by Laken Cane
Blood, pain, and sweat.
Then she was at the front of the crowd and no one stood between her and the two men.
They circled each other, shivs in hand, bloody, battered, and mean.
The berserker was a mountain next to the smaller Owen, but Owen was holding his own. That he was still alive almost shocked her.
Owen suddenly lunged, slicing into Strad’s stomach before leaping at the berserker’s throat. He missed by a whisper when Strad moved.
Strad’s roar was loud in the dark, quiet day. He grabbed Owen by the throat and with his fist wrapped around his blade, punched Owen in the face.
She couldn’t breathe as Owen went limp in the berserker’s grip.
Then, as though he felt her there, Strad looked up and saw her.
He dropped Owen and strode toward her. Those closest to her gasped and scrambled away from the berserker’s anger.
“Damn you, Rune.”
She put her hands on her hips and said nothing.
“I told you to go home.”
His right eye was nearly swollen shut, his lip was split, and the front of his tattered shirt was bloody from cuts.
If the berserker looked that bad, she could only imagine Owen’s injuries. Owen wasn’t even back to full strength yet, and she had no idea how he was able to stand against the berserker.
She glanced behind Strad to see Owen still lying in the overgrown weeds. But as she watched, he sat up—slowly, but he sat up.
“Strad, if I ever want someone to tell me what to do, I’ll be sure to let you know.”
“You don’t need to watch this.”
She grasped the hem of his shirt and pushed it up, then leaned forward to run her tongue over the blood coloring his ribs.
“Holy shit,” someone whispered.
He grabbed her shoulders, but made no attempt to push her away. “Rune…”
“I know what I need, Berserker.” She pulled back and grinned. “Go take shit out on Owen. You can come back to me ragged as hell and torn to bits, but neither one of you sons of bitches had better fucking die on me.”
He knew she was serious.
He frowned, his eyes glittering in the shadows of his face, but before he could say another word Owen began loping toward him, blades in each hand.
Strad turned to meet him.
She was still worried. Still terrified one of them would die.
But fuck that. She pushed the worry deep. She wasn’t their mother.
Someone put a hand on her shoulder and she glanced over to find Raze and Jack at her side. They said nothing, just watched the two men fight.
Once, Owen hit Strad in the eye with the hilt of his knife.
“Fuck,” Jack murmured. “Not the eye.”
But Owen could have sliced into the berserker’s eye with his blade if he’d wanted to. Could have sent it into his brain.
She dug her fingers into her thighs. Assholes.
Strad shook his head as though trying to shake away the pain in his eye, and once more he and Owen circled each other. A little more slowly, though.
“Cops,” someone said, and the entire group hastened to disperse, everyone watching seemingly afraid of being arrested.
It was the Moor, so their fear was likely warranted.
“Jack,” Rune said, not taking her stare off Strad and Owen.
“On it,” he said, and went to head off the two cops before they tried to interfere and ended up dead.
Owen and Strad stopped circling and began to fight in earnest. They fought almost like they were deep in battle and it was life or death.
There was one difference—they threw down their weapons. No blades, no spears, no guns.
Blood sprayed and bones crunched—mostly Owen’s—and each time it happened, Rune flinched.
“Um, Alexander,” someone said, and she looked away to find the cops watching the fight. “They’re going to kill each other.”
“How are they still alive? You sure you don’t want us to stop them?” the other asked.
“If you need to die in a hurry,” Raze said, “go ahead.”
“Raze,” Rune said. “Jack. If I asked you to stop them, would you?”
He and Jack looked at each other. “Nope,” they said in unison.
She grinned at them, and Raze winked at her. Jack, maybe still thinking about the knife to the eye, didn’t so much as smile.
Strad knocked Owen halfway across the lot, and Rune groaned as Owen finally rolled to a halt and lay as still as death.
The berserker started toward him. His big body was covered with blood and grime. His hair had come out of its band and clung to the sweat of his upper arms. He was so bruised and cut and battered that Rune wondered how he could walk, but he didn’t just walk to Owen, he strode to him.
And she finally noticed another difference.
Strad wasn’t raging—he was pissed, yes, and doing something he felt he needed to do, but he wasn’t raging. He was taking care of business.
And that made her feel a little better, because that meant he wasn’t out to kill Owen.
Before Strad reached him, Owen stirred.
“God,” Rune breathed.
Strad leaned down, wrapped his fist in Owen’s tattered shirt, and yanked him to his feet.
The cowboy punched the berserker solidly in the throat.
Not even Strad could ignore that. He took a step back, his hands to his throat.
Owen tottered, then fell to his knees.
“Idiots,” Rune muttered.
Her cell rang and she grabbed it. “What?”
“Rune,” Lex said. “Levi was…talking with the assassin. The assassin needs bitten so badly he’ll tell you anything you want to know. He knows where Megan is. And he says he’ll tell you about the Shop leader if you’ll feed him. He says…”
“What, Lex?”
“He says the baby you delivered is alive. And he said it was normal. Just like you.”
She was halfway back to her house almost before she realized she’d taken off.
Normal. Just like her.
She’d never been called normal in her life.
She laughed, but even to her ears the laughter held a hint of hope. The assassin would help her find Megan and the baby. She would find them, and she would save them.
That was the most important thing to her right then, and she didn’t give Strad or Owen another thought as she sped to the assassin.
Chapter Forty-Five
She sprinted through her house and to the panic room, her heart beating hard. She put her palm against her chest and wiped at the warm, familiar stickiness of blood. Once again, her stake wounds were seeping.
“Trade,” the assassin said.
She pushed her hair out of her face. “Start talking.”
“I need a glass of water.”
She studied him. Lex and Denim crowded the doorway, and Levi crouched beside the assassin. He’d taken out some of his darkness on the prisoner. Both Levi and the assassin were messy, flinching, and bloody. One of Levi’s blades lay on the floor at his side.
Levi looked…disgusted. Disgusted with himself.
His face was pale and shadowed and his eyes held too much desperation for her to ignore.
“Levi,” she told him. “Go find Ellie.”
He shook his head but his eyes moistened.
She clenched her fists, hating his pain. “Go,” she said, gently, but firmly. “Let Ellie take care of you.”
“He’s locked himself in his bedroom.” Lex crossed her arms, unhappy, but didn’t move toward Levi.
“Levi,” Rune said.
“I can’t.” He rose without another word or glance at anyone and left the room. He wasn’t back, but he was getting closer.
And really, his anger at Ellie was understandable.
Levi had allowed the assassin to keep his mask.
The agonized twin might have been dark, but he wasn’t an asshole.
The assassin had been dumped onto
the floor. His hands were cuffed with zip ties behind him and then attached by a chain to the handle on the bathroom door. His ankles were restrained as well.
He wasn’t going anywhere.
“How are we going to work this?” she asked him.
“You’ll have to trust me.” His voice was rusty and low, but strong.
He’d been tormented beyond belief by the horrific shit in his past and worse, by his new addiction. He’d tried to kill her.
Yet there he sat, calmly demanding she trust him.
She laughed. “That won’t happen, dude.” She hoped he couldn’t hear her desperation.
She could kill him, easily.
But a dead assassin was a worthless assassin.
“I won’t live much longer without your bite,” he said, as though she’d never spoken. “I wouldn’t want to. I have two options. I can die, or I can…”
“What? You can what?”
“I can offer you my services. Myself. I can become Shiv Crew.”
No one moved, or spoke. Maybe no one breathed.
“No,” Rune said, finally. “Not possible.”
“Shiv Crew extra, then,” he said. “Let me live and I’ll disappear until you need me. Or until I have info to trade.” He shrugged. “Right now I need your bite. In return I will give you the Shop head and the girl.”
She squatted in front of him. “You have a lot of secrets, don’t you?”
He said nothing.
Denim brought in a glass of water, then held it to the assassin’s mouth before putting the half empty glass on the floor beside Rune.
“I have you,” she told him. “I’ll leave you restrained while I bite you. Afterward, you’ll give me the information I need or I’ll leave you here to suffer until you rot. Deal?”
He didn’t care that she might bite him and keep him restrained. He couldn’t care, because the bite was so close.
He shuddered, but kept his stare on hers. His eyes were like diamonds through the mask holes. “Deal.”
He was caught.
The most important thing for the rest of his life would be her bite. Nothing else would matter to him as much.
The same way nothing would matter quite as much to the berserker.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
For a moment, she thought he might not answer, but finally, he gave her a name. Maybe it was his, maybe it wasn’t.
“Will.”
He spoke, as he usually did, in a clipped monotone. But she could hear the eagerness. The need.
She dropped her fangs.
I don’t want to bite that. I don’t want to…
As Denim and Lex watched, she grabbed the assassin’s head, tilted it to get at the strip of flesh below his mask, and struck.
It was…horrifying.
Not the taste of the blood—that was creamy, rich, and flavored with life.
No. Getting the blood was what nearly made her pull her mouth from him and run gagging from the room.
Because before the blood spurted into her mouth, she had to get through the scar tissue covering his flesh.
She’d bitten into a particularly thick patch, and it was like rubber against her lips. The scar seemed to scream when she punctured it.
Don’t think about it. Think about the blood. The blood.
And finally, she succeeded in ignoring the packaging in which her dinner was wrapped. Finally, she could enjoy the meal.
A whisper of sound left Will the Assassin’s mouth. Just a whisper, but in that sound was the release of every bad thing he’d ever experienced. Having his addiction fed at last would have been like nothing he’d ever known.
Heaven.
She withdrew before she drained him, her monster sighing at the bliss of feeding. She dropped her hands from his neck with a lazy contentment, but jerked out of her daze when she unintentionally brushed her fingers across his erection.
She stood and wiped her mouth, uncomfortable. “Talk, Assassin.”
He rolled his head languidly against the wall, and it took him two attempts before he was able to lift his fingers to touch the wounds left by her fangs. “There are two people you need to destroy to end the attempts at creating lab monsters. One is the Shop head, Orson Blackthorne. The other is his son—he holds something inside him, something…”
She thought of the flashes of silver swimming around the tank babies. “Magic?” she asked.
He nodded. “Magic. It’s all about magic with Orson and his branch of the Shop.”
She shivered, then wiped her hands on her pants. “Where are they?”
“You’ll have to go back to Reverence. He never leaves the county. Some of his people bring him what he needs.”
“Where is the lab?”
“In the hills.” He leaned forward, maybe to take pressure off his bound hands. “In hell. There’s a road called Tick Ridge. Follow it. You’ll come upon a small village of nondescript houses after you crest the third hill. The entire village is his. He has a lab under his house at the corner of Oak Street. I don’t know how to get into it—that’ll be something you and your people will have to figure out. I’ve only ever been carried there unconscious, drugged, or blindfolded.” His voice was completely emotionless, as though he were giving the instructions on making a sandwich.
She nodded. “He has the baby and Megan Smith?”
“He has the girl. Maybe the baby, but he’s probably thrown it away by now. The sheriff said it was normal. Before you go after him, take out his son. Without the boy, the Shop can’t create more living monsters. At least for a while. If you leave the boy alive, someone else will continue to use him. Orson has apprentices. They do anything he wants.”
“What do you mean?”
“They get the girls for him. Once he impregnates them, he sends them away to be kept by his team. They take him the monsters when they’re born.”
“How does he get them pregnant?”
His gaze was unblinking. “He takes what he needs from captive people—usually Others—and uses needles and magic to get it to go where he needs it to go.”
She didn’t comprehend what he was telling her about the procedure. Not really. She got the feeling he didn’t, either. “How do you know so much about him?”
His voice was soft, dark, and smooth, and had it not been for the information he was giving her, she could have been lulled to sleep.
But his next words woke her up. Her heart began to pound with dread.
“You know his son,” he told her. “You’ve met him. You’ve felt sympathy for him. But he is not one to sympathize with. He will gnaw your bones as you scream, if he gets the chance.”
“Who the fuck is he?” she whispered.
“He’s the evil you know as Epik,” Will said. “Part of him is inside every monster those girls birth. And I know so much because I am also Orson Blackthorne’s son. I don’t contain the magic that lives inside my brother. My father attempted to make me special in other ways.” He smiled—she was sure of it.
“My brother hates me. He thinks what my father put me through is something to be jealous of. Orson gave me too much attention and Epik needed it all.”
She wanted to put her hand to her stake wounds, but resisted. “Why do you work for him?”
“I don’t. Now release me. I’ve told you everything. I’ll lie low and enjoy my relief while you prepare yourself for the trouble that lies ahead.”
Chapter Forty-Six
She knocked on Ellie’s bedroom door. “Ellie?”
Levi opened the door, surprising her. “We were talking,” he said, like he needed to reassure her.
And maybe he did.
She smiled. “I’m glad, baby.” She poked her head in. “We need food. As soon as we’ve eaten and gotten ready, we have monsters to hunt.”
“What happened?”
“I’ll tell you while we’re eating to save time. I have to shower and wait for…” She swallowed, then continued. “For the berserker and Owen. Elli
s, can you—”
“I’ll make sure all the crew is here in half an hour,” he said, “If I have to hunt down Strad and Owen myself.” His voice was tight with disapproval. “All this fighting.”
“It’s what we do,” Rune said. “You should be used to that by now.”
“We don’t fight each other,” he told her, coming to the door to stand beside Levi. “I’ll never get used to that.”
Levi slid away from Ellis.
“Are you okay?” she asked the twin.
He seemed a little less dark. A little less frustrated. “Better.”
“Good.” She turned to go, her mind already on the night ahead, when Levi grabbed her arm. She flinched. “Don’t grab me, Levi.”
He cleared his throat. “I want to thank you.”
“For what?”
“For being on my side no matter how fucked up I am. No matter what I do, good or bad, you’re on my side.”
“Yes. Remember that.” She reached up and cupped his face. “You’re never alone.”
“And you’re always loved,” Ellis added.
Levi didn’t respond to Ellie. He might have been talking to him, but he wasn’t forgiving him. Not yet.
Rune let go of Levi. “I’m glad the two of you are working shit out. You need each other.”
“I wanted to tell him what happened,” Levi said. “We’re not…” He swallowed his words. “I also need to explain to you, if you have a minute.”
She would never have refused him. “Yeah.”
“Gustav saw me in the cafeteria. I don’t know what he was thinking. Why he thought…”
He took a deep breath, then continued. “He sat down with me, told me he couldn’t get me out of his mind, and he grabbed me.” He stared at the wall over her head. “Even after what he’d done with Ellis. He slid his hand under the fucking table and grabbed my dick.”
Ellis closed his eyes.
“I went dark,” Levi continued. “I barely remember anything except…” He shrugged. “I wanted to kill him. I wanted to kill.” He clenched his fists and pressed his lips together when they trembled.
No one said anything for a long, tense moment.
Once upon a time Rune might have said, “Yeah, it’s a shit world.” And she would have walked out of the room.