by J. R. Ward
“What if they come through the opening?” Qhuinn asked.
“I’ll pick ’em off one by one.”
Hard to argue with the guy. Especially as the Brother trained his second gun right where Qhuinn and John had been shooting through.
That was the end of any further convo.
John and Qhuinn fell into flanking position and took off together. Using the moonlight as a guide, they streaked through the professionally equipped kitchen, and tried every door they came to. Locked. Locked. Locked.
The dining, living, and family rooms turned out to be one massive expanse, kind of like a football field that had been outfitted at a home show. The good news was that there were ornate columns at regular intervals that supported the ceiling over the expanse, and he and Qhuinn used them for cover as they darted out, checked sliding glass doors, and ducked back again.
Everything was locked: As they worked the circle of the giant room, shit was tight as a tick on all sides. But God, all that glass…
Stopping short, he leveled his gun muzzle at a stretch of it, whistled twice to signal to V… and popped off a test shot.
No shattering. Not even a cracking. The ten-by-six-foot pane simply caught the bullet and held it, like the thing was nothing more than ABC gum.
Assail hadn’t lied. At least not about that.
From the back of the house, their host’s voice was distant but clear. “Close and lock the door at the base of the stairs to the second floor. Fast.”
Roger. That.
John let Qhuinn sweep the bathrooms and the office as he beat feet over to a black-and-white marble staircase. Sure enough, tucked into the wall was a stainless-steel, fireproof panel that, when you pulled it out, smelled like fresh paint, as if it had been recently installed.
There were two locks on it, one so you could isolated yourself upstairs, one for doing the same downstairs.
As he got the thing into place and secured, he had to have some respect for how Assail handled security measures.
“This place is a fortress,” Qhuinn said as he came out of another bathroom.
Cellar? John mouthed so he didn’t have to reholster his gun.
Like he read minds, Assail called out, “The basement door is locked. It’s in the kitchen by the second fridge.”
They darted back in the direction they’d started out in, locating another one of those steel jobbies that happened to already be slid into place and bolted.
John checked his phone, and saw the group text that Rhage had sent out: Hvy fghtn dwntwn—b thr ASAP.
Fuck, he breathed as he flashed the screen to Qhuinn.
“I’m going out there,” the guy announced as he jogged for one of the sliders. “Lock the door after me—”
John lunged for the fighter, snagging a hold. The hell you are, he mouthed.
Qhuinn shook off the iron grip. “This is a cluster-fuck waiting to happen, and Wrath has to be taken to the clinic.” As John cursed in silence, Qhuinn shook his head. “Be reasonable, buddy. You’re the backup for V with Assail, and the pair of you have to keep the interior secured. Likewise, that van has to get moving because the king’s bleeding. You need to let me go out there and do what I can to secure the area—we can’t spare anybody else.”
John cursed again, his mind churning for other options.
In the end, he clapped his best friend on the side of the neck and brought their foreheads together for a brief moment. Then he let go and backed the fuck off—even though it nearly killed him.
Bottom line, his first duty was to save the king, not his best friend. Wrath was the mission critical here, not Qhuinn.
Besides, Qhuinn was a deadly son of a bitch, fast on his feet, good with a gun, great with a knife.
You had to trust those skills. And the bastard was right: They were sorely needed in this situation.
With a final nod, Qhuinn slipped out of a glass door, and John closed and locked it behind him… leaving the male on his own.
At least the Band of Bastards would likely assume everyone was in the house and staying there—they had to know that backup would be coming, and in most situations, people waited for their reinforcements to arrive before they marshaled a counterattack.
“John! Qhuinn!” V called out. “What the hell is going on out there!”
John jogged back to the mudroom. Unfortunately, there was no effective way to communicate without losing his weapon—
“Shit, Qhuinn went out there alone, didn’t he.”
Assail laughed softly. “And I thought I was the only one with a death wish.”
FORTY-ONE
Directly after Syphon pulled the trigger on his long-range rifle, Xcor’s first thought was that the male may well have killed the king.
Standing in the shelter of the forest, he was amazed at his soldier’s accuracy: The bullet had sailed across the lawn, blown out the glass pane of the door… and dropped the king like a bag of sand.
Either that or the king had chosen to take cover.
There was no way of knowing whether the disappearance was a defensive reaction or the collapse of a male gravely injured.
Mayhap both were true.
“Open fire,” he commanded into the newfangled transistor at his shoulder. “And assume second positions.”
With practiced precision, his soldiers went into action, the ringing sound of gunfire providing cover as everyone but him and Throe shifted in various directions.
The Brotherhood would be arriving at any moment, so there was little time to batten down the hatches and prepare for conflict. Good thing his soldiers were well trained—
All at once, the house went dark—smart. It made them more difficult to isolate as targets, although given the way all the glass except for that back door’s had withstood bullets, it appeared as though Assail was far more tactical than your average glymera waffle-about.
Car bombs notwithstanding.
In the lull that followed, Xcor had to assume that if the king were alive and completely unhit, Wrath would dematerialize through the opening in the back door, get out of the area, and the others would attack. If the king was injured, they would hunker down and wait for the other members of the Brotherhood to arrive and provide cover for a drive-out. And if the Blind King were dead? They would stay with the body to protect it until the others got here—
A gun went off in the interior. One shot, the flash of which appeared to the left.
They were testing the glass, he thought. So Assail was either dead or they didn’t trust him.
“Someone is coming out,” Throe said by his side.
“Shoot to kill,” Xcor ordered into his shoulder.
There was no reason to take a chance at a capture: Anybody fighting alongside the Brotherhood would be trained to withstand torture, and therefore not a good candidate for information gathering. More to the point, this situation was a powder keg about to explode, and reducing the number of the enemy was the most important goal; taking prisoners was not.
Gunfire rang out as his bastards tried to pick off whoever had departed, but naturally the fighter dematerialized so it was unlikely they were hit—
The Brotherhood arrived all at once, the massive fighters taking positions all over the exterior of house, as if it had been scoped out previously.
Gunfire was traded, with Xcor aiming for the pair on the roof whilst his others focused on the dark shapes moving around the porches as well as any who might be coming up from behind in the woods.
He needed to get in the path of any vehicle that attempted to get away from the house.
“I shall cover the garage,” he spoke into his transistor. “Hold positions.”
Glancing over his shoulder at Throe, he ordered, “You back up the cousins at the north.”
As his soldier nodded and took off, Xcor ducked and did the same, shifting his position by running, as he was too keyed up to dematerialize: If they tried to take Wrath out by vehicle because he was injured, Xcor had to be the one who g
ot the satisfaction of preventing the king’s escape… and finishing the job as necessary. The garage, therefore, was his best vantage point: The Brothers would have to commandeer one of Assail’s vehicles as they appeared to have arrived without any—and Assail would offer the aid. He had no allegiance to any particular group—not the Band of Bastards, not the Council, probably not even the king. But he wouldn’t want to bear the price of someone else’s vendetta against Wrath.
Xcor set up behind a massive boulder that sat at the edge of the asphalt square behind the house. Taking out a small, convex strip of metal that was polished to a high shine, he positioned the mirror on the rock so he had a view of whatever was behind him. And then he waited.
Ah, yes. Right again…
As gunfire continued to ring out, the garage door farthest to the right opened, the protection it offered disappearing panel by panel.
The van that backed out had no windows in its rear portion, and he was willing to bet that, like the house, its flanks were impenetrable by anything less than an antiaircraft missile.
It was entirely possible, of course, that this was a ruse.
But he was not going to miss the opportunity in the event that it wasn’t.
Flicking his eyes up, he checked behind him, then refocused on the van. If he jumped out into its path, he might get a shot into the engine block through the front grille—
The attack that came from behind was so swift, all he felt was an arm locking around his throat and his body getting hauled backward. Shifting instantly into hand-to-hand self-defense mode, he stopped the male from snapping his neck by elbowing the shit out of the fighter’s gut, and then taking advantage of the momentary stun to spin around.
He had a brief impression of mismatched eyes… and then it was all about the fighting.
The male attacked with such ferocity, the punches were like getting rained upon by cars. Fortunately, he had outstanding balance and reflexes, and crouching low, he took the male by the thighs and tackled him hard. Riding that massive lower body down to the ground, he jumped upward and worked the fighter’s face until there was blood not just on his knuckles, but flying in the air.
His superior position did not last. In spite of the fact that the soldier couldn’t possibly see clearly, he somehow caught one of Xcor’s wrists and held on to it. With brute strength, he yanked back, brought Xcor within range, and head-butted so hard, for a moment the world went incandescent sure as if the trees around them had fireworks for branches and leaves.
An abrupt shift in gravity told him that he was being rolled, but fuck that. He stopped the momentum by throwing out a leg and digging his boot into the ground. As he strained against a great weight on his chest, he saw the black van screeching off like a bat out of hell down the driveway.
Anger at a missed chance at the king gave him extra power, and he rose up onto his feet with the male draped across his shoulders, a shawl of soldier.
Unsheathing his hunting knife, he stabbed around the back of his own torso, and he knew he hit something, given the resistance and the cursing. But then that grip around his neck returned, challenging his airway, making him work even harder for oxygen.
The large rock he’d taken cover behind was about a meter away, and he headed for it, his boots clomping across the lawn. Spinning about, he slammed the male once… twice.…
On the third time, just before he was about to black out, the grip loosened. With sloppy disorientation, he freed himself just as a bullet whistled by his head, so close he felt a stripe of heat on his scalp.
Behind him, the soldier fell down upon the grass, but that wasn’t going to last—and a quick glance around at the gunfight being waged told him that if he and his bastards stayed much longer, there would be catastrophic casualties—yes, they would take out some of the Brotherhood with them, but only at a tremendous cost to their own numbers.
His gut instinct told him Wrath had already left. And damn it, even if half the Brotherhood was in or around that van—and if the king was being transported away, some of them were undoubtedly shadowing the vehicle—there were still plenty of Brothers left here at the river’s edge to do vital damage to him and his males.
The Bloodletter would have stayed and fought.
He, however, was smarter than that: If Wrath was mortally injured, or if that was his body, Xcor was going to need his band of bastards for the second phase of his takeover.
“Retreat,” he barked into his shoulder piece.
He hauled back his combat boot and kicked that downed, mismatched-eyed motherfucker on the ground—to make sure the male stayed where he was.
Then he closed his eyes and forced himself to calm… calm… calm.…
Life and death turned on whether he could get himself into the right frame of mind—
Just as another bullet whizzed by his skull, he felt himself take wings… and fly.
“How we doing back there?”
Tohr yelled out the question as he forced the van into yet another curve in the road. The POS cornered like it was on a coffee table with bad legs, rocking to and fro until even he felt a little nauseous.
Wrath, meanwhile, was playing marble-in-a-jar in the back, the king rolling around and flailing his arms to catch himself.
“Any chance—” Wrath lurched in the other direction and coughed some more. “You can slow… this bus down?”
Tohr looked in the rearview mirror. He’d kept the partition open so he could keep an eye on the king, and in the glow from the dashboard, Wrath was white as a sheet. Except for where the blood stained the skin of his throat. That was red as a cherry.
“No slowing down—sorry.”
If luck was on their side, the Brotherhood was keeping the Band of Bastards fully occupied at the house, but who the fuck knew. And he and Wrath were on the wrong side of the Hudson River with a good twenty minutes of driving in front of them.
And no backup.
And Wrath… shit, he really didn’t look good.
“How you doing?” Tohr called out again.
There was a longer pause at that point. Too long.
Gritting his teeth, he triangulated the distance to Havers’s clinic. Fuck, it was nearly equidistant—so gunning for that facility in the hopes of finding somebody, anybody with medical training wasn’t going to save much time.
From out of nowhere, Lassiter appeared in the passenger seat—right out of thin air.
“You can put your gun down,” the angel said dryly.
Shit, he’d pulled his heat on the guy.
“I’ll take the wheel,” Lassiter ordered. “You deal with him.”
Tohr was out of that seat belt and doing the driver shuffle in a heartbeat, and as the angel took over, it was clear the guy was fully armed. Nice touch. “Thanks, man.”
“No problem. And here, let me shed some light on the subject.”
The angel began to glow, but only toward the back. And… goddamn… when Tohr stepped through the partition, what he saw in the golden illumination was death on four hooves coming for the king: Wrath’s breathing was shallow and coming in puffs, his neck cords straining with the effort it was taking him to get oxygen down into his lungs.
That gunshot in the neck was compromising the airway above the Adam’s apple. Hopefully it was just swelling; worst case, he was bleeding from an artery and drowning in his own blood.
“How far from the bridge,” he barked out to Lassiter.
“I can see it.”
Wrath was running out of time. “Don’t slow down. For anything.”
“Got it.”
Tohr knelt beside the king and ripped off his own leather jacket. “I’m going to see if I can help you, my brother—”
The king grabbed his arm. “Don’t… get… panties… in a wad.”
“I’m not wearing any, my lord.” And he was not being paranoid about the danger they were facing. If the king didn’t get some help with the breathing thing, he was going to die before anyone addressed whatever else
was wrong.
Snapping into action, he tore open the king’s coat, stripped off the front of the Kevlar vest—and was only mildly reassured to find nothing doing on that big chest. The problem was the neck wound, and yup, closer inspection suggested the bullet was lodged in there somewhere. Christ only knew precisely what was wrong. But he was pretty sure that if he could open up an air access point below the injury, they might have a fighting chance.
“Wrath, I gotta get you breathing. And please, for the love of your shellan, don’t fight me about the trouble you’re in. I need you to work with me, not against me.”
The king fumbled with his hand at his face, eventually finding his wraparounds and shoving them out of the way. As those incredibly beautiful, bright green eyes locked on Tohr’s own, it was as if they worked.
“Tohr? Tohr—” Clicking, desperate clicking as the king tried to draw breath. “Where… you?”
Tohr captured that flapping palm and squeezed it hard. “I’m right here. You’re going to let me help you breathe, okay? Nod for me, my brother.”
When the king did, Tohr shouted up to Lassiter, “Keep it real steady up there until I say so.”
“Hitting the bridge right now.”
At least they had a straightaway.
“Real steady, angel, we clear?”
“Roger that.”
Unsheathing one of his daggers, he put it on the carpeted floor by Wrath’s head. Then he shed his water pack and ripped it apart: Taking the flexible plastic tubing that snaked from the mouthpiece to the bladder, he drew the thing out flat and cut it at both ends; then he blew the water out of the inside.
He leaned down to Wrath. “I’m going to have to cut it into you.”
Shit, the breathing was even worse, nothing but hitches.
Tohr didn’t wait for consent or even acknowledgment. He palmed his knife and, with his left hand, probed the soft, fleshy field between the terminals of the king’s collarbones.
“Brace yourself,” he said hoarsely.
It was a damn shame he couldn’t sterilize the blade, but even if he’d had a bonfire to draw it through, he didn’t have time for the thing to cool down: Those jerking breaths were getting quieter, instead of louder.