Lover Avenged (3 page)

“As leahdyre of the council, you would be in a position of enormous power. Even if you are not elected as president, the council is going nowhere. And let me reassure you about the Black Dagger Brotherhood. I know your sister is mated to one of them. The Brothers will not be affected by this.”

“You don’t think it’s going to piss them off? Wrath is not just their king. He’s their blood.”

“Protecting our race is their primary mandate. Whither we go they must follow. And you have to know that there are many who feel they have been doing a poor job of late. Methinks perhaps they require better leadership.”

“From you. Right. Of course.”

That would be like an interior decorator trying to command a tank platoon: a shitload of noisy chirping until one of the soldiers offed the lightweight flash in the pan and churned over the body a couple of times.

Perfect plan there. Yup.

And yet…who said Montrag had to be the one elected? Accidents happened to both kings and aristocrats.

“I must say unto you,” Montrag continued, “as my father always said unto me, timing is everything. We need to proceed with haste. May we rely on you, my friend?”

Rehv got to his feet and towered over the other male. With a quick tug on his jacket cuffs, he straightened his Tom Ford, then reached for his cane. He felt nothing in his body, not his clothes or the weight shifting from his ass to his soles or the handle against the palm he’d burned. The numbness was a side effect of the drug he used to keep his bad side from coming out in mixed company, the prison in which he jailed his sociopathic impulses.

All he needed to get back to basics was one missed dose, though. An hour later? The evil in him was alive and kicking and ready to play.

“What say you?” Montrag prompted.

Wasn’t that the question.

Sometimes in life, from out of the myriad of prosaic decisions like what to eat and where to sleep and how to dress, a true crossroads is revealed. In these moments, when the fog of relative irrelevancy lifts and fate rolls out a demand for free will, there is only left or right-no option of four-by-fouring into the underbrush between two paths, no negotiating with the choice that has been presented.

You must answer the call and pick your way. And there is no reverse.

Of course, the problem was, navigating a moral landscape was something he’d had to teach himself to do to fit in with the vampires. The lessons he’d learned had stuck, although only to a point.

And his drugs only kind of, sort of worked.

Abruptly, Montrag’s pale face became cast in variations of pastel pink and the male’s dark hair went magenta and his smoking jacket became the color of ketchup. As a red wash tinted everything, Rehv’s visual field flattened out so it was like a movie screen of the world.

Which perhaps explained why symphaths found it so easy to use people. With his dark side taking over, the universe had all the depth of a chessboard, and the people in it were pawns to his omniscient hand. Every one of them. Enemies…and friends.

“I’ll take care of it,” Rehv announced. “As you said, I know what to do.”

“Your word.” Montrag put forward his smooth palm. “Your word that this shall be carried out in secret and in silence.”

Rehv let that hand hang in the breeze, but he smiled, once again revealing his fangs. “Trust me.”

As Wrath, son of Wrath, pounded down one of Caldwell’s urban alleys, he was bleeding in two places. There was a gash along his left shoulder, made by a serrated knife, and a hunk out of his thigh, thanks to the rusty corner of a Dumpster. The lesser up ahead, the one he was about to gut like a fish, had been responsible for neither: The asshole’s two pale-haired, girlie-smelling buddies had done the damage.

Right before they’d been reduced to a matched set of mulch bags three hundred yards and three minutes ago.

This bastard up ahead was the real target.

The slayer was hauling ass, but Wrath was faster-not just because his legs were longer, and despite the fact that he was leaking like a corroded cistern. There was no question the third would die.

It was an issue of will.

The lesser had chosen the wrong path tonight-although not in picking this particular alley. That had been the only right and just thing the undead had probably done for decades, because privacy was important for fighting. Last thing the Brothers or the Lessening Society needed was for human police to get involved in anything so much as a nose blow in this war.

No, the bastard’s I’m-sorry-that’s-not-the-correct-answer had happened when he’d killed a male civilian about fifteen minutes ago. With a smile on his face. In front of Wrath.

The scent of fresh vampire blood had been how the king had first found the trio of slayers, catching them in the act as they tried to abduct one of his civilians. They’d clearly known he was at least a member of the Brotherhood, because this lesser up ahead had killed the male so he and his squadron could be hands-free and fully focused for the fight.

The sad part was, Wrath’s arrival had spared his civilian a long, slow, tortured death in one of the Society’s persuasion camps. But it still burned his ass to see a terrified innocent sliced open and dropped like an empty lunch box onto the icy, cracked pavement.

So this motherfucker up here was going down.

Eye-for-an-eye-and-then-some-style.

At the alley’s dead end, the lesser did a pivot-and-prepare, spinning around, planting his feet, bringing up his knife. Wrath didn’t slow. In midstride, he slipped free one of his hira shuriken and sent the weapon out with a flick of his hand, making a show of the throw.

Sometimes you wanted your opponent to know what was coming at him.

The lesser followed the choreography perfectly, shifting his balance, losing his fighting form. As Wrath closed the distance, he winged another throwing star and another, driving the lesser into a crouch.

The Blind King dematerialized right on the motherfucker, striking from above with fangs bared to lock into the back of the slayer’s neck. The stinging sweetness of the lesser’s blood was the taste of triumph, and the chorus of victory was not long in coming either as Wrath grabbed onto both of the bastard’s upper arms.

Payback was a snap. Or two, as it were.

The thing screamed as both bones popped out of their sockets, but the howl didn’t travel far after Wrath clapped his palm over its mouth.

“That’s just a warm-up,” Wrath hissed. “It’s important to get loose before you’re worked out.”

The king flipped the slayer over and stared down at the thing. From behind Wrath’s wraparounds, his weak eyes were sharper than usual, the adrenaline cruising along his highway of veins giving him a shot at visual acuity. Which was good. He needed to see what he killed in a way that had nothing to do with ensuring the accuracy of a mortal blow.

As the lesser strained for breath, the skin of its face sported an unreal, plastic sheen-as if the bone structure had been upholstered in the shit you made grain sacks out of-and the eyes were popping wide, the sweet stench of the thing like the sweat of roadkill on a hot night.

Wrath unclipped the steel chain that hung from the shoulder of his biker jacket and unwound the shiny links from under his arm. Holding the heavy weight in his right hand, he wrapped his fist, widening the spread of his knuckles, adding to their hard contours.

“Say ‘cheese.’”

Wrath struck the thing in the eye. Once. Twice. Three times. His fist was a battering ram, the eye socket below giving way like it was nothing more than a pocket door. With every cracking impact, black blood burst up and out, hitting Wrath’s face and jacket and sunglasses. He felt all the spray, even through the leather he wore, and wanted more.

He was a glutton for this kind of meal.

With a hard smile, he let the chain uncoil from his fist, and it hit the dirty asphalt on a seething, metallic laugh, as if it had enjoyed that as much as he had. Below him, the lesser wasn’t dead. Even though the thing was no doubt developing massive subdural hematomas on the front and back of its brain, it would still live, because there were only two ways to kill a slayer.

One was to stab it in the chest with the black daggers the Brothers wore strapped to their chests. This sent the POS back to its maker, the Omega, but was only a temporary fix, because the evil would just use that essence to turn another human into a killing machine. It was not death, but delay.

The other way was permanent.

Wrath got out his cell phone and dialed. When a deep male voice with a Boston accent answered, he said, “Eighth and Trade. Three down.”

Butch O’Neal, a.k.a. the Dhestroyer, descended of Wrath, son of Wrath, was characteristically phlegmatic in his response. Real middle-of-the-road. Easygoing. Leaving so much room for interpretation in his words:

“Oh, for fuck’s sake. Are you kidding me? Wrath, you have got to stop this moonlighting shit. You’re the king now. You’re not a Brother any-”

Wrath clipped the phone shut.

Yup. The other way to get rid of these sonsabitches, the permanent way, was going to be here in about five minutes. With his mouth riding shotgun. Unfortunately.

Wrath sat back on his heels, re-coiled the chain on his shoulder, and looked up at the squat box of night sky that was visible above the rooftops. As his adrenaline ebbed, he could only slightly differentiate the rising dark torsos of the buildings against the flat plane of the galaxy, and he squinted hard.

You’re not a Brother anymore.

The hell he wasn’t. He didn’t care what the law said. His race needed him to be more than a bureaucrat.

With a curse in the Old Language, he got back with the program, going through the slayer’s jacket and pants, looking for ID. In an ass pocket, he found a thin wallet with a driver’s license and two dollars in it-

“You thought…he was one of yours…”

The slayer’s voice was both reedy and malicious, and the horror-movie sound triggered Wrath’s aggression once more. In a rush, his vision sharpened, bringing his enemy into semifocus.

“What did you say to me?”

The lesser smiled a little, seeming not to notice that half its face had the consistency of a runny omelet. “He was always…one of ours.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“How…do you think”-the lesser took a shuddering breath-“we found…all those houses this summer-”

A vehicle’s arrival cut off the words, and Wrath’s head shot around. Thank fuck it was the black Escalade he was hoping for and not some human with a cell phone cocked and loaded with a 911 call.

Butch O’Neal stepped out from behind the wheel, his gum-flapping in full swing. “Have you lost your damn mind? What are we going to do with you? You’re gonna give…”

As the cop kept riding the Holy Hell Trail, Wrath looked back at the slayer. “How did you find them? The houses?”

The slayer started laughing, the weak wheeze the kind of thing you heard out of the deranged. “Because he’d been in them all…that’s how.”

The bastard passed out, and shaking him didn’t help bring him back. Neither did a palm slam or two.

Wrath got to his feet, frustration triggering the rise. “Do your business, cop. The other two are back behind the Dumpster on the next block.”

The cop just stared at him. “You’re not supposed to fight.”

“I’m the king. I can do whatever the fuck I want.”

Wrath started to walk away, but Butch grabbed onto his arm. “Does Beth know where you are? What you’re doing? You tell her? Or is it only me you’re asking to keep this secret?”

“Worry about that.” Wrath pointed to the slayer. “Not me and my shellan.”

As he pulled free, Butch barked, “Where are you going?”

Wrath marched up into the cop’s grille. “I thought I would pick up a civilian’s dead body and carry it to the Escalade. You got a problem with that, son?”

Butch held his ground. Just one more way their shared blood showed. “We lose you as king and the whole race is fucked.”

“And we got four Brothers left in the field. You like that math? I don’t.”

“But-”

“Do your business, Butch. And stay out of mine.”

Wrath stalked the three hundred yards back to where the fighting had started. The beaten slayers were right where he’d left them: moaning on the ground, their limbs at wrong angles, their black blood seeping out into filthy slush puddles beneath their bodies. They were no longer his concern, though. Going around behind the Dumpster he looked at his dead civilian and found it hard to breathe.

The king knelt down and carefully brushed the hair back from the male’s beaten-to-shit face. Clearly, the guy had fought back, taking a number of hits before getting stabbed through the heart. Brave kid.

Wrath cupped the nape of the male’s neck, slid his other arm under the knees, and slowly rose. The weight of the dead was heavier than the pounds of the body. As he stepped away from the Dumpster and started for the Escalade, Wrath felt as though he held his whole race aloft in his arms, and he was glad he had to wear sunglasses to protect his weak eyes.

His wraparounds hid the sheen of tears.

He passed Butch as the cop jogged off toward the broken slayers to do his thing. After the guy’s footfalls halted, Wrath heard a long, deep inhale that sounded like the hiss of a balloon slowly deflating. The retching that followed was much louder.

As the suck and gag was repeated, Wrath laid the dead out in the back of the Escalade and went through the pockets. There was nothing…no wallet, no phone, not even a gum wrapper.

“Fuck.” Wrath pivoted around and sat on the SUV’s back bumper. One of the lessers had cleaned him out already in the course of the fighting…and that meant that as all the slayers had just been inhaled, the civilian’s ID was ashed.

As Butch came weaving down the alley toward the Escalade, he was like an alkie on a bender and the cop didn’t smell like Acqua di Parma anymore. He stank of lesser, as if he’d lined his clothes in Downy dryer sheets, taped a pair of fake-vanilla car fresheners under his armpits, and done a dog roll in some dead fish.