Blood-Bonded by Force (21 page)

Nỵko yelled again, his chest on fire with rage. He thundered up the last stairs and leapt over Thomal’s still form, the scent of blood assaulting his senses. Whoever had shot his partner was about to get—

He stopped so suddenly the soles on his biker boots made a rubbery fart sound. Gripping his gun in a hard fist, he blindly reached out his other hand for the support of the handrail. Now he knew why Thomal had hesitated, why he’d been too stupefied to shoot.

A pair of black eyes glared at Nỵko over the snout of a smoking pistol.

Nỵko knew those eyes. Thomal did, too.

Shọn.

Chapter Twenty-two

In the six weeks since Nỵko had seen his little brother, Shọn hadn’t changed much. His mouth still shaped a permanent pout, his black hair stood up in spikes all over his head, and his black Om Rău eyes looked coated in a bright ceramic glaze. His body type was Nỵko’s exact opposite; where Nỵko was all bulk and bulges, Shọn was lean and mean. The youngest Brun was marked with the required teeth tattoos and, like Jaċken and Nỵko, wore them on his forearms. Unlike Jaċken and Nỵko, that was the only place Shọn was marked.

Shọn’s upper lip tugged up, displaying one of his unnaturally long canines, as he continued to point his gun directly at Nỵko…and didn’t seem at all nervous about it.

Nỵko let his own gun wilt down to his side.

A police siren skirled its high-pitched
woo-woo
into the night, the noise drawing steadily closer. And another.

The employee door above banged open. “Shọn!” a man shouted. “Take care o’ that cockhead, then leg it! It’s the fuckin’ bobbies!”

Shọn’s nostrils quivered as he inhaled and exhaled.

Down the stairs, Nỵko heard Thomal groan and stir. “Shọn.” Nỵko uttered his brother’s name in a rush.

Shọn pulled the trigger.

A bullet slammed into Nỵko’s right bicep, catching his muscle on fire. He bellowed in pain—bellowed in shock and anger. His fingers went lifeless, his gun clanking down the stairwell to join Thomal’s headset in the abyss.

Shọn turned around and darted up the stairs.

Teeth bared, Nỵko exploded after his brother, then checked himself at the employee door, pausing to do a quick glance into the hallway. No one.
Stupid fast idiots
. Nỵko stole down the hall. The door to apartment 6G was hanging woozily on one hinge, and he slowed his strides as he approached. Shọn and his cohorts had to have gone in here. Nỵko did another quick check.
Clear
. He entered and cautiously made his way across the living room, one hand gripped around the hilt of his sheathed blade. The blood from his bullet wound was seeping slowly down his arm, oozing past the ribbed cuff of his sleeve to trace his fingers then trail over his knife hilt.

He swept the room with his eyes. The apartment was spookily quiet. There was only the intermittent creak of the front door behind him as it twisted in a breeze brought in from the open terrace. The noise ran up his spine. He skirted the edge of a wide puddle of blood at the far side of the living room, his fangs pulsing.
Whose blood
? Dang it, where were Dev and Gábor?

He pushed the “speak” button on his headset. “This is Nỵko,” he said in an undertone. “I’m checking in. Where is every—?”

“Freeze!”

Nỵko spun toward the open doorway, and his pulse leapt forward a beat.

A police officer was hunkered in the jamb, his black gun leveled at Nỵko two-fisted, his legs braced wide. “Drop your weapon!”

Weapon? Oh, the knife. Nỵko carefully peeled his bloody hand off the hilt of his blade.

“I said drop it!” the cop blared. “You’re under arrest.”

Nỵko remained still and watched the cop. Jail was a
no way, José
option for their sun-allergic breed.
Where to escape to
…? His mind raced in rhythm with his heartbeat. He heard more people clomping down the hallway. Soon he’d be outnumbered.
Now or never
. He turned and leapt through the open sliding glass door of the terrace, catapulting himself into a handstand on the guard railing, then back-flipping over the other side into open air: a full rainbow arc, a perfect ten from the judges for the harrowing gymnastic maneuver. Now the question was: would he stick the landing?

The Park Place building whooshed by him as he fell through the night, down and down, lights and colors a messy whirl. His hair whipped into his eyes. He circled his arms and cycled his feet, all the while drawing in great lungfuls of air to harness the power of the moon. He hadn’t been topside in so long… A bolt of panic shot through him as the pavement rushed up fast to meet him.
Come on
… He blanked his mind, going into a near trance as he reached deep inside himself. His body thrummed. A bubble formed around him, providing buoyancy just as his feet hit the asphalt—hard. His ankles compressed painfully, but…he wasn’t dead. He stumbled forward a few steps, caught his footing, then shot a glance over his shoulder and up.

The cop was gaping down on him from the sixth floor balcony, his handgun hiked back next to his ear, his entire face sagging as if pulled there by four G-forces of shock.

Oopsy-daisy.
Here’s hoping the guy is a heavy drinker.

Headlights swiped across Nỵko.

He leapt out of the way, but the driver chased after him. Nỵko ran, but his sore ankles bobbled sideways, and the car was able to catch up and ram him. He caught air, flew several feet, hit, and rolled across the street for several more feet, tearing the elbows out of his turtleneck. He sprawled to a stop onto his back, dizzied.

Car doors slammed.

A man’s face loomed into Nỵko’s vision. His mind registered:
bad guy
. But in the next breath, he knew he’d be okay. The man’s scent spelled R-E-G-U-L-A-R, and there wasn’t a human alive who could take him out.

Nỵko moved to rise, but the man pushed him back down, the hand on his chest
very
strong.
What’s this
? Nỵko back-stepped his senses and caught it then. The man’s scent was sort of off.

A fist rocketed toward his face and his lights blinked out.

Nỵko popped his eyes open. Tied to a chair. Pain in right arm. Om Rău male nearby.

He tabulated sights, smells, and sensations in 3.5 seconds.

“Welcome back to the livin’, half-Rău.”

The Om Rău male Nỵko had scented was standing directly in front of him, making it impossible to ignore the sheer size of him. Shirtless, dressed only in combat boots and tight black leather pants, the man was a towering fortress of muscle with the body of a heavyweight boxer, shoulders, arms, and chest bulging with thick, hard slabs, his abdomen striated. Black flame tribal tattoos whipped up the entire front of his torso, erasing all doubt that this was a Topside Om Rău. A lip scar tugged the man’s mouth into a sneer, adding more menace where none was needed.
Lip scar
…

So Nỵko was finally meeting Videön.

Three other men were in the room, smelling like regulars, but kind of not, too, like the guy who’d punched Nỵko.

Their odd group appeared to be gathered in the living room of a condemned building. The windows were closed off with crisscrossed boards, drywall had crumbled away in sections, exposing the bowed and splintered wood frame beneath, and there was a fire-charred hole in the middle of the floor, revealing part of an empty apartment one floor below. No electricity equaled lanterns set up around the room. Wisps of black smoke curled up from their glass chimneys, adding a distinctive kerosene stink to the stench of Videön’s caustic acid blood.

Nỵko concentrated for a second on the sort-of-regulars. To a man, they were big, their bodies covered with a staggering variety of tats, and their eyes were narrow and mean. Probably ex-cons, the kind of men who asked questions, maybe, after all the killing had already been done. They didn’t seem like the type to wear jewelry, but necklaces glinted at each man’s throat. Nỵko squinted. Not necklaces, amulets. He nearly shivered from a feeling of evil enchantment.

“Ye havin’ a brown-trouser moment, fella?” Videön asked, then smiled cruelly. “If not, ye should be.”

Probably so. The advantage-disadvantage ratio was fairly obvious. Nỵko was currently chained from ankles to collarbone to a chair that felt bolted to the floor, and even though he was bigger than Videön—because Nỵko was bigger than every man—in this case, it wasn’t by much. “What do you—”
want
? The last word dropped off the end of Nỵko’s sentence as Shọn sauntered into the room.

His little brother crossed to a rusted-out radiator and sprawled against it, crossing his arms, his eyes cold, black ice. Just watching.

Videön indicated Shọn with a nod of his head. “Yer brother here says he don’t know where the entrances to yer lair are. Says he gets transported in and out in a vehicle with blacked-out windows.”

Nỵko glanced at Shọn again. That was true. The community doled out information about their secret entrances on a need-to-know basis only. The Travelers knew, of course, since they brought supplies into the community, and the Special Ops Topside Team, as they did their own driving on missions. The Dragon women had found out, too, because once they’d engineered an escape from Ţărână. But no, Shọn didn’t know.

“Says
ye
know, though. So ye’ll be tellin’ me.” Videön grabbed a gym bag and dropped it at Nỵko’s feet. “I couldn’t break that fuckin’ mare o’ yers tryin’ to get the information out o’ her. What was her name?”

“Candace,” Shọn supplied.

Bile brewed in Nỵko’s throat. Candace was the Traveler Videön had tortured to death, which had led to Marissa getting captured, which had led to Pändra letting Marissa go—a whole chain of events had been set in motion by Videön’s brutality.

Videön rolled his neck, cracking vertebrae. “Goin’ to get it out o’ ye, though.”

“No,” Nỵko said.
No, you won’t break me
and also,
No, I won’t let you hurt me
. Covered all over with marks that had come from torture, he was done with that. Plain and simple. There wasn’t a man on this earth, regular, demon, large, or larger, who could make him endure it anymore. Death would come first.

Videön’s laugh was coarse and grating. “I was hopin’ ye’d be full o’ piss about it. Funner that way.”

Nỵko shifted against his restraints. They were tightly secured. “Why do you even care about our entrances?” he asked. “You’re not after Tonĩ.”

“But Raymond is,” Videön answered. “And since I’m gettin’ myself into a bit o’ a war with that scunt, I’m acquirin’ what he wants.”

Another ex-con entered the room. It was the guy who’d punched Nỵko. He was also wearing an amulet. “Preston’s ready,” he told Videön.

So these jerks had succeeded in capturing Dr. Preston. An ache speared through Nỵko’s throat. It was his fault the team had failed to save the plastic surgeon. If Nỵko wasn’t such a freak of nature, then he and Thomal would’ve made it up to the sixth floor in time to help Dev and Gábor fight the bad guys, and the outcome would’ve been different.

“I’ll be there in a tick, Kevin,” Videön answered, an ugly grin still aimed at Nỵko. “I ain’t finished with this tonk, yet.”

“I don’t think Preston has much life left,” Kevin said. “He’s bleeding out fast.”

Videön growled. “All right. Is Jerry ready for the ritual, too?”

“’Course.”

“Let’s crack on, then.” Videön waved his men toward the door. “Shọn, ye guard this bloke.”

Kevin frowned. “They know each other, Videön.”

“Aye, they do. So it’ll be another test o’ his commitment to us.” Videön shot Shọn a heavy-lidded glance. “He’ll pass.” Videön left with his men, the gym bag swung over his shoulder.

Chapter Twenty-three

Nỵko let his gaze wander around the squalid living room, looking anywhere but directly at his brother. Not that there was anything much to see in here besides rat poop and mold. After a thick silence, he finally forced himself to meet his brother’s eyes. “What are they doing to Dr. Preston?” he asked, avoiding the real questions.
What the heck are
you
doing here, Shọn
?
Why are you betraying your people
?

Shọn hitched a shoulder. “Don’t know. I’m not that far into their inner circle, yet.”

Yet
. “Ah. So…” Nỵko coughed. “So how long have you been hanging out with the Topside Om Rău?”

“A while,” Shọn answered vaguely.

“And, uh… Well, why are you with them, Shọn?”

Shọn scoffed. “I’d think that’d be obvious. The community banished me, so I headed where I was wanted.”

Nỵko’s mouth fell open. Shọn thought they’d abandoned him? “But… No, Shọn. You were sent topside
temporarily
, to help you get better, to give you a break from the community for—”

“It was a
punishment
.” Shọn’s words slammed into Nỵko. “And if the community thinks it can keep my loyalty after a maneuver like that, then the whole damned town should be nuked for its idiocy.”

“It was partly a punishment,” Nỵko admitted. “But it absolutely wasn’t a rejection of you. You were supposed to come back. Jaċken and I, the whole community, want you to—”

“I’m not going back.” Shọn sounded bored now. “And don’t worry about my survival, either, when you stop sending my blood donor up. Videön keeps a stable of whores around. I’ll feed off one of them until Videön kills her, then move on to the next.”