Lover Mine (53 page)

Xhex called Rehv out of contacts and hit him up because it was the fastest way to get to the Brothers. When voice mail kicked in, she left the specs and the tag on that car and asked for Vishous to track them.

Then she hung up and fired the phone back to Trez.

“No Domino’s then?” he muttered. “They deliver, you know.”

Swallowing a curse, she frowned and remembered that V had given her a phone. Shit . . . she was not as sharp as she should be in this situation—

“And another department is heard from . . .” iAm said.

Her eyes shot to the road as an unmarked came to a stop in front of the house. The homicide detective who got out was someone she knew. José de la Cruz.

At least the humans had sent in a good man. Then again, maybe that kind of competence wasn’t great news. The less involvement of that other race in a situation like this, the better, and de la Cruz had the instincts and follow-through of a bloodhound.

Man . . . it was going to be a loooooong frickin’ day. A very, very long frickin’ day.

As she watched the humans mill about and spin their wheels, and felt the collective weight of her bodyguards pressing down on her head, her right hand began to move, her fingers forming the curves and straightaways John had taught her.

A . . .

B . . .

C . . .

 

 

Lash woke up to the sound of moaning. And not the good kind.

Lying facedown on a bare mattress in that cheesy-ass ranch was another buzz kill. Third strike was the fact that when he finally got up, his body left a black stain behind.

Kind of like a shadow thrown on the ground, a reflection of what actually was.

Jesus f’n Christ. He was like that Nazi guy at the end of
Raiders of the Lost Ark
, the one whose face melted off . . . the one the DVD extras had said was special effected by hitting Jell-O with a hot fan.

Not exactly the sort of movie role he wanted to rock in RL.

As he walked out toward the kitchen, he felt like he was dragging a refrigerator behind him, and what do you know, Plastic Fantastic wasn’t doing much better as she lay on the floor by the back door. She’d been drained enough to incapacitate her, but not enough to zap her back to the Omega.

Bummer for her. To be forever on the brink of death, with all that pain and suffocation, and yet aware that the vast peace on the other side of all that was never coming? It was enough to make you want to kill yourself.

Cue laugh track.

Then again . . . she didn’t have a clue that she was going nowhere. That she would be forever in “as-is” condition. Probably best to keep that info on the down-low—it would be his good deed for the day.

As she marshaled a pathetic groan for him to help, he stepped over her and went to check on the food sitch. To conserve cash, he’d sucked back Mc-Crap for dinner on his way here. Shit had been one step up from dog food, and that had been warm and fresh from the fryer.

Age did not improve the half he hadn’t been able to stomach at the end of the night, but he ate what was left over anyway. Cold. Standing up over the crumpled bag on the countertop.

“Want some?” he said to the woman. “Yes? No?”

All she could do was plead with her bloodshot eyes and her gaping, oozing mouth. Or . . . maybe it wasn’t pleading. She looked kind of horrified—which suggested that whatever condition she was in, his appearance was startling and ugly enough to draw her out of her agony for a moment.

“Whatever, bitch. The sight of you ain’t doing wonders for my appetite, either.”

Turning away, he stared out the window to the sunny day and felt a whole lot of fuck-this-shit-for-real.

Man, he hadn’t wanted to leave that farmhouse, but he’d been a narcolepsy candidate, he’d been so exhausted—and no way he was risking a nap with that many of his enemy around. It was a case of retreat to fight again as opposed to pull a dreamland and bite the muzzle of a gun. Or worse.

But at least the sun was still on its rise in the cloudless sky, which was good news for him—it gave him the time he needed. The Brotherhood wasn’t showing up in one form or another until it was dark enough, and what kind of host would he be if he wasn’t there waiting.

The Omega’s fucking kiss-ass bitch may have started the party, but Lash was going to damn well finish it.

He needed more ammo, though, and not for his heat.

Grabbing his raincoat and putting on his hat, he tugged on his gloves and stepped back over the prostitute. As he was unlocking the dead bolt on the door, her shrunken hand skittered over to his shoe, her bloody fingers scratching at the leather.

He looked down at her. She no longer had speech, but her red- rimmed, bulging eyes said it all:
Help me. I’m dying. I can’t kill myself . . . do it for me.

Apparently she’d gotten over her revulsion of him. Or maybe the fact that he’d covered up helped.

Ordinarily, he would have just left her as she was, but he couldn’t shake the memory of peeling his own face off. He was operating under the assumption that he wasn’t going to end up a perpetually rotting nightmare, but what if that was his destiny? What if he continued to melt away until he could no longer support his skeleton and he ended up in the condition she was . . . nothing but suffering for eternity?

Lash withdrew a knife from the small of his back, and when he came at her with it, she didn’t shrink back. Instead, she rolled herself over, offering the fresh meat of her chest.

One stab was all it took and her immediate misery was over: On a bright flash of light, she puffed into thin air, leaving nothing but a scorched circle on the matted rug.

Lash turned to leave—

He didn’t make it through the door. His body ricocheted back and he slammed into the far wall, lights flashing in front of his eyes as a rush of power blasted through him.

It took a moment to figure out what the fuck was doing . . . and then it became clear: What he had given the prostitute had come home to him.

So that was how it worked, he thought as he breathed deep and felt less like death on roller skates.

Whatever was stabbed with steel returned to sender, so to speak.

Well, it went back provided that the Brotherhood’s secret weapon didn’t get there first. Butch O’Neal was the Omega’s Achilles’ heel, capable of circumventing that reunion by absorbing the evil essence that animated a slayer into himself.

Having just gotten the rush, Lash now knew what a threat O’Neal was. If you didn’t get your LEGOs back, eventually you couldn’t build much of anything—or worse, your toy box was empty . . . and then what. You disappeared?

Yeah, avoiding that Butch bastard was important. Good tip.

Heading into the garage, Lash left the ranch in the Mercedes and went not out to the sticks, but downtown to the ’scrapers.

As it was just a little past eleven thirty in the morning, there were suits and ties out everywhere, the fleet of wingtips stopping at intersections, waiting for the go-ahead, and then striding across the streets right in front of the grilles of cars. They were all so fucking self-righteous, these humans with their chins up and eyes straight ahead like nothing existed except whatever meeting, lunch, or waste-of-time errand they were speeding to.

He wanted to stomp on the accelerator and turn them into sloppy bowling pins, but he had enough to worry about and better things to do with his time. His destination? Trade Street and the hub of the bars and nightclubs. Which, unlike the business district, would be dead at this time of day.

As he cut down toward the river, it was clear that the two different parts of town functioned as a yin and yang when it came to crowds as well as appearances. In the sunlight, the tall financial buildings with their glass windows and steel frames sparkled and flashed. In the land of dark alleys and neon signs, however, shit looked like an old whore well used: dirty, seedy, and sad.

When it came to people? Former was packed with the productive and the purposeful. Latter was lucky if it could pull together more than a couple of bums at this hour.

Which was precisely what he was banking on.

Heading for Caldwell’s twin bridges, he passed by a vacant lot that had a chain- link fence around it and had to slow a little. Christ . . . that was where ZeroSum had been before it was reduced to a pile of rubble. And the real estate sign that was in front had a Sale Pending sticker slapped on it.

Wasn’t that how things worked. Nasty, like nature, abhorred a vacuum—so if the new club going up on the site met a similar MacGyver end as Rehv’s had, another would take its place just as fast.

Kind of like the sitch with his father. In no time at all, Lash had been replaced by something right up his own alley, so to speak.

Made you feel fucking dispensable. It really did.

Down under the bridges, it didn’t take long to find what he was looking for, but wished he didn’t need. His trolling beneath the overpasses quickly brought out the raggedy humans who slept in cardboard boxes or burned-out cars, and he thought of how similar to stray dogs they were: drawn by the hope of sustenance, suspicious from experience, riddled with disease.

The mange parallel worked, too.

He wasn’t picky and neither were they. Soon enough he had a female in his passenger seat, oohing and ahhing not over the AMG’s leather, but the plastic Baggie of coke he gave her. While she pinkied some up and went Hoover on it, he drove her over to a dark cave formed by the massive concrete foundation of the incoming bridge.

One snort was all she got.

He was on her in a flash, and whether it was his need or her physical weakness, he was able to completely subdue her while he drank.

Her blood tasted like dirty dishwater.

When he was finished, he got out of the car, went around, and yanked her out by the collar. Her color had been pale to begin with; now it was the gray of the concrete.

She would be dead soon if she wasn’t already.

He paused and looked down at her face, measuring the thick lines in the skin and the busted capillaries that had given her an unhealthy blush. She had been a newborn once. She had been fresh to the world years ago.

Time and experience had certainly battered her, and now she was going to die like an animal, alone and on the dirt.

After he dropped her, he reached forward to shut her eyelids—

Jesus . . .
Christ.

Lifting his hand up, he looked through his palm out to the river.

No longer rotting flesh, but dark shadow . . . in the form of what he used to write with and punch with and drive with.

Dragging the cuff of the raincoat up, he saw that his wrist was still corporeal.

A surge of strength powered through him, the loss of skin no longer something to mourn, but a source of rejoicing.

He wasn’t going to end up like that whore he’d just stabbed back to himself. He was heading for the Omega’s territory, not rotting . . . but transforming.

Lash began to laugh, great belly rolls of satisfaction percolating from his chest and boiling up his throat and leaping out of his mouth. He fell to his knees next to the dead woman and let the relief—

With a sudden surge, he jacked to the side and threw up the spoiled blood he’d taken in. When there was a pause, he wiped his chin with his hand and looked at the glossy red as it covered the shadowy outline of what had once been flesh.

No time to admire his nascent new form.

Violent vomiting racked him so hard he was blinded by the stars exploding in his vision.

S
itting in her private quarters, Payne stared out over the Far Side’s landscape. The rolling green grass and the tulips and honeysuckle reached only so far before they were cut off by a ring of trees that encircled the lawn. Above it all, the arching milky sky stretched from fluffy treetops to fluffy treetops, the lid on the wardrobe trunk.

From personal experience, she knew that if you walked to the edge of the forest and penetrated its shadows, you ended up emerging . . . right where you entered.

There was no way out, except through the Scribe Virgin’s permission. She alone held the key to the invisible lock and she wasn’t going to let Payne go—not even to the Primale’s house on the Other Side, as the others were allowed to do.

Which proved that female knew well what she had birthed. She was very aware that once Payne got loose, she was never coming back. Payne had said as much—in a yell that made her own eardrums hum.

In retrospect, her outburst had been a victory for honesty, but not the best strategy. Better to have kept that to herself, and perhaps been allowed to traverse to the Other Side—and stayed there then. After all, it wasn’t as if her mother could force her back to the land of the living statues.

Well, at least theoretically.

On that note, she thought of Layla, who had just returned from having seen her male. The sister had been glowing with a kind of happiness and satisfaction that Payne had never felt.

Rather justified the urge to leave here, didn’t it: Even if what awaited her on the Other Side was nothing like she remembered from her small slice of freedom, she would have choices to make on her own.

Verily, it was a strange curse to have been born and yet not have a life to live. Short of killing her mother, she was stuck herein, and however much she hated the female, she wasn’t going to take that trail. She wasn’t sure she’d win in such a conflict, for one thing. For another . . . she had already disposed of her sire. Matricide was not an experience that held any new or particular fascination for her.

Oh, the past, the painful, wretched past. How awful to be stuck here with an infinite, bland future whilst burdened with a history that was too awful to dwell on. Suspended animation had been a kind gift when measured up against this torture—at least in the frozen state, her mind hadn’t been able to wander and tangle with things she wished hadn’t transpired, and things she would never get to do—