by J. R. Ward
With the back of his neck as tight as a fist, John burst through the door and skidded to a halt. The sadness in the room was a tangible threshold he had to breach, his body penetrating the cold wall of desolation only because he forced his feet forward.
She had been kept here.
Xhex had been kept here . . . and hurt here.
His lips parted and he breathed through his mouth as his eyes traced the scratches on the walls. There were legions of them, along with black stains . . . and other dried blood.
Which was a deep, purpley red.
John went over and ran his hands down one gouge that was so deep, the silk wallpaper had given way to the lath and plaster beneath.
His inhales grew sharper and his exhales shorter as he went around the room. The bed was an absolute mess, the pillows scattered to the floor, the duvet a tangle. . . .
There was blood on it.
Reaching out, he picked up one of the pillows and held it gently. Bringing it to his nose, he inhaled . . . and caught a stronger version of what he dreamed of every night: Xhex’s scent.
His knees weakened and he went down like a stone through still water, collapsing by the side of the mattress. Burying his face into the softness, he drew her into him, her fragrance lingering like a memory, at once tangible and elusive.
She had been here. Recently.
He glanced at the bloodied sheets. The bloodied walls.
He was too late.
John’s face grew wet and he felt something drip off his chin, but he didn’t give a shit. He was consumed with the thought that he’d come so close to saving her . . . but just not arrived soon enough.
The sob that breached his throat actually made a sound.
For all of her life, Xhex’s heart had not been prone to breaking. She’d long suspected that it was a result of her symphath side, a kind of congenital condition that hardened her about things that most females lost it over.
Turned out that was wrong, however.
As she stood beside John Matthew, and watched his huge body crumple down by the bed, the organ that beat behind her sternum shattered like a mirror.
Nothing but shards.
She was utterly and completely ruined as he cradled that pillow like it was a newborn, and in this moment of his utter despair, she would have done anything to ease his pain: Even though she had no idea why he felt the way he so clearly did, the reasons were unimportant.
His suffering was paramount.
Weakened herself, she knelt down next to him, her eyes sending the tragic image he cut straight into the core of her brain.
It felt like centuries since she had seen him, and God, he was still so beautiful—even more than she remembered in her quiet moments. With his strong, hard profile and his extraordinary blue eyes, his face was that of a warrior, and he had the huge body to match, his shoulders making three of hers. All his clothes were leather except for the T-shirt under his jacket and his hair was essentially shaved off, like he’d stopped giving a shit and was cutting it with a buzz razor.
There was lesser blood down the front of his jacket and on his shirt.
He had killed tonight. And maybe that was why he’d found her.
Well, almost found her.
“John?” a male voice said softly.
She looked over toward the doorway, even if he did not. Qhuinn was standing with the Brothers Rhage and Vishous, having just joined them.
In an absent way, she noted the shock on the Brothers’ faces—and got the sense that they hadn’t guessed there’d been any serious connection between her and John. They knew it now though. Loud and clear.
As Qhuinn stepped inside and approached the bed, his tone continued to be gentle. “John, we’ve been here for a half hour. If we’re going to interrogate that lesser downstairs about her, we need to move him pretty damn quick. We don’t want to do it here and I know you want to be in charge of things.”
Oh, God . . . no . . .
“Take me with you,” Xhex whispered desperately. “Please . . . don’t leave me here.”
Abruptly, John glanced up at her, as if he heard her plea.
Except no, he was just staring through her to his friend.
As he nodded, she memorized his face, knowing that it was the last time she’d see him. When Lash found out about the break-in, he’d either kill her outright or move her somewhere else—and chances were good she wouldn’t survive long enough to be found again.
Lifting her hand, even though it would do no good, she laid it on the side of John’s face and swept her thumb back and forth over the tracks of his tears. She imagined she could almost feel the warmth of his skin and the wetness on his cheeks.
She would have given anything to be able to take him into her arms and hold him close. More still to go with him.
“John . . .” she croaked. “Oh, God . . . why are you doing this to yourself.”
He frowned, but no doubt it was because of something Qhuinn was saying. Except then his own palm lifted and he placed it where she was touching him.
It was just to sweep his tears away, though.
When he stood up, he took the pillow with him, and he stepped right through her.
Xhex watched his back retreat, her blood thundering in her ears. This was, in some ways, an echo of the process of death, she thought. Little by little, inch by inch, what tied her to life was leaving, heading off, departing. With each step John took toward that door, her breath was evaporating in her lungs. Her heart was stopping. Her skin was growing cold.
Her chance of rescue was walking away. Her chance at . . .
It was then that she knew what she had been fighting all along, and for once, she felt no inclination to hide her emotions. No need to. Though he was with her, she was totally alone and separate from him, but more to the point, her own mortality clarified her priorities.
“John,” she said softly.
He paused and looked over his shoulder toward the bed.
“I love you.”
His handsome face tightened in pain, and he rubbed the middle of his chest, as if someone had fisted up his heart and squeezed it dead.
And then he turned away.
Xhex’s body overrode her mind. With a frantic leap, she ran for the open door, arms outstretched, mouth cranked wide.
As she hit the confines of her prison, she heard a loud noise, like a siren . . . or the shrill whistle of fireworks after they were lit . . . or maybe it was the security system’s alarm going off.
But it was none of those.
She was screaming at the top of her lungs.
SIXTEEN
John had to tear himself away from that bedroom. If it hadn’t been for the overriding logic and the need to crack open that lesser, he wouldn’t have been able to budge his boots an inch.
He could have sworn he felt her presence . . . but he knew that was a mind trick born out of his quest. She wasn’t in the room. She’d been in the room. Two totally different things . . . and his only chance at finding out what had happened to her was downstairs in the kitchen.
As he headed for the first floor, he rubbed his eyes and his face and found that one hand wanted to linger over his cheek. The skin there was tingling . . . kind of like it did when Xhex had touched him the few times she had.
God . . . the blood in that room. All that blood. She’d been fighting Lash off, and though it was a source of pride to think she’d shanked the fucker a good number of times, he couldn’t stand the reality that had rolled out in that bedroom.
John hung a left and stalked through the dining room, trying to get his game head back while feeling as if he’d had his skin stripped off and been thrown raw into the ocean. Pushing through the butler’s door into the kitchen—
The instant his eyes locked on the lesser, an earthquake ripped through him, his firmament breaking open all the way down to his hot core.
His mouth stretched wide and he let loose a mute bellow.
As he lunged forward, rage punc
hed his fangs out into his mouth and his body went on autopilot, dematerializing through the space, taking form in front of the bastard. Shoving Blay off the slayer, John’s bonded vampire attacked with a kind of ferocity he’d heard about . . . but never seen.
Certainly never experienced.
With his vision on whiteout and his muscles energized by mania, he was all action, no thought as he attacked, his hands cranking into claws, his fangs slicing like daggers, his inner wrath so great he was an animal.
He had no idea how long it took him . . . or even what he did. The only thing that registered was the dim awareness that a sweet stench was all he could smell.
Sometime later . . . much later . . . a lifetime later . . . he paused to catch his breath and found that he was down on all fours, his head dangling off the top of his spine, his lungs burning from exertion. His palms were planted on tile that was slick with black blood and something was dripping off his hair and out of his mouth.
He spit a couple of times to try to get rid of a foul taste, but whatever it was, the shit wasn’t just around his tongue and teeth; it was down the back of his throat and into his gut. His eyes were also stinging and blurry.
Was he crying again? He didn’t feel sad anymore . . . he felt empty.
“Jesus . . . Christ . . .” someone said softly.
Abruptly overcome with exhaustion, John allowed his elbow to go lax and let his weight shift to the side. Laying his head down in a cooling puddle, he closed his eyes. He had no strength. It was all he could do to breathe.
A while later, he heard Qhuinn talking to him. Innate politeness, rather than any clue what was going on, made him nod when there was a pause.
He was momentarily surprised when he felt hands on his shoulders and his legs and his lids managed to flicker open as he was lifted up.
Weird. The countertops and cabinets had been white when they’d first come in. Now . . . they’d been painted in a high-gloss black.
With delirium, he wondered why someone had done that.
Black was hardly a welcoming color.
Closing his eyes, he felt the bumps and shifts as he was carried out and then there was a final hefting followed by his body landing in a heap. Car engine turned over. Doors shut.
They were en route. No doubt back to the Brotherhood compound.
Before he passed out completely, he took his hand and raised it to his cheek. Which made him realize he’d forgotten the pillow.
Coming awake with a flash, he jacked himself up, all Lazarus back from the dead.
Blay was right there with what he’d taken, however. “Here. I made sure we didn’t leave without it.”
John took what still smelled like Xhex and curled his huge body around it. And that was the last thing he remembered of the trip back home.
When Lash woke up, he was in precisely the same position he’d been in when he’d fallen asleep: flat on his back, arms crossed over his chest . . . like a corpse laid out in a coffin. Back when he’d been a vampire, he’d moved around during the day, usually waking up on his side with his head under a pillow.
As he sat up, the first thing he did was look at the lesions on his chest and stomach. Unchanged. No worse, but unchanged. And his energy level hadn’t improved significantly.
In spite of the fact that he’d slept . . . Jesus Christ, three hours? What the hell?
Thank fuck he’d had the sense to postpone that appointment with Benloise. You didn’t meet a man like that when you looked and felt like you’d been on a bender for a week and a half.
Shifting his legs off the bed, he braced himself and then pushed his ass free of the mattress, going all the way vertical. As his body weaved, he heard nothing but silence from downstairs. Oh . . . wait. Someone was throwing up. Which meant the Omega had finished his biz with the new recruit and the kid was starting on a fun-filled six to ten hours of vomiting.
Lash picked up his stained shirt and his suit and wondered where in the hell his wardrobe change was. It didn’t take three hours for Mr. D to get his ass over to Benloise’s, reschedule things, and then head over to the brownstone to feed Xhex and pick out a new set of threads from the closet.
On his way down the stairs, Lash dialed the idiot, and as voice mail kicked in, he snapped, “Where the fuck are my clothes, asshole?”
He hung up and stared through the hall into the dining room. The new recruit was not on the table anymore; he was partially underneath, and huddled over a bucket, dry heaving like there was a rat in his gut that couldn’t find either exit.
“I’m leaving you here,” Lash said loudly. This caused a pause and the recruit looked over. His eyes were bloodshot and there was something like dirty dishwater running out of his open mouth.
“What’s . . . happening to me?” Small voice. Small words.
Lash’s hand went to the sore on his chest and he found it difficult to breathe as he thought once again that the recruits were never told the full story. They never knew what to expect or the full value of what they gave up and what they received.
He’d never thought of himself as a recruit before. He was the son, not another cog in the Omega’s machine. But how much did he really know?
He forced his hand away from his lesion.
“You’re going to be okay,” he said roughly. “Everything’s . . . going to be okay. You’re going to pass out in a little bit and when you wake up . . . you’re going to feel like yourself only better.”
“That thing . . .”
“Is my father. You’re still going to work for me, like I said. That hasn’t changed.” Lash headed for the door as the urge to run got too strong to fight. “I’ll send someone for you.”
“Please . . . don’t leave me.” Watery eyes implored and a stained hand reached out. “Please . . .”
Lash’s ribs seized up hard, compressing his lungs to the point of malfunction, until he could draw no more air down his throat.
“Someone will come for you.”
Out of the door, out of the house, out of the mess. He hustled for his Mercedes, got behind the wheel, and locked himself in the car. Tearing out of the farmhouse’s short driveway, it took him about three miles before he could breathe properly and it wasn’t until he saw the skyscrapers of downtown that he felt more himself.
As he headed to the brownstone, he called Mr. D two more times and got voice mail, and then . . . voice mail.
Taking a right down the alley to the garage, he was ready to fire the phone out the window in frustration—
Easing off on the gas pedal, he let another car go past him . . . but he didn’t slow down just to be courteous to his neighbor’s Porsche.
The door to the brownstone’s garage was wide open and Mr. D’s Lexus was parked right in there. Not protocol.
That and all the no-answering was a red flag the size of Texas and Lash’s first thought was of Xhex. If those motherfucking Brothers had taken her, he was going to stake them out on the lawn and let the sun take them nice and slow.
Closing his eyes, he sent his instincts outward . . . and after a moment, he could sense Mr. D, but the signal was way dim. Nearly imperceptible.
The fucker had obviously been dusted, but not finished off yet.
When a car came up behind him and honked its horn, he realized he was stopped dead in the middle of the lane.
Ordinarily, his first move would have been to pull the Mercedes into the garage and flash into the brownstone with his fists up . . . but he was half-mast at best, all sluggish and woozy. And in the event the Brothers were still inside, now was not the time to engage his enemy.
Even lessers could wake up dead. Even the son of the evil could be sent home.
But what about his female?
Dogged by an odd, cold terror, Lash went farther down the alley, and took one right and then another. As he trolled by the front of his house, he prayed like a little bitch that she was still—
Looking up to the windows on the second floor, he saw her in the bedroom—and hi
s relief was so powerful his breath left him on a wheeze. No matter what might have gone down in that house, no matter who had infiltrated, Xhex was still there where he had left her: Her face was plain for him, and only him, to see on the far side of that glass, her eyes lifted up to the sky, her hand raised to her throat.
What a lovely picture, he thought. Her hair was growing out and starting to curl and the moonlight on her high cheekbones and perfect lips was downright romantic.
She was still his.
Lash forced himself to keep driving. The thing was, she was safe where she was—his invisible prison was impenetrable by any vampire or human or lesser, whether it was a Brother or just any old schmo with a gun and an attitude.
If he went in there, and got into a skirmish with the Brothers? If he was injured? He was going to lose her, because that spell she was trapped in took energy for him to maintain. He was already having enough trouble summoning the strength to keep it going—and though he despised his weakness, he was a fucking realist.
It killed him to keep going. Absolutely killed him.
But it was the right decision. If he wanted to keep her, he had to leave her behind until dawn cleared that brownstone out.
It took him a while to realize he was driving around aimlessly, but the truth was, the idea of going back to crash at one of those shitty little ranches that the Lessening Society owned made him want to peel the skin off his face.
Man, was the dawn never going to come . . .
On some level, he couldn’t believe he was so ball-less as to be pulling a drive-off. But on the other hand, he was having trouble keeping his head up and his eyes open behind the wheel. As he started over Caldwell’s westbound bridge, he just didn’t get the tired routine. The sores could well be from the battles with Xhex, but the exhaustion was—
The answer occurred to him as he glanced over at the eastbound lanes. It was so obvious and yet it struck him with such force that his foot eased off the accelerator.
East and west. Left and right. Night and day.