The Sinner

by J. R. Ward

  From out of nowhere, the brightest light Syn had ever seen coalesced right in front of him, and even in his delirium, he knew what it was. It was the Fade, arriving to claim him, and somehow, that was the biggest surprise of all. He had assumed he would go unto Dhunhd.

  Then again, having just made the acquaintance of the Omega, maybe the evil didn’t want his sorry ass—

  As he was bathed in the heavenly illumination, the relief that suffused his body was so complete it was unfathomable. It was as if the sickness inside of him was erased, and in its absence? An exhausted peace and calm, like he had come to the end of a long trial.

  But that had been his life. A slog that had seemed infinite on a good night, and a curse on a bad one.

  Giving himself up to the death, he waited for the door he had heard about to come through the light unto him… the door that ancient wisdom said you opened and stepped through, finding yourself in an eternity with your loved ones. Would his mahmen be there?

  Would Jo be allowed there as a human?

  Panic shot through him. He was leaving his female undefended; his death was not going to get her out of danger. Gigante would send someone else to kill her—

  All at once, the light retracted, Syn’s vision cleared, and his ears came back online. Looking up, he wasn’t sure what he expected to see… but the Brother Vishous kneeling down with a torch was not it—

  Wait. That wasn’t a torch. It was the male’s hand, the one that always had that black leather glove on it.

  Maybe the illumination hadn’t been the Fade.

  Maybe those rumors about V being the born son of the Scribe Virgin weren’t bullshit.

  Maybe he should be nicer to the motherfucker, assuming he didn’t want to be turned into a s’more.

  Syn pushed himself off the pavement, and as he cautiously got up on his feet, he expected the world to go around in circles again. It did not. And that was when he realized the Brother must have done to him what he did to Butch.

  “You tackled the Omega?” V said. “What the fuck were you thinking, you crazy sonofabitch.”

  Vishous punched Syn’s shoulders—and then Syn was being yanked forward against that huge chest, the embrace as unexpected as the Brother breaking into song with “Achy Breaky Heart.”

  ’Cuz V didn’t like anybody.

  Guess if you saved his best friend’s life, it got you on his Good Guy list.

  Syn felt himself get set back, and then both of his cousins were talking to him. Everyone was talking to him, the Brothers who were on site and all the other fighters. It was a blur, and he had some thought that they were making a hero out of him for no good reason. He just wanted to kill something, anything, and he wanted a good fight. The Omega was tailor-made for that shit.

  “Where’s Syn?” he heard somebody demand. “Is Syn okay?”

  Butch broke through the rugby huddle that had formed, and the former cop, former human, seemed to fall back into his role as civil servant. He was all about the Good Samaritan as he approached.

  “Jesus, that was brave and stupid. But thank you. I’m serious.”

  Syn met the hazel eyes of the Brother and shook his head.

  Butch nodded, as if he knew what Syn was thinking, but Syn could guarantee he did not.

  And to cut any further gratitud-inal shit, Syn tried to walk in a circle to get a sense of how steady he was. Yay. He didn’t weave. He didn’t throw up again. His body and strength were, like, five on a scale of ten.

  Whereas before V had showed up with that searchlight of a palm? Try not even on the damn scale.

  “Where are you going?” Butch asked.

  Am I leaving? Syn wondered.

  “I’m on rotation,” he heard himself say. “I’m going out to fight.”

  Dr. Manello jumped in like he had a chip in the back of his neck that alerted him to dumb decisions. “Nope. You’re taking the rest of the night off.”

  “I’m not injured,” Syn said as he motioned down his body. “And I’m not sick anymore. You have no reason to deny me.”

  As V lit up a hand-rolled, the Brother looked over the cup of his hand. “Let him go. He’s more than earned the right to fight if that’s what he wants to do. Besides, I took care of him. There isn’t anything of the Omega left in him.”

  Syn pegged the doctor in the eye. “I’m just going to go out anyway. No matter what you tell me.”

  More conversations, especially as another round of Brothers arrived, Tohr, Z, and Phury needing to catch up on what had happened with the Omega.

  Hoping to dematerialize out before his part in the story got more airtime, Syn took a step back from the crowd. And another. When Balthazar glanced over like he was going to put the brakes on the retreat, Syn glared at his cousin and dared him to get involved. When the guy just lit up one of V’s homemade cigarettes and cursed, it was clear the message was received.

  His kin was not going to get in the way of him getting gone.

  * * *

  As the alley turned into a brother-convention, Butch went back over to the carcass of the lesser. He hadn’t gotten far into the inhale before Syn decided to play bowling ball with the Omega and there was a job to be finished.

  And fuck no, he wasn’t going to honor that promise to the evil of stabbing the damn thing back to its master.

  “You don’t have to, cop. You can take a break tonight.”

  He looked over at V. The brother’s clear, cold eyes were like fresh air when you were sick to your stomach. And inside Butch’s head, thoughts started to spin, careening into each other, making hash of any logic.

  “Cop, you just went through some shit.”

  “Yeah, and the only way out of this whole thing is to do my fucking job.”

  Butch dropped to his knees, and angled his face over what was left of the slayer’s mashed-in features. As he braced himself to take one of those long, strange inhales that he’d been pulling ever since the Omega had gotten into him, he thought—not for the first time—that he didn’t know how it worked. He didn’t understand the metaphysics of how he could drain the essence out of its vessel.

  Then again, an explanation wouldn’t change reality and he wasn’t sure he really wanted to know the particulars. Besides, he had other issues to worry about…

  “The Omega should have been able to kill me,” he said as he glanced up at V. “It was throwing shit at me… the magic should have blown me apart. And then there was its presence. I mean, I’ve been right up close with that thing before. I know how powerful it used to be. Not anymore… it’s dying.”

  And you’d think he would have gotten a second wind—natch—from the bald evidence of his success. Instead? He only felt more exhausted.

  V knelt down and exhaled over his shoulder. “That means it’s working. The prophecy is coming true.”

  “Yeah.” Butch stared at the glistening mess of the slayer’s face, the cheekbones white under the inky stain of the black viscera. “I feel like a competitive eater in the last thirty seconds of Nathan’s Famous.”

  V put his gloved hand on Butch’s shoulder. “We have time. It doesn’t have to end tonight. Send him back and let’s go home.”

  Butch shook his head at the lesser. “The Omega should have been able to kill me.”

  When another pair of shitkickers entered his field of vision, he glanced up. Qhuinn had come over, and the brother was white as a sheet, his hands trembling at the ends of the sleeves of his leather jacket. The male lowered himself down. His blue-and-green eyes were red-lined and watery, and he was blinking them like he had a fan right in front of his face.

  “Butch, you saved my life,” the brother said. “And you’re spent. Let me stab it, and we’ll all go home.”

  Butch wanted to do that. He was tired in a way unrelated to physical exertion. He wanted to call Marissa and hear her voice, ask her to cut work early, and just lie beside his shellan. He wanted to know that his brothers and the other fighters were on the mountain and behind the mhis, behind t
he thick stone walls of the mansion, behind the fortress Darius had built over a hundred years ago. He wanted to be certain that, if only until nightfall the following evening, everybody was safe.

  But that was the thing, wasn’t it.

  Safety was an illusion if it only lasted twenty-four hours. And those precious kids in that house, not just Lyric and Rhamp, but all of them, deserved to have their parents beside them. Hell, all of the mahmens and sires of all of the species should have that guarantee.

  As long as the Omega was on the planet, normalcy was a fragile privilege for vampires, not a basic right.

  Butch refocused on the slayer. It was still moving, the fingers flexing and curling on the asphalt, the legs churning in slow, faint motion.

  Opening his mouth, Butch had to force himself to start inhaling.

  So he could take the evil into his body once again.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Jo stood outside McGrider’s on the sidewalk, watching a car pass by. Stepping aside as two guys in what had to be plainclothes went into the bar. Checking her phone, even though who cared about the hour.

  The next time Syn asked for her number, she was going to damn well give it to him.

  Assuming she ever saw him again.

  The night seemed especially cold as she walked back toward the CCJ offices—positively Baltic, in fact—and it was funny, she hadn’t noticed the temperature on the way over with Syn. And as she went along, she became aware that Caldwell had suddenly emptied out of life-forms. In spite of the people behind the wheels of the cars that went along the city streets, and the patrons she’d left behind at McGrider’s, and even her misogynistic boss, and dear, sweet Bill and Lydia, she felt post-apocalyptic alone, the sole survivor of a nuclear catastrophe.

  Then again, someone significant could take everyone else with them when they left—

  Okaaaaaaaaaay, time to put away the melodrama. This was not a grown-up episode of My So-Called Life, with her as Angela and Syn as Jordan Catalano.

  “Hormones,” she muttered as she came up to the front of the CCJ building.

  Instead of walking all the way round to the back, she took out her pass card and went in a side door. The sense that she wasn’t going to be working at the paper for much longer was both part of her weird emotional state, and not that big an extrapolation. And it sucked. The last forty-eight hours had been full of the crazy, but she was starting to love reporting. Blackmailing her boss to let her work was not her gig, though, and she wasn’t going to kid herself about Dick. She’d forced his hand for now, but that was sandbags against a storm surge. Sooner or later, the hold was going to break and he was going to find a way to fire her.

  She hit the bathroom because she was in no hurry to go sit home alone—although the idea of binge-watching Angela Chase’s love life wasn’t a bad B plan to the prospect of sitting at her desk until dawn. After she came out drying her hands, she checked her email to see if the other photographs McCordle was going to send from his phone had come in. They hadn’t.

  Before she started cleaning her desk out, and not because she was firing herself, she decided this was ridiculous. She couldn’t stay here all night. Putting the back exit to use, she ducked her head and hustled quickly to her car, aware of a ringing paranoia in her blood. Glancing around furtively, she didn’t unlock the Golf until she was four feet away from the driver’s side. But come on, like someone was going to sneak into her back seat otherwise? Throwing herself behind the wheel, she shut the door on her coat and left it there as she locked things back up.

  Cranking the sewing machine engine over, she pulled her seat belt across her chest, put the gearshift in reverse, and hit the gas—

  Jo slammed on the brakes.

  In her rearview mirror, bathed in the red illumination of her taillights, a huge figure with a Mohawk was standing right behind her rear bumper.

  Jo shoved the engine into park and jumped out.

  A quip about long time/no see died in her throat.

  “Are you okay?” she asked as she got a load of him.

  When he nodded, she didn’t believe him. He was pale and shaken, and at the base of both sleeves of his leather jacket, his hands were trembling.

  “I need a shower,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I don’t smell good.”

  “Your cologne is all I can smell.”

  “I need…”

  She had the feeling he had no idea what he was saying, and she wanted to know what the hell had happened during the twenty minutes between when he’d run out of the bar and now. It couldn’t be second thoughts about leaving her. That wouldn’t leave a hard-ass like him in this dazed, disordered state.

  Before she was aware of making a conscious decision, she went to him and took his hand. She meant to say, “Come with me.” But his skin was so icy, she worried about hypothermia.

  “We need to get you warm.”

  “Am I cold?”

  She led him around to the passenger side and opened the door for him. “Sit.”

  You know, in case he didn’t know what to do—although how in the hell was he going to fit his big body into that seat—

  “Guess you’re retractable,” she muttered as she shut him in.

  Going around the front bumper, she put herself back behind the wheel, aware that her heart was pumping hard and her blood was rushing. As she put the car in reverse for a second time, she glanced at the man she’d picked up off the street like a stray dog.

  He barely fit into her car: “Retractable” was an overstatement. Cantilevered was more like it. His knees were practically up to his earlobes, his arms wedged in between his legs, his far shoulder squeezed against his door. He didn’t seem to care. Then again, he didn’t seem to know where he was.

  “My apartment’s not far from here,” she said. Well, not compared to someone who lived in Vermont. “I mean…”

  Syn stared straight ahead. As if he were in a different world.

  “Seat belt?” she prompted.

  When he didn’t move, she hit the brakes and reached across him to—

  In the cramped space, he moved so fast, she couldn’t track him. One second he was like a full-length coat crammed into a shoulder bag. Then next, he had grabbed her around the throat and was looking at her with blank, unseeing eyes.

  True fear shot through Jo’s chest. “Please…” she croaked out. “No—”

  He blinked and focused on her properly.

  “Oh, shit…” He immediately dropped his hold. “I’m sorry. You took me unaware.”

  Sitting back against her seat, she put her hands up to her neck. “I’m not going to do that again.”

  “It’s just because… I’m somewhere else. I’m not going to hurt you, I swear.”

  As he shuddered, he seemed to have trouble breathing right. And even though he was physically strong and clearly a tough guy, she felt an overwhelming need to take care of him. He looked broken.

  “It’s okay,” she told him. “You be wherever you are. I’ll handle the rest right now.”

  * * *

  “I knew I couldnae trust you.”

  As Syn’s father spoke, Syn put his back to the sweet cottage, to the young female and her little brother, to the innocents who ran with abandon and unknowing bliss through the wildflower meadow.

  His sire took another step forward, another fallen branch cracking under his horrible weight. “And I knew where you would go. Care you not that I hunger? You were to get something to sustain me, but it looks as though I must find something myself.”

  Glittering black eyes shifted to above Syn’s head, and they tracked the fragile prey that had been marked. As his father’s lips parted, the tips of his stained fangs descended, and his body lowered into an attack stance.

  Syn moved without thinking. He burst forth and bit the back of his sire’s hand, the one that had previously held his front teeth within its flesh. As his molars found home, his father’s roar was so loud, it rebounded th
rough the trees, and Syn prayed unto the Scribe Virgin that the female and her brother heard it and ran for safety.

  There was no waiting round to see if his entreaty unto the higher power was granted.

  His sire turned upon him with a vengeance that was madness and aggression combined. And Syn made sure that he stayed within range of the punishing blow that came down with the swiftness of a hawk upon a lemming. At the moment before impact upon his face, he ducked and scampered back. His sire took the bait, lurching forth, swinging again, stumbling, for he was as yet in his mead though he had stopped his imbibing long before.

  Syn kicked his father in the shin and went further back. Then he took an off-kilter punch to the side of the head and went another step back.

  He knew he had provided a sufficiency of challenge and affront when an unholy red light, emanating from his father’s eyes, bathed him in the color of coming death.

  It was then that Syn ran.

  And he ran fast, but not too fast.

  He had no idea where he was going. He knew only that he had to draw the monster away from that family if it was the last thing he did. And indeed, it would be. He was going to die in this, but hopefully the female and her kin would take heed of his broken body and protect themselves—and mayhap this was the best solution for all. He would be over, and that young female would be, if not safe, then safer, for surely Syn’s sire would be cast out of the village by the elders?

  Another thing to pray for, not that he had time to entreat the Virgin Scribe once more.

  With the red light of his father’s violence streaming behind him, the forest was lit in a murderous manner, the trees and brush, the trail that Syn found himself upon, the deer that were flushed from their stands, illuminated in the fashion of the blood that would soon be shed.

  Syn’s thin legs pumped as fast as they could, and the only thing that allowed him to keep the lead was his father’s prodigious weight. Verily, the hoarse breathing, the huffing and puffing, was like a dragon that labored upon the ground in a canter when it should have taken unto the air. His sire did not have that skyward option, thank Fates.