The weight of his stare fell on me, and his hands tightened on the steering wheel. “This was the bargain you struck.”
“This is me honoring it.” I shut my eyes. “Nowhere in my contract did it stipulate I had to be happy about it.”
Conversation died after that, and he turned the radio to a local news station.
The steady drone lulled me to sleep, and I was grateful for the temporary escape.
The Yazoo City clinic resembled every other doc-in-a-box outfit I had ever seen. The only difference being walk-ins weren’t welcome. You had to chat with someone on the intercom and get buzzed in. The lobby was empty of chairs. No family or friends were encouraged to wait. The flipside, I guess, was they must expect to shove their patients down the assembly line quickly if they didn’t rate seating either.
A fresh-faced boy who looked primed for his high school graduation manned the desk, and Wu aimed us in that direction.
“Mr. Wu,” he said, his voice a rolling baritone that made me do a double-take. “Ms. Boudreau.” His gray eyes sparked electric blue. “We’ve been expecting you.”
That made one of us. “How long will this take?”
“Four hours start to finish.” He smiled, and the effect was that of wax melting. “You’ll be in and out before you know it.”
A tremor set my pinky finger twitching, so I clenched my fist. “Yeah. Sure.”
“We aim to make every experience as painless and efficient as possible, so you’ll anticipate your return.”
Uh huh. All girls just loved having their bits fondled by strangers and devices implanted in their bodies.
“Okay, I can’t even pretend to bob my head in agreement with that. I hate doctors. I hate hospitals. I hate strangers touching me. Nothing you do will minimize or change that. Let’s not pretend otherwise.” I let a shudder roll through my shoulders. “Less talking and more whatever-the-hell you’re doing to me.”
The boy’s expression didn’t shift. I wasn’t sure it was malleable enough to form three different expressions in the span of five minutes. “Follow me, please.”
He waited for me to step up beside him before leading me toward a set of double doors.
Wu offered no words of encouragement. Just leaned a hip against the desk and ducked his head to avoid making eye contact with me.
Thanks, partner.
Rixton would have at least cracked a joke about me getting felt up without dinner first. Scratch that. He never would have brought me here. No matter how many rules it broke, he would have kept me from this sterile building with its sterile walls and sterile floors and—I cut my eyes to the boy—its sterile employees.
By some miracle, if someone had twisted his arm to get us this far, he would have come with me to stand watch outside the door. One whimper of pain, and he would have shielded his eyes with one hand while he knocked the doctor out cold with his other fist.
That’s what partners did for each other. We looked out for one another.
“Please, enter.” The boy unlocked a door. Unlocked. The room was a self-contained chamber with no doorknob or window or way out except through the opening he was about to close behind me. “The doctor will be right in.” He indicated a stack of white and blue fabriclike paper. “Leave your clothes on the chair. The top goes on like a vest. The blanket is for your lap.”
The snick of the lock clicking into place behind him spiraled dizziness through me.
I can do this. It’s an exam. I’ve had a billion. What’s one more? Nothing.
These people weren’t like the human doctors. They were well aware of who and what I was, so they ought to get the job done with minimal fanfare. As long as no one started bowing and scraping while my pants were off, I would be fine.
I stripped fast and shoved my arms into the paper top, hating how exposed my breasts felt as I reclined on the frigid table. I flicked open the paper sheet and tucked it in around me, which was pointless when the doctor would rip it aside when they got ready to ogle my wares.
“I really, really wish Maggie were here,” I said to the empty room.
A static click made me wonder if I wasn’t being monitored. I didn’t have long to question if I had imagined the noise. A door opened in the rear of the room, admitting an older woman with silver hair and a pleasant smile. They sure did love their seamless doors around here. Maybe it was a charun thing. Or an NSB thing? Either way, it was damn creepy to never know which way to expect company to arrive.
“Ms. Boudreau, I’m Dr. Lachlan. I’ve been assigned to your case, so we’ll be working together from here on out.” She pulled a rolling stool to the end of the table and sat, giving her a prime view of my real estate. “I hope that’s all right with you.”
None of this was okay, but I didn’t exactly have a say in the matter. “Sure.”
“Today I’m going to conduct a general exam,” she began. “That means I’ll—”
“Been there, done that, got the pap smear.” I had to force my thighs to relax when her icy fingers touched my skin. “What else will you be doing? I assume I’m here for more than a general wellness screening?”
“I’ll be inserting an IUD prototype we’ve had luck using on charun with similar biological traits.” She got down to business, and I stared at the ceiling, wishing I was anywhere other than here. “The process takes less than five minutes.” I jolted at a sharp pinch. “Your sister has responded well to treatment. I don’t foresee any complications for you.”
Selling Famine out to the NSB might have bothered me had she not been wearing my uncle the last time I saw her. As far as I was concerned, she deserved everything she got. And if they tested all their doodads out on her before implanting them in me, all the better.
The rest of the visit passed with about as much indignity as you might expect. It wasn’t horrible, but it wasn’t great either. Maybe I ought to be grateful that if Cole and I ever got past first base, or even to first base, I didn’t have to worry about making our duo a trio, but it was hard to think sexy thoughts with a speculum cranking my downstairs open.
“We’re all done here.” Dr. Lachlan patted my knee. “You can clean up and dress. A nurse will be in shortly to draw blood and take a tissue sample.”
“Great.” I snapped my thighs together. “Sounds like fun.”
Once I was alone, I cleaned up and dressed. Walking felt . . . weird. It’s not like the IUD was big or anything. She had shown the T-shaped device to me before she got started, and it was about two inches or so. The sting at insertion wasn’t a picnic, but that was no reason for me to feel like I ought to be waddling.
Raised voices distracted me from being utterly ridiculous, and I strained my ears to hear.
“Unlock this door,” Wu snapped on the other side. “We have to leave.”
“Her exam isn’t complete,” the boy soothed. “We’re not allowed to open the door until—”
The hinges made an unholy groan, and the door started buckling under the onslaught of his fists.
“What the actual hell?” I muttered while pulling on the rest of my clothes.
“Sir, you must stop this.”
“Open the door.”
“I’m not authorized to—”
Ready to rock and roll, I braced for when the door came down. God only knows what lit a fire under Wu, but if he was coming in hot, I had to be prepared to reach for the cold.
The slab of metal flew open and smacked against the far wall. Wu stood in the doorway, panting from exertion. I had never seen him so disheveled. Not even during the raid on War’s nests.
“What’s wrong?” I searched the hall behind him, but it stood empty.
“We have to get you out of here.” He stormed in, clasped my hand, and hauled me after him. “Hurry.”
“Gotta admit,” I panted, “you’re scaring me here. Who are we running from?”
Wu didn’t slow down as he said, “My father.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
I had known for a while tha
t Wu had daddy issues. I assumed, from the way he spoke of his father, that they were estranged. Yet somehow, in my head, that hadn’t translated into us breaking into a sprint to avoid detection. Don’t get me wrong. I had seen Maggie pull similar stunts when she snuck boys home or that time she smoked pot in her bedroom and didn’t want her dad—whose stash she had pilfered—to smell how she had spent her afternoon. But Wu was a grown-ass man, and charun were frankly terrified of him. How much worse must his father be that he would flee from the reach of the man’s shadow?
“We’re going out the back.” Wu set a brutal pace. “If we get separated, meet me back at the hotel.”
“Is all this necessary?” A stitch was gathering in my side, and my elbow ached from the pressure of him dragging me in his wake. “Can’t you guys hug it out?”
“War is an echo, a repetition of her title that’s forged her into the exact same weapon that’s failed to cut down Earth in all her previous incarnations. She is unoriginal. Clever, yes. Brutal, certainly. Deadly, of course. But she’s unimaginative. She might have a strategic mind, but the plays in her book have been used until most players on the other teams spot them coming from a mile away.”
Funny thing. No one had given me a copy of the playbook. That might come in handy. Clearly, there were cadre manuals no one was forwarding to my email. “Okay . . . ”
“My father is an original. They call him Alpha. He’s a prime, one of the first of our species. The first, if you ask him. And who can contradict what no one else was alive to argue? He’s the closest thing this world will ever see to a god, and he’s on his way here to check on his wayward son. He wants to meet my partner. Any interest I show to a particular person marks them as a target.”
That might have been nice to know before he assigned himself as my partner.
No wonder the guards at The Hole treated him like a god. He was the son of a self-proclaimed one.
“The NSB has a god on the payroll?” They had recruited one-quarter of the apocalypse. That took balls. But a god? Why recruit from both ends of the spectrum? Had Daddy Wu refused to smite on command and gotten himself dethroned? “If that’s true, then why do they need so many charun?”
Why did they need me?
“Have you ever wondered what happens when you deify someone?” We hit a service hallway, and he powerwalked toward the emergency exit. “Tell them they’re a god often enough, and somewhere along the line, they start believing it too.”
“Okay, so your dad has a big ego.” Like father, like son. “Are you ashamed of me?” I laughed at the very idea when he’d been parading me around like a frickin’ trophy. “Afraid to take me home to meet the ’rents?”
We burst outside into an employee parking lot hemmed in by trees. A limo idled a dozen feet away from us, and a chauffeur stood at parade rest beside the rear passenger side door. Three beefy guys dressed to the nines stood around the car until each point had a body guarding the vehicle. They all snapped to rigid attention when they spotted us.
“This is a minor guard.” Wu sounded relieved. “Father is still inside.” He ignored the lot, the road, the cars, all of it. He led me straight into the woods. “We don’t have long.”
“We’re abandoning the car?” I glanced over my shoulder, expecting pursuit, but the men stood where we had left them. “Where are we going?”
“Luce.” Wu stopped on a dime, whirled and clamped his hands on my upper arms. “Why do men embrace gods?”
“They need to believe in a higher power, that everything happens for a reason. That death isn’t the end.”
“They also need a figurehead to receive their prayers.” His hard gaze drilled into mine. “What do you think Earth prayed for the first time the cadre appeared?”
“Salvation.”
“And who do you think delivered them from evil?”
“Your father,” I said, stunned.
“We don’t resemble angels,” he spat. “Angels resemble us.”
“Shit.” A cold rush of understanding trickled down my spine. “He’ll kill me.”
That’s what good guys—or guys convinced they were good—did to those they viewed as the bad guys.
“You’re cadre.” His grip eased. “He would only see a demon from a mythology he helped create.”
“What the hell, Wu?” I broke his grip and stumbled back. “This was not in the recruitment brochure.”
“My father sleeps for decades at a time, and most charun will never hear of him, let alone see him.” He recaptured my wrist in a brutal grip then dragged me deeper into the forest. “He roused the day you were found.”
“What I’m hearing is you knew exactly what was going to happen and chose not to warn me—” a stab of true fear pierced my heart, “—or my coterie. Are they safe?”
“For now.” He skidded to a stop in a clearing and started stripping down to his waist. “We’re flying out. We need to be miles from here before he turns his eyes this way.”
“Make with the wings.” I snapped my fingers. “Let’s go, go, go.”
A crooked smile made his lopsided mouth more inviting than it had been all day. “I thought you were afraid of flying.”
“I’m more afraid of dying and leaving the people I love behind to fend for themselves.” I walked right up to him. “You and I are going to have a talk. You owe me answers—real answers—and I intend to collect.”
“You’re right.” He bowed his head. “I thought I had more time. Father hasn’t been lucid until recently, the last year or so. He’s still not clear-headed. That makes him more dangerous, not less. He won’t wake fully until Death breaches.”
When he opened his arms, I leapt into them. I linked my hands behind his neck, wrapped my legs around his waist, and kicked him in the butt with my heel. “Giddy-up.”
Wu flexed his shoulders, and three sets of golden-brown wings burst into existence. He wasted precious seconds stretching, grimacing as if the confinement wore on him, before gripping me tight and rocketing us into the sky. I leaned closer, tucking my face against his throat to keep the wind from tearing at me.
“I am sorry,” he exhaled into my ear. “For all of this, but especially for him.”
The raw tone from him made me squirm after our moment in Greenville.
“I get you’re damaged goods. We all are.” I was starting to think everyone, human or charun, carried baggage waiting to burst at the seams. “But the only way this partnership works is if we lean on each other and not pull apart at the first sign of trouble.”
“Wisdom learned from your time with Rixton?”
“Yes.” I grimaced to remember how we used to fight. “We were a bad match to start. He was grieving for his previous partner, and I was a rookie. We didn’t try hard to find common ground. We didn’t work together so much as each of us marched toward our own resolution.” Remembering the moment we clicked, though. That made me ache. “Once his wife stepped in and smacked our heads together, we got over the posturing and backbiting. We became a unit. We shared our work and our lives. He was . . . one of my best friends.”
“I’m not human, and neither are you. We can’t have the simple relationship you enjoyed. Ours will always be more complex.”
“The sexual tension thing?” As awkward as it was to admit, Wu and I sparked. Just not as brightly as Cole and I did. I never had that with Rixton. I met him as a married man, and the side of my brain that measured compatibility with guys switched off after meeting Sherry. No sane woman could see them together and think she stood a chance. And he was such a huge pain in my ass, I never got around to checking out his. “I can keep it in my pants if you can keep it in yours.”
“Just not around Cole,” he said, and he didn’t sound bitter just . . . resigned.
“No,” I answered softly, hoping I hadn’t hurt him. “Not around Cole.”
That mountain was in danger of being climbed the minute its ice thawed enough for me to make the trek.
Wu lapsed into silence, his focus
on the journey ahead, but it grew too deafening for me.
There was too much on my mind for me to hold my tongue. “Where are we going?”
“A haven where Father would never think to look,” he said with a hint of his trademark smugness returning. “He doesn’t know it exists.”
A place Wu had taken great pains to hide, then. “Not omniscient then?”
“Much to his eternal regret, no.”
“Excellent.” I squinted up at him. “Running from an all-seeing god would have sucked.”
Quivers raced in trembling lines along the insides of my thighs, and my neck was cramping when our forward motion finally slowed. Lifting my head, about to ask if we had arrived, I clamped my mouth shut over a scream as the familiar sensation of freefall caused my stomach to levitate above my head. The fear of plummeting thousands of feet to splatter like a Rorschach for him to interpret later had me tightening my legs around Wu’s torso until he grunted, and my arms around his throat until he coughed.
Impact jarred us both, and he eased his hands over my hips to grip my waist and set me on the ground. Well, he made a valiant effort. I hung around his neck like a pendant while he fumbled with the clasp, namely my hands, which were woven into an ironclad knot at his nape.
After he untangled us, I stood there, panting like I was the one who had flown for over an hour.
“That was not as bad as I—” Throat convulsions sneak-attacked me, and I staggered away to be sick on a square of roofing tiles that didn’t deserve what I did to them. Panting through the dry heaves, I angled my head toward Wu, who had tucked away his wings. “Please tell me you’re packing breath mints.”
Wu pressed two sticks of peppermint gum into my palm, and I popped them in my mouth. “Thanks.”
Footsteps brought my head up, and I scanned the area for their source. We had landed on a flat expanse of industrial building. A stairwell gave the wide, open space its only definition, and a slim woman with flame-orange hair and fire-bright eyes waited for us there.
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