by J. R. Ward
“Yup. I’ll be right there.”
When Phury hung up, he looked back and forth between them, his yellow eyes narrowing. “Okay, so they’ll take us the second we get there. I’ll have Fritz get the Mercedes warmed up, but I’m driving.”
“I’m sorry,” Layla said as she stared up at the great male. “I know I’ve let the Chosen and you down—but you did tell us to come to this side and…live.”
Phury put his hands on his hips and exhaled. As he shook his head, it was clear he wouldn’t have picked any of this for her. “Yeah, I said that. That I did.”
THIRTY-TWO
Oh, great unleashed power, Xcor thought as he regarded his soldiers, each of them armed and ready for a night of fighting. After twenty-four hours of recovery following that group feeding, they were chomping at the bit to get out and find their enemies—and he was ready to let release them from the warehouse’s underspace.
There was only one problem: Someone was walking the floor above.
As if on cue, footsteps traversed the wooden hatch over his head.
For the last half hour, they had tracked the progress of their uninvited visitors. One was heavy—a masculine form. The other was lighter—a feminine variety. There were no scents to catch, however; the underground level was hermetically sealed.
In all likelihood, it was just a pair of humans passing through—although why two non-vagrants would waste time wandering around such a decrepit structure on a cold night, he could not guess. Whoever they were, whatever the reason they came, however, he would have no problem defending his squatter’s rights, such as they were.
But there was no harm in waiting. If he could avoid slaughtering some useless humans here? It meant he and his soldiers could continue to use the space undisturbed.
No one said a thing as the walking about continued.
Voices mingled. Low and higher. Then a phone went off.
Xcor tracked the ringing and the conversation that ensued, walking in silence over to the other hatch where the speaker chose to stop. Going still, he listened hard, and caught one half of a very uninteresting conversation that gave nothing away as to the identity of the parties.
Not long thereafter, the unmistakable sounds of sex filtered down.
As Zypher chuckled softly, Xcor glared in the bastard’s direction to shut him up. Even though each of the trapdoors had been locked from below, one never knew what kind of trouble those rats without tails could bring to any situation.
He checked his watch. Waited for the moaning to stop. Motioned for his soldiers to stay put when it did.
Moving in silence, he proceeded over to the trapdoor in the far corner of the warehouse, the one that opened up into what must have been a supervisory office. Unlatching it, he palmed one of his guns, dematerialized out, and inhaled.
Not a human.
Well, there had been one here…but the other was something else.
Over in the corner, the outer door clapped shut and the lock was engaged.
Ghosting across the way, Xcor put his back against the warehouse’s sturdy brick wall and looked out of one section of the cloudy glass windows.
A pair of headlights flared down in front, in the shallow parking lot.
Dematerializing up and out of a busted pane, he shot forward to the roof of the warehouse across the street.
Well, wasn’t this interesting.
That was a Shadow down there, sitting behind the wheel of the BMW with the driver’s-side window down, and a human female leaning into the SUV.
Second time he’d run into one in Caldwell.
They were dangerous.
Getting out his phone, he called Throe’s number by finding the male’s picture in his contacts, and ordered his soldiers to go and fight. He would deal with this departure alone.
Down below, the Shadow reached out, pulled the woman into him by the neck, and kissed her. Then he put the vehicle in reverse and drove off without looking back.
Xcor shifted his position to keep up with the male, going from rooftop to rooftop, as the Shadow headed toward the club district on the surface roads that ran parallel to the river—
At first, the sensation in his body suggested a change in wind direction, the chilly gusts seeming to come up from behind him, as opposed to hitting him face-first. But then he thought…no. It was purely internal. Whatever ripples he felt were under his skin—
His Chosen was nearby.
His Chosen.
Immediately abandoning the Shadow’s trail, he peeled off and headed closer to the Hudson River. What was she doing down—
In a car. She was traveling in a car.
From what his instincts were telling him, she was going at a fast speed that was nonetheless trackable. So the only explanation was that she was on the Northway, going sixty or seventy miles an hour.
Proceeding back in the direction of the rows of warehouses, he focused on the signal he was picking up on. As it had been months since he’d fed from her, he was panicked to find that the connection created by her blood in his veins was fading—to the point that it was difficult to pinpoint the vehicle.
But then he locked in on a luxury sedan thanks to the fact that it slowed down and got off at the exit that funneled traffic onto the bridges. Dematerializing up onto the girders, he planted his combat boots on the pinnacle of one of the steel risers and waited for her to pass under him.
Shortly thereafter she did, and then continued onward, heading to the other half of the city on the opposite shore.
He stayed on her, maintaining a safe distance, although he wondered who he was fooling. If he could sense his female?
It would be the same for her.
But he would not abandon her trail.
As Qhuinn sat in the passenger seat of the Mercedes, his Heckler & Koch forty-five was held discreetly on his thigh, and his eyes flipped incessantly from the rearview mirror to the side window to the windshield. Next to him, Phury was behind the wheel, the Brother’s hands doing a ten-and-two so tightly it was like he was strangling somebody.
Man, there was too much goddamn shit unraveling right now.
Layla and the young. That whole Cessna incident. What Qhuinn had done to his own cousin the night before. And then…well, there was the Blay thing.
Oh, dear God in heaven…the Blay thing.
As Phury got off the exit that would take them onto the bridges, Qhuinn’s brain shifted from worrying about Layla to reviewing all kinds of pictures and sounds and…tastes from the daylight hours.
Intellectually, he knew what had happened between them hadn’t been a dream—and his body sure as hell remembered everything, like the sex had been a kind of branding on his flesh that changed the way he looked forever. And yet, as he went about dealing with the newest frickin’ drama, the too-short session seemed prehistoric, not less than a night old.
He feared it was a one-and-only.
Don’t you touch me like that.
Groaning, he rubbed at his head.
“It’s not about your eyes,” Phury said.
“I’m sorry?”
Phury glanced into the backseat. “Hey, how we doing?” he asked the females. When Layla and Doc Jane answered in some sort of affirmative, he nodded. “Listen, I’m going to shut the partition for a sec, ’kay? All good up here.”
The Brother didn’t give them a chance to answer one way or another, and Qhuinn stiffened in his seat as the opaque shield rose up, cutting the sedan into two halves. He wasn’t going to run from any kind of confrontation, but that didn’t mean he was looking forward to round two of this one—and if Phury was cutting the pair in the back off, it wasn’t going to be pretty.
“Your eyes are not the problem,” the Brother said.
“Excuse me?”
Phury looked over. “My being pissed off about this has got nothing to do with any defect. Layla’s in love with you—”
“No, she’s not.”
“See, you’re really pissing me off right now.”
“Ask her.”
“While she’s miscarrying your young?” the Brother snapped. “Yeah, I’ll do that.”
As Qhuinn winced, Phury continued. “See, here’s the thing with you. You like living on the edge and being all wild—frankly, I think it helps you come to terms with the bullshit your family put you through. If you iconoclast everything? Nothing can hurt you. And believe it or not, I don’t have a problem with that. You do you, and get through your nights and your days any way you can. But as soon as you break the heart of an innocent—especially if she’s under my care? That’s when you and I have an issue.”
Qhuinn looked out his window. First off, props to the big man over there. The idea that there was a judgment against Qhuinn based on his character instead of a genetic mutation he hadn’t volunteered for was a refreshing change. And hey, it wasn’t that he didn’t agree with the guy—at least not until about a year ago. Back before then? Hell, yeah, he’d been out of control on a lot of levels. But things had changed. He had changed.
Evidently, Blay becoming unavailable was the kind of boot in the balls he’d needed to finally grow the fuck up.
“I’m not like that anymore,” he said.
“So you are in fact prepared to mate her?” When he didn’t reply, Phury shrugged. “And there you go. Bottom line—I’m responsible for her, legally and morally. I may not be behaving like the Primale in some respects, but the rest of the job description I take pretty goddamn seriously. The idea that you got her into this mess makes me sick to my stomach, and I find it very hard to believe that she didn’t do this to please you—you said you both wanted a young? Are you sure that it wasn’t just you, and she did it because she wanted to make you happy? That’s very much her way.”
This was all presented as a rhetorical. And it wasn’t like Qhuinn could criticize the logic, even if it happened to be wrong. But as he dragged a hand through his hair, the fact that Layla was the one who had come to him was something he kept to himself. If Phury wanted to think it was all his fault, that was fine—he’d carry that load. Anything to take the pressure and attention off Layla.
Phury stared across the seats. “It wasn’t right, Qhuinn. That’s not what a real male does. And now look at the situation she’s in. You did this to her. You put her in the backseat of this car, and that’s just wrong.”
Qhuinn squeezed his eyes shut. Well, wasn’t that going to be banging around the inside of his head for the next hundred years. Give or take.
As they started over the bridge and left the twinkling lights of downtown behind, he kept his godforsaken yap shut, and Phury fell silent as well.
Then again, the Brother had said it all, hadn’t he.
THIRTY-THREE
Assail ended up further tracking his prey from behind the wheel of his Range Rover. Much cozier this way—and it wasn’t as if the woman’s location was an issue now: While he’d been waiting by the Audi for her to come off his property, he’d attached a tracking device to the underbelly of her side-view mirror.
His iPhone took care of the rest.
After she’d left his neighborhood in a rush—following his deliberate dematerialization from sight just to further destabilize her—she had crossed the river and headed around to the backside of the city, where the houses were small, packed in close to one another, and finished with aluminum siding.
As he trolled behind her, keeping at least two blocks between their vehicles, he regarded the brightly colored lights in the neighborhoods, the thousands of strands of twinklers strung among bushes and hanging from roof lips and boxing out windows and doorframes. But that wasn’t the half of it. Manger scenes placed prominently on tiny front lawns were spotlit, and there were also fat white snowmen with red scarves and blue pants that glowed from within.
In contrast to the seasonal accoutrements, he was willing to bet the Virgin Mary statues were permanent.
When her vehicle stopped and stayed that way, he closed in, parking four houses down and killing his lights. She didn’t get out of the car right away, and when she finally did, she wasn’t wearing the parka and tight ski pants she’d had on whilst spying on him. Instead, she had changed into a thick red sweater and a pair of jeans.
She’d let her hair down.
And the heavy, brunette weight reached below her shoulders, curling at the ends.
He growled in the darkness.
With quick, easy strides, she surmounted the four shallow concrete steps leading up to the modest entrance of the home. Propping open the screen door with its curlicue metalwork, she buttressed the thing with her hip, let herself in with a key, and closed things back up.
As a light came on downstairs, he watched her shape walk through the front room, the thin privacy drapes giving him only a sense of her movement, not any kind of clear view.
He thought of his own screens. It had taken him a long time to perfect that invention, and the Hudson River house had been perfect for piloting them. The barriers worked even better than he’d anticipated.
But she was smart enough to have picked up on the anomalies, and he wondered what the giveaway had been.
On the second floor, a light came on, as if someone who had been resting had stirred at her arrival.
His fangs pulsed. The idea that some human man was awaiting her in their mated bedroom made him want to establish his dominance—even though that didn’t make sense. After all, he was tracking her for his own self-protection, and nothing more.
Absolutely nothing more.
Just as his hand sought the car door handle, his phone rang. Good timing.
When he saw who it was, he frowned and put the cell up to his ear. “Two calls in such a short time. To what do I owe this honor?”
Rehvenge was not amused. “You didn’t get back to me.”
“Was I required to?”
“Watch yourself, boy.”
Assail’s eyes remained locked on the little house. He was curiously desperate to know what was going on inside. Was she heading up the stairs, undressing as she went?
Exactly who was she hiding her pursuits from? And she was in fact hiding them—otherwise, why change in the car prior to entering the house?
“Hello?”
“I appreciate the kind invitation,” he heard himself say.
“It’s not an invitation. You’re a goddamn member of the Council now that you’re in the New World.”
“No.”
“Excuse me?”
Assail thought back to the meeting at Elan’s house in the early winter, the one Rehvenge had not known about, the one to which the Band of Bastards had shown up and flexed their muscle. He also thought of the attempt on Wrath, the Blind King’s life—on Assail’s own property, for godsakes.
Too much drama for his liking.
With practiced ease, he launched into the same speech he had given Xcor’s faction. “I am a businessman by predilection and purpose. Although I respect both the current sovereignty and the Council’s power base, I cannot divert energy or time away from my enterprise. Not now, nor in the future.”
There was a stretch of silence. And then that deep, ever-so-evil voice came over the connection. “I’ve heard about your business.”
“Have you.”
“I was in it myself for a number of years.”
“So I understand.”
“I managed to do both.”
Assail smiled into the darkness. “Mayhap I am not as talented as you.”
“I’m going to make something perfectly clear. If you don’t show up at that meeting, I’m going to assume you’re playing on the wrong team.”
“By that very statement, you acknowledge there are two and they are opposed.”
“Take it as you will. But if you’re not with me and the king, you are my enemy and his.”
And that was precisely what Xcor had said. Then again, was there any other position in this growing war?
“The king was shot at your house, Assail.”
“So I rec
ollect,” he muttered dryly.
“I’d think you’d want to put to rest any notion of your involvement.”
“I already have. I told the Brothers that very night that I had nothing to do with it. I gave them the vehicle in which they escaped with the king. Why would I do any such thing if I were a traitor?”
“To save your own ass.”
“I am quite accomplished at that without the benefit of conversation, I assure you.”
“So what’s your schedule like?”
The light on the second story was extinguished, and he had to wonder what the woman was doing in the darkness—and with whom.
Of their own volition, his fangs bared themselves.
“Assail. You are seriously boring me with this hard-to-get bullshit.”
Assail put the Range Rover in gear. He was not going to sit upon the curb whilst whatever happened inside…happened. She was clearly home for the night, and staying there. Besides, his phone would alert him in the event that her car was once again set into motion.
As he rolled into the street and gathered speed, he spoke with clarity. “I am herewith resigning my position on the Council. My neutrality in this battle for the crown shall not be questioned by either side—”
“And you know who the players are, don’t you.”
“I shall make this as bald as I am able—I have no side here, Rehvenge. I do not know how to state this more plainly—and I will not be pulled into the war either by you and your king, or by any other. Do not attempt to push me, and know that the neutrality I present to you is exactly what I give to them.”
On that note, he had made a vow to Elan and Xcor not to reveal their identities, and he was going to keep it—not because he believed the group would e’er return the favor to him, but rather for the simple fact that, depending upon who won this tussle, a confidant to either side would be viewed either as a whistle-blower to be eradicated or a hero to be lauded. The problem was, one wouldn’t know which until the end, and he was uninterested in such a gamble.
“So you have been approached,” Rehv stated.
“I received a copy of the letter they sent in the spring of this year, yes.”