by J. R. Ward
Three, two . . . one—
Rhage kicked the door to the house open, bootlicking the bitch so hard his shitkicker left a dent in the metal panel.
The two lessers in the hall swung around, and Z didn’t give them a chance to respond. Leading with his SIG’s muzzle, he popped both right in the chest, the bullets sending the pair pinwheeling backward.
Rhage went on dagger duty, leaping forward, stabbing first one and then the other. As the flashes of white light and the sharp sounds faded, the brother leaped to his feet and froze like a boulder.
Neither Z nor Rhage moved. Using their senses, they sifted through the house’s silence, searching for anything that suggested further inhabitation.
The moan that bubbled up into all the quiet came from the back, and Z walked swiftly toward the sound, muzzle first. In the kitchen the cellar door was open, and he dematerialized to the left of it. A quick head jab and he took a look-see down the stairs. A bald lightbulb hung from a red-and-black wire at the bottom, but the pool of light showed nothing but stained floorboards.
Z willed the light off down below and Rhage provided cover from upstairs as Z bypassed the rickety steps and dematerialized into the darkness.
On the lower level he smelled fresh blood and heard the staccato click of rattling teeth from the left.
He willed the cellar light back on . . . and lost his breath.
A male civilian vampire was tied by the arms and legs to a table. He was naked and covered with bruises, and instead of looking at Z, he squeezed his eyes shut, as if he couldn’t bear to know what was coming at him.
For a moment Z couldn’t move. It was his own nightmare in living color, and reality blurred such that he wasn’t sure whether he was the one tied down or the guy who was coming to the rescue.
“Z?” Rhage said from above. “ Anything there?”
Z snapped to attention and cleared his throat. “I’m on it.”
As he approached the civilian, he said softly in the Old Language, “Be of ease.”
The vampire’s eyes flipped open and his head jerked up on his spine. There was a look of disbelief, then astonishment.
“Be of ease.” Z double-checked the corners of the basement, his eyesight penetrating the shadows, seeking signs of a security system. All he saw was a lot of concrete walls and wooden flooring, along with old piping and wiring snaking around the ceiling. No electric eyes or sparkling new power supplies.
They were alone and unsupervised, but God only knew for how long. “Rhage, still clear?” he shouted up the stairwell.
“Clear!”
“One civilian.” Z assessed the male’s body. He’d been beaten, and though he didn’t seem to have any open wounds, there was no telling whether he could dematerialize. “Call the boys in case we need transport.”
“Already have.”
Z took a step forward—
The floor broke apart beneath his feet, splintering right out from under him.
As gravity grabbed him hard with greedy hands and he went into a free fall, all he could think about was Bella. Depending on what lay at the bottom, this could be—
He landed on something that shattered on impact, shards of whatever it was slicing at his leathers and his hands before bouncing up to cut into his face and neck. He kept hold of his gun because he’d been trained to, and because the jolt of pain tightened him up from head to foot.
It took some deep breathing before he could reboot his brain and try to assess any damage.
As he sat up slowly, the chiming sound of bits of glass falling to a stone floor echoed around him. In the circle of light that fell from the cellar above, he saw that he was sitting in the midst of a brilliant shimmer of crystals. . . .
He’d fallen on a chandelier the size of a bed.
And his left boot was facing backward.
“Fuck. Me.”
His broken lower leg started to pound with pain, making him think that if only he hadn’t looked at the damn thing, maybe he would have kept on not feeling it.
Rhage’s face popped over the rim of the ragged hole above. “You okay?”
“Free the civilian.”
“Are you all right?”
“Leg’s shot.”
“How shot?”
“Well, I’m looking at the heel of my shitkicker and the front of my knee at the same time. And there’s a high probability I’m going to throw up.” He swallowed hard, trying to convince his gag reflex to pipe down. “Get the civilian loose and then we’ll see about getting me out of here. Oh, and stick to the rows of nails on the floor. Clearly the boards are weak.”
Rhage nodded, then disappeared. As massive footsteps above caused drifts of dust to powder down, Z went into his jacket and took out a Maglite. The thing was about the size of a finger but could throw a beam as strong as the headlight on a car.
As he panned the thing around, his leg problem bothered him a little less. “What . . . the hell?”
It was like being in an Egyptian tomb. The forty-by-forty-foot room was stocked with objects that gleamed, from oil paintings in gilt frames to silver candelabra to bejeweled statuary to whole mounds of sterling flatware. And across the way there were stacked boxes that probably contained jewelry, as well as a lineup of fifteen or so metal briefcases that must have had money in them.
This was a looting repository, filled with what had been taken during the raids this past summer. All of this shit had belonged to the glymera—he even recognized the faces in some of the portraits.
Lot of value down here. And what do you know. Over to the right, close to the packed dirt floor, a red light started blinking. His fall had triggered the alarm system.
Rhage’s head popped back into view. “Civilian is free, but unable to dematerialize. Qhuinn’s less than a half mile away. What the fuck are you on?”
“A chandelier, and that’s not the half of it. Listen, we’re going to have company. This place is wired and I tripped it.”
“There a staircase to you?”
Z wiped the pain sweat off his brow, the shit cold and greasy on the back of his bleeding hand. As he moved the flashlight around, he shook his head. “Can’t see one, but they had to have gotten the loot in here somehow, and sure as hell it wasn’t through that floor.”
Rhage’s head flipped up and the brother frowned. The sound of him unsheathing his dagger was a metal-on-metal gasp of anticipation. “That’s either Qhuinn or a slayer. Drag yourself out of the light while I sort this.”
Hollywood disappeared from the hole in the floor, his footsteps now whisper quiet.
Z holstered his gun because he had to, and cleared some of the crystal fragments out of the way. Palming his ass off the ground, he braced his good foot and spidered away into the darkness, heading for the security beacon. After backing his ass right up to the damn thing, as it was the only break he could find in the piles of art and silver, he settled against the wall.
When upstairs stayed way too quiet, he knew it wasn’t Qhuinn and the boys. And yet there wasn’t any fighting.
And then shit went from bad to worse.
The “wall” he was leaning against slid away and he fell flat on his back . . . at the feet of a pair of white-haired, pissed-off lessers.
FOUR
There were many great things about being a mom.
Holding your young in your arms and rocking them to sleep was definitely one of them. So was folding their little clothes. And feeding them. And watching them look up at you in happiness and wonder when they first came awake.
Bella repositioned herself in the nursery’s rocker, tucked the blanket under her daughter’s chin, and gave Nalla’s cheek a little stroke.
A not-so-hot corollary to momdom, however, was that the whole female-intuition thing was totally heightened.
Sitting in the safety of the Brotherhood’s mansion, Bella knew there was something wrong. Even though she was safe and sound, and in a nursery that was right out of an article entitled “The Perfect Family
Lives Here,” it was as if there were a draft going through the room that smelled like dead skunk. And Nalla had picked up on the vibe as well. The young was preternaturally quiet and tense, her yellow eyes focused on some middle ground as if she were waiting for a big noise to go off.
Of course, the problem with intuition, whether tied to the mother thing or not, was that it was a story with no words and no time line. Although it got you prepared for bad news, there were no nouns or verbs to go with the anxiety, no time/date stamp, either. So as you sat with the ambient dread clamped on the back of your neck like a cold, wet cloth, your mind got to rationalizing because that was the best anyone could do. Maybe it was just First Meal not sitting well. Maybe it was just free floating anxiety.
Maybe . . .
Hell, maybe what was churning in her gut wasn’t intuition at all. Maybe it was because she’d reached a decision that didn’t sit well.
Yeah, that was more likely the case. After having stewed and hoped and worried and tried to think her way out of the problems with Z, she had to be realistic. She’d confronted him . . . and there had been no real response from him.
Not I want you two to stay. Not even I’ll work on it.
All she’d gotten from him was that he was going out to fight.
Which was a reply of sorts, wasn’t it.
Looking around the nursery, she cataloged what she would have to pack up . . . not much, just an overnight bag for Nalla and a duffle for herself. She could get another diaper pail and crib and changing table set up easily enough—
Where would she go?
The easiest solution was one of her brother’s houses. Rehvenge had a number of them, and all she’d have to do was ask. Man, how ironic was that? After having fought to get away from him, now she was contemplating going back.
Not contemplating. Deciding.
Bella leaned to the side, took her cell phone out of the pocket of her jeans, and hit Rehv’s number.
After two rings a deep, familiar voice answered, “Bella?”
There was a roar of music and people talking in the background, the various sounds like a crowd competing for space.
“Hi.”
“Hello? Bella? Hold on, let me get into my office.” After a long, noisy pause, the din was cut off sharply. “Hey, how are you and your little miracle doing?”
“I need a place to stay.”
Total silence. Then her brother said, “Would that be for three or for two?”
“Two.”
Another long pause. “Do I need to kill that fool bastard?”
The cold, vicious tone scared her a little, reminding her that her beloved brother was not a male you wanted to screw with. “God, no.”
“Talk, sister mine. Tell me what’s going on.”
Death was a black parcel that came in a lot of different shapes and weights and sizes. Still, it was the kind of thing that when it hit your front doorstep, you knew the sender without checking the return address or even opening the thing up.
You just knew.
As Z back-flatted into the path of those two lessers, he knew that his FedEx-tinction package had arrived, and the only thing that went through his mind was that he wasn’t ready to take delivery.
Course, it wasn’t the kind of thing you could refuse to sign for.
Above him, cast in a dim glow from some kind of light, the lessers froze as if he were the last thing they expected to see. Then they took out their guns.
Z didn’t have a last word; he had a last image, one that totally eclipsed the double-barreled action that was at point-blank range of his head. In his mind he saw Bella and Nalla together in that rocker back in the nursery. It was not a picture from the night before when there had been Kleenexes and red-rimmed eyes and his twin looking grave. It was from a couple of weeks ago, when Bella had been staring down at the young in her arms with such tenderness and love. As if she’d sensed him in the doorway, she’d lifted her eyes, and for a moment the love that was in her face had wrapped around him as well.
The two gunshots rang out, and the weirdest thing was that the only pain he felt was the sting of the sound in his ears.
Two flopping thunchs followed, echoing around the stolen riches.
Z lifted his head. Qhuinn and Rhage were standing right behind where the lessers had been, their guns just lowering. Blay and John Matthew were with them, their guns drawn as well.
“You okay?” Rhage asked.
No. That would be one big fat hairy fuck-no. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m tight.”
“Blay, back into the tunnel with me,” Rhage said. “John and Qhuinn, you stay with him.”
Z let his head fall back and listened as two sets of shitkickers headed off in the distance. In the eerie silence that followed, a wave of nausea rolled over him and every inch of him started to shake, his hands flapping like flags in a brisk wind as he brought them up to feel his face.
John’s hand touched his arm and he jumped. “I’m okay . . . I’m okay. . . .”
John signed, We’re going to get you out of here.
“How—” He cleared his throat. “How do I know this is happening?”
I’m sorry? How do you know . . . ?
Zsadist’s fingers skipped along his forehead as he tried to prod where the slayers had aimed their guns. “How do I know this is real? And not a . . . How do I know I didn’t just die?”
John glanced over his shoulder at Qhuinn like he had no idea how to respond and was looking for backup. Then he pounded on his own chest with a solid thumping. I know I’m here.
Qhuinn leaned down and did the same, a heavy bass sound rising from his chest. “Me, too.”
Zsadist let his head fall back again, his body scrambling in its own skin so badly his feet tap-danced on the hard-packed floor. “I don’t know . . . if this is real . . . oh, shit . . .”
John stared at him as if measuring his increasing agitation and trying to figure out what the hell to do.
Abruptly the guy reached down to Z’s broken leg and gave his turned-around shitkicker a quick tug.
Z shot upright and barked, “Motherfucker!”
But it was good. The pain acted like a great broom sweep of his brain, clearing out the web of delusions and replacing them with a focused, pounding clarity. He was very much alive. He really was.
Right on the heels of that realization he thought of Bella. And Nalla.
He had to reach them.
Z shifted to the side to get his phone, but his vision went furry from what was doing with his leg. “Shit. Can you get me my cell? In my back pocket?”
John carefully rolled him over, took out the RAZR, and handed it to him.
“So you don’t think there’s any working this out?” Rehv said.
Bella shook her head in answer to her brother’s question, then remembered he couldn’t see her. “No, I don’t think so. At least not in the short term.”
“Shit. Well, I’m always here for you, you know that. You want to stay with mahmen?”