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Voices mingled. Low and higher. Then a phone went off.

Xcor tracked the ringing and the conversation that ensued, walking in silence over to the other hatch where the speaker chose to stop. Going still, he listened hard, and caught one half of a very uninteresting conversation that gave nothing away as to the identity of the parties.

Not long thereafter, the unmistakable sounds of sex filtered down.

As Zypher chuckled softly, Xcor glared in the bastard’s direction to shut him up. Even though each of the trapdoors had been locked from below, one never knew what kind of trouble those rats without tails could bring to any situation.

He checked his watch. Waited for the moaning to stop. Motioned for his soldiers to stay put when it did.

Moving in silence, he proceeded over to the trapdoor in the far corner of the warehouse, the one that opened up into what must have been a supervisory office. Unlatching it, he palmed one of his guns, dematerialized out, and inhaled.

Not a human.

Well, there had been one here…but the other was something else.

Over in the corner, the outer door clapped shut and the lock was engaged.

Ghosting across the way, Xcor put his back against the warehouse’s sturdy brick wall and looked out of one section of the cloudy glass windows.

A pair of headlights flared down in front, in the shallow parking lot.

Dematerializing up and out of a busted pane, he shot forward to the roof of the warehouse across the street.

Well, wasn’t this interesting.

That was a Shadow down there, sitting behind the wheel of the BMW with the driver’s-side window down, and a human female leaning into the SUV.

Second time he’d run into one in Caldwell.

They were dangerous.

Getting out his phone, he called Throe’s number by finding the male’s picture in his contacts, and ordered his soldiers to go and fight. He would deal with this departure alone.

Down below, the Shadow reached out, pulled the woman into him by the neck, and kissed her. Then he put the vehicle in reverse and drove off without looking back.

Xcor shifted his position to keep up with the male, going from rooftop to rooftop, as the Shadow headed toward the club district on the surface roads that ran parallel to the river—

At first, the sensation in his body suggested a change in wind direction, the chilly gusts seeming to come up from behind him, as opposed to hitting him face-first. But then he thought…no. It was purely internal. Whatever ripples he felt were under his skin—

His Chosen was nearby.

His Chosen.

Immediately abandoning the Shadow’s trail, he peeled off and headed closer to the Hudson River. What was she doing down—

In a car. She was traveling in a car.

From what his instincts were telling him, she was going at a fast speed that was nonetheless trackable. So the only explanation was that she was on the Northway, going sixty or seventy miles an hour.

Proceeding back in the direction of the rows of warehouses, he focused on the signal he was picking up on. As it had been months since he’d fed from her, he was panicked to find that the connection created by her blood in his veins was fading—to the point that it was difficult to pinpoint the vehicle.

But then he locked in on a luxury sedan thanks to the fact that it slowed down and got off at the exit that funneled traffic onto the bridges. Dematerializing up onto the girders, he planted his combat boots on the pinnacle of one of the steel risers and waited for her to pass under him.

Shortly thereafter she did, and then continued onward, heading to the other half of the city on the opposite shore.

He stayed on her, maintaining a safe distance, although he wondered who he was fooling. If he could sense his female?

It would be the same for her.

But he would not abandon her trail.

As Qhuinn sat in the passenger seat of the Mercedes, his Heckler & Koch forty-five was held discreetly on his thigh, and his eyes flipped incessantly from the rearview mirror to the side window to the windshield. Next to him, Phury was behind the wheel, the Brother’s hands doing a ten-and-two so tightly it was like he was strangling somebody.

Man, there was too much goddamn shit unraveling right now.

Layla and the young. That whole Cessna incident. What Qhuinn had done to his own cousin the night before. And then…well, there was the Blay thing.

Oh, dear God in heaven…the Blay thing.

As Phury got off the exit that would take them onto the bridges, Qhuinn’s brain shifted from worrying about Layla to reviewing all kinds of pictures and sounds and…tastes from the daylight hours.

Intellectually, he knew what had happened between them hadn’t been a dream—and his body sure as hell remembered everything, like the sex had been a kind of branding on his flesh that changed the way he looked forever. And yet, as he went about dealing with the newest frickin’ drama, the too-short session seemed prehistoric, not less than a night old.

He feared it was a one-and-only.

Don’t you touch me like that.

Groaning, he rubbed at his head.

“It’s not about your eyes,” Phury said.

“I’m sorry?”

Phury glanced into the backseat. “Hey, how we doing?” he asked the females. When Layla and Doc Jane answered in some sort of affirmative, he nodded. “Listen, I’m going to shut the partition for a sec, ’kay? All good up here.”

The Brother didn’t give them a chance to answer one way or another, and Qhuinn stiffened in his seat as the opaque shield rose up, cutting the sedan into two halves. He wasn’t going to run from any kind of confrontation, but that didn’t mean he was looking forward to round two of this one—and if Phury was cutting the pair in the back off, it wasn’t going to be pretty.

“Your eyes are not the problem,” the Brother said.

“Excuse me?”

Phury looked over. “My being pissed off about this has got nothing to do with any defect. Layla’s in love with you—”

“No, she’s not.”

“See, you’re really pissing me off right now.”

“Ask her.”

“While she’s miscarrying your young?” the Brother snapped. “Yeah, I’ll do that.”

As Qhuinn winced, Phury continued. “See, here’s the thing with you. You like living on the edge and being all wild—frankly, I think it helps you come to terms with the bullshit your family put you through. If you iconoclast everything? Nothing can hurt you. And believe it or not, I don’t have a problem with that. You do you, and get through your nights and your days any way you can. But as soon as you break the heart of an innocent—especially if she’s under my care? That’s when you and I have an issue.”

Qhuinn looked out his window. First off, props to the big man over there. The idea that there was a judgment against Qhuinn based on his character instead of a genetic mutation he hadn’t volunteered for was a refreshing change. And hey, it wasn’t that he didn’t agree with the guy—at least not until about a year ago. Back before then? Hell, yeah, he’d been out of control on a lot of levels. But things had changed. He had changed.

Evidently, Blay becoming unavailable was the kind of boot in the balls he’d needed to finally grow the fuck up.

“I’m not like that anymore,” he said.

“So you are in fact prepared to mate her?” When he didn’t reply, Phury shrugged. “And there you go. Bottom line—I’m responsible for her, legally and morally. I may not be behaving like the Primale in some respects, but the rest of the job description I take pretty goddamn seriously. The idea that you got her into this mess makes me sick to my stomach, and I find it very hard to believe that she didn’t do this to please you—you said you both wanted a young? Are you sure that it wasn’t just you, and she did it because she wanted to make you happy? That’s very much her way.”

This was all presented as a rhetorical. And it wasn’t like Qhuinn could criticize the logic, even if it happened to be wrong. But as he dragged a hand through his hair, the fact that Layla was the one who had come to him was something he kept to himself. If Phury wanted to think it was all his fault, that was fine—he’d carry that load. Anything to take the pressure and attention off Layla.

Phury stared across the seats. “It wasn’t right, Qhuinn. That’s not what a real male does. And now look at the situation she’s in. You did this to her. You put her in the backseat of this car, and that’s just wrong.”

Qhuinn squeezed his eyes shut. Well, wasn’t that going to be banging around the inside of his head for the next hundred years. Give or take.

As they started over the bridge and left the twinkling lights of downtown behind, he kept his godforsaken yap shut, and Phury fell silent as well.

Then again, the Brother had said it all, hadn’t he.

THIRTY-THREE

Assail ended up further tracking his prey from behind the wheel of his Range Rover. Much cozier this way—and it wasn’t as if the woman’s location was an issue now: While he’d been waiting by the Audi for her to come off his property, he’d attached a tracking device to the underbelly of her side-view mirror.

His iPhone took care of the rest.

After she’d left his neighborhood in a rush—following his deliberate dematerialization from sight just to further destabilize her—she had crossed the river and headed around to the backside of the city, where the houses were small, packed in close to one another, and finished with aluminum siding.

As he trolled behind her, keeping at least two blocks between their vehicles, he regarded the brightly colored lights in the neighborhoods, the thousands of strands of twinklers strung among bushes and hanging from roof lips and boxing out windows and doorframes. But that wasn’t the half of it. Manger scenes placed prominently on tiny front lawns were spotlit, and there were also fat white snowmen with red scarves and blue pants that glowed from within.

In contrast to the seasonal accoutrements, he was willing to bet the Virgin Mary statues were permanent.

When her vehicle stopped and stayed that way, he closed in, parking four houses down and killing his lights. She didn’t get out of the car right away, and when she finally did, she wasn’t wearing the parka and tight ski pants she’d had on whilst spying on him. Instead, she had changed into a thick red sweater and a pair of jeans.

She’d let her hair down.

And the heavy, brunette weight reached below her shoulders, curling at the ends.

He growled in the darkness.

With quick, easy strides, she surmounted the four shallow concrete steps leading up to the modest entrance of the home. Propping open the screen door with its curlicue metalwork, she buttressed the thing with her hip, let herself in with a key, and closed things back up.

As a light came on downstairs, he watched her shape walk through the front room, the thin privacy drapes giving him only a sense of her movement, not any kind of clear view.

He thought of his own screens. It had taken him a long time to perfect that invention, and the Hudson River house had been perfect for piloting them. The barriers worked even better than he’d anticipated.

But she was smart enough to have picked up on the anomalies, and he wondered what the giveaway had been.

On the second floor, a light came on, as if someone who had been resting had stirred at her arrival.

His fangs pulsed. The idea that some human man was awaiting her in their mated bedroom made him want to establish his dominance—even though that didn’t make sense. After all, he was tracking her for his own self-protection, and nothing more.

Absolutely nothing more.

Just as his hand sought the car door handle, his phone rang. Good timing.

When he saw who it was, he frowned and put the cell up to his ear. “Two calls in such a short time. To what do I owe this honor?”

Rehvenge was not amused. “You didn’t get back to me.”

“Was I required to?”

“Watch yourself, boy.”

Assail’s eyes remained locked on the little house. He was curiously desperate to know what was going on inside. Was she heading up the stairs, undressing as she went?

Exactly who was she hiding her pursuits from? And she was in fact hiding them—otherwise, why change in the car prior to entering the house?

“Hello?”

“I appreciate the kind invitation,” he heard himself say.

“It’s not an invitation. You’re a goddamn member of the Council now that you’re in the New World.”

“No.”

“Excuse me?”

Assail thought back to the meeting at Elan’s house in the early winter, the one Rehvenge had not known about, the one to which the Band of Bastards had shown up and flexed their muscle. He also thought of the attempt on Wrath, the Blind King’s life—on Assail’s own property, for godsakes.

Too much drama for his liking.

With practiced ease, he launched into the same speech he had given Xcor’s faction. “I am a businessman by predilection and purpose. Although I respect both the current sovereignty and the Council’s power base, I cannot divert energy or time away from my enterprise. Not now, nor in the future.”

There was a stretch of silence. And then that deep, ever-so-evil voice came over the connection. “I’ve heard about your business.”

“Have you.”

“I was in it myself for a number of years.”

“So I understand.”

“I managed to do both.”

Assail smiled into the darkness. “Mayhap I am not as talented as you.”

“I’m going to make something perfectly clear. If you don’t show up at that meeting, I’m going to assume you’re playing on the wrong team.”

“By that very statement, you acknowledge there are two and they are opposed.”

“Take it as you will. But if you’re not with me and the king, you are my enemy and his.”

And that was precisely what Xcor had said. Then again, was there any other position in this growing war?

“The king was shot at your house, Assail.”

“So I recollect,” he muttered dryly.

“I’d think you’d want to put to rest any notion of your involvement.”

“I already have. I told the Brothers that very night that I had nothing to do with it. I gave them the vehicle in which they escaped with the king. Why would I do any such thing if I were a traitor?”

“To save your own ass.”

“I am quite accomplished at that without the benefit of conversation, I assure you.”

“So what’s your schedule like?”

The light on the second story was extinguished, and he had to wonder what the woman was doing in the darkness—and with whom.

Of their own volition, his fangs bared themselves.

“Assail. You are seriously boring me with this hard-to-get bullshit.”

Assail put the Range Rover in gear. He was not going to sit upon the curb whilst whatever happened inside…happened. She was clearly home for the night, and staying there. Besides, his phone would alert him in the event that her car was once again set into motion.

As he rolled into the street and gathered speed, he spoke with clarity. “I am herewith resigning my position on the Council. My neutrality in this battle for the crown shall not be questioned by either side—”

“And you know who the players are, don’t you.”

“I shall make this as bald as I am able—I have no side here, Rehvenge. I do not know how to state this more plainly—and I will not be pulled into the war either by you and your king, or by any other. Do not attempt to push me, and know that the neutrality I present to you is exactly what I give to them.”

On that note, he had made a vow to Elan and Xcor not to reveal their identities, and he was going to keep it—not because he believed the group would e’er return the favor to him, but rather for the simple fact that, depending upon who won this tussle, a confidant to either side would be viewed either as a whistle-blower to be eradicated or a hero to be lauded. The problem was, one wouldn’t know which until the end, and he was uninterested in such a gamble.

“So you have been approached,” Rehv stated.

“I received a copy of the letter they sent in the spring of this year, yes.”

“Is that the only contact you’ve had?”

“Yes.”

“You’re lying to me.”

Assail stopped at a traffic light. “There is naught you may say or do to pull me into this, dear leahdyre. ”

With menace in abundance, the male on the other end growled, “Don’t count on that, Assail.”

With that, Rehvenge hung up.

Cursing, Assail tossed his phone onto the passenger seat. Then he made two fists and banged them on the steering wheel.

If there was one thing he could not abide, it was being sucked into the vortex of other people’s arguments. He didn’t give a pence who sat on the throne, or who was in charge of the glymera. He just wanted to be left alone to make his money off the backs of rats without tails.

Was that so fucking hard to understand?

When the light turned green, he stomped on the accelerator, even though he had no real destination in mind. He just drove in a random direction…and about fifteen minutes later, he found himself going over the river on one of the bridges.

Ah, so his Range Rover had decided to take him home.

As he emerged onto the opposite shore, his phone let off a chiming sound, and he nearly ignored it. But the twins had gone out to move Benloise’s newest shipment, and he wanted to know if those petty dealers had shown up for their quotas after all.

It was not a phone call or a text.

That black Audi was on the move again.

Assail stomped on the brake, cut in front of semi that blew its horn like the f-word, and plowed up and over the snow-covered median.

He positively flew back over the inbound bridge.

From his vantage point at a rather distant periphery, Xcor required his binoculars to properly sight his Chosen.

The car that she had been traveling in, that vast black sedan, had continued onward after the bridge, going about five or six miles before getting off on a rural road that took it north. After another number of miles, and with little warning, it had turned onto a dirt lane that was choked on either side with hardy all-season undergrowth. Finally, it came to rest before a low-slung concrete building that was lacking not just pretense of any kind, but windows and, seemingly, a door.

He tightened up the focus as two males got out from the front. He recognized one instantly—the hair was a dead giveaway: Phury, son of Ahgony—who, according to the gossip, had been made Primale of the Chosen.

Xcor’s black heart began beating hard.

Especially as he recognized the second figure: It was the fighter with the mismatched eyes whom he had battled at Assail’s as the king was spirited away.

Both males took out guns and surveyed the landscape.

As Xcor was downwind, and there appeared to be no one else around, he figured there was a reasonable expectation, barring the revelation of his position by his Chosen, that the pair would proceed with whatever they had planned for his female.

In fact, it appeared as if she were being delivered unto a prison.

Over. His. Dead. Body.

She was an innocent in this war, one used for nefarious purposes through no fault of her own—but clearly she was going to be executed or locked within a cell here for the rest of her time upon the earth.

Or not.

He palmed one of his guns.

It was a good night to take care of this business. Indeed, now was his chance to have her as his own, to save her from whatever punishment had been doled out on account of her having unwittingly aided and abetted the enemy. And mayhap the circumstances around her unjust condemnation would make her favorably predisposed toward her enemy and savior.

His eyes closed briefly as he imagined her in and among his bedding.

When Xcor once again lifted his lids, Phury was opening the rear door of the sedan and reaching inside. When the Brother straightened, the Chosen was drawn out of the vehicle…and taken by both elbows, the fighters holding on to her on each side as she was led toward the building.

When Xcor prepared to close in. After so long, a lifetime, he finally had her once more in the vicinity of his person, and he was not going to waste the chance destiny was providing him, not now—not when her life so obviously hung in the balance. And he would prevail in this—the threat to her strengthened his body to unimaginable power, his mind sharpened such that it both raced with attack possibilities and remained utterly calm.

Indeed, there were merely those two males guarding her—and with them, a female who not only appeared weaponless, but did not regard her vicinity as if she were trained for or inclined to conflict.

He was more than mighty enough to take his female’s captors.

Just as he prepared to lunge forth, his Chosen’s scent reached him on the stiff, cold breeze, that tantalizing perfume unique to her causing him to weave in his combat boots—

Immediately, he recognized a change in it.

Blood.

She was bleeding. And there was something else….

Without conscious thought, his body moved itself in close, his form reestablishing corporeal weight and heft at a distance of a mere ten feet, behind an outbuilding set off from the main facility.

She was not a prisoner, he realized, being led to a cell or execution.

His Chosen was having difficulty walking. And those warriors were supporting her with care; even with their weapons out and their eyes searching for signs of an attack, they were as gentle with her as they would have been with the most fragile of blooms.

She had not been ill treated. She was marked not with bruises and welts. And as the trio progressed, she looked up at one male and then the other and spoke as if trying to reassure them—for in truth, it was not aggression tightening the brows of those warriors.

In fact, it was the same terror he felt upon smelling her blood.

Xcor’s heart pounded even harder behind his breast, his mind trying to make sense of it all.

And then he remembered something from his own past.

After his birth mahmen had shunned him, he had been dropped at an orphanage in the Old Country and left for whatever fate befell him. Therein, he had stayed among the rare unwanted, most of whom possessed physical deformities such as his own, for nearly a decade—long enough to form permanent memories of what transpired at the sad, lonely place.

Long enough for him to piece together what it meant when a lone female appeared at the gates, was let in, and then screamed for hours, sometimes days…before giving birth to, in most cases, a dead young. Or miscarrying one.

The scent of the blood back then had been very specific. And the scent upon the cold wind of this night was the same.

Pregnancy was what he had in his nose now.

For the first time in his life, he heard himself utter in absolute agony, “Dearest Virgin in the Fade…”

THIRTY-FOUR

The idea that members of the s’Hisbe were in the Caldwell zip code made Trez want to pack up everything he owned, grab his brother, and RV it out of town.

As he drove from the warehouse to the Iron Mask, his head was so fucked-up, he had to consciously think of the turns to take, and the stop signs to brake at, and where he was supposed to park once he got to the club. And then after he turned the X5’s engine off, he just sat behind the wheel and stared at the brick wall of his building…for like, a year.

Helluva metaphor, all the going-nowhere in front of him.

It wasn’t like he didn’t know how much he was letting his people down. The issue? He didn’t give a shit. He was not going back to the old ways. The life he led now was his own, and he refused to let the promise he’d been born into cage him as an adult.

Not going to happen.

Ever since Rehvenge had done his good deed for the century and saved his and his brother’s asses, things had turned around for Trez. He and iAm had been ordered to align themselves with the symphath outside of the Territory in order to work off the debt, and that “forcible” repayment had been his ticket to ride, the way out he’d been searching for. And although he did regret sucking iAm into the drama, the end result was that his brother had had to come with him, and that was just another part of the perfect solution he was now living. Leaving the s’Hisbe and coming into the outside world had been a revelation, his first, delicious taste of freedom: There was no protocol. No rules. No one breathing down his neck.

The irony? It was supposed to have been a slap on the back of the hand for daring to go beyond the Territory and tangling with UnKnowables. A punishment intended to bring him back in line.

Hah.

And since then, in the recesses of his mind, he’d kinda been hoping the extent of his dealings with the UKs over the past decade or so would have contaminated him in the eyes of the s’Hisbe, making him ineligible for the “honor” he’d been given at his birth. Soiling him into a permanent freedom, as it were.

Problem was, if they’d sent AnsLai, the high priest, clearly that goal hadn’t been accomplished. Unless the visit had been to disavow him?

He’d have heard from iAm on that, though. Wouldn’t he?

Trez checked his phone. No VMs. No texts. He was in the doghouse with his brother again—unless iAm had decided to fuck all the bullshit and gone home to the tribe.

Damn it—

The sharp knock on his window didn’t just bring his head around. It brought his gun out.

Trez frowned. Standing outside his car was a human male the size of a house. The guy had a beer belly, but his thick shoulders suggested he did regular physical labor, and that heavy, rigid jawline revealed both his Cro-Magnon ancestry as well as the kind of arrogance most common to big, dumb animals.

With great, bull-like puffs of breath pouring from his flared nostrils, he leaned in and pounded on the window. With a fist as big as a football, natch.

Well, obviously he wanted some attention, and what do you know. Trez was more than willing to give it to him.

Without warning, he threw open the door, catching the guy right in the nuts. As the human staggered backward and grabbed for his crotch, Trez rose to his full height and tucked his gun into the small of his back, out of sight, but within easy reach.

When Mr. Aggressive had recovered enough to look up, waaaaay up, he seemed to lose his enthusiasm for a moment. Then again, Trez had easily a foot and a half, and seventy-five, maybe a hundred pounds on the guy. In spite of that Dunlop he was sporting.

“Are you looking for me,” Trez said. Read: Are you sure you want to do this, big guy?

“Yeah. I is.”

Okay, so both grammar and risk assessment were a problem for him. Probably had the same issue with single-digit adding and subtracting.

“Am,” Trez said.

“What?” Pronounced whut.

“I believe it is, ‘Yeah, I am.’ Not ‘is.’”

“You can kiss my ass. How ’bout that.” The guy came closer. “And stay away from her.”

“Her?” That narrowed it down to what, a hundred thousand people?

“My girl. She don’t want you, she don’t need you, and she ain’t gonna have you no more.”

“Who exactly are we talking about? I’m going to need a name.” And maybe even that wouldn’t help.

In lieu of an answer, the guy took a swing. It was likely meant to be a sucker punch, but the windup was so slow and laborious, the goddamn thing could have come with subtitles.

Trez caught that fist with his hand, palming it like a basketball. And then with a quick twist he had the piece of beef turned around and held in place—proof positive that pressure points worked, and the wrist was one of ’em.

Trez spoke into the man’s ear, just so the ground rules were clearly received. “You do that again, and I’m going to break every bone in your hand. At once.” He punctuated that with a jerk that left the guy whimpering. “And then I’m going to work on your arm. Followed by your neck—which you will not walk away from. Now, what the fuck are you talking about.”

“She were here last night.”

“Lot of women were. Can you be more specific—”

“He means me.”

Trez looked over. Oh…fucking wonderful.

It was the chick who’d gone apeshit, his happy little stalker.

“I tole you I got this!” her BF shouted.

Yeah, uh-huh, the guy really looked in control of things. So apparently both of them were into delusion—and maybe that explained the relationship: He thought she was a supermodel, and she assumed he had a brain.

“Is this yours?” Trez asked the woman. “Because if it is, would you take it home with you, before you need a bucket loader to clean up the mess?”

“I tole you not to come here,” the woman said. “What you doing here?”

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14