by J. R. Ward
“Plastic surgery is expensive,” she murmured with a laugh. “But the shit works.”
“Clearly.” He nodded down at her black, sparkling outfit. “And is this ensemble Chanel or am I crazy?”
“It is! How’d you know?”
Like anything else came with all those interlocking C’s? he thought.
They chatted about the past during the walk back by the garage where he’d left the R8, and he was surprised how good it was to plug into those memories of growing up—and by that, he didn’t mean the shit in his household, with his father hating him and his mom being flinchy about everything. He meant the kids stuff. The friend stuff. The school stuff. Not all of his childhood had been bad.
At least not until Janie was abducted and murdered and raped. In that order.
“So you’re not married?” he said.
“Nah. There was someone, but it didn’t work out.”
“I can’t imagine any man walking away from you.”
“You say the sweetest things.” Mel gave his arm a squeeze, but then cursed under her breath. “He found someone he liked better.”
“Hard to imagine.”
“She was nothing like me.”
“Well, his loss.” He looked over. “Was it recent?”
“Yeah. Very. I’m just getting my feet back under me again. I feel kinda lost.”
As they came up to the club, he took Mel right to the head of the wait line. When the bouncer looked her up and down, it was clear that she was going to get in without a problem, but just to be sure, he made a little arrangement with the guy’s gray matter.
“You sure you can’t come in with me?” she asked.
“No, but thanks.”
“Let me give you my number. Tell me yours so I can text it.”
“You know, it’s been nice catching up, but I’m going to leave you off here.”
He debated whether to go into her mind and clear the memories, but he found himself not wanting to be a ghost to everyone from his past.
“I won’t tell her,” Mel murmured. “Joyce, that is. It’s pretty clear you don’t want to have contact with her. Or you woulda.”
“It doesn’t matter. You do you. Goodbye, Mel—”
“Maybe we’ll run into each other again.”
“Maybe.” She seemed rootless and floundering as she stared up at him from out of her beautiful face, and he felt bad for her. “True love’s out there, okay? I promise you. Hell, I never thought I could find it, and if the shit can happen for a loser like me? You’re going to be a piece of cake.”
When she launched herself at him and gave him a hug, he lightly patted her shoulder blades and then stepped back.
“Go on,” he said. “See if your new man’s waiting for you in there.”
“What if I’ve already found him.”
Butch frowned. But before he could say something on that, she gave him a wave and strutted into the strobe-lit check-in area.
The club’s door closed, but Butch didn’t immediately step away. Lifting the sleeve of his leather jacket to his nose, he breathed in. Poison by Dior was all over his sleeve.
Like he’d been marked.
CHAPTER TWENTY
McGrider’s was indeed a local establishment that served a lot of cops and firemen, and, back in the heyday of newspapers, Jo imagined that most of the CCJ’s staff ate here as well. The vibe was scuffed convenience, everything worn down by generations of patrons, the beer signs in the windows Bud Light, Michelob, and Pabst. And as she and the man in leather settled into a wooden booth—or, rather, she settled and he squeezed—her eating companion didn’t seem bothered in the slightest by all the uniforms in the place. Just like he’d said.
“So you have to tell me your name,” she announced. “Before anything else happens.”
Yeah, ’cuz God forbid she chow down a cheeseburger in front of someone she hadn’t been properly introduced to. Evading a police helicopter, fine. But dinner? She had to draw the line.
Rolling her eyes at herself, she said, “What I mean is—”
“Syn,” he interjected.
“Sin.” Jo tilted her head to the side. “As in not a virtue?”
“No, with a y.”
“What’s it short for?”
“Syn.”
His dark, glowing eyes calmly stared back at her across the table, like he was prepared to field a credit check if she wanted to Experian his ass. And the juxtaposition between all that open-book and the sheer size of him wedged into the booth was a contradiction she was grateful for. The fact that he didn’t seem to have anything he was hiding from her made him so much less dangerous.
Plus, again, there was a whole squad of cops around them. If she needed 911, all she had do was pull a “Help!” and a sea of blue would ride up on the guy.
Then again, if he’d wanted to hurt her, he’d had plenty of chances already.
“Can I ask you something?” she said, leaning forward. “And I don’t want to offend you.”
“You won’t offend me.”
“You don’t know what I’m going to ask.”
“It doesn’t matter what it is. You will not offend me.”
As he continued to look over at her, the commotion of the busy bar disappeared on Jo. Between one blink and the next, there were no waiters buzzing around with trays of drinks and pitchers of beer. No plates of onion rings or chicken wings being delivered. No men with badges laughing loudly or women with badges telling stories. Privacy bloomed around them, an illusion created by how she felt as he stared at her like that.
Jo cleared her throat. What had she been—oh, right.
“Are you a pro wrestler or something?” she blurted.
“Wrestler?”
“You know, the WWE. Hulk Hogan, although I guess he was doing that in the eighties. I know of him through reality TV. And that lawsuit over the sex tape years ago, thank you, TMZ.” As Sin with a y just continued to meet her eyes, she shook her head, aware she was babbling. “Have you heard of any of those things?”
“I know what a sex tape is, though I’ve never seen one.”
“That makes you party of nobody else,” she said dryly.
“Why would I want to watch someone I don’t know having sex? Or someone I do know, for that matter.”
Now her eyebrows went up. “You have single-handedly disavowed the porn industry, then.”
Make that left-handedly disavowed, she amended to herself. And she would have made that joke out loud, but she didn’t know him well enough. Maybe he was really religious?
“It’s just not of interest,” he said.
“You’ve never watched YouPorn.”
“What is that?”
“You’re not from here, are you.” As if geography might account for him being the one person in the bar who wasn’t familiar with that URL?
“No, I’m not.”
“So where are you from?”
“Not here.”
When she waited for him to fill that one in and he did not, she sat back. “Europe? I mean, you don’t sound American.”
“Yes. Europe.”
Tick-tock… no amplification on that, either.
All right, he might have been open to answering anything, but he clearly wasn’t going to help her much on the Easter Egg hunt.
“So you’re not a wrestler—are you a weight lifter? Wait—a CrossFit guy?”
He shook his head. “No.”
“So how are you this big?” She shook her head. “What I mean is—”
“Genetics,” he said remotely.
“See, I have offended you.”
“No, I just don’t like where I came from.”
In the pause that followed, a waitress walked up with a pad and pen. As there were no uniform requirements for the bar, the twenty-something was rocking a hipster vibe with mud-colored clothes, a tattooed sleeve down one arm, and some piercings in her face.
“What can I getcha to drink?”
That she only
looked at Syn seemed right. Jo would have done the same in her shoes—hell, she was doing the same. Of all the people in the place, he stood out—and yes, the men and women in uniform and plainclothes had noticed him, too. And at least nobody was springing forward with a Taser and some cuffs.
“Water,” he said.
The waitress pulled an “And you?” without glancing in Jo’s direction. Her eyes were too busy roaming around the span of Syn’s leather jacket and the breadth of his chest and what little she could catch of his lower body. Obviously, she was doing sexual math in her head and solving the equation of him naked with all kinds of yes-please.
“I’ll take a Sam Adams in the bottle, no glass,” Jo said.
“You got it. Menus are in the holder.”
Syn didn’t seem to notice the woman’s departure any more than he’d bothered with her arrival, and Jo told herself not to be complimented.
“You’re not going to take your jacket off, are you?” she said as she shucked her own coat.
“I’m not hot.”
Ohhhhhhh, don’t be too sure about that, she thought to herself. And besides, she knew the lack of outerwear removal was less about his body temperature and more about the guns and ammo he was hiding under all that leather.
“I was hoping you’d call me.” Syn linked his hands and put them on the table, like he was a choirboy in spite of his nickname. “But I’m glad you’re all right.”
She thought of what he’d said the night before. About death. “Actually, I went to the doctor’s today.”
“They won’t help you.”
She froze in the process of folding her coat on the seat. “I beg to differ. That’s their job. That’s what they do when people are sick.”
“You’re not sick.”
“Then explain that to my flu symptoms,” she muttered. “And you and I are going to have to agree to disagree on whether I’m ill. FYI, given that I’m in my skin, I have more credibility on this topic than you do.”
“What is Jo short for? I heard you say your name when you answered your phone.”
“Josephine.”
The waitress brought his water over and the bottle of Sam Adams. Then she lingered, like she was enjoying the close-up more than the panoramic view of him—and even though it was inappropriate on so many levels, Jo felt like hissing as if she were a cat. As if both of them were a cat. As if two cats were—
Frickin’ metaphors.
To keep herself from doing something stupid—or something that would land her with a flea collar—she tried her beer. The first draw on the open neck was heaven, so she took another.
“I’m surprised you’re so comfortable in here,” she murmured as the waitress finally left. “Given all the metal on you. But I guess everything is properly registered.”
“I have nothing to fear in this place or any other.”
Jo eyed his thick neck and the heft of his shoulders under that leather jacket. Then she remembered what his body had felt like as she had wrapped her arms around his waist. He was hard as a rock, no fat on him, just muscles on top of muscles.
Even though she didn’t want to, she found herself following in the footsteps of the waitress, her mind going to places that involved no clothes and lots of exercise.
“That I believe,” she said remotely.
* * *
As Mr. F aimlessly walked the streets in the darkness, part of his life was the same. He had been a wanderer in and around the city for much of the last three years, returning to the bridge’s underworld when he needed a fix or the weather was bad or it was time to crash. Back before whatever had happened to him at the outlet mall, the constant motion had been because he enjoyed the movement after the intense part of the nods faded, and also because he’d always had an internal, ticking nervousness right under his skin.
Now, though, he got nothing out of his numb ambulation, the pavement under his feet passing like the minutes and the hours, unnoticed, unaccounted for. He had walked all day long, randomly making big fat circles through the neighborhoods of downtown while the sun rose, peaked, and fell back into the horizon. In spite of his marathon of miles, there was no pain in his feet or legs. No blisters. No need for food or drink or the bathroom. And he mourned the loss of all of those inconveniences, the absence of the nagging aches and pains of humanity. As he continued further, he realized he no longer had the sense that he was, in spite of his lack of assets, status, and success, exactly like all the other men and women who strode by him, drove by him, flew in planes above him, worked in buildings around him.
Then again, he was no longer human, was he.
The disconnection from everybody else made him feel as if things were closing in on him, although he wasn’t sure exactly what the “things” were, and had no idea how to avoid them. This lose/lose created a buzzing in his head that was something he had previously been able to needle away, and the fact that his addiction was no longer an option made him feel his dislocation and anxiety all the more acutely. As he struggled to keep it together, he realized that the drugs had been an artificial, but highly reliable, horizon for him, a far-off land that was always available whenever he felt boxed in or cornered—which had been, and continued to be, most of the time.
No more travel for him, though. His passport had been revoked.
When his boots finally halted, he was surprised, and he looked down at them with the expectation that they would explain themselves. There was no answer coming, however, and when his brain gave them a nudge to keep going, they stayed where they were.
It was as if he were on autopilot, and the person in charge of his remote had punched a button—
His head tilted up, sure as if there was a puppet string attached to his eyebrows and the guy running this Muppet version of himself was getting him ready to say a line of dialogue.
Well. What do you know. He was on a narrow street that was littered with big trash: soiled mattresses, a kitchen sink, a refrigerator with the door removed. Somebody had clearly decamped out of an apartment and wanted the city to take care of their shit. Or maybe it was a renovation job, although in this kind of zip code, demolition was more likely.
In the dim light, which did not compromise his vision at all, a figure stepped out of a shallow doorway two blocks down. Mr. F immediately recognized them, though they were a stranger: It was like seeing a distant family member, one who you couldn’t put a name to, but who you recalled from weddings and funerals when you were young.
He knew this other man. This other man knew him.
Not that either of them were men anymore.
And the one controlling Mr. F was insisting they interact. They hit Mr. F’s Go Forward toggle, and like any battery-powered device, his body was ready to do what it was told. Meanwhile, the other lesser seemed to be waiting for him to do something, say something—and that was when Mr. F got real with himself. He hadn’t actually been pacing in random directions all day long. He’d been avoiding the others, shifting among the streets in a defensive fashion so there was no chance of intersection.
Like the asphalt grid of downtown was a radar screen and the other blips warships he had to steer clear of.
As his right foot started to lift, he forced it back down onto the pavement, and when the boot came up again, it was bizarre to find himself not in control of his own body. Then again, after years of heroin addiction? Like he wasn’t used to being a servant to a master outside of himself?
Forcing his body to obey his brain, not this external will, he took a step backward. And another.
The other slayer seemed confused at the retreat—
The attack on it came from the left, the airborne vampire pile-driving into the lesser, taking it down so hard, there was a crack that had to have been its skull or spine.
The impulse to join the fight, to defend, to conquer and kill, was as foreign as sobriety, and as compelling as the promise of a nod, but Mr. F fought to back himself out of the way, flattening his shoulders against whatever
building he bumped into, gripping the bricks, holding himself in place against the draw to intercede in some hand-to-hand he had not been trained for and had no experience in.
The conflict did not go well for his comrade.
The vampire took control of the ground game, pinning the slayer in place, a length of chain swinging out to one side. But instead of strangling the slayer with the links, the attacker let the momentum wrap them around his fist. Then the beating began. That reinforced set of knuckles pounded down into the face of the lesser over and over again, black blood splashing the killer as bones were crushed and features gave way.
Mr. F stayed where he was, even as the vampire finally sat back and caught its breath. After a moment of recovery, the thing turned to its shoulder and spoke into a receiver of some sort, the words too muffled to hear—
Abruptly, the wind changed directions and came around, hitting Mr. F in the face.
No, that wasn’t right. It wasn’t a force of weather. It was more as if a vacuum had appeared behind him, a sucking vortex drawing the air molecules toward whatever had created the flow and caused the strange breeze.
Slowly, Mr. F looked over his shoulder.
Something had opened up in the night… like a hole in the fabric of time and space. Of reality itself. And the pull of the inexplicable phenomenon was undeniable, stray newspapers skipping along toward whatever it was, the clothes on Mr. F’s body drawn forth in the same way, the hair on his head teased into his face.
And then… an arrival.
A swirling fulcrum bloomed in the center of the alley, a dust devil without the dust.
But definitely the devil.
The evil was so dense that its presence created its own gravitational field, and Mr. F recognized his master by what was in his own veins, his body a tuning fork for what appeared. And he was not the only one who noticed. Over the body of the lesser, the vampire with the facial piercings and the tattoo of a teardrop under one of his eyes was likewise focused on what had joined them.
“Motherfucker,” it muttered.
That just about covered things, Mr. F thought as the dense, roiling hatred took shape.