by J. R. Ward
It was courtesy of the illumination that she watched the horror movie unfold.
Even as the gunshots and shouting continued out in the parking area, even as there was another explosion somewhere on the property, she forgot about everything else.
As she witnessed three killings happen right in front of her.
The hulking shadow with eyes that glowed red moved fast and low to the ground, taking the men down one by one, and not by shooting. A knife. A dagger—no, two daggers—slashed in a deadly dance, the hazy headlights streaming through the ruined wall of the building showing all of the blood that flew from sliced throats, opened veins, and amputated limbs.
One after another, the three men who had locked themselves in fell to the concrete, writhing, bleeding out, mortally wounded.
Syn was so lethal and fast, it was as if he were a machine, and when he was finished, he braced his feet and sank down into his thighs. With the light shining on the front of him, he was nothing but a black shadow to Jo, his Mohawk a raised stripe on his head that rotated as he scanned the area—
And that was when Jo realized there were no more gunshots out in the lot.
There were, however, the sounds of screeching tires and pounding footfalls.
Jo pushed herself off the wall. As her weight came fully into her boots, she was about to say Syn’s name when a high-pitched whistle sounded out in a series of four short bursts. Immediately thereafter, there was a response from another direction, in a different rhythm.
And that was when the roar ripped through the groundskeeping shed.
Jo put her palms to her ears as her body shied away, not from conscious thought, but primordial, survival instinct.
Syn reared back as he released his battle cry, his arms extending out from his torso, his matched set of knives jutting from his brutally hard fists.
And then he put the daggers away. As they disappeared somewhere inside his jacket, Jo had a thought that he was going to come check on her.
He did not. Instead, he marched over to the first man he had cut up. Standing above his prey, he snarled something—
And bent down low.
Syn attacked the man with his… teeth. Or at least that was what it looked like as his head went down over and over again, pieces… pieces seeming to be torn away from… the face. And dear God, the victim was alive as he was torn apart, his legs kicking and his arms flailing, as juicy, gurgling, gagging sounds rose up from the hole in his throat.
Syn did not stop.
When he was finished with the first, he moved on to the next, picking that man up off the floor by the thigh and the neck, and slamming his spine on the top of Syn’s leg. The crack was so loud, Jo jumped—
Syn slammed the now-corpse headfirst into the concrete, the sound of a skull shattering even worse than that of the lightning strike snap of the vertebrae.
“Stop… stop…” she whispered as she held a scream in.
But there was no stopping him.
Especially not as he moved on to the third, taking the slowly churning legs by the ankles and swinging the almost-dead man around in the air like a discus. Once, twice… and then Syn released his hold.
Against the spotlight of the high beams that penetrated the blast hole, through the still clearing smoke, the body spun like a Frisbee, blood leaving from its open wounds with a curious grace, floating up on the air.
Defying gravity for a brief moment.
Before crashing down along with everything else.
Including Jo’s illusions about who she had been sleeping with.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
With a screech of tires, Mr. F fled the fight, K-turning the car he’d stolen and punching the gas like his immortal life depended on it. The ten-year-old Ford Taurus was like a turtle on a skateboard, and as he careened down the side of the abandoned mall, he ran over something—someone—he didn’t know.
“Shit, shit, shit,” he repeated.
Keeping his foot on the gas, his eyes shot to the rearview. No one was behind him, but would that change? How had the Brotherhood known to be there?
More tires leaving rubber on the road as he slammed on the brakes and wrenched the wheel to go around by the front of the stores. Another car—low-slung and fast—came at him, and they almost crashed. Both of them instinctively made the right decision, however, swerving in opposite directions—and then he was clear and so was the other driver.
The descent down the hill was the fastest he imagined the POS sedan had gone since it had left its assembly line, and he glanced down at the Fore-lesser manual on the passenger seat. But like that would give him another two hundred horses under the hood? Or explain how things had gone down so disastrously? He had called the gathering of lessers through the mental connection the book had told him he had with his subordinates. He had intended to get the slayers together and organized. Find out how many of them there were. Figure out what the resources were.
And then give his command.
As he got to the bottom of the rise, he didn’t know where he was going. Paranoia made him wonder if there was some kind of tracer on the car, but like a random Ford Taurus that he’d found at the side of the street downtown would have a GPS tracker on it? Tied to the Brothers? Impossible.
He went right just because he went right. And as he punched the accelerator and the anemic engine wheezed, a second car came toward him. As they passed, he looked up again into the rearview. That car took a left to ascend the hill.
More slayers to their “death,” such as it was.
Not at all how this was supposed to go. But at least, the further away he got, the more his adrenaline eased up and allowed him to think with better clarity. He had been the second to arrive. And then the other trucks and sedans and two motorcycles had rolled up on the parking area in front of the groundskeeping building. Men had gotten out of the vehicles, dismounted the Honda crotch rockets, and come over to him with expectation on their faces.
No, not men. Not anymore.
They had been reborn into the undead. A servant class that bled stink and had limited free will. An army cobbled together to kill vampires, led by an evil entity who was fucking insane.
Tonight was supposed to have been all of them coming together, meeting for the first time in person in most cases, a ragtag congregation of has-beens, never-was’s, and street-smart psychotics with anger issues. Mr. F, not a born leader, had tried to prepare some kind of speech beforehand, but what he’d come up with had been all platitudes, low on inspiration—and he had never gotten to it. Just as he had been about to address his soldiers, such as they were, a hail of bullets had fired up inside the building. Everybody had taken cover, and within moments after that—thirty seconds at the most—warning alarms had started screaming in his head, in his veins. And that was when the shadows had emerged from the tree line. Six of them. Seven of them.
The Black Dagger Brotherhood. And some of their fighters.
He had known exactly who they were.
More shooting at that point, not inside the groundskeeping building, but outside, in the parking lot, bullets ricocheting off of the quarter panels of cars and the hoods and bumpers of trucks. Mr. F had thrown himself flat on the ground, right behind the rear tires of this car he’d stolen. Shitting his pants, covering his head, he had panicked and shut down, his brain going on an ill-timed vacation.
So he had seen the explosion go off in slow motion. One of those flashy motorcycles had been parked by the right corner of the building, like its owner was precious about the bi-wheeled coffin dropper and worried some idiot would open a car door into its tailpipe or something. A stray bullet, one of dozens, found the gas tank. Or maybe it was more than one.
And it shouldn’t have exploded. Mr. F had seen the MythBusters episode when he’d been in one of his rehabs. But clearly there was something special in what the Brotherhood was shooting.
BOOM!
The force of the combustion had recalibrated the verticality on all kinds of
vampires and slayers alike, blowing men and males off their boots, bodies flying backward. Then came the shrapnel, falling to the ground from the sky, metal chunks and pieces of bike skipping across the asphalt in a clatter of applause as if the show of light and force had been approved of.
Mr. F had meant to stay. He’d intended to stay. He’d told himself he was going to stay.
But it turned out the mortal survival instinct was one thing that even the Omega’s induction couldn’t disappear. With things still dropping from the explosion, he had slithered into the sedan, cranked the key, and thrown it in reverse.
And so he was here. Out on the four-laner that carved a trail through all manner of retail stores and touristy holes-in-the-wall. Every car he passed he wondered whether it was one of his. And every time he looked at the road behind himself, he worried that something with a vampire at the wheel was closing in on him.
As far as his brain had informed him, there had been thirteen lessers left in the Society. But he had no idea how many had survived, and it would be a while before he could concentrate and do a recount.
The Omega was going to be pissed at this.
And Mr. F knew what the punishment was going to be.
“Damn it,” he moaned.
* * *
The white landscape—the barren, blinding wasteland of white—drifted away like fog dispersed by a cold wind. In its place… awareness. Sounds, smells, tastes… and then sight.
The first thing Syn saw when he was able to focus was the one thing he never wanted to see. As the black-ink blood of lessers dripped off his fangs and his fingers, off his chin and his clothes, as the still-alive, half-destroyed bodies of his victims moved slowly on the blood-covered concrete, as the smoke cleared and the skirmish quieted… he discovered that he had turned to Jo and was staring at her.
Revealing the realest part of him.
To her.
The horror on her face. The hands up to her cheeks. The slack mouth and pale skin.
Yes, she saw him. She saw all of him, including his talhman, and she saw everything he did.
Wiping his mouth on the back of the sleeve of his leather jacket, he whispered something. It didn’t carry. He didn’t want it to.
And then the Brotherhood came rushing in: familiar, heavy boots pounding over the concrete and stopping behind him, breathing that was heavy, scents that were intermingling with the stench, shadows that were long from those headlights shining in through the blast hole.
“Syn,” someone said. “How you doin’?”
When somebody tried to walk by him, his arm snapped out and stopped them by grabbing a hard hold.
“Do not touch her,” he growled. “She is mine.”
Another voice. Different than the first. “Okay, my guy. We won’t go near her. But listen, you’re leaking, and this is not a secured site. We’ve got shit we have to deal with and you need some stitches.”
Please, he thought at Jo. Even though he didn’t know what he was begging for.
Bullshit, he knew exactly what he needed from her. He wanted her to forgive him for being his father. For revealing to her the fact that he was a terrifying killer. For showing her why he didn’t care that everyone else knew, but what he wished she had never discovered.
Jo shook her head. Then she focused over his shoulder and her face changed.
“Oh, shit,” one of the Brothers said.
“I’ve seen you before,” Jo said hoarsely. “Coffee shop.”
Syn looked over his shoulder. Rhage was standing a couple of feet away, and the Brother ran his palm down his face.
“Does she know what’s going on?” Hollywood asked.
“No,” Syn muttered. “She does not.”
“Motherfucker.”
“That about covers it.”
Syn stepped off and tried to walk around, hands on his hips, head lowered, heart pounding. He didn’t get far. His boot knocked into something… a torso that was bent backward, its limbs moving in slow motion, like the thing was a remote control robot whose batteries were running out.
Out of the corner of his eye, he was aware that everybody was staring at him, and he knew what the questions were. Too fucking bad. The only ones that mattered were from Jo, and he had no good answers for her.
The arm of the slayer at his feet flopped over on its own accord, and he watched as the black-stained hands clawed uselessly at his boots.
With nothing to lose, and Jo having already seen the worst, he unsheathed one of his steel daggers, tossed it in the air, and caught the hilt with a smack of his palm. Vicious point down, he lifted the weapon over his shoulder as he dropped onto one knee to stab—
Rhage caught his wrist. “No. We wait for Butch.”
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
Right about the time Syn was trying to shoot his way out of that groundskeeping building, before the explosion, Butch was attempting to get out of the office building downtown. He punched the bar on an interior fire door, breaking the thing open on its hinges. As it swung wide, he burst out into yet another corridor—even though he didn’t know what the fuck he was rushing for. He was still going to end up in that mail receiving area with no IT MacGyver flashy shit to get him out smoothly.
Then again, he didn’t need to be smooth, right? Did he really care if the whole goddamn building lit up with alarms and the cops came with sirens blaring? He was going to be long gone, running back to the garage, getting the R8 and going 0–60 in 3.2 seconds to the conflict location.
Thank God V got the engine upgrade to the performance—
The smell of fresh air was not good news. As he rounded the final corner before the receiving bay, the scent of the night was a shocker and meant someone had already come in. Cops? Maybe the alarms were silent.
Skidding to a halt in front of the last door, he unholstered one of his guns and back-flatted it against the wall. There were no sounds of anyone moving around on the other side. Nobody talking. But he didn’t want to be someone’s target practice just because he was distracted and not reading the situation right.
He was quiet about his penetration this time, slipping through the last panel.
“What… the fuck?”
One of the bays was wide open, and parked right in front of it, ass in to the building, ready to go with the powerful engine already running… was V’s R8.
Like Butch was Tony Stark and had summoned the fucking thing with a remote.
“Lassiter?” he said as he looked around the dreary mail room.
Whatever. No time, no time.
Butch covered the distance in three big strides, leaped out of the bay like a parachuter, and would have Dukes of Hazzard’d it into the driver’s seat of the R8 except for: (1) the window wasn’t down; (2) there was no way in hell he could fit himself through the aperture of the top half of the door; and (3) if he left so much as a smudge on the paint, the leather, the trim, the seat, the center console, whatever V did to Lassiter after the containment spell was going to look like a Sandals vacation in Cancún.
Five minutes later, he was out of the congested streets and tall buildings of downtown. Five minutes after that, he was in the sprawling retail-urbs, blowing through red lights and dusting the few cars on the road with him in the passing lane. If he’d met a cop, it would have gotten nasty, but he didn’t.
When he made the turn to go up to the Adirondack Outlets Mall, even the Quattro couldn’t keep the supercar on the pavement, the heavy back end of the car fishtailing. At the top of the rise, he shot forward to the stores—and nearly bought the farm in a front-end collision with a gray Ford Taurus.
The inside of the older sedan was dark so he couldn’t see the driver, but there was no time to follow up on that shit, either.
He went around to the back, as instructed, and got a load of a scene out of a Schwarzenegger movie circa 1987. You want to talk about chaos? There were cars and trucks full of holes, slayers on the ground still moving, gunpowder—and in this case, gasoline, too—thick in the
air. Oh, and a whole corner of the building was gone. Slamming on the brakes, he got out, and the stench of lesser was so intense, he fell back against V’s precious car.
Qhuinn came jogging over. “We got some enemy down on the ground, all ready for you.”
“How many?”
“Nine. Maybe ten.”
Butch kept his groan to himself. “Any of us hurt?”
“We’ve got one with a leak—even if he refuses to admit to the shit. Manny’s on the way.”
“Who’s injured?” Butch looked around. “And what the fuck happened to the building?”
“Bike blew up. Oopsie.” Qhuinn calmly unholstered one of his guns and put three shots into the head of a slayer who’d reached for his pant leg. “I believe it’s being classified as a Honda-plosion.”
“I’m going to need Vishous to come in.” Butch shook his head. “But I hate to have him so exposed.”
“We’ll move the bodies, then.”
Rhage jogged over, called by the shooting. “Everything okay out here?”
“One of them was getting touchy-feely, but my body, my choice.” Qhuinn tucked his gun back under his arm. “And now he doesn’t have a frontal lobe or eyeballs so it’s not going to be a problem.”
“We need transport,” Butch said. “You’re exactly right. We’ll move the slayers to a neutral location where I can do what I have to and V can be right on hand. This place is way too exposed.”
Sure, V could throw up some mhis, but after that explosion, the scene was bound to be on 911’s radar. The last thing anyone needed was a bunch of humans wondering why they couldn’t see something that they knew damn well was there.
“And we’ve got one other problem,” Rhage said.
As Butch’s phone went off, he glanced at the screen. Then focused on the brother. “Manny’s ETA is just six minutes from now. So if it’s bleeding, we’ve got it covered.”
“It’s not bleeding. And I wish it was the kind of thing the docs could fix.”