by J. R. Ward
Shaking her head, Jo checked the street sign as she crossed another intersection and then cut over toward where she’d left her VW Golf. The wind came at her now, and it was hard to say exactly when the scent registered. But even with the goal of getting safely to her junker, her feet slowed… and stopped.
Copper. She was tasting copper in the back of her throat.
There was only one thing that did that, and there had to be a lot of it for the smell to be concentrated in this kind of stiff breeze.
Narrowing her eyes, she tried to see what was up ahead while she went for her cell phone. Looking behind herself, she couldn’t see the woman anymore, and there was no one else around.
Maybe she was wrong. Maybe this was…
Even though her instincts were screaming at her to come back when the sun was up, she walked forward, the smell of blood getting thicker until she felt like she wasn’t so much breathing it in as drinking it. And then she caught sight of her car, about a hundred yards away—
The dripping stopped her.
Between each of her footfalls, she became aware of a soft plunk, plunk, plunk.
Don’t look, a small voice inside her said. Don’t… look—
Up on the first landing of a fire escape, there was a tangled knot the size of an armchair, and her first thought was Why the hell would someone put a piece of furniture up there?
And then she saw the origin of the dripping sound.
There was a steady stream of something dropping from the knot, and as she went over to the fire escape, light from an exterior fixture some distance away lined up with what was falling to the asphalt.
The stuff was red and translucent.
Stumbling back, Jo covered her mouth with her palm, but then she needed to throw out her arms for balance as her foot knocked into a soccer ball—
Not a soccer ball.
What rolled off to the side was a human head.
As it came to rest, the facial features were angled toward her. The eyes were open and staring sightlessly upward, the mouth lax as if the man had been screaming as he had been decapitated.
Jo’s vision went checkerboard and her legs went loose, but she had the presence of mind to dial 911. When the operator answered, the words did not come. She was breathing hard, yet there was no air in her lungs, nothing to send the syllables up her throat and out her mouth.
She focused on her car, and the proximity terrified her. In the back of her mind, she heard Gigante threaten her life.
Run! she thought. Except she was now a witness to some kind of a crime—because there was no way this was a suicide or an accident.
“My name is J-j-jo Early,” she said hoarsely. “I’m at the c-c-corner of Eighteenth and Kennedy and I need to report… a murder, a killing… he’s dead. Oh, God, his head… is not on his body anymore…”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
By eight the next morning, Syn was a caged animal as he paced around his empty bedroom. He was not animated by food that he had consumed nor blood that he had swallowed. He was not well rested, either.
The sense that he was needed by that female and could not respond, that he was powerless in the face of the sun’s dominance, that he was not strong, but weak, gave him an energy that shook his hands and rattled his teeth. And as a result of the physical quaking, things under his conscious surface, things he had refused to let air for so many years, were threatening to break through.
He fought them back as best he could, but he lost the battle thanks to the bathroom mirror. It was there, standing naked before the sinks, that he bared his fangs—as if to prove to himself he still had them—and it happened.
The present disappeared and the past took him over, a storm unleashed…
Old Country, 1687
When Syn lifted his head, blood spooled out of his mouth, falling to the dirt floor of the hut. There was a ringing sound in his ears, surging and retreating by turns, and he thought of the sea that did the same at the base of the cliffs nearby. How long had he been without consciousness this time?
The inside of his nose was stuffed up so he swallowed to be better able to breathe through his lips. As his tongue brushed against where his front teeth should have been, there was a ragged gap, the two—no, four—empty sockets tender and tickly.
He went to try to stand up to see if aught was broken of his arms and legs, but he knew better.
With caution, he looked across to the only bedding pallet. Beneath a carpet’s worth of blankets, the great beast slept, the mound of flesh and muscle rising and falling, a gurgle marking the inhales. Even in repose, it had its priorities. A meaty hand protruded out of the woolen layers, the dirt- and blood-caked fingers resting protectively upon the open throat of a bladder of mead.
The snoring was the signal Syn could move, and as he pushed his torso up, he was sore in his shoulders and his ribs. The hut was never clean, never tidy, but after he had been beaten with a copper pot and thrown about like a bolt of cloth, there was more disorder than ever. The only thing that had not been disturbed was the mummified remains of his mahmen, the body, wrapped in its rags, as yet where it had been for the last ten years.
Gingerly setting his seat upon the packed floor, he made sure that the aches and pains were not from serious injury. Verily, his father seemed to know how far he could push the battering. No matter how drunk he was, he did not take the beatings unto death’s door. He stopped a hairsbreadth before the point of ne’er return.
The empty belly cradled between Syn’s pelvis became something he could not ignore, and not because his hunger was of sufficient urgency. He had been so long starved that the hollow feeling was a natural extension of his body, nothing of note. But the growling sounds it made were dangerous.
He did not want to rouse his sire, although it was hard to know what was worse—when the male was disturbed from his addled state and still of drunken mind, or when he awoke furious at the recession of the mead’s soporific properties.
As Syn attempted to stand, his legs wobbled, thin and unreliable beneath his slight frame, and he balanced himself only when he threw out his arms. His father’s pallet was set directly afore the heavy skin flap that covered the doorway to the outside, and given that Syn was a pretrans, he could not close his eyes and carry himself off upon the air. He must needed to ambulate about in a corporeal fashion.
Placing his palms upon his stomach, he pressed in whilst he held his breath. On the balls of his feet, he chose his path with care, disturbing naught, and he orientated his safety upon the bladder of mead and the fingertips resting upon it. His sire suffered from an unrelenting unsteadiness of extremity. If he were to awaken, his fingers would tell the tale through movement—
As Syn focused on the back of that hand, he saw something odd in the blood-caked flesh. There was a flash of brilliant white, and he thought that perhaps the strikes of the night—or the day, he knew not which—had been so hard, his sire had broken through the flesh of his knuckles, down to the bone.
But no.
That was not what it was.
Touching the heartbeat behind his upper lip, something stirred deep within Syn’s breast. He had no name upon which he could label the emotion, and there was, like so much in his life, nothing he could do to control the feeling.
It was, however, strong enough, insistent enough, that he committed the unthinkable. He approached the beast. Crouched down beside the pallet. Reached out with a hand no steadier than his sire’s.
Whereupon he removed a tiny fragment from the flesh of his father.
A tooth.
His own tooth.
As he held the piece of bone with care, as if he were cradling his broken body, he looked over to the remains of his mahmen. He missed her, but he was grateful she suffered no further. Indeed, her remains had not been kept within this horrid hut as a remembrance of love. They were a warning of what came when one did not obey.
Syn put his tooth into the pocket of his ribboned pants, and he glanced around at th
e floor. He should like to retrieve the other three. Perhaps he would—
“Where’d you think you go the now, young.”
Syn jumped back and began trembling. Ducking, he put his arms up and around his face. The response was ingrained. Trained. Second nature.
“I must needs go to get victuals,” he whispered. “I go to get food.”
There was a grunt from the pallet and his sire lifted his head. His beard was long and gnarled, a rope of coarse dark hair that was indistinguishable from the tangle that grew out from all sides of his skull. Glittering black eyes beneath fleshy brows glared.
“You get them and come back, young. Waste not time. I am hungry.”
“Yes, sire.”
His father looked down at the hand that was over the mead. A rivulet of blood, fresh and red, had welled and descended unto his forefinger, released by the tooth’s removal.
“I shall go the now,” Syn rushed in. “I shall beg fervently. I shall—”
Those eyes came back and narrowed. Hatred, like a swill upon the surface of a pond, came to the fore.
“I go now,” Syn said.
With a quick shuffle, he skirted around the pallet, but he had to slow at the heavy tarping. As a pretrans, he could survive the sunlight. His sire could not. The hut was backed in against the wall of a cave, its entry point well protected from direct light. But if he did not follow the way things were properly done upon departure, he would be put in the cage and submerged in the river’s current.
He would rather be beaten.
“You come back, young.” His father’s gravel voice was like the curse of the Omega, sly and invasive, with the promise of suffering. “Or I shall become bored and be forced to find something to do. If I haven’t already.”
Syn nodded and fell free of the hut, his stumble running him into the cave’s outcropping of damp stone.
If he hadn’t already? Syn thought. What had the male done?
Bolting out of the cave, in spite of the soreness in his legs and his torso, he threw himself into the night with all the alacrity he could summon. The moon overhead was low to the horizon and its position terrified him. How long had he been without consciousness? How long had his father been free to roam about the village and environs?
Fates, what had he done?
Fear parched Syn’s mouth, and the thirst took him unto the stream where he fell down onto his scabbed knees and put his face into the cold rush. The sting was nearly unbearable, but as he drank, his head cleared. When he righted himself, he wiped his eyes on his torn and bloodied sleeves. The night was cold, but for him, it seemed everything was always of lower temperature than he.
Upon the wind, carried from the south, smoke from a fire wafted unto him. Not just one fire. Several. The village was alive with bustling commerce, trade and service performed and provided during the dark hours before the sunlight brought a halt to it all.
The promise made unto his father called him in the direction of the other vampires. None would e’er take him in for fear of what his sire would do, but there were good souls who took pity upon Syn, recognizing the curses of his existence, remembering what had been done unto his mahmen—and knowing full well what would happen if Syn, weak as he was, did not feed the beast who lurked in that cave, in that hut.
Yet Syn did not go unto the village center. He would, later. As soon as he could.
Instead, he set out upon the forest, crossing o’er fallen trunk and low-level brush, moving like a deer, in silence. He traveled far and tired readily, but he kept going.
None too soon he came unto a clearing, and he was of care to seek shelter behind a thick tree. It would do no good for anyone to know of his proximity, and he wouldnae have come if he could have prevented it.
Across the wildflowers that grew with graceful, unabashed glory, the thatched cottage was modest, yet lovely, and he told himself to trust the lack of commotion. Nothing appeared to be on fire outside of the hearth. There was no bloodshed that he could see or scent. There was—
The wooden door opened wide and the sound of giggling rose like the singing of spring birds, and as with finches flushed from a perch, two figures scampered out. One was short and stocky, the little male running as fast as he could, a pink ribbon streaming behind him. The other was a taller female just out of her transition, her blond hair flying as a flag as she chased after her brother and the prize he had claimed. Together, they ran down to the vegetable garden that had been cultivated in the meadow, and then to the paddock wherein two healthy milking cows were penned.
Syn’s shoulders eased and he found he could breathe. As long as the female and her family were safe, that was all that he cared about. She was always so kind to him in the village, and fearless in her regard of him. Indeed, she seemed to notice not his rags and the way he smelled. She saw only his hunger and his suffering, and her eyes did not duck away from that as the stares of so many others, far older than her, did. Nor was she content to merely pity him. She snuck him clothes which, given the scent upon the cloth, she had made for him. He was the now wearing pants she had fashioned from a hearty, thick cloth, and his only coat, the one that kept him warm, but that he had left behind in his haste, had been a coverlet that she created for him.
She was the moonlight in his night sky, and often, the only thing that gave him any ease. Just the sight of her, whether with her basket of weaving wares or as she minded her brother, was enough to give him the strength to carry on.
As the female and her brother rounded by the barn, Syn was content to watch and spin fantasies that wouldnae e’er occur. Verily, he imagined he was the one being chased by her, and he would be sure to allow himself to be caught. In his mind, he went forth into the future, after his own transition. He saw himself tall and strong, capable of defending her and keeping her safe, his brawn the guarantee against this cruel world that naught would hurt her—
The snap of a stick made him jump.
“Whate’er you do here, son of mine,” came a growl behind him.
* * *
The sound of knocking returned Syn to the present, although the reorientation was neither immediate nor dispositive. Part of him was back in those trees, at the edge of that flowered meadow, and he was grateful for whoever had interrupted his memory-lane’ing. He resented the revisit of his history. There were so many reasons not to dwell on any part of his past, but especially that particular night. Maybe if things had gone differently back then, he would be different now.
Then again, maybe he’d been cursed at birth, everything that happened then and since, predetermined and inevitable.
“I’m coming,” he muttered as the knocking started up again and he got over his intermission gratitude.
Whoever was on the other side better have a good fucking reason to disturb all his totally-not-sleeping.
He was even less interested in other people than usual today.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Butch finished off the last inch of Lagavulin in his glass, and just as he righted his head from the toss back, the door he was rapping on ripped opened. On the far side, Syn was obviously not a morning person, his glare right out of the Hulk’s playbook, his big-ass naked body the kind of thing that could do serious damage to anyone with an alarm clock. Cheerful greeting. Piece of toast.
The Bastard had a case of the cranky-wankies.
“Well, well, well,” Butch said. “If it isn’t sunshine personified.”
“What do you want?”
“Right now? Ray-Bans to shield me from the glare of your happiness.”
Balthazar stepped up, putting his solid wall of a body between the two of them. “Let’s relax, cousin.”
Leaving the blood relations to sort out the welcome wagon issues, Butch barged his way into the completely bare set of rooms. Syn lived like a monk, which was his call, but come on. Like you wouldn’t take advantage of a pillow top mattress when they were available to you? But no, we gotta be Old Country hard-ass on the floor.
�
��So,” he said as he strolled around, the remaining pain in his groin from his case of Chrysler-itis something that was briefly eclipsed by the job he’d come to do. “You wanna put some pants on or are you okay airing your junk out like that?”
Balthazar was the one who closed the three of them in together, and the Bastard stayed right by the door, as if he knew there was a chance his cousin could vote with his feet.
Syn put his hands on his hips. “Do I make you uncomfortable?”
Butch laughed. “You have no idea what my roommate’s into. So no, I’m good. But you, my friend, are causing some problems for yourself. And not just in a draft-on-your-shaft kinda way.”
“How so.”
“I think you know.” Butch took the hard copy of the Caldwell Courier Journal out from under his arm. “You read the paper this morning?”
“Cover to cover. And did the crossword.”
“Did you.” Butch looked for a place to put his glass down and ended up setting it on the floor. Then he flipped the front page open and faced it toward the guy. “Curious, did you think something like this wouldn’t get noticed?”
Syn’s eyes didn’t dip down to the black-and-white crime scene photograph that took up most of the top half of the fold. And given that the Bastard didn’t have a computer, and wasn’t on Fritz’s paper-boy delivery list, it was impossible to believe he’d read anything—and to hell with the crossword bullshit.
“No comment?” Butch murmured as he jogged the pages. “ ’Cuz I’m afraid that’s not going to be good enough.”
Syn’s shrug was not a surprise. Neither was his dead calm affect or the hostile light in his eyes. The Bastard was like a torch of aggression as he stood there, all banked natural disaster—and for a split second, Butch kind of wanted the guy to do something spectacularly stupid. A good fistfight might actually burn off some of his own nervous energy.
