Lover Mine (51 page)

He didn’t look over. Didn’t say anything else. Just kept flipping through the channels.

Choices, choices, choices, John thought.

He could rush out after her and torch his ass. Stay in front of this door like a dog. Peel his own skin off with a knife. Drink himself into a stupor.

From the billiard room, he heard a muted roar and then the screams of a crowd of people.

Drawn to the sound, he went in and stood before the pool table. Over the back of Tohr’s head, he saw Godzilla trampling the shit out of a model of downtown Tokyo.

Kind of inspiring, really.

John went over to the wet bar and poured himself a Jack, then sat down next to Tohr and put his feet up on the table as well.

As he focused on the television screen and tasted the whiskey in the back of his throat and felt the warmth of the fire that had been lit across the way, he felt the blender in his brain slow down a little. And then a little more. And further still.

Today was going to be brutal, but at least he wasn’t contemplating death by sun ray anymore.

Sometime later, he realized it was Tohr who he was sitting beside, the two of them stretched out as they’d done back home when Wellsie had still been alive.

God, he’d been so pissed off at the guy lately that he’d forgotten how easy it was just to hang with the Brother: On some level, it felt like they had done this for ages, the pair of them before a fire, drink in one hand, exhaustion and stress in the other.

As Mothra flew in for some wing-to-claw action with the big guy, John thought of his old bedroom.

Turning to Tohr, he signed,
Listen, when I was at the house tonight
—

“She told me.” Tohr took a drink from his squat glass. “About the door.”

“Not to worry. Shit like that can be fixed.”

True that, John thought, turning back to the television. Unlike so much else.

From way against the far wall, Lassiter let out a sigh that suggested someone had cut off his leg and there wasn’t a medic in sight. “I should never have given you the remote. This is just some guy in a monster suit, batting around at a piñata. Come
on
, I’m missing
Maury
.”

“What a shame.”

“Paternity tests, Tohr. You’re button-blocking paternity tests. This sucks.”

“Only to you.”

While Tohr held steady on ’zilla-vision, John let his head fall back against the leather cushions.

As he thought about Xhex out there alone, he felt as if he’d been poisoned. The stress was literally a toxin in his bloodstream, making him light-headed and nauseated and twitchy.

He thought back to all that “Kumbaya” shit he’d been spouting before he’d found her. How he was owning his feelings, how even if she didn’t love him, he could still love her and do what was right and let her live her life and blah, blah, blah.

Yeah, he was so choking on that self-actualization Kool-Aid right now.

He was
not
okay with her out there by herself. Without him. But she clearly wasn’t going to listen to him or anyone else.

And how much you want to bet she was scrambling to get to Lash before nightfall—when John could finally be in the field. On some level, it shouldn’t matter which of them took out the piece of shit—but that was rationality talking. The inner core of him couldn’t bear another weakness—like, oh, say, sitting idly by while his female tried to kill the son of evil and likely got mortally wounded.

His female . . .

Ah, but wait, he told himself. Just because he had her name tattooed on his back didn’t mean he owned her—it was just a lot of black letters in his skin. Fact was, it was more like she owned him. Different. Very different.

Meant she could walk away quite easily.

Just had, as a matter of fact.

Fuck. Rehv seemed to have summoned up the sitch better than anyone could: Her end game didn’t include anyone else but herself.

Couple hours of good sex wasn’t going to change that.

Nor was the fact that, like it or not, she had taken his heart out there into the daylight with her.

 

 

Qhuinn went to his bedroom and headed straight for the bath on legs that were surprisingly steady. He’d been pretty drunk before the emergency meeting had been called, but the idea of John’s female out in broad daylight, walking into a shitstorm all by herself, had a way of slapping down the waves of heeeeeey-noooow.

Then again, he was kind of dealing with a twofer along those lines.

Blay was also off in the world all by his little lonesome.

Well, he wasn’t alone; he was unprotected.

That text that had come through from an unknown number had settled the mystery of where he was and then some:
I am staying the day with Saxton. I’ll be home after dark.

So like Blay. Everyone else in the world would have shortened that message to:
Stayn t day w Sax b hm afta drk

Guy’s texts were always grammatically correct, though. Like the idea of busting out of the King’s English made him scratch.

Blay was funny like that. All proper and shit: He changed for meals, trading leathers and T-shirts for French-cuffed button-downs and pressed slacks. He showered at least twice a day, more if he sparred. Fritz found his room a complete frustration because there was never any mess to clean up.

He had table manners like a count, wrote thank-you letters that could make you tear up, and he never, ever swore in the presence of females.

God . . . Saxton was perfect for him.

Qhuinn sagged in his own skin at that realization, imagining all the proper English that Blay was calling out at this very moment as the other guy had him.

Merriam-Webster had never been used so well, no doubt.

Feeling like he’d been punched in the head, Qhuinn ran the cold water in the sink and splashed his face with the shit until his cheeks tingled and the tip of his nose started to go numb. As he toweled off, he thought back to that tat shop, to the bump and grind he’d had with the receptionist there.

The curtain that had separated the two of them from the rest of the place had been thin enough so that with his mismatched, but highly functional eyes, he’d been able to see everything that was going on on the far side. Everyone, too. So that when that chick had been on her knees in front of him and he’d turned his head, he’d looked out . . . and seen Blay.

The wet mouth he’d been drilling into abruptly morphed from some stranger’s to his best friend’s and that shift had cranked up the sex from servicing a generic need to something incendiary.

Something important.

Something raw and erotic and lose-your-soul right.

Which was why Qhuinn had pulled her up and spun her around and taken her from behind. Except as he’d pounded into his fantasy, he’d realized that Blay was watching him . . . and that had changed everything. He’d abruptly had to remind himself who he was fucking—which was why he’d pulled the girl’s head up to his and forced himself to stare into her eyes.

He hadn’t orgasmed.

As she’d come hard, he’d faked it—the truth was his erection had started to fade the instant he’d looked into her face. The only saving grace had been that she clearly hadn’t known the difference, having been wet enough for the two of them—and besides, he’d fronted like a pro, laying it on thick like he was all satisfied and shit afterward.

But it had been a total lie.

How many people had he fucked like that in his lifetime, all wham-bamforget-I-ever-met-ya? Hundreds. Hundreds and hundreds—and this was even though he’d been on the sex ride for only a year and a half. Thing was, though, those late nights at ZeroSum, picking up three and four chicks at a clip, could get you into those big numbers fast.

Of course, a lot of those sessions had been with Blay, he and his buddy balling the women together. The pair of them hadn’t actually been with each other during those bathroom orgies at the club—but there had been a lot of watching. And wondering. And maybe a private hand job from time to time when the remembering got too vivid.

At least on Qhuinn’s part.

That had all ended, though, when Blay had put the kibosh on it by realizing that he was gay and that he was in love with someone.

Qhuinn didn’t approve of his choice. Not at all. Guy like Blaylock deserved somebody much, much better.

And it appeared he was heading down a road that would get him just that. Saxton was a male of worth. All the way around.

The fucker.

Looking up at the mirror over the sink, Qhuinn couldn’t see a thing because it was totally dark in both the bathroom and the bedroom. And wasn’t it just as well that he couldn’t see his reflection.

Because he was living a lie, and in quiet moments like this he knew it with such conviction he got sick to his stomach.

His plans for the rest of his days . . . oh, his glorious plans.

Such perfectly “normal” future plans.

Involving a female of worth, not a long-term relationship with a male.

The thing was, males like him, males with something wrong with them . . . like, oh, say, one iris that was blue and another that was green . . . were despised in the aristocracy as evidence of a genetic failure. They were embarrassments to be hidden away, shameful secrets to be buried: He’d spent years watching his sister and his brother get elevated on pedestals while everyone who crossed his path performed evil-eye rituals to protect themselves.

His own father had hated him.

So it didn’t take a therapist with a diploma on the wall to see that he just wanted to be “normal.” And settling down with a female of worth, assuming he could find one who could stand to be mated to somebody with a genetic glitch in the system, was mission-critical to that happy little tag.

He knew if he got tangled up with Blay that wasn’t going to happen.

Knew also that all it would take was one fuck and he was never going to leave the guy.

It wasn’t that the Brothers didn’t accept homosexuals. Hell, they were cool with it—Vishous had been with males and no one blinked an eye, or judged him, or cared. He was just their brother, V. And Qhuinn had crossed the line every now and again just for shits and giggles and they all knew about that and didn’t give a crap.

The
glymera
cared, though.

And it galled him that he still gave a crap about those motherfuckers. With his family gone, and the nucleus of the race’s aristocracy scattered around the East Coast, it wasn’t as if he had any contact with that stick-up-the-ass crowd anymore. But he was a dog too well trained to be able to forget they existed.

He simply couldn’t come out.

Ironic. His outside was all about the hard-core. Inside? He was straight-up pussy.

Abruptly, he wanted to punch the mirror, even though all it was showing was a whole lot of shadow.

“Sire?”

In the darkness, he squeezed his eyes shut.

Shit, he’d forgotten Layla was still in his bed.

X
hex wasn’t precisely sure which farmhouse she was looking for, so she materialized in a wooded area off Route 149 and used her nose to tell her what direction to head in: The wind was coming out of the north, and when she caught the slightest whiff of baby powder, she tracked the scent, vaporizing herself at hundred-yard intervals through the scruffy, mowed-down cornfields that had been lambasted by winter’s winds and snow.

The spring air tingled in her nose and the sunlight on her face warmed wherever the breeze didn’t brush over her skin. All around, skeletal trees had halos of bright green, their tentative buds drawn out of hiding by the promise of warmer hours.

Lovely day.

For a killing spree.

When the stench of
lessers
was all she could smell, she unsheathed one of the knives Vishous had given her and knew that she was so close she could—

Xhex took form at the next row of maples and stopped dead.

“Oh . . . fuck.”

The white farmhouse was nothing to write home to Mom about, just a wilted structure next to a cornfield, surrounded by a ring of pines and bushes. Good thing it had a lawn, though.

Otherwise the five police cars that were jammed up close to the front entrance wouldn’t have had enough room to get their doors open.

Masking herself as
symphaths
did, she ghosted her way up to a window and looked inside.

Perfect timing: She got to see one of Caldwell’s finest throw up into a bucket.

Although it wasn’t as if he didn’t have good reason to. The house looked like it had been bathed in human blood. Actually, scratch the “looked.” It
had
been covered in the shit, to the point where she tasted copper on the back of her tongue even though she was out in the fresh air.

It was like Michael Myers’s kiddie pool in there.

The human cops were walking around the living room and dining room, picking their way with care not only because it was a crime scene, but obviously because they didn’t want the stuff splashing up on their pants.

No bodies, though. Not one single body.

At least, not that was visible.

There were nascent
lessers
in the house, however. Sixteen of them. But she couldn’t see them and neither could the cops, even though from what she sensed, the men were walking right over them.

Lash’s cloaking again?

What the fuck was he up to? Calling the Brothers, announcing this shit . . . and then getting the cops to come? Or had someone else done the dialing to 911?

She needed answers to so much . . .

Mixed in with all the blood was some inky residue and one of the officers was frowning over a patch of it, looking like he’d found something icky. Yup . . . that amount of oily mess wasn’t sufficient to explain the strong sweet scent she’d followed—so she had to assume that the inductions had been successful and what was hidden was no longer human.