by Reinke, Sara
“Your turn, mišiću,” Nikolić told him, as with a grunt, he stood, getting out of the car again. Julien glanced at him, found the son of a bitch smiling—the proverbial cat that just fucked the canary in the ass. Holding out his hand, Nikolić flapped it in beckon. “Your guns.”
With a scowl, Julien spun the Nighthawks in each hand, presenting them, butt-first. Nikolić took one, and when someone plucked the other from his opposite hand, he turned and—not to his complete surprise—found Anna holding it now, the business end pointing in his direction.
“I should’ve guessed,” he muttered, shaking his head. “No goddamn good deed goes unpunished.”
She smiled and dropped him a wink, then shoved the length of a serrated hunting blade—three and a half inches, by Julien’s perfunctory glance and guess—into his chest. The knife sank to the hilt between his right fourth and fifth ribs, and then she wrenched it loose again with a grunt. Julien stumbled back a step, blinking stupidly at the circumference of blood—bright red as it burst from his lung—that began to spread against the fabric of his shirt. It didn’t hurt—not yet, but he tasted blood in the back of his mouth. His knees failed him and he sank to the ground, moving as if in slow motion, and knew pain was about to be the least of his worries.
CHAPTER THREE
“I’ll meet you in Karen’s suite. Give me half an hour.” Even in his sleep, Mason couldn’t escape the ghosts from his past. He dreamed of the night his downward spiral into despair had begun—the night of Jean Luc Davenant’s attack. He’d been in Las Vegas with Tristan and Karen under the pretense of protecting Karen—because that had been the only way to get Tristan to agree to accompany them. He could be goddamn stubborn when he set his mind and heart to something, no different than any other Morin male.
He dreamed of their last night together, of the dinner they’d shared. Despite the circumstances of their visit, the meal had been relaxed and fun, one of the last truly good, enjoyable times in Mason’s recent memory. But all of that had abruptly changed.
“He’s here,” Tristan had said, returning, ashen and upset, from a trip to the men’s room. “I don’t know how he found us, but he did. I heard him in my head. He knows my goddamn name, Mason.”
Mason hadn’t needed to ask who he meant; who he was. He’d known. “I’ll stop off at my room first and give Michel a call,” he’d told the young lovers as they’d parted company with him outside of their hotel restaurant. He hadn’t told them the real target of Jean Luc’s hunt—his true prey—wasn’t Karen at all, but Tristan. At the time, he’d thought his silence would keep his younger brother safe. But instead, it had only made thing worse—much worse—for them all.
While Tristan and Karen had returned to her suite, Mason had gone to his room, as he’d told them. In his dream, he relived these moments, oblivious of their outcome, his memories of that night swept away that he might suffer through them fresh and new, all over again. He rode the elevator up to the penthouse suites. Though the inner door was brushed chrome, the outer wall was nothing but glass, awarding a stunning view of the hotel lobby and indoor tropical gardens as it ascended. It also gave passengers a glimpse of those traveling in the adjacent glass cars, and as Mason’s had stopped to let passengers off on a lower level, he watched the neighboring one continue upward.
He felt a strange sensation as it passed, prickling and peculiar, like a soft breath blown against the back of his ear. It was a feeling he’d get whenever another of the Brethren were near. Up to that moment, he’d been distracted trying to send a text to Michel. More than just the revelation of Jean Luc’s presence, the fact that Tristan said he’d addressed him telepathically by name alarmed Mason. He and his father had worked hard to keep the truth of Tristan’s birthright a closely held and well-guarded secret, and at that time, Tristan had no idea Michel was his father, or Mason, his brother.
Has Jean Luc figured it out somehow? Mason worried with a frown, gazing distantly at the glass elevator car beside them. As he felt that tingling sensation that meant another Brethren was close, his eyes widened. And as the elevator car passed his own, and he caught a fleeting glimpse of a man standing among the crowd of passengers inside, they had widened all the more.
Julien?
Dark hair, blue eyes, the hint of a wry smile—Mason pushed his way to the glass wall and craned his head to try and see, but it was too late. The man was gone, the elevator car rising faster than Mason’s, ascending beyond his view.
Was that was Julien? he thought, his heart racing in a sudden mix of excitement and alarm. It had been so long since he’d last seen Julien—two hundred years—and even though there could only be one reason he was in Las Vegas that didn’t stop the flood of pain-filled, heartsick emotions from flooding through Mason’s heart and mind.
Had Julien tracked them to Las Vegas—had it been Julien speaking in Tristan’s mind, not Jean Luc? Unlike some of Julien’s other siblings, like his older half-brother Allistair with whom Julien only shared a common father, Julien and Jean Luc had the same mother, too. They’d favored each other in their youths, Mason recalled, enough so that they might be easily mistaken.
Especially in the forest after dark, he thought, because that was where Naima and Michel said they’d first encountered one of the Davenants scouting around: the Morin family compound in Lake Tahoe.
If it was Julien, if he’s here to kill Tristan, then I can stop him, he thought—foolish naiveté on his part, maybe, especially considering how things had ended between him and Julien, But even so, he’ll listen to me, Mason thought. I know he will. I can stop this—I can stop him.
At the next stop, the two elevator cars were side by side, but Mason still couldn’t get a good look at the man he thought might be Julien. Just as the doors to his car began to close, he caught a glimpse—a dark-haired man in a dark suit stepping off the adjacent elevator. Again, he cut a glance in Mason’s direction as if he realized he’d been spotted, and he dropped a wink. Mason still couldn’t be sure; the lighting was dim, and he was too far away for certainty, but God, it looked like Julien. Enough so that he opened his mind even as with his voice, he called out for someone to hold the elevator doors.
Julien! Julien—wait!
With a grunt, he shouldered his way to the front of the elevator and out the doors. As they slid shut behind him, he looked frantically around for Julien, but saw only a half-dozen or so people milling about in sport coats and cocktail dresses, clearly headed out for a night on the town. Just when Mason was beginning to wonder if somehow Julien had gotten back onto the elevator without him noticing, he saw the same dark-haired man in a dark suit walking briskly down one of the nearby corridors. He had nearly reached the end of it, a doorway to the emergency stairwell.
“Julien!” Mason broke into a sprint, hurrying after him. Again, he called out in his mind; again, he received no response. He couldn’t even sense the man’s peripheral thoughts, his mind was so well shielded psionically. Julien, please wait! It’s me—Mason!
The man pushed the stairwell door open and ducked through. Mason continued to give chase; by the time he reached the stairwell, he could hear the patter of footsteps above him as the man headed toward the roof. Taking the steps two and three at a stride, Mason raced after him.
I know you can hear me, he thought, his brows narrowing. Goddamn it, Julien, I can’t let you do this. I can’t let you hurt my brother.
But did he really have a hope in hell of stopping Julien? He was a surgeon, for Christ’s sake—a doctor, not a fighter, He’d spent most of his life trying to protect his hands, not actively seek out ways to batter them. He didn’t have a weapon, but even if he did, could he bring himself to use it against Julien?
He has to listen. That’s the only hope I’ve got. No matter what’s happened in the past, or what came between us, he’ll listen to me. He has to.
Julien, please, he called out again. From several flights above him, he heard a loud, heavy sound as the roof-access door opened, then clos
ed. Winded, Mason followed the sound to the top of the stairwell, and a steel door with the words: Roof Access, Authorized Personnel ONLY emblazoned in bright red painted letters.
“Julien?” Mason pushed the door open and stepped out onto the roof.
“Surprise, faggot,” he heard a voice seethe almost directly in his ear from behind. Before he could turn around in surprise, something struck him hard enough in the back of the head to leave him reeling. With a sharp cry, Mason crashed to the ground. He tried to lift his head and tasted blood in his mouth from where he’d cracked his chin hard enough to jar his back teeth together into the meat of his tongue. His vision swam in and out of dizzy focus as a figure stepped over him from behind—a dark-haired man wearing a dark suit.
It wasn’t Julien, Mason realized; how could he have been so stupid? Even though their resemblance to each other was in many ways remarkable, there was no mistaking Julien’s older brother, Jean Luc, as he towered above him on the rooftop.
There was something in his hands, some kind of long, stout pipe, and when Jean Luc swung it, he aimed for Mason’s head again. This time, the brutal impact knocked him out cold.
* * *
His cell phone rang, the ringer set loudly enough to startle Mason from the depths of post-drunken unconsciousness, and the nightmare that had left him writhing restlessly in bed. Half-expecting to be on the rooftop of the Trésor Resort in Las Vegas, his eyes widened with bleary surprise to instead find himself in a well-appointed hotel room—one that seemed only vaguely familiar.
The phone screeched again and with a groan, he reached out, eyes still closed, pawing blindly for it. He groped along the bedside table, fumbling with the base of a lamp, and the console of an alarm clock, but still couldn’t find it.
“Goddamn it,” he grumbled, and it felt for all of the world like his eyelids peeled back against the resistance of half-dried Superglue, which in fact turned out to be the leftover remnants of eyeliner and mascara he’d forgotten that he was wearing.
“Goddamn it,” he muttered, because just as he looked down and saw his phone on the floor beside the bed, it stopped ringing. Clapping the heel of his hand to his forehead, he closed his eyes and waited for the ringing in his skull that had taken its place to subside.
What the hell happened last night? he wondered because at the moment, his mind still felt half-submerged in groggy shadows, his memories distant, dream-like, and disturbing. He glanced down at himself, surprised to see he was wearing some kind of sequin-covered bikini bottoms—a thong, if the pain tearing through his ass crack as he moved was any indication.
He was not surprised, however, to roll over and find himself alone in the bed. Clearly he’d wimped out on the previous evening’s festivities, but for Jaime, the party had kept going.
Typical, he thought, as he pushed himself clumsily into a seated position. The room did a lazy twirl as he shifted his weight, and he closed his eyes again, hanging his head, waiting for the sensation of vertigo to pass. Orthostatic hypotension—a temporary drop in blood pressure accompanying an abrupt change in position from horizontal to vertical, the clinical part of his mind said, coming back online after apparently having taken the night off.
“Yes, thank you for that,” Mason grumbled, forking his fingers through his hair and grimacing at the stiff, tacky texture left by too much styling wax. “Could’ve used your help last night with some friendly reminders about alcohol’s effects on my liver.” He glanced at the gold gloves and matching boots he wore and grimaced. Not to mention my fashion sense. And pride.
One by one, he pulled, kicked, or tore off the gaudy remnants of his costume. He thought the pasties were the worst, leaving his nipples tender and nearly peeled raw, until he tried to wrestle the bobby pins he’d used to hold the headdress in place from out of his tangled hair. The trashcan by the bed smelled distinctly of vomit, and considering the way his mouth both tasted and felt, Mason was willing to bet it was his. As he stood, hooking his thumbs beneath the slinky side straps of his G-string, his phone began to ring again.
He frowned, expecting it to be Jaime calling with some bullshit excuse about where he’d been all night. And probably asking for cash, too, he thought. Thank Christ after the last trip they’d taken together—when Jaime had managed to run up his credit card total to the theme of $7,500, all without leaving the hotel—he’d made sure his bank would automatically require photo identification for all point-of-sale purchases from that point on. That hadn’t stopped Jaime, though. Hell, it hadn’t even slowed him down for long.
“Why do you stay with him?” Tristan had asked before he’d left for Miami. He’d still been too weak to get out of bed on his own, but had felt strong enough that day to sit up in a wheelchair for a while. Mason had taken him out on the patio of the medical center in Lake Tahoe and watched with a forlorn sort of fondness at the simple pleasure Tristan took in closing his eyes and enjoying the breeze against his face.
“I don’t know,” Mason had answered honestly, drawing his younger brother’s gaze. The heavy shadows ringing Tristan’s eyes, the gauntness in his cheeks, the frailty in his face—it all broke Mason’s heart. Tristan had nearly died from osteomyelitis, a bone infection he’d suffered in the wake of injuries sustained when Jean Luc Davenant had attacked them in Las Vegas. That it had almost overwhelmed even Tristan’s Brethren ability to heal spoke volumes as to how serious and severe the infection had been.
And the bitch of it all—it was my fault, Mason thought, picking his phone up off the hotel room floor. His frown deepened, because it wasn’t Jaime calling after all. The number on his caller I.D. was wholly unfamiliar to him. He hit the ‘ignore’ option to silence the ringer without taking the call, then tossed the phone atop the rumpled bedspread.
Mason shuffled into the bathroom, but left the bright lights above the sink turned off, knowing the sudden glare would only stab through his head like knifepoints. He glanced at himself in the mirror and felt the crushing weight of shame. His bright red lipstick was now down his chin and across his cheek. He looked like a raccoon, his eye makeup had smeared so much. His hair stood out in haphazard, crazy spikes and tufts. Now the events of the previous night started to come back to him; he’d lost track of things in a booze-induced haze sometime shortly after dinner, but recalled bits and pieces up to the point where Jaime had turned to him with a shit-eating grin plastered on his face and cried, “Come on! It’s the cattle call! Let’s get our asses onstage!”
Did I do that? he thought—even though he knew damn well that he had. He usually wound up doing things that went completely against his nature—and his common sense—whenever Jaime was around.
“He’s not good for you,” Tristan had told him that day on the patio. He had reached for Mason, lifting his arm weakly because Jean Luc had shattered the bones so brutally, he’d needed steel rods to put them back together again. Curling his fingers around Mason’s, he’d looked up and smiled. “Just be careful, okay?”
Despite everything he’d been through—everything he was still going through—he’d been more worried about Mason’s unhappy, unhealthy relationship than anything else, and Mason had been touched by this, moved nearly to tears. Michel was gone now. Julien had been gone for more years than he could count, lost to him, as had Lisette, Edith, and others he’d loved only to lose in one way or another. Tristan was all he had left, the only person in the world with whom he felt a genuine bond. He’d already cost Tristan so much, so dearly; he couldn’t risk letting anything ever happen to him—ever hurt him—again.
Not ever, Mason thought, looking at himself in the mirror. He drew the tip of his tongue first along his upper palate, then across the pointed tips of his canine teeth. Only they weren’t his anymore, not his real ones; he wore a removable bridge with porcelain-capped prosthetic canines. Jean Luc had ripped out his fangs with a pair of pliers, the culmination of hours spent brutally beating him.
With a flick of his tongue, Mason loosened the bridge plate. Leaning forwa
rd, he spit it out against his palm. When he looked into the mirror again, he could see the gaps now when he smiled, the empty sockets in his gum-line. His natural fangs, like all Brethren, had been more than four inches in length when fully extended. When not in use for feeding, they had lain in recessed grooves in his upper jaw, with only the distal-most points protruding from his gums—making them resemble a human’s canine teeth. The process of pulling them out, of Jean Luc forcibly wrenching them from these deep, natural sockets, had been agonizing. And while that had, in part, been Jean Luc’s intention, his purpose had been far crueler.
He had, in essence, castrated Mason as a vampire.
Mason had another set of prosthetics, elongated fangs he could wear if he chose. But he couldn’t feed with them; they were for show, a sad and pathetic attempt for him to still feel physically whole, even though he was not. The humiliation that had begun at Jean Luc’s hands, he realized, would continue—would remain with him, his reflection as a reminder—for the rest of his life.
Mason’s brows furrowed and, with a hoarse cry, he rammed his fist into the glass, sending splinters scattering across the marble sink vanity.
* * *
He stayed in the shower for almost a full hour, washing the remnants of cosmetics and glitter from his skin down the drain.
Wish I could wash the last six months of my life away as easily…make it like it all never happened, he thought, shutting off the water and watching the last of it swirl down the chrome-plated drain at his feet. As he stepped out of the tub, he heard his cell phone ringing from the other room. Hooking a towel from a nearby rack, he wrapped it loosely around his waist as he padded, dripping, back toward the bed.
That same number again, he thought with a scowl, lifting the phone in hand. He could see that he’d missed several calls from this same number—six, in fact, since three o’clock that morning. His frown deepening, he drew the phone to his ear, answering the line.