The Savior

by J. R. Ward

  The humans jumped and whirled around. Before they could call for help, he reached into their minds and paralyzed them where they stood. Then he chose the one on the right, and started popping the tops off the man’s mental canisters, peering into all kinds of memories.

  Okay . . . wow.

  The guy was cheating on his wife and worried he’d caught a venereal disease from his girlfriend. He had tremendous guilt over the betrayal, but he couldn’t fathom his life without the other woman and he was obsessed with knowing who else the woman was sleeping with. Was it Charlie from Engineering—

  Totally not what Murhder was looking for, but brains were not like a library full of books. There was no Dewey decimal system with a corresponding card catalogue to go by. Things came up in order of importance to the individual, not the temporal trespasser.

  He switched to the guy on the left and hit the jackpot.

  This one had just gotten promoted and was eager for the union-mandated break to be over so he could get back to work. He liked having some power around the place.

  Much better, Murhder thought.

  Moments later, he had the information he needed: Yes, there was a top secret laboratory, and it was not far.

  Murhder wiped their memories clear of his interruption, and then inserted orders for them to sit back down and resume watching the game.

  No reason to kick up complications until he absolutely had to.

  Out in a corridor now, and there was no dematerializing anymore. He was way too hyped, his senses far too alive, and as a master would unleash a hound, so he released the most animalistic part of himself to carry forward: Ambulation was no longer a conscious coordination of limbs but an autonomic process serving the greatest good.

  These humans had vampires imprisoned here. And they were doing unholy things to them.

  He knew this down to his soul, and he was going to get it right this time. No distractions. No mistakes. No emotions.

  All of which had led to his failure before.

  When he rounded a corner and came upon two human males in white laboratory coats, he snapped their necks and left the bodies where they fell. Innocent victims? Not fucking hardly, and if time hadn’t been of the essence, he would have taken their death knell pain to new levels—and not stopped with just this pair.

  He would murder every single living, breathing entity in this torture chamber.

  Instead, he kept going, pounding down corridors, passing in and out of the views of security cameras mounted in the ceiling.

  The alarms sounded just as he stopped before a door that was made of steel, the one metal that vampires could not dematerialize through.

  And they’d sealed the walls of whatever was on the far side with steel mesh.

  These humans knew how to keep their victims on their premises, he thought.

  Thank fuck they hadn’t had the foresight to secure the entire facility that way—no doubt because they were more concerned with escape rather than rescue.

  The explosives he carried were in his backpack, and he set up a quick wad of C4, shoved a detonator into its compliant form, and stepped back. Boom! was an understatement. And before the smoke cleared, the door fell away from its jamb, landing on the floor inside like a tomb slab.

  Murhder jumped forward with his daggers palmed. No guns. He didn’t want to kill any captive victims with stray bullets—

  It was a full-blown medical laboratory with shelves full of supplies, an operating table that made him want to throw up, and all kinds of microscopes and monitors on counters and desks.

  He slaughtered the lab workers in seconds. Three of them, all men in white coats. They offered no coordinated resistance to his attack, wasting time screaming and trying to run, and he went for the one who picked up a phone first. As he slashed their throats, those lab coats turned red down the front, and the laminated ID cards they wore around their necks got a pink stain.

  As he dropped the last of them, he wheeled around and confronted a pair of mesh-covered cages. They were some six feet wide, fifteen feet long, and six feet tall, and through the densely woven steel that had been wrapped around them top to bottom, he saw a male on the left, naked with a food bowl and a container of water like he was a fucking animal.

  There was a female in the other pen—

  Dearest Virgin Scribe, she was heavily pregnant.

  And as her eyes, hollow and haunted, stared out at him through the weave of steel bands, her mouth opened in shock.

  Reality warped on him.

  The face in the sacred glass. From the seeing bowl.

  This was the female!

  “You can’t touch the bars,” the male said over the din of the alarms and through the dissipating smoke. “They’re charged.”

  Murhder shook himself back to attention. The male was up on his feet, but so emaciated, he was probably going to have to be carried out. And the female with the young was in even worse shape—she was on her knees, and he worried that was all she could do.

  “Over there,” the male said as he pointed to an electrical box mounted on the wall. “There’s the circuit breaker for the cages.”

  No time to fuck around with fuses. Murhder traded one of his daggers for a gun and plowed six shots into the metal panel. Sparks flew and there was a minor explosion, more smoke with a metal bite to it released into the lab.

  “Stand back,” he ordered.

  The male knew what he was thinking, and the poor guy got his fragile body out of the way as Murhder pointed his gun at the locking mechanism on the cage. The bullet he discharged split the casing, releasing a set of mechanical internal organs onto the floor.

  The prisoner pushed the door wide and stumbled out on pin-thin legs that trembled so badly, the knobby knees knocked together. His hair had been shaved and there were electrodes attached to his skull.

  Murhder focused on the pregnant female. “We can’t leave her.” The sprinkler system came on, water raining down on them, triggered by the release of smoke. “I need to . . .”

  But he couldn’t carry both of them and still have a hand free for a gun. And it went without saying that in their weakened states, neither one of them could dematerialize.

  “I’m going to save her.” His voice didn’t sound like his own. “It is my destiny.”

  As Murhder approached the cage, the female dragged herself over to the hinged panel in front. Behind the steel mesh, her hands clenched on the bars, her mouth moving, her voice too weak to register through the alarm, the sprinkler, that internal screaming inside his head.

  Her hair had been shaved off, too. She had bruises on her shoulders. To spare her modesty, he didn’t look any further down.

  “She won’t make it out alive,” the male said in a voice that cracked. “She’s about to give birth.”

  “Fuck that,” Murhder said as he reached for the latch. “I’ll carry her out and then we’ll get her medical attention—”

  Security guards skidded into the doorway, three men in blue uniforms who were armed with autoloaders. Murhder shot at them as he pulled the male behind his body and moved for cover. Flipping a worktable over, he yanked a portion of glass-fronted metal shelving on top of the thing, all kinds of beakers and test tubes crashing as the front panels broke open and let loose its contents. Changing clips, he kept shooting, but it was without aim.

  The male let out a bark. “I’m hit!”

  More security guards at the door. Murhder looked at the other cage, at the female. She had flattened herself in the far corner as best she could, her big belly out to the side, her eyes locked on him as if she knew he was her one chance to get out of a nightmare.

  He looked at the male, and did the risk benefit analysis in his head. Twice.

  There was no chance of getting her out of that cage safely now, and as long as he was in the lab, bullets were going to continue to fly.

  “I’ll come back for her. I’ll bring the brothers with me. I swear on my honor.”

  Another lead slug
whizzed by his head. Two more went into the table and the shelving, the dull, metallic impacts belying the flimsy nature of their cover.

  They both looked over at the female. She hadn’t been hit, yet, and it was clear she could read what was on their faces. That mouth of hers opened wide as she clawed at the bars, at the mesh, her frantic eyes revealing the depths of the hell she was in—

  A car horn, set at the precise pitch of that terrified female’s scream, brought him back to the present. He had stopped dead in the middle of the snowy street, and as he turned toward the sound, he was blinded by headlights. His arm went up to shield his eyes, but he didn’t think to move—

  The car hit him solidly, its tires locking on the snowpack, its mass times acceleration utterly unabated on the slippery road—and his body slammed into the hood and rolled up the windshield. He caught a quick passing survey of the clear winter sky as he passed over the roof, and then he hit the road on the far side facedown and in a jumble of limbs.

  With a curse, he gave his body a second to register any complaints, and besides, the cold snow felt good against his hot cheek. Dimly, he noted the sound of car doors opening—three of them?

  “Aw shit, my father’s gonna kill me—”

  “You shouldna drive high—”

  “What the fuck, Todd—”

  Murhder cranked his head around and focused on the three young human boys standing near the back end of a very expensive BMW.

  “I’m okay,” he told them. “Just go.”

  “You serious?” one of them said.

  And that was when he caught a scent he hadn’t smelled in years and years. As tears came to his eyes, he closed his lids.

  “If he’s fucking dead,” he heard Xhex say in her hard-ass voice, “I will kill each one of you. Slowly.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Xhex shouldn’t have been anywhere near this car accident for a whole lot of reasons. First, she was supposed to be down at shAdoWs, keeping the humans in line as the club’s head of security—and considering it was midnight on a Saturday, the fun was just getting rolling down there at work. Second, she didn’t have any invitation to be at the King’s Audience House for this Brotherhood-only business.

  And third, she didn’t actually want to see Murhder.

  Be all that as it were, however, she was now in this shitshow way too deep to pull out.

  Naturally, the trio of stoner idiots who’d gotten out of Daddy’s motherfucking BMW was staring at her like she was their favorite wet dream upright in leathers. Which made her want to slap some sense and manners into them on principle. But there was no time for that. The Brother she’d never thought she’d cross paths with again was lying facedown in the middle of the road like he was paralyzed or had broken something seriously material to ambulation—and considering that the house he was in front of was crawling with vampires and this was a ritzy human neighborhood where people had security guards on their properties and were themselves iPhone’d up the ass, it was more important to clear the scene.

  “Get the fuck of here,” she ordered the boys. “Or I’m calling the police.”

  Todd I, II, and III looked at each other like they were either communicating telepathically or so stoned and dumbfounded at her appearance, they’d lost the ability to speak.

  “Now!” she barked.

  The three slipped and slid in their loafers to get back into the car, and whoever was behind the wheel hit the gas so hard, tire treads of snowpack pelted her lower legs.

  As she turned back to Murhder, she had hope he’d be getting to his feet. Nope. He was still lying on his stomach with his face turned to the side—and his eyes were closed, his dark lashes low on his prominent cheekbone.

  Dropping herself to her haunches, she swallowed hard as she tried to get a read on his condition. Even though it was dark, there were peach-colored streetlights at regular intervals down the lane, the whole neighborhood glowing sure as if the wealth of its homeowners had been brought out to the curbs in gold bars. And she tracked every nuance of him in the man-made gloaming.

  At least he was breathing, and as soon as she saw that, she took note of other things: His black hair was still long and streaked with red. He was still a very big male. And his scent hadn’t changed.

  God . . . so much. She and Murhder had been through so much together, too little of it any good.

  “Do you require medical attention?” she said hoarsely.

  Like she was addressing a stranger who had been struck. Instead of a male she had been to hell and back with.

  Well, actually, that hyperbole wasn’t exactly true. She had rejoined life. He had not.

  “Murhder? Are you dead?” As she whispered the words, her breath came out in puffs that were carried away in the cold air.

  “Strange question to ask someone,” came a croaking reply.

  As her eyes stung with relief, she glanced in the direction the BMW had sped off. “So I take it the answer’s no.”

  Murhder popped his lids and looked up at her. A sheen of tears made the peach of his irises shimmer. “You look the same.”

  As they made eye contact, the impact of their shared past was so great, she was knocked off her crouch, her ass hitting the cold snow, her brain unable to deny the onslaught of memories: Him breaking into that room up in the symphath colony, thinking he was rescuing her from an abduction. His shock as he realized she had come willingly . . . to see her blooded family.

  Which meant she was not as she had portrayed herself to be.

  And then her relations streaming in and realizing that she had lied to them, as well.

  Symphaths and vampires did not mix in those days. Still didn’t.

  What had happened after the truth had come out had been one nightmare after another. Her relatives had tortured Murhder in the way only symphaths could, getting into his subconscious and making hash out of every part of who he was as a male, as a vampire, as a mortal entity. Then they had cast her out of the colony—and not as in banishment. As in selling her to humans as a lab animal to be experimented on.

  And the story hadn’t ended there.

  “I shouldn’t have come,” she said roughly.

  When John Matthew had texted her that he was going out into the field with Blay because the Brotherhood had a special meeting at the Audience House? She should have just sent back her regular response of “Be safe, love you.” Then she should have put her phone in her back pocket and continued to monitor the crowd at the bar, on the dance floor, in the rear hallways where the bathrooms were. She should have stuck to her own lane because she, like any other person who wasn’t a Brother, had no goddamn reason to be here.

  But as a symphath, she had sensed the unrest in the Brotherhood’s household for the last several nights. The anxiety had been the deep kind, the soul kind, and each one of the Brothers’ emotional grids had registered the same upset. There was only one explanation, and even though she had pledged to herself she would not use her species’ toolbox among the vampires who were now her family, she had lifted the lid on one of the warriors.

  Murhder was coming from South Carolina—

  Male voices caught her attention and she looked up. Members of the Brotherhood were streaming out of Darius’s old place into the snow, their heavy bodies covered with loose coats to hide their weapons.

  “Help is on the way,” she said as she got to her feet.

  “Don’t leave.”

  Guilt stung as she turned away, and it wasn’t on account of leaving him in the street. “Good luck with your Brothers.”

  “I’m not one of them anymore.”

  As she dematerialized, she hated that she’d been seen. The Brothers all knew what had gone on between her and Murhder back before she’d headed up to the colony that final time, and she’d just as soon they not know she’d been anywhere near the male in the present.

  And as for John Matthew, yes, he was aware of the who, what, where, and when of her time with Murhder, but she’d just as soon things
stayed on that newspaper article level. After all, she’d—what did they call it—she’d “processed” what had happened, including what had been done to her and how Murhder had lost his mind and everything the male had done afterward.

  It was over. Finished. In the past, moving on, focusing on the future.

  So there was no reason to reopen anything—

  And yet she had come tonight. To see him.

  She was surprised he was still alive.

  The fact that John didn’t know she had sought out another male—even though it was, obviously, not to have sex or bond or feed or anything like that—felt like a betrayal of her mate because it was an admission that, much as she hated it and wished it were not true, there was unfinished business between her and the Brother who had been kicked out for insanity.

  Business that threatened every part of the life she held so dear.

  This was not the way he wanted to return the fold, Murhder thought: Facedown in the street. Eyes leaking. Throat choked.

  As Xhex dematerialized and the Brotherhood approached in fighter formation, he reflected it was also not the way he wanted to see that female again—although he would have been hard-pressed to define exactly under what conditions he would have chosen to meet up with her. She was the fulcrum of his downfall, the eye of the storm that had taken him into madness, the catalyst, although not the precise cause, of his disintegration.

  All things considered, it was a relief to have to face the Brothers—which was saying something, as he had no real interest in seeing them, either.

  As he pushed his torso off the snowpack, and rolled over to sit up on his ass, he measured the males who came unto him. He recognized all but two, and noted two were missing: Wrath wasn’t among them and neither was Darius, no doubt because the latter had stayed inside to guard the former.

  When he tried to get to his feet, he became aware that his right thigh bone was probably broken. The pain that registered as he moved his leg was a chainsaw that rode up his spine and slashed through his brain, his vision going in and out as he attempted to put weight on it. He ended up back on his butt.