Jo knew she would remember the way he looked for the rest of her life—
With a quick jerk, he snapped to attention, focusing on something down at the far end of the alley.
From overhead, a voice piped through a loudspeaker announced, “Drop your gun. Police units have surrounded the area. Drop your weapon.”
Jo looked up at the helicopter in surprise. Were they talking to her—
“We have to go,” the man in leather barked. “Now.”
She heard what he said, but she was not going to run from the police. She just needed to explain to the nice guys with the badges and the landing gear that she wasn’t actually going to shoot this man in front of her. She just wanted to scare him off—
Said man in said leather put his face into hers. Which meant her gun’s muzzle was now pressed directly against his sternum.
“You have to come with me.” He looked down the alley again. “Or you’re going to die—”
“The police are not going to—”
“It’s not the police I’m worried about.”
As the copter made a tight swoop, the down draft from its rotor blades created a gust that nearly blew her off her feet—and that was when Jo smelled the stench again. That baby powder and roadkill smell.
The man grabbed her arm. “You’ve got to come with me. You’re in danger.”
“Who are you?”
“There’s no time.” He looked to the left one last time. “Keep your gun out. You may need to use it.”
With that, he took off—and took her with him. Her legs had no choice but to start running. It was that or she was going to get dragged. And when he took a sharp turn, she lost her stride, her feet tripping. His hold on her forearm was the only thing that kept her up and she recovered as best she could.
In the back of her mind, she knew this was all wrong. She was fleeing the police with the very man she had pulled a gun on.
Talk about out of the fire and into the frying pan.
Or shit… something like that.
CHAPTER TEN
Butch closed in on the slayer in front of him, the distance between their churning bodies tightening up as sure as if they were beads on a string. The lesser seemed to be tiring, and this, like that heart in that bucket at the abandoned outlets, was a news flash. The fuckers usually had Energizer Bunny endurance in their favor and just kept going, and going, and going.
Unsheathing his black dagger, he didn’t know where Z was. The two had lost track of each other when he’d gone after this motherfucker. He knew the brother could handle himself, however, and there was backup called in already. But he would rather have had them stick together.
The corner in the alley came up quick, and the lesser skidded on the oil-slicked pavement as he hung a louie, his footing slipping out from underneath him, his body going cockeyed. And that was Butch’s cue to skidoo. Leaping up in the air, he flew with dagger outstretched, gunning for the back of the slayer’s head. His aim was impeccable. His trajectory sublime. His impact—
Got fucked in the ass when that slayer lost his balance entirely and went down early.
Butch had a passing glance at the skull he had intended to stab as he flew over the sonofabitch—and he was reminded of the truism of SUVs on ice. Four-wheel go did not mean four-wheel stop, and the same was true for nearly three-hundred-pound vampires when they were not in contact with the ground.
Torqueing in midair, he twisted his body and swung his legs out in front of him so they were the bow of his shit-canned ship. The maneuver didn’t slow him down, but it made it possible for him to land in a crouch.
Or he would have.
If he hadn’t run into the hood of a car that had been abandoned and stripped for parts.
The front grille split him like a wishbone, one leg going north and peeling off the Chrysler emblem mounted over the radiator, the other going south and getting jammed under the front spoiler. His nut sac took the impact and turned him into a soprano, the C note he hit seven thousand octaves higher than any male should ever get near outside of an opera cape.
It was as his ’O Sole M’otherfucker echoed around that the lesser jumped to his feet. There was a split second where he and the slayer looked at each other. Hard to say who was more surprised, but who got back on the boogie train was answered pretty damn quick. Twinkle Toes with the perfectly timed face-plant didn’t hang around. He took off, racing past Butch’s new avocation as a hood ornament.
Groaning, Butch surgically removed his nads from the car and started after the slayer again. The pain was enough to make his stomach roll and his eyes water, and he had to swing his legs out from ground zero, his gait like a cowboy who’d gotten off his horse after three years in the saddle. Things evened out pretty quick, though, the idea that this could be the one, this could be the final lesser, making him go faster than his crotch would have liked.
Then again, going by how shit was feeling down there? He should be lying on a couch with a bag of frozen peas wrapped around his courting tackle.
Another corner, and by force of will alone, he started to close again. This time, he wasn’t going to run the risk of another crotch-on collision. With his prey in sight, enough with the Matrix shit. He just chugged it out until the stench wafting off the slayer was punching him in the nose, and the huffing and puffing of the undead was as loud as the roar of his own blood in his ears.
Throwing out an arm, he crowbarred his enemy, his elbow locking around the throat, his free hand grabbing onto his own wrist, his body yanking off to one side so that the lesser popped off the pavement and maypole’d around. With a practiced move, Butch dominated the ground game that followed, mounting the slayer, palming the back of the head, slamming the face into the pavement.
And that was when he discovered that he’d lost his dagger.
Yanking out his other one, he grabbed onto the lesser’s short hair, pulled back, and slit the throat from ear to ear.
The undead went slack, and Butch let go and rolled off, disgusted w
ith himself and the sloppy takedown. As the slayer’s face flopped onto the asphalt, and all kinds of sputtering and choking rose up, he hung his own head and tried to catch his breath. With the chase over, his adrenaline was ebbing, and oh, God, the pain from his poor, abused testicles took the place of his aggression.
Leaning over, he retched and went between his thighs to delicately rearrange things—not that it helped. Blue balls had nothing on bashed balls.
When he could, he refocused on the slayer. Its arms and legs were still moving, and he thought of a dog in repose, chasing after imaginary squirrels and bunnies, paws twitching as the body went nowhere. Same diff here. Except unless he took care of business, this nonsense was going to go on in perpetuity. Or until some human rode up and went 911 on the situation.
After which, total calamity would ensue as the secret about the vampires and the Lessening Society got out.
Yup, the need for discretion was the only thing that the two sides agreed on.
On that note, he forced himself to get back to work. Reaching out, he grabbed the undead’s shoulder and rolled it over. The gurgling sounds got louder, and he stared down at the busted-up face with its wide, secondary smile. That new mouth, below the chin, was drooling black, stinky oil all over the place, but even if the body was drained dry, its motion would continue.
There were only two ways to get a lesser gone. One was the stab of a steel knife through the front of the chest, the blade going into the hollow space where the heart had been. Pop-pop, fizz-fizz, back to the Omega it is—at which point, the essence of evil that had been imparted into this once-human body would be returned to the Evil, recycled and put into another vessel.
The second way to “kill” the enemy was the one that was bringing the end of the war, and Butch was the only person who could do it.
Re-sheathing his dagger, he looked up as a police helicopter paddled overhead, its brilliant beam skating past him and the slayer, missing them entirely. Time to move fast. He wasn’t taking for granted he’d luck out like that again when it came back around. With a grunt, he planted one hand on either side of the slayer’s head. Then he leaned over, his arms bowing out, his eyes meeting the undead’s. It was hard to know how much the lesser was taking in. Those peepers were wide as car tires, the whites glowing in the darkness. There was no vengeance or hatred in them, however.
