The Savior

by J. R. Ward

  “Sonofabitch!” he barked as the slayer on top of him managed to drive a finger—or maybe its entire arm—into the bullet wound on his thigh.

  Jacking upright, he held his PITA cover in place and crab-walked backward into a shallow doorway. But like that was going to help much?

  The advancing lesser kicked a clip out of the butt of that gun and slammed in another one.

  Everything slowed down, and Murhder had only one thought go through his mind.

  This is how it happens? This is how I die?

  He was more annoyed with his own stupidity than sorry—until he thought of Sarah, back at the training center, working with good faith to save a vampire she didn’t know, as she waited for Murhder to come back to her.

  Dearest Virgin Scribe, what if the Brothers didn’t do right by her? What if they didn’t take care of her? What if she went back to the human world and somehow suffered the consequences for Nate’s rescue?

  True panic flooded Murhder’s veins, giving him super strength. Forcing himself up off the ground, he kept one arm locked around the bleeding slayer’s torso as he grabbed for the handle of the door—

  Locked. Of course.

  The lesser with the gun raised that muzzle and pointed it at Murhder’s head. The slayer was fifteen yards away. Ten yards. Five—

  From out of the corner of his eye, Murhder caught sight of a figure entering the alley at the far end, the dark shape cutting through the billowing, backlit steam that rose out of a manhole, white and frothing as a cloud.

  Something in the way the figure moved, the size of its shoulders, the short crop of its hair, took Murhder back twenty years.

  “Darius . . . ?” he whispered.

  John Matthew stopped at the head of the alley. Humans working on a sewer main had cordoned off the next intersection of the street, their brilliant lights, clutch of municipal trucks, and official hard-hatted conference around a room-sized hole they’d made in the pavement suggesting that they were going underground with their equipment soon.

  But they weren’t subterranean yet, and they all had cell phones.

  He refocused on the alley. As steam boiled up around his body, obscuring his view, he didn’t need his eyes to tell him that there was a bloody fight going on in the darkness. He’d caught the combination of vampire and slayer blood on the wind as he’d walked out of that park, faint at first, strengthening as he closed in.

  It wasn’t any of the Brothers he worked with.

  But he knew who it was. And they were not dying on his watch, goddamn it.

  Just as the slayer pulled his trigger at Murhder point-blank, John dematerialized onto the undead and shoved the muzzle of the autoloader away.

  The bullet ricocheted off a metal girder on the building, the spark yellow in the night.

  And it was on. John fought for control of the gun, two-handing that wrist, grunting, cursing, as he and the lesser landed in the frozen snow tracks that were stained with the blood spilled from Murhder’s fight.

  When you fought in a pair, you had to make sure you knew where your other half was, especially if there were firearms involved. Last thing you wanted was collateral damage that was your fault. And by some stroke of luck . . . or magic . . . he always knew what Murhder was going to do—and vice versa. The former Brother peeled off with his lesser and danced behind John’s ground game, like they had choreographed the shit.

  But why the hell had he thought it was a good idea to come out without any weapons?

  And fuck it, he’d had enough of this.

  Pinning the slayer facedown, he got up on the lesser’s back, slammed a hold on the gun arm’s elbow and yanked up on the wrist, breaking all the bones, the snap like that of hardwood thrown on an open fire. When the lesser started to scream, John pushed its piehole into the snowpack, the sound muffled.

  Talk about your suppressors.

  Then he snatched the Glock out of the now lax hand and put the muzzle to its head.

  One! Two! Three!

  The bullets went through the skull and brains, all knife-and-butter, the arms and legs flopping with each impact.

  John jumped off, and double-handed the weapon, pointing it at—

  Murhder was back on the ground, holding his slayer down with his superior weight, his arms bowed out, his head down in the bite-zone.

  When he came up, he brought a hunk of flesh with him, the whatever-it-was anatomy dangling from his descended fangs, black blood covering his chin, his throat, the front of the parka he had on.

  He spit it out to the side.

  Beneath him, the slayer was moving in a slow, uncoordinated churn—oh, check it. Most of its facial skin was gone, the cheekbones and curlicued roots of the teeth flashing bright white in the midst of all the glistening black tendons and ligaments.

  With his red-and-black hair tangled on his shoulders, his huge body poised to do more damage to what was underneath him, his gleaming fangs and wide, brilliantly glowing eyes, Murhder looked like a demon.

  And then he started to laugh.

  Not in an evil way, though.

  More like someone whose hometown team has just beaten their rivals at the buzzer: The sound was all about the high-five, the cheer, the go-us.

  “This was fucking awesome!” he said. “And nice timing, I was almost dead!”

  John blinked. It was the last thing he’d expected to come out of the guy’s mouth—especially given what had just been in it.

  “Let’s finish these off—and go get some more!”

  As if the field of conflict were a Baskin-Robbins and they had fifty-two more flavors to look forward to.

  This is crazy, John thought. He himself was injured—totally red-shirted until further notice or when he took to his deathbed. They had one gun between them—thanks to the slayer with the now-broken arm—and a questionable amount of bullets left. And there were things other than slayers stalking the night, shadows that John had learned about the hard way.

  Oh, and this male with the black blood all over his face and chest was known to be insane.

  But John started to smile.

  The next thing he knew, he’d dismounted his lesser and was picking a discarded tire iron up out of the snow. Back at the undead, he two-fisted the thing over the chest of the slayer and drove the dull end you were supposed to work lug nuts with into the hollow cavity where the heart had previously been.

  The pop and flash momentarily blinded him. And then he was back to work, doing the same to the slayer Murhder had given a facial to.

  After that flash of light and sound faded, John reached down and offered a palm to the former Brother.

  Murhder was leaking, the scent of his fresh blood suggesting he’d been plugged by at least one lead slug somewhere. But as the male’s eyes shined with an uncontaminated happiness, John knew the guy wasn’t going to let that bother or stop him any more than a certain shoulder wound was going to sideline John.

  They clapped palms and John dragged the other male off the snow with his good arm. Then they walked off into the night, side by side.

  It was almost, John reflected, as if they’d done this before—

  Murhder started to whistle a cheery little tune, and John had to do a double take.

  After a silent laugh, John joined in, finding a perfect harmony: “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” When Murhder started doing a hop’ita-skip’ita every third step, John Fred Astaire’d, too.

  Just two vampires, looking for the undead, ready to enjoy some good old-fashioned bloodshed.

  Besties.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Tohr had heard that parents had a sixth sense about their young. That even if your kid grew up, went through the change, and came out the other side, ready to settle down with a mate to live their own lives, you still had this radar that pinged when they needed you. When they were off the rails. When something was wrong and they hadn’t come to you about it yet.

  As Tohr walked the territory that he, as the commanding officer of the
Brotherhood, had assigned himself in the field, he couldn’t shake the idea that John was in trouble.

  The male hadn’t been at First Meal. More to the point, Xhex had showed up in the dining room only long enough to look the cast of characters over and leave quick as she came. Which suggested she didn’t know where he was.

  Plus hello, that wound—

  “What’s up, my man?”

  He glanced across at Qhuinn. In the last couple of months, he’d taken to pairing himself with the brother, even though on paper they didn’t make a lot of sense. Tohr had come up in the Old School and was as disciplined as a soldier could be. Everything from the trim of his high and tight to the press of his muscle shirts, his daily workouts to his calorie intake, his fighting stances and his weaponry had to be perfect, and he was ever eagle-eyed for error like a pathologist looking for cancer cells.

  Qhuinn? Gunmetal-gray piercings up one entire ear. Tattoos everywhere, a collection he was constantly adding to with V’s help. And the brother could take or leave workouts, liked boxes of Milk Duds and bags of Cheetos when he got peckish, and couldn’t give two shits about a proper haircut.

  He’d colored his black hair deep purple two weeks ago.

  In another seven days, it was liable to be hot pink.

  But here was the thing. Qhuinn was now the happy father of a pair of twins and totally committed to his hellren, Blaylock. He was also a crackerjack fighter, utterly loyal to the King, and fiercely protective of the others in the Brotherhood.

  So yeah, core values and all that stuff.

  Plus he and Tohr both liked American Horror Story and Stranger Things. And actually, on his cheat days, Tohr had been known to sneak Cheetos.

  Aware that a reply was in order, Tohr stopped and glanced around at the abandoned warehouses, the girded skeletons all that was left behind of Caldwell’s previous claim to fame as a vital port of call on the St. Lawrence waterway’s turn-of-the-century trade routes.

  “I’ve just got a bad feeling about—” His phone went off with a vibration and he took it out. “Damn it. We need to head downtown.”

  As he gave Qhuinn an address that was right in the middle of the financial district, the brother didn’t ask for any explanation—which was another thing Tohr liked about the guy. Qhuinn was prepared for anything at any time in any form.

  Probably explained the hair thing.

  The pair of them ghosted out and re-formed in an alley behind Citibank’s towering monument to capitalism.

  Xcor, leader of the Band of Bastards, was standing next to his boy, Balthazar. The latter had been the one to text, as Xcor was just becoming literate. In front of them, in the dirty snow, were twin scorch marks that had yet to refreeze in the below-zero temperatures.

  Tohr walked over to the burns and knelt down. The stench of lesser blood was so strong, his sinuses stung from it. “And you didn’t do these?”

  He knew the answer before there was any reply: Vampire blood had also been spilled at the scene, and he knew whose it was.

  “No,” Xcor replied. “We came upon them during our sweeps.”

  “Goddamn it,” Tohr muttered as he looked around.

  There was gunpowder in the air, too, so someone or someones had a gun. What the hell was Murhder doing out here, killing lessers without permission?

  As he rose back up to his full height, a jackhammer sounded out at the next intersection down.

  “And right next to humans. Just his style.”

  Xcor frowned. “You know who did this, then?”

  “You haven’t had the pleasure of his acquaintance yet. If you luck out, he’ll leave Caldwell before you have to shake his hand.”

  “Do you want us to help find whoever this is?”

  “No, you go back to monitoring your territory. Call me if you find anything else, though.”

  He clapped palms with the two fighters and hung back as they took off. Then he looked toward the bright glow of the humans’ construction zone.

  “So who is it?” Qhuinn asked.

  “A blast from the past. Come on, we’ve got to find the idiot before he gets himself killed.”

  Sarah took a break from looking at spreadsheets of data, stretching her neck and then standing up from the stool she’d been using. It had been a long while since she’d enjoyed the amnesia that came with getting deep into scientific study, her brain lit up with extrapolations and questions, her body left behind as she fell into an intellectual vortex.

  Linking her hands over her head, she arched left. Leaned right.

  All over the exam table in front of her, spread like the snow that covered everything else in New York State, were pages and pages of patient files. The species evidently had an issue with the storage of its blood, both for transfusion and for feeding purposes. Unless the stuff came directly from the vein, it was all but clinically worthless. So . . . if someone had an arterial wound and experienced a sharp drop in blood volume? Or if they were giving birth and had a uterine bleed? Unless someone of the species was standing handy with an available jugular, the patient was going to die. And the same was true for feeding, especially when it came to transitions. If you were trapped indoors because of sunlight, and no one could get to you when the change hit? You were dead.

  It was a fascinating problem, and it related to John’s wound in a couple of different ways. For one, transfusions for vampires were trouble. The white blood cell count in the recipient inevitably exploded after blood was given intravenously. Every time. So there was something in transfused blood that turned it into a foreign body to be defended against, and she’d wondered initially if this wasn’t a solution for John: Give him some blood vein to vein and have his immune system ramp up all over his body. Unfortunately, any transfusion under those conditions was potentially fatal—so no-go there, given that she wasn’t sure it would help him.

  The risk/reward equation just didn’t work.

  But maybe there was another solution somewhere.

  And the other way the studies were tied to John was on the feeding side. She assumed he was fully fed.

  But maybe, she thought, we need to make him take his mate, Xhex’s, vein—

  Sarah stopped. Looked around at the exam room. Stared down at the spreadsheets.

  Amazing to think in just over twenty-four hours she’d gone from “they” to “we.”

  On that note, she went over to the door and let herself out into the corridor.

  Nate’s room just two doors down and she knocked before she entered. When she heard his voice, she leaned inside.

  “Feel like some company?”

  The boy—um, man—sat up higher in the bed. “Please.”

  Sarah entered and brought a chair over with her. Sitting down, she crossed her legs and smiled. “You look great.”

  “They said I’m free to go at nightfall tomorrow.” Nate frowned. “But I don’t have anywhere to go.”

  Yeah, I get that, she thought.

  “I’m sure you’ll find a . . .” She cleared her throat. “I wish I could help. But I’m on the other side of things.”

  Funny how disappointing that was now.

  “How did you know?” he asked. “That I was in there, I mean. You never said.”

  “I work at BioMed. Well, worked. I’m very sure I’m out of a job by now.”

  She had remote-accessed her home phone, and there weren’t any messages from HR or her supervisor. But she hadn’t showed up for work, and if that trend continued—given that there was still nothing about the BioMed raid on the news—she had to imagine someone would start trying to find her.

  She hurried to fill the silence. “I want to assure you that I wasn’t involved in . . . I didn’t have anything to do with the experiments on you.”

  “I know.” He fanned out his large hands as if still marveling at the changes he’d been through. “But how did you find me?”

  “Did you know the people who worked on you? By name?” Sarah’s heart began to pound. “Did you know them?”


  “They always had masks on and they tried not to speak around me. Sometimes they slipped up, but never about names.”

  Sarah took a deep breath. “My fiancé worked in the department.” As Nate stiffened, she shook her head. “He’s dead. He died two years ago—actually, he was murdered. I’m not with someone who hurt you.”

  Any longer, she thought to herself.

  She thought about Gerry sitting at that computer of his, his back to her, all holed up in that home office. Keeping secrets, bad secrets.

  “He was murdered?” Nate asked.

  As Sarah nodded, her temples started to hum with pain and she winced, rubbing her head. “He was a diabetic. But I believe he was killed.”

  “By who?”

  “I don’t know who exactly. It’s a dirty business he was in, though. We didn’t know that when we started, of course.”

  “Are you in danger?”

  Yes. “No.” She forced a smile. “I’m perfectly fine.”

  “They’re not going to let you stay, are they.”

  “Here, you mean? I don’t think so. I’m going to help for as long as I can, but then I guess I have to go back where I belong.”

  “You belong here.”

  She thought of being with Murhder and found herself agreeing. But that was emotion talking, not reality.

  “I wish that were true.” She patted Nate on the foot. “But enough about me. I just want you to know that I will be sure to say goodbye before I go, okay? And I will not leave until I’m satisfied that there’s a plan for your future that you’re comfortable with. You’re what’s important here. Not me.”

  There was a long pause. And the boy—man, rather—shook his head gravely.

  “No, you also matter. A lot.”

  As tears came to her eyes, she ducked her head and blinked fast. That was what had been missing from her relationship with Gerry at the end, she realized: She had not mattered any longer to him, and since his death? She hadn’t mattered to anybody—including herself.

  If you were loved, if you had people who cared about you, you could be by yourself and never feel alone. But if no one cared? You were isolated even in a crowd.