The Sinner

by J. R. Ward

  It was rank fear. In spite of the fact that the humanity was gone, a very human terror was coming through loud and clear.

  “You’re not going home,” Butch muttered. “I’m going to save you. Even though you don’t deserve it.”

  Although he wasn’t so sure about that.

  The slayer had run when it had the chance. It hadn’t attacked. It hadn’t fought back with any weapons. It clearly wasn’t trained, and it was alone.

  Butch knew this because he could sense the Omega’s boys and there weren’t any others around. He knew this because, briefly, he had been one of them.

  “Do you regret what you agreed to?” Butch whispered.

  The head slowly nodded, and a single tear escaped the far corner of one of those bloodshot, swollen eyes.

  The mouth, the real one, not the one Butch created with his dagger, moved in a coordinated way: Too late.

  * * *

  Six blocks over, Jo threw her anchor out and ripped her arm free of the man’s hold. In response, there was an immediate holler from her rotator cuff, and he wheeled around just as quick.

  “You’re not safe here,” he said.

  In the back of her mind, she noted that he was barely breathing. On her side of things, her lungs were in crisis mode, her rib cage doing push-ups like she was about to be thrown overboard.

  “You have to trust me.”

  “No, I don’t,” she got out between pants.

  He looked in the direction they’d come from, as if they were being chased. Or were about to be.

  “I cannot leave you here.”

  There was an accent to his words. Not quite French, not really German. Not really Italian.

  He lowered his head and his nostrils flared. Then he cursed. “You need me—”

  Jo stepped back sharply. “Leave me alone—”

  “I can’t. You’re going to die.”

  Fear curled inside Jo’s chest, and it wasn’t because she was scared of him. “You don’t know me—”

  The man cursed again. “You’ve got to listen to—”

  That helicopter crested over the building next to them, the light swinging in a wide circle and heading in their direction.

  “The police aren’t going to help you,” he said. “They’re going to arrest you. And I know where to go. You can trust me.”

  “I’m not going to run from the—”

  “They saw you holding a gun to my chest. They know what you look like. Do you want to end up in jail tonight? Or do you want to get out of here.”

  As Jo looked up, the blast from the blades peeled her hair back against her head. To keep things together, and because she didn’t want to be recognized, she yanked the hood of her windbreaker up and tied it in place.

  “I don’t trust you,” she yelled through the wind currents.

  “Good. You shouldn’t. But I’m all you got right now.”

  “Sonofabitch,” she muttered.

  When he took her hand again, she expected to be pulled behind him once more. Instead, he stayed where he was, his huge body tense, his eyes fierce, his aura that of such urgency, you’d have sworn he was rescuing her from a serial killer.

  She thought of what she’d look like in her mug shot. Then she pictured how thrilled Dick would be that she’d gotten herself arrested. Finally, she considered her bank account. She might have been the adopted daughter of the grand and glorious Philadelphia Earlys, but the estrangement she had effected with her parents years ago had hit her bank account hard.

  “Well,” she snapped, “where are we going.”

  And still he did not move. “I’m not going to let anything happen to you.”

  “Great, now stop talking and start moving, or I will.”

  He nodded, as if they’d struck some kind of deal, and then they were off, pounding down the alley, going further into the maze of downtown as the helicopter swung around again overhead. The corners they took were made with decisive turns on his part, as if he knew exactly where he was taking her, and she kept up with him now, the desire to evade the police making her go track star with the running.

  Skidding into a right turn, he shot them down a narrow artery between two apartment buildings, and then he—

  Took them right into the path of a Caldwell Police Department patrol car.

  As the headlights hit them both, he stopped. And so did she.

  Maybe it was McCordle, she thought—

  “Drop your weapon!” the female officer barked as she opened her door and stuck her gun out around the jamb of the windshield. “Drop your weapon—now!”

  Jo put both her hands up.

  And that was when she realized that the cop wasn’t talking to the man next to her. Jo was the one who was armed; she still had her gun in her palm.

  “Guess you don’t know which way to go as well as you thought,” she muttered as she ordered her grip to release the nine millimeter.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Devina, the immortal who wanted to be a woman, put her palms together, stuck out her forefingers, and extended both her thumbs up, making like she had a gun. Aiming her red painted nails at the night sky, she pretended she was leading the helicopter that was circling like a fly trying to land in someone’s soup. It was hard to judge whether her extrapolations of speed and direction were correct, however, without actually sending a bullet into that annoying tin can with its loud, thumping rotors.

  Her virtue for a handheld missile launcher.

  Now that might be fun. And for a second, she thought about conjuring one out of thin air, just for shits and giggles. It would be exciting to see a fireball explode under those rotator arms, and then watch as the twisted, no-longer-flight-worthy carcass careened into a building. Or maybe the thing would pull a Ping-Pong ball and ricochet into a couple of skyscrapers, the flanks of the stone and glass constructions like rackets to send it back and forth.

  People would definitely be killed, and not just the pilot. Maybe a transformer would get overloaded and become a secondary source of fun and games. Chaos. Sirens. Humans tripping over each other, trampling puppies and kittens, babies rolling like melons down the street.

  Yay. Rah.

  She should get right on it.

  Or maybe… she would just keep wandering.

  As she resumed her promenade, she played with her short skirt. It was vintage Escada, a poufy, poppy-colored, polka-dotted flounce that was only long enough to cover her thong. She’d put it on along with a little muscle shirt and fifteen “Like a Virgin” sautoirs, the crosses and beads and chains tangling in a mesh over her breasts. For shoes, she went straight-up Carrie Bradshaw—Jimmy Choos from 1991. In a pink that ever so slightly clashed with the skirt. No purse because she had just plain forgotten, and she didn’t need a coat in the cold because, hello, demon.

  It was a good outfit. Chosen from her wardrobe with forced care.

  An attempt to self-medicate with fashion.

  In the back of her mind, she heard Dr. Phil say, And how’s that working for you?

  Not well, Phil. Not at all, actually.

  She took another pretend shot at the helicopter, and then her child’s version of an autoloader disappeared as she sneezed and had to cover her lower face for decorum. Fuck. That smell. It was like someone had tied a dead raccoon to a stick and sprayed the bloated nose-nightmare with drugstore perfume—

  Devina stopped, her senses threading out.

  In slow motion, her head turned on its spine and she narrowed her eyes on an alley, about which nothing seemed remarkable: There were fire escapes spiderweb’ing down the back sides of some older buildings, a couple of dumpsters… and miscellaneous pavement trash that collected in doorways, the city’s version of dandruff.

  None of that mattered. What held her attention were the two male figures about a block down from the intersection she was standing in. One was lying faceup in a classic pose of supplication, arms flopped out to the sides, boots lolling at the ends of his ankles. The other was bending over as
if he intended to kiss the first, but not with passion. It was more like the Grim Reaper coming to claim a soul, menace and death marking the exchange, something consumed from the one who was a victim by the one who was a predator.

  As a tingle curled in Devina’s gut, the sensation was at once achingly familiar and utterly alien. It had been that long.

  And it wasn’t just that two men getting it on was awesome.

  Something swirled around the tableau of dominance and submission, and it wasn’t the stench.

  Evil. Pure, high-octane evil was down there in that alley. It was… her, but not her, her essence captured and held within the flesh of the one that was on the ground… and yet he was not what interested her. No, she was enthralled by the one who was now opening his mouth. Now beginning to inhale. Now… drawing up and out of the parted lips of the supplicant a black ether, breath, but not breath.

  Devina stepped into the shadows, and cast a spell around herself, ensuring that she was indistinguishable from the bricks and mortar she abruptly had to lean against. Beneath the aggressor, the body of the victim jerked, the chest rising up, the head falling back as if in great ecstasy or great agony. And that was when she saw the slice across the throat and the black blood oozing out of the jugular vein.

  Whispers deep in the core of her sex became stirrings… which expanded to an honest-to-demon need, the pilot light, long dimmed, flaring to life and heating her body.

  The sounds of the transfer, of the consumption, were like the sucking and smackings of a blow job, erotic in her ear, the gurgling, the gasping, the clicking of the dead man’s mouth, fuzzing her brain as her blood began to race. Heat pooled between her thighs and did not stay put, the transforming tide washing upward into her breasts, her nipples tightening, her heart racing such that her plump lips parted and she drew in a quick gasp.

  The next thing she knew, her hand was under her skirt and between her legs, the rubbing and pressure a compulsion that was sweetly served by her fingers. Meanwhile, the man on the bottom, the one with the slit throat, began to tremble and jerk, sure as if that which was being extracted was presenting some kind of resistance to its removal. The faster and more torturous his quaking, the faster and more rigorously Devina stroked herself—

  She orgasmed just as there was a howling screech.

  The release made her squeeze her eyes shut, and for a moment, she was so suffused in pleasure, she forgot she was standing against a building in a shitty alley in a not-so-hot part of Caldwell.

  When her lids eventually lifted with languorous delay, there was only one man where before there had been two, and the one who had been doing the inhaling listed to the side and fell over onto the ground. Was he dying? He barely breathed, his skin pasty white, his fingers twitching, his legs jerking, as if poison was in his system. Meanwhile, evil emanated from his very pores. He was a resplendent repository for all that was vile and depraved, a black hole of the kind of thing that coursed through her own veins.

  He was her twin.

  When he seemed to stop moving, Devina took a step forward. And another.

  She didn’t want to be alone anymore. She was tired of these cold, empty streets, this listless existence, this… isolation.

  If he died right here? It was too much of a loss to bear even if she didn’t know him. She had been an empty shell since she had landed back in the hustle/bustle of this world, wandering the night like a lost soul, pining after an angel who had despised her rather than loved her.

  But this man? This… whatever he was?

  He would not despise her. And she would have him for her very own—

  “Cop! I’m here!”

  From out of thin air, an entity coalesced and knelt by the man. Devina’s man. Before she could kill it, her doppelganger reached for the new arrival with unsteady hands.

  “Fuck, V. God…”

  “I gotchu. Come here.”

  With impossible gentleness, the entity reached out and gathered her man close, holding him to a chest that was broad and strong. And then a nightmare happened. The two became one, their bodies entwining, as a horrible, awful light began to glow. The illumination was the antithesis of everything Devina had been attracted to, a beneficence that cleared conscience and cognition at once, that eased suffering, that provided miracles too unlikely to even be prayed for. It was the force that returned the lost to the loved one, that rescued the drowning, that gave the first breath to an infant who should not have survived the birthing canal.

  Devina stumbled back in disgust.

  She was of a mind to murder that interloper, the one who had brought the unwelcomed light to the delicious dark. It was hard not to feel betrayed by his presence, even as she was aware that hers was a very one-sided sense of violation.

  The contact between them and the glow that surrounded their bodies didn’t last forever. Even though it felt like it persisted for an eternity.

  And when whatever process or procedure was done, the evil was gone, only the two men remaining. Except—no. These were not men, were they. They were other.

  They were vampire.

  Okay, that was fucking hot.

  * * *

  Jo had been a rule abider all her life, and it was probably the adopted thing. She had always felt if she didn’t do what she was told, she would get sent back to wherever the reject kids got returned to, like a microwave with a faulty latch or an alarm clock that didn’t go off or a suitcase that had a handle broken.

  And Jesus, when you had a police officer pointing a gun at you? All that yes-ma’am inclination ratcheted up even higher.

  “Put the weapon down now!”

  As her hand followed her brain’s command to release, she had a moment when she prayed this wasn’t a Quentin Tarantino film where the damn thing would hit the ground and somehow go off into her knee, scaring the policewoman into shooting her full of holes as well—all while some seventies standard played in the background and the man next to her suddenly had wide lapels and a desire to talk about what quarter pounders with cheese were called in Europe.

  Except it didn’t go down like that.

  The man next to her might have kept the lapels of his leather jacket just the same. But he somehow caught the gun before it had dropped more than three inches from her hand.

  And nothing happened.

  The policewoman didn’t start pulling her trigger and there were no more verbal commands from her, either. She just stood where she was, crouched behind the cover of her open door, gun trained straight ahead.

  “Come on,” the man beside Jo said. “Let’s go.”

  He put the weapon back in her hand and started forward.

  “What are you doing?” she said, staring at her gun as if she’d never seen it before.

  “She won’t be a problem. But we’ve got to move.”

  Jo looked up into the stark face of her very questionable savior. He was utterly calm, almost bored—while he had his back to a member of the Caldwell Police Department who two seconds ago had been trigger-happy.

  But who now seemed like she’d swallowed an Ambien. Or twelve. Maybe fifteen.

  This is my answer, Jo thought. This man is what I have been looking for.

  As she nodded and they took off again, she was aware that the choice to go with him was a threshold, and having crossed over it, she would be wise not to take for granted that she was going to like the answers she found. This quest thing she had been caught up in had always been frustrated up until now. But sometimes, there was comfort to be had in the unattainable. You didn’t appreciate it, however, until you got the kind of information that you only wanted to give back.

  Too late, though. She had voted with her feet.

  Literally.

  The man in leather took her down more alleys, and then, without warning, he stopped in front of a door that looked like it had had a very tough life. The metal panel had multiple boot marks right next to the jamb by the deadbolt, as if there had been a number of frustrated attempts to bre
ak in.

  On the other hand, somehow, the man didn’t have any trouble opening it. Did he use a key and she just not see?

  As he went through the doorway, Jo followed, taking comfort that her gun was still in her hand. The interior of wherever they were was so dark that she could see nothing, but that changed when a candle flared.

  Ten feet away from where they were both standing.

  Pivoting toward the fragile flame, she felt her heart pound—and not from exertion. “How did you do that?”

  “Do what?” he said as he shut them in together and then walked past her.

  “The candle. The door. The cop.”

  When he faced her again, he was across a cluttered space, and there was frustration in his expression, as if he were upset with himself. With a grunt, he settled himself down on the floor, stretching his legs out and crossing his arms over his chest. He did not meet her eyes, and she had the strange sense that he was not so much avoiding her, but containing himself while he was around her.

  In the strained silence, she looked around because it was a better option than staring at him. The commercial kitchen they’d taken refuge in had been long abandoned, and the exodus from its short-ceiling’d confines had been sloppy and rushed. There was trash everywhere, restaurant-sized, rusted-out cans of vegetables and containers of condiments littering the dusty counters and floors… broken plates, bowls, and glassware Humpty-Dumpty’ing in corners… discarded aprons and checkered chef pants molding up in mounds stained with food grime.

  “Oh, my God…” she said as she pulled her hood off. “I know this place.”

  She had been meaning to come here for months.

  “You eat here when the restaurant was open?” he asked.

  “No.” Not even close. “This kitchen has an interesting story attached to it.”