The Savior

by J. R. Ward

  On that note, the FBI was asking questions about the deaths, not the work.

  Or maybe they were probing the corporation and she just didn’t know the depth of what had triggered their investigation.

  “What happened to the patient?” she said aloud while she rubbed her aching eyes.

  As she closed her lids and leaned back again, from out of nowhere, a memory of her hanging up the phone in her teenage bedroom came to mind, and she saw everything so clearly: the messy floral bedspread she’d been sitting on and her Smashing Pumpkins posters across the walls and the blue jeans draped on the back of her desk chair.

  Bobby something or another. She couldn’t remember what his last name had been and didn’t that seem odd, given the momentous bomb he’d dropped on her.

  Total devastation: He’d told her he was taking someone else to senior prom forty-eight hours before the dance. And not just anyone, either. He was escorting her good friend, Sara, a.k.a., No-“h”, because Sarah had been with the “h”. Talk about your sniper invites. Bobby had been relatively new to school, having arrived the year before as a junior when his dad took a job with the metro government. Sara and Sarah, on the other hand, had known each other since kindergarten.

  That phone conversation had been quick, the kind of thing that he’d rushed through because he felt bad, but his mind was made up.

  It wasn’t like Sarah didn’t get it. No-“h” was a knockout, or had been ever since her body had gotten its curves on the summer before. She was also funny and friendly, the kind of girl you looked forward to sitting next to at lunch because there was always going to be a good laugh.

  She was not a mean girl. But this was a surprise.

  Sarah would have thought, even if Bobby had had the bright idea, that there would have been a no-way from No-“h.”

  Her prom dress had been hanging off her closet door, and she could recall how she’d looked over at it and started to cry. Her dad had taken her shopping two weeks before in what had been yet another in a whole line up of awkward I-wish-Mom-were-here kind of interactions. Like when Sarah had gotten her period for the first time. Or when she’d wanted to start shaving her legs. Or how about worrying whether she could get pregnant after she hooked up with Bobby for the first time, even though they hadn’t gone all the way.

  The dress had been form-fitting and a deep red. Her father had approved of neither, but she’d wanted to come out as a woman for the first time.

  No more girl stuff. No pastels. No frills. No big bows.

  As she’d stared at the gown, she’d thought about how every night after she turned the light off, she looked at it and smiled, imagining all kinds of prom moments with Bobby, him in a tuxedo, her enshrined in red, the pair of them grown-ups at a big blowout. Dancing together. Making out. Maybe sealing the deal in what would be, for her at least, the first time.

  Now? She could still go, sure. But the prom was just two days away and everyone was paired up.

  And then there was the joy of realizing that they’d all gone in on the limo, eight couples, including No-“h”.

  Who apparently had broken up with her boyfriend.

  As the trickle-downs to the phone call played out—including the cringer that maybe Bobby had liked Sara all along and he’d just been waiting for the break-up to happen and the corollary sting that Sara should have called but probably wouldn’t—all Sarah had wanted was her mom.

  Sometimes, you needed to bear your soul’s pain to somebody who had walked a mile in your sparkly high heels.

  It wasn’t that she didn’t love her father. But he was a resource for other things.

  The yearning for her mom, so familiar, so mournful, so ultimately going-nowhere, had just added to her crushing despair.

  Sarah felt shadows of that now.

  There were questions she needed to ask. Fears she wanted allayed. Choices to discuss. And not just with anyone. With Gerry.

  She needed to talk to him about this. Ask him what he knew and what he had done. Demand to know whether he was the good man she had believed him to be or someone else entirely.

  But he was gone, and there was nowhere to go with any of it.

  She was alone with a baseless yearning, once again.

  After so many years of being in this isolated spot, you’d think she’d be used to it.

  Some destinations were ever new territory, however, no matter how well you knew their town squares.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  No, it wasn’t Siberia.

  But as Murhder re-formed at the outer fringe of a forest, the winter landscape before him seemed both cruel and pervasive. The snowdrifts across the meadow’s open acreage were like waves upon a restless arctic sea, the top layer carved into drifts by relentless cold winds. What trees there were seemed tortured by the cold, their bare branches like claws retracted in pain, their trunks starved and ragged. Overhead, a thick cloud cover suggested another blizzard’s battering was coming, the weather seeming to hate the earth.

  About three hundred yards away, on the far side of the bare field, the shack cowering in the midst of a grove of stubby pines was not the cozy haven of a postcard. There was no wisp of cheery smoke rising from its tilted chimney, no glow of candlelight and warmth in its paltry windows, no strong refuge against the gales, given its frayed siding.

  Maybe this was the wrong address.

  Maybe V was mistaken—

  As Xhex materialized beside him, Murhder shifted in the snow even though he’d been prepared for her appearance. Still, her scent in his nose was a strange shock.

  Glancing over, he measured her grim profile. Her hair was even shorter than it had been when he’d known her. Her eyes seemed even darker—but that could be the situation. The rest of her was exactly as he remembered, powerful and sure.

  They had said little before they’d left Darius’s former house together. And he had the sense that he wasn’t going to get another chance to talk to her. Ever again.

  “Thank you for coming with me,” he said roughly.

  She shook her head, and he figured she was going to it’s-not-about-you him. When she didn’t say anything, he frowned.

  “What,” he asked.

  It was a while before she answered him. Then again, given their history and all the things they had never discussed? Lot to choose from.

  “Why did you keep going after them?” She looked at him. “That lab. Those scientists. Those humans. Why did you hunt them?”

  Murhder recoiled. “Are you serious?” When she just stared at him, he cursed under his breath. “How could I not. They hurt you. They nearly killed you.”

  Xhex refocused on the meadow ahead. “We weren’t like that, you and I. I wasn’t a mate to ahvenge.”

  “On my end, we were.”

  “I lied to you.”

  “I know.”

  As she exhaled, her breath came out into the cold as a haze that dispersed quickly. “I’m sorry. For everything. For not telling you what I am. For my bloodline and what they did to you up in the colony. I’m really sorry.”

  Murhder opened his mouth. He intended to tell her it was all okay. That he was fine. That he . . .

  But they both knew that wasn’t true, and he refused to lie. At least out loud, that was.

  “I never blamed you for that,” he said roughly. “Not telling me about the symphath in you, I mean.”

  “Why?”

  “You were protecting yourself. As a fighter, I get that.”

  Back then, no one with mixed blood would have ever come forward for fear of getting deported. And he assumed that was the same now—although so much had changed since he’d been around, who knew.

  Abruptly, she turned to him. Her eyes were shadowed and not just because there was no moon out. They were filled with pain, and he knew what that felt like.

  As the cold wind blew his hair around, and sadness darkened the night even further, he realized that even though the pair of them were not destined to be together, they would never ful
ly be apart, either. Their relationship had carved runes in the bedrock of their souls, the suffering on both sides longer lasting than any resonant joy could have been.

  “You make me ashamed of myself,” she said hoarsely. “You kept going after those humans. I stopped. Otherwise, maybe I could have saved this female. And her young.”

  Murhder shook his head. “Don’t blame yourself. There’s no right answer when it comes to healing from tragedy. You took care of yourself. That is what matters.”

  Okay, so that was some serious bullshit. He hadn’t healed a damn thing in himself, so he really didn’t know what he was talking about when it came to recovering from anything more serious than a broken bone. Still, he wanted to ease her conscience. After everything that had been done to her, she deserved freedom, and not just from that cage she’d been kept in.

  “You were there the night I burned that lab down, weren’t you.” As he nodded, she continued, “How did you know where I was?”

  He closed his eyes and fought against going back to the past. And if it hadn’t been for the rock-solid conviction that they were never seeing each other again after this, he probably would have let it all go.

  Instead . . . he found himself answering, the words bubbling up his throat and coming out of his mouth on shaky syllables.

  “When your people gave you over to the humans up at the colony, I broke free and tried to save you. I saw you get put into a van with blacked-out windows and there was a logo on it. I would have followed, but . . .” Well, her relatives took control of his brain again and that had pretty much ruled his roost. “After Rehv got me out sometime later, I searched for the laboratory that matched the logo. It was dumb luck that I happened to find it the night you lit that fire.”

  Dumb luck . . . or part of the Scribe Virgin’s grand plan. If you believed in that kind of thing.

  He touched the shard of seeing glass through his shirt. That van had been how he’d eventually found the other two vampires. As he had watched Xhex against the flames she had started, a vehicle that he had not thought much about at the time had driven off. Only later, after he had decided to leave Xhex alone and had dematerialized away from the site of the blaze, had he recalled it had been the same van from the night she’d been taken from the symphath colony.

  That was how he’d suspected there were others being held.

  And he’d been right.

  “I didn’t know there were others at the lab.” Xhex cleared her throat. “I mean, while I was there, they kept me alone, probably because I attacked them every time they came at me.”

  Murhder closed his eyes and shook his head. “That should never have happened. To you, or anybody.”

  “I don’t blame you at all for keeping your distance from me. But what I can’t understand is, why did you tell the Brotherhood you were the one who burned down the lab?”

  “Does it matter now?”

  “Yes. I mean, it wasn’t until tonight that I figured it all out. That they blamed you for all of it. First that fire and then the slaughter at the second site.”

  He shrugged. “By the time the Brothers linked what you’d done to all my wrongs? It was a drop in a bucket. I decided you didn’t need any more trouble than you’d already found and God knew I was in deep enough as it was.”

  “They know about me. About what I am.”

  “I figured that out. Good on them for accepting you—”

  “I’m mated now.”

  “Congratulations,” he heard himself say.

  “He’s a good male.”

  He better be, Murhder thought. Or I’ll kill him with my bare hands.

  When she didn’t say anything further, he waited for feelings of jealousy and possession to bubble up in his chest. Something did kindle, deep inside, but it was too quiet an emotion for him to process. He was very sure it was not a bonded male reaction, however.

  “I didn’t come back here to make problems for you,” Murhder said. “It’s really all about the female.”

  “Any way I can help, I’m there.” Xhex looked away to the cabin. “I owe her, even though I don’t know her.”

  Murhder didn’t mean to reach out, but his arms extended before he could think about it one way or another . . . and the next thing he knew, Xhex was in his arms, the pair of them holding on to each other, the invisible winds of their pain and suffering turning them into the eye of a hurricane.

  It was what he had wanted to do the night of that fire, but he had lacked the nerve.

  “I’m sorry, too,” he said over her head.

  “What are you apologizing for?” she asked.

  “Everything.”

  John Matthew was downwind from Xhex and Murhder as they embraced in the shadows of a stand of pine trees.

  The ugly grunt that came out of his throat was low and dangerous to his own ears. And then there was the fact that his palms had somehow managed to find both his daggers and unsheathe them from his chest holster.

  The crack of a stick directly behind him was the only thing that stopped him from rushing out into the meadow and attacking the former Brother.

  As John wheeled around, Tohr loomed behind them. “Damn it, John. What the hell are you doing here?”

  All John could do was breathe. His raging bonded male was so dominant that the instinct to attack, protect, defend took over his higher reasoning. Or at least most of it. There was still enough to remind him that he did not want to hurt his surrogate father.

  “Son,” Tohr said, “don’t do this, okay? Don’t do any of this.”

  The image of Xhex stepping in against another male, a former lover of hers, a Brother, was like gasoline on the fire of his temper. And Tohr must have known he was about to act because the male locked a hold on John’s right shoulder—

  Directly on the bite wound.

  If John had had a voice that worked, he would have cursed loud enough to bring snow from the storm clouds overhead.

  The unholy pain that lanced through him was so intense it was probably the only thing that could have overridden his bonded male. Pitching forward, temporarily blinded, he fell into Tohr, who caught him before he hit the ground.

  “Are you injured? John!”

  Tohr rolled him over and laid him out flat on the snow, and as his nervous system struggled with the sensory load plowing through him, his daggers were stripped from his hands and the Brother’s face appeared above his.

  “Talk to me, son, what’s going on?”

  With sloppy reflexes, he fumbled around the area of his shoulder, trying to push the Brother’s hold away from what was killing him—

  Okay, that was a bad choice of words right there.

  With a swift yank, Tohr opened his leather jacket.

  “You’re not bleeding.” The Brother took out his phone and turned the light on. “Let me pull your shirt—”

  As strung out as John was, he knew the second when Tohr saw the bite wound through the straps of the muscle shirt. The Brother’s face froze, composure slamming down on his features. He actually seemed to lose concentration for a split second.

  When he came back on line, his voice was falsely even. “When did this injury happen and why haven’t you told anyone?”

  John just shook his head, the snow underneath his skull creaking from the cold—which made him wonder dimly why he didn’t feel the wintery temperature. Actually . . . he wasn’t feeling anything all of a sudden, not the weight of his body, not the buzz of his aggression, not even the pain.

  At least that last one was good news.

  Other voices, now. Deep and quiet. Tohr had called for someone(s), but John didn’t bother trying to see who it was.

  Instead, he stared straight up at the gray sky overhead. Funny, back before his transition, he had thought he had good eyesight—or maybe it had been more like he hadn’t had bad eyesight. Near or far, he’d gotten what he needed in terms of visual information.

  After the change? It was as if a cloudy film had been removed, his ability
to notice minute details about objects and people from a football field’s distance away in near pitch darkness such a shock, he could remember thinking surely it was a superpower.

  Now, as he watched the sky, he could see the different shades of gray in the storm’s underbelly, the currents of wind swirling in slow-motion banks of snow-swollen clouds. The effect was quiet, beautiful . . . calming, like silk billowing in an open doorway.

  Xhex and that male felt miles away. Then again, so did his corporeal form, even as his vantage point suggested he wasn’t having an out-of-body experience.

  Am I dying, he asked mutely.

  When no one answered, he wasn’t surprised. They couldn’t hear him, and even if they could have, he couldn’t connect with whoever was around him.

  Sadness washed through him. He didn’t want to leave things with Xhex like this.

  Even if he was the only one who knew they were estranged.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Murhder and Xhex stepped back from the embrace at same time, and as he stared down at her, he figured out what his emotion had been when she’d told him that she was mated to someone. It had been a quiet relief. A door closing not with a slam, but with a click.

  Not that he’d come back here thinking they had any future together. It was just a resolution he had not expected to find, and yet valued more than he would have guessed.

  “If he ever hurts you,” Murhder said, “I’ll skin him alive.”

  “John, you mean?” She shook her head. “He’s a prince of a guy. I think you’d like him, actually.”

  God, it had been so long since Murhder had thought in terms of liking or not liking another living being. But that was what happened when you were all about survival. And when your brain was an unreliable mess.

  “Let’s do this,” he said as he looked across the snow-blanketed meadow.

  Xhex nodded and they started off side by side, her boots and his heavy treaded shoes punching through the icy top level and compressing the softer flakes underneath with muffled crunches. Before leaving Darius’s old house, the Brothers had given him a heavy parka and thick snow pants as well as gloves and the shoes. No weapons. Not that he’d asked for his own back.