Lassiter, p.13
Lassiter, page 13
Her lover had been here.
And where had he gone next, she thought as she looked outside of the yellow crime scene tape. The flimsy length had been strung in a square around the trunks of four dead trees set into cutouts in the parallel sidewalks, a highlighter pen drawing attention to nothing that had been focused on for very long. Yes, the police had responded to a shooting here, at least from what Jer’s squawking communicator had informed her. But unlike in the suburban part of town with that retail break-in, the CPD wasn’t sparing much of their workforce on this decrepit block.
No doubt shootings were a dime a dozen down here, and the surprise was that the disturbance had been called in at all.
Assessing the busted-out, rotting apartments that ran the street filled her with disgust—although not for Lash and the fact that maybe he was in one of them right this very moment, hiding from the daylight. Shit, she wished she could feel that kind of haughty disdain for him. No, she hated the humans who had built this up, and the ones who had let it fail, even though none of that cast of characters had any bearing on the fact that her one true love had been in this shitty zip code, for a time.
And had gone.
She needed to hate somebody in all this, though.
Glancing down at her Louboutins, she planted one in the mess and moved the toe of her stiletto back and forth in the viscous puddle, watching as the lesser blood gleamed like inky come. It was the only way to feel connected to her lover, this six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon not even close, but all she had.
Remnants of him left behind.
“Where the fuck are you,” she demanded.
OMEGA.
Clear as day, she could see the letters crudely depicted on the wall of her lair, the Book communicating to her what she had been too dense to understand until it was so obvious that it was, quite literally, right in front of her face.
The truth of her lover’s origins had tantalized her.
They were also going to define his future.
His goal, now that he’d broken free of her, was inevitable, and she told herself that it came with good news. He was going to stay in Caldwell.
Because that was where the vampires were.
That fucking Lassiter might have broken the spell the Book made for her, but those fanged assholes Lash was going to be so determined to kill were the diversion that was in her way. If her lover didn’t have them to worry about, he would see her, he would be with her, with or without the Book’s bullshit. They had the sexual compatibility. They could have built on that.
But noooooooooooo. He had to go Van Helsing on everything.
Her hatred swirled away from the neighborhood’s architects and former residents and toward that race of night dwellers. Then she thought about that fucking angel and his shouldn’t-have-ever-happened reunion with his beloved.
Fuck.
But surely, if there were no vampires, then her lover would fall in line…
“Oh, who am I kidding,” she muttered.
Lash would likely move on to something else to conquer. Just as, for her, there had always been something else she wanted to buy: It wasn’t about the acquisition. It was about the struggle, the hunt. The capture and own.
Tilting her head back, she measured the amount of light in the sky. It was such a gray, overcast day, you wouldn’t need sunglasses, but the illumination was still going to be too much for her lover—at least from what he told her. There had been a time when he’d been able to withstand it. No longer, however.
Where was he hiding?
She needed to get to him, but again, that lock of hair hadn’t worked. She was the one who had the tie to him, not the other way around—so she couldn’t draw any energy from him and pinpoint his location. He was giving nothing to her now that he was gone.
“Fuck.”
If she could only find him, though, she could talk some fucking sense into the motherfuck—
It was as she went to duck back under the tape, without having any concrete next-destination in mind, that she caught sight of a gleam over on a stairway. So subtle, the reflection of light, the kind of thing that should have escaped her notice.
Frowning, Devina walked to the set of steps. There were hunks out of the poured concrete contours and also a variety of stains and weathering on them, but she ignored all that.
It was the drops that dotted the scuffed surface, so shiny in the dull daylight, so stinky. Leaning back, she looked up the facade of the Victorian four-level. Where was the yellow tape around the entrance? The cops had either missed the drips or they’d cleared the building because they’d found nothing.
Or maybe the inky stuff in the middle of the road was as far as they were willing to take things in this war-zone part of town.
Either way, she was going inside.
There had to be a basement.
Had to.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
When Lassiter pulled back from their kiss, Rahvyn could not breathe. Staring up into his beautiful, oddly colored eyes, her heart was hammering and she had no voice. Not that he was speaking, either. The angel seemed as transformed as she was.
His hand shook as he brushed a lock of her hair over her shoulder.
“My first kiss,” she whispered.
He closed his eyes, and as his features tightened, she wished she had not spoken. The truth had to come out, however—and she imagined it was going to be hard for him to reconcile her fumbling with the fact that she was no virgin. Meanwhile, on her side, she was going to struggle with the aftereffects of the violence that had been wrought upon her two hundred years ago by the calendar, but mere nights past for her experience.
Fortunately, here in this netherworld, with him… all of what had been done unto her seemed far away.
The challenge was going to be to keep it at such distance. With the way he’d just melded his own mouth with hers, and how she was feeling the now, so hot and hungry, things were going to progress to places where making sure that she stayed where she was in this vital present, and not regress to where she had been in that castle, might become more difficult.
“Rahvyn…”
As he opened his lids and focused on her, the yearning in his voice was so intense, it was a physical caress, and she reclosed the distance that had bloomed between their bodies, fitting herself to him. When her hips came up against his, she felt the hard length there—and she cursed that sadistic aristocrat who had taken from her that which she would have chosen to gift Lassiter.
But the cruelty shown to her had been the final key to her coming into her own. And that which had been forged in pain was stronger than what was nurtured, as it turned out. At least in her case.
“Yes,” she replied to the question he had not asked. Not with words, at any rate. “I need to be with you, and I have this troubling sense… that time is running out.”
Just as he frowned and seemed prepared to argue the point—
The double doors at the far end of the library opened, and what appeared, silhouetted against the pastoral landscape, seemed a threat, even though he was not one. Not in the conventional sense, at least.
The Brother Vishous stepped inside and walked toward them, his heavy boots making a thunderous sound he did not bother to dim.
With a shiver of anxiety, she heard the echoing beat as a countdown of whatever hours remained for her and Lassiter.
“I’m here for Rahvyn,” the Brother announced.
Lassiter stepped around, placing himself in front of her, blocking her with his body. “Why.”
Except Rahvyn was not inclined to have anyone speak on her behalf, not even him. Moving out from under the lee of the angel, she focused on the Brother’s chest. No daggers. No weapons on the male at all, as it turned out.
“Whate’er may I do for you?” she said quietly.
The icy eyes that bored into her made her feel so uncomfortable, she looked to the bookshelf she and Lassiter had come to stand before, to the tome he had taken out and flipped through. It was not precisely back in line with its ilk, and she had an odd thought that it would probably resettle itself, the perfection of arrangement in the library, in the Sanctuary as a whole, as self-perpetuating as the flora.
“Nate.”
As the name reverberated up into the high ceiling, her eyes flipped back to the Brother’s. “Is he all right? Has something happened—”
“What you did to him, to bring him back.”
Rahvyn immediately began shaking her head. “No, if you’re asking me to do that to someone else—”
“We need you.”
She put both her palms out. “Forgive me, but I will ne’er do that for anyone nor anything e’er again. It is a violation of the natural order and a curse more than a blessing.”
“It’s the miracle that we need right now.”
Before she got into a proper argument with the fighter, she glanced up at Lassiter for some assistance. He was staring at Vishous as if he were attempting to read tea leaves, and after a moment, he put his hand to his face and passed it over his features with exhaustion.
“I don’t think you understand,” Vishous said, “how important this is or who it involves.”
“It does not matter.” She thought of Nate. Her cousin, Sahvage. Herself. “Death can be cruel, but it is, along with birth, the basis of the Creator’s construction, and ultimately, a blessing. Tampering with that is wrong and certainly not for me to undertake. I should not have done what I did—”
“It’s Wrath.”
Abruptly, the portrait the Book had shown her was all she could see, the image of the great Blind King’s face consumed by darkness, by evil, the tide rushing in, claiming.
Lassiter looked down at her from his greater height. Then he said grimly in the Old Language, “Whither the King goes so goeth the species.”
A strange feeling of arrival cut through her anxiety. What if this was the reason for her powers, the mission she had always wondered about: All those times, when she had lain awake, consumed by confusion as to why she had been gifted with so much she did not understand, when she had grappled with implications she could not comprehend… what if it all came down to this moment here.
The Book had certainly sent her back down here for a purpose.
What if the Creator had been working through the ancient tome, just as He was working through her now by presenting her with this messenger of need?
So many disparate instances suddenly stitched together, including the torture of her body by that aristocrat, when he had unleashed the evil within her, providing the balance required for her powers to be fully present…
Yet the more she sought to construct her destiny, the more she returned to a core question that could not be skirted: Who was she to determine a King’s fate?
“It is not right,” she said as she stared back at Lassiter. “You yourself just told me thus.”
* * *
Back down in Caldwell, in a cluttered, filthy storage room in the basement of the Victorian walk-up, Lash sat with his back against a rough stone wall, his legs stretched out before him and crossed at the ankles, the cold-and-clammy wrapping around him like a blanket just pulled out of a foul pond. With a hunting knife he’d stolen from that Dick’s Sporting Goods store, he whittled a broom handle that he’d broken free of its shaggy head. The shht, shht, shht was loud in the silence, a beat that played contrapunto to a leak in the far corner.
From time to time, a rat scampered across the dirt floor—or maybe it wasn’t dirt as in earthen, but layers of dust packed into a solid over concrete slabs you’d have to dig down to find. Either way, to his sensitive ears, the rodent’s padding of paws reminded him of dice rolling on a backgammon board.
There was one other sound.
When another groan hit the airwaves, he said without looking up, “Forget about him.”
“How the fuck is he still alive,” a male voice asked.
“That’s the point. He’s not.”
Lash glanced across the drafty darkness. His second and third inductees were sitting together on top of an old freezer that was a horizontal opener, their lower legs dangling at right angles, both sets of hands gripping the lip on either side of their knees as if they were about to get pushed off and prepared to fight the shove.
You already fell, Lash thought to himself as he resumed his even passes of the blade off the tip of the broom handle, little shavings flying free to join the loose pile by his thigh.
“So this is it? This is all we gonna do?”
Mr. Mouthy, who’d been the driver of the blacked-out Suburban, had had a rough time with the induction. Then again, his buddy had been the first to get his veins opened, so he’d gotten a gander at what was coming. To keep things tidy—a first in this basement, evidently—Lash had emptied the contents of their vascular systems in a claw-foot tub out in the hall. After that, he’d slit his own wrists and had them feed from him. This had been a new method of transmitting the essence of his father, but he’d felt as though he’d needed to make his mark on the process.
This was his time now, his turn to dictate how things were going to go.
After their hearts had circulated their new blood—after he had stood over them as they had writhed and retched—he had taken the cardiac muscles, burrowing his bare hands under each one’s sternum and pulling out the still-beating muscle.
The hearts were in the tub with the red blood. Enough with the stupid fucking jars.
“Yo, man, hello?” Mouthy demanded.
The Suburban’s driver, whose name didn’t matter, was getting grating. Lash had much preferred when the guy had been in too much pain to talk, but he had to remind himself: After facing an eternity in Dhunhd, he’d never expected to be back in his sire’s game. So this annoyance shit was a more-than-fair trade-off for—
Up above, the apartment building’s entry door opened and someone set foot in the shallow foyer.
As his acolytes looked up, he ignored their twitching nervousness. He’d learned something from that brunette with the pneumatic sex drive and all the clothes. Hiding in a parallel plane of existence was a good trick, and it was a damned shame he couldn’t pull it off to the extents she could. What he was able to do—and he’d learned this when the cops had searched everything earlier—was project an image of a-okay that disarmed the curious. It wasn’t as complete a cover as the demon whipped up, but it was enough to have things appear as if there was nothing going on.
Come to think of it, his Band-Aid over reality was similar to what he’d done to secure the SUV. That vehicle he’d coveted, which was now his, had been moved two blocks away and stored under a tarp.
The reality patch he’d pulled over the tub out in the hall and this room here with the three of them was just the same.
He glanced over at the oozing mess of the lesser on the floor in the corner.
Okay, fine. Three and a half.
The incompetent security guard, who’d been pumped full of lead out on the street, was still restless and ever-leaking, the movements of his arms and legs slow and unceasing, his suffering manifest. Lash could have just left him where he’d collapsed, but like with the inductions, he’d been compelled to be tidy about things, throwing the sack of undead down here with the rest of them. The stink was horrible, the moaning pitiful—
Lash lowered his knife and looked to the off-kilter door. As the pair on the freezer likewise came to attention, he flared his nostrils.
And smelled Poison.
Tossing his broom handle aside, he got to his feet and jacked up the camo pants he’d stolen. “You stay here.”
“We ain’t stayin’ shit, man—”
As Mr. Mouthy went to get off the fridge lid, Lash threw a blast of energy at him, pinning the subordinate sonofabitch right where he was.
Leaning forward on his hips, Lash met him directly in the eye. “If you want to try that out for fun”—he pointed to the slayer in the corner—“go right ahead.”
Mouthy’s buddy spoke up. “Nah, we good. He good. Chill.”
“I thought so.”
As Lash walked out of the storage area, he shut the door with his mind and waited by the tub full of blood. The fact that his cock thickened between his legs was exactly the kind of reaction he wasn’t looking for, and he put faith in his temper as it also rose to attention.
He was not about to let a good fuck screw him.
The brunette started down the basement steps, and as the clip, clip, clip of her heels preceded her, he pictured her legs descending, shapely and lean, and her manicured fingertips tickling the top of the old balustrade, and her tits casting shadows even in the darkness. The fact that he fully hardened made him think of the lessers he had just spawned.
They were now impotent, a little fact that—oopsie—he might have forgotten to mention in the preamble. But their sexless lives were a saving grace for them right now.
Lash might not want to be with the demon all twenty-five, eight. But he sure as shit wasn’t going to put up with anything looking at her with ideas—
Devina emerged at the base of the stairs, and as she stopped, he looked her up and down. Well… fuck.
Literally.
Her dark eyes sought out where he was standing, as if she could see him even though he remained hidden behind his optical illusion of vacancy. It was galling, to not face her legitimately, but he didn’t understand how he’d ended up so locked in on her, with her.
Until suddenly, for whatever reason, he’d been set free.
So no, he wasn’t rolling any dice with getting re-caught. He had a war to restart and a King to murder. He was too fucking busy to get entangled, no matter how hot the rope—
The demon started coming toward him, her strides slow, her eyes drifting to the tub, which would appear dingy and dust-covered to her, not filled with the blood and pair of hearts that were actually in there: She was just like the cops, blind to whatever he didn’t want her to see.
