The Beloved, page 10
Sweet and tart at the same time, with a molar crunch that was satisfying. Candy from a tree, and maybe it would bring up his blood sugar levels and cut the crankies a little.
There were a couple of stools against the unadorned wall and he took a load off to wait for the others. The fact that he was stuck with an emergency meeting of the Brotherhood—which wasn’t an emergency at all because, as usual, something bad had happened and that male Nate had been involved in it—was the way the night was going. He’d been boots-on-the-ground downtown for only about ten minutes when he’d watched a very familiar iridescent white Tesla stop in the middle of the fucking four-laner, get approached by a cop-bot—and then take off after a bullet had been discharged into the law enforcement robot from a gun that had no silencer on it.
“At which point things went from crap to shit…” he muttered as he took another slice off the black blade with his fangs.
Courtesy of the emergency-services light show that turned the bot’s patrol car into a roman candle, he’d been momentarily blinded, and then he hadn’t been able to dematerialize out of Dodge even if he’d wanted to because of all the lithium lamps and traffic enforcement cameras that were triggered as part of Caldwell’s Civil Protection Protocol. After that? Cue the car crash. As that idiot Shuli hit the gas to escape the disaster of his own creation, the Tesla had jumped the curb in front of a bagel place, flipped over, and gone for a carnival-ride-slide on its roof.
Naturally, Z’d had an obligation to go and make sure that Tweedle-twat and Tweedle-twit were okay—so he could bash their heads together himself. Setting out at a jog, his footfalls and repeated fucks had been a steady heartbeat of the beatdown he was going to give the pair of jackholes in the Tesla—and he’d known there were two in there before any visuals had confirmed it. Shuli might be an easy-living aristocrat, but the male was not the type to pop a bot in the middle of a downtown street without provocation.
Sure enough, Nate had crawled out from the passenger side, and as Shuli had laid into the guy, even though police were streaming to the scene, there was no question whose finger had pulled that trigger.
The geniuses had taken off before Z could get to them, ducking into an alley, and no doubt ghosting out from there. Of course they’d fucked off the car. With all the money Shuli had inherited after both of his parents had died, the male could afford to leave the two-seater on the sidewalk, and yeah, there was no tracing it.
Some things changed over time. Fake New York State registration chips did not.
But that wasn’t the point. You couldn’t be target-practicing on law enforcement droids like that. Gone were the nights when brothers or soldiers could fix the oopsie of getting the CPD’s attention with an on-scene mental scrub or two. Those fucking bots had to be dealt with by V and his team of hackers at F.T. Headquarters, and that bunch of brainiacs had enough going on already with their remote monitoring of all the places the Brotherhood owned and operated.
What Nate had done wasn’t even sloppy. It had been a deliberate act of defiance against the non-involvement clause of engagement—and now the brothers all had to have a meeting about the unhinged idiot. Instead of being out and doing their real jobs. Or being in and doing their jobs here by monitoring the audiences in person: All civilian appointments had been canceled per Tohr’s order, and all members of the Brotherhood told to convene here.
Nate was a brutal soldier, a real killer in the field. But when that aggression wasn’t tempered by self-control? It was worse than useless. It was a complication that slowed things down, endangered peoples’ lives, and created work for others—
Bing-bing.
At the cheerful chime, Z took his last slice, tossed the whittled core, and wiped his blade off on a bandana. Then he looked down the hall. Tohr was always early too—
The vault-worthy door swung wide and…
The hair on the back of his neck stood up straight at what was revealed.
Later, he would wonder how he knew. The scent? Some kind of molecular recognition? Or maybe… it was the dog.
There was just something about the way George was pressed right up close to that leather-clad thigh, as if he were steering the male who gripped his harness, instead of walking side by side.
Zsadist never fumbled with his black daggers. He had used them for too long in too many different ways.
For the first time in his life, he dropped his blade.
As the weapon hit one of his shitkickers and bounced off the steel-toed tip, he forgot all about the thing.
“Is it you,” he said softly as he shifted off the stool.
Even though he knew.
“Z.”
Wrath put his free hand out and Zsadist walked forward in a daze, his mind going haywire-crisscross-bonfire.
As he noticed Tohr standing behind the King—the real King—he knew this wasn’t a dream.
So he grabbed Wrath and was grabbed in return. Somehow, the great Blind King…
… was back from the dead.
CHAPTER TWELVE
As Nate fell to his knees, time slowed to a crawl and Nalla parallel processed everything about the alley, from where the two of them were to the burn mark on the pavement to the lesser who’d been shot in the chest.
And still managed to pull his own trigger.
Nate’s voice was weak. “You have to go—save… your—”
The slayer’s eyes slanted up at her from where the thing had fallen face down on the pavement, and the smile that tilted up its lips was pure hatred—as it recalibrated the gun in its hand at Nate.
Whose own sternum was a perfect target.
Nalla blinked once. And sprang forward in one, two, three strides.
With the fourth, she angled her foot to go soccer ball on the gun. Just as the lesser pulled that trigger again—
She missed. She fucking missed the kick.
And the bullet went directly into Nate’s heart.
As he barked an exhale and fell to the side, she tripped while wrenching around, and she was never going to forget what she saw… Nate focused on her and her alone as blood came out of his mouth and he landed with the bounce of a dead body on the dirty snow.
A sound came out of her like no noise she had ever made before, and she saw nothing, just a white plane of rage. Baring her teeth, she launched herself at the lesser, going for the hand that gripped that gun.
She was unaware of biting the wrist until she tasted something foul in her mouth, and she didn’t even think about what she did next. She bent the elbow with her free hand, turned the barrel into the slayer’s face, and forced her finger into the trigger guard.
The bullet entered through the bridge of the nose and the body seized on a oner, all the muscles contracting in sync, a spray of black blood and gray matter blowing out the back of the skull. No fucking around this time. With a sweeping plunge, she swung her right arm downward and stabbed him through the back.
It wasn’t enough.
Oh, God, what if there were more slayers, what if there was backup, what if—
Her strength doubled, and she peeled the lesser off the snow by the sleeve of his jacket, rolling him over with a jerk. Even though her hunting instinct swelled until it took the place of what was normally in her veins, she didn’t look into the white face of her prey.
Her eyes were on Nate.
As she stabbed the center of the slayer’s torso, she was blinded by the light and momentarily stunned by a blast of bus-exhaust smoke.
But then she crawled through the dissipating heat. “Oh, God, Nate…”
His voice was just a croak. “Don’t call for anyone—”
“Are you out of your mind—”
“—I just need a minute—”
“—you’re bleeding to death!”
“—I’m not bleeding to death!”
As they both got to the finish line at the same time, Nalla was done with the arguing. Glancing up and down the alley, there didn’t seem to be any other lessers. And what humans were around were way out on the sidewalk of Market Street. And there was no monitoring by the city’s crime prevention systems in this irrelevant alley or windows for people with prying eyes and phones.
Thank fuck.
Getting out her cell, she tried not to drop it with her shaking hands—
Nate snatched the thing from her and smashed it on the pavement.
“What the hell is wrong with you!” she barked. “We need help—”
“No—gimme a minute. No… matter what… happens… just…”
He started coughing, and as blood came out of his mouth and speckled his chin, she jumped up. But where was she running to?
“What the hell is wrong with you!” she yelled again.
“Relax,” he said through a choked inhale. “Minute. Maybe less. All it… takes.”
“For you to die!”
Fuck this, she thought as she started diving into his jacket to go through his pockets.
Of course he tried to fight her—because he was an idiot. But the only good thing about the fact that he was bleeding out in two places now was that his strength didn’t last long and it was a case of patty-cake-patty-cake. And she found his phone. The screen was cracked, but it came alive in her palm. He was coughing up so much blood now, she wasn’t sure facial recognition was going to work—
It did.
Meanwhile, his lips were clicking, and going by the glare on his increasingly gray face, it was clear he was yelling at her as best he could. Which was frickin’ insane. The last moments of your life, and you’re wasting them getting all hostile with a relative stranger?
She went into his contacts, to the final entry there was. Yet even with all the urgency, her fingertip hesitated over the name: Zsadist.
“You need to be giving me a last message to your parents,” she snapped at him as her heart rate tripled.
Call him.
Except she couldn’t do it. Even though her sire was one of the best people anybody would want in a life-or-death situation… he was the last person she needed here. She could just imagine him losing his shit that she was out of the house, then add in the slayers?
“You should be—” Her voice cracked as tears made that name blurry. “You should tell your parents that you love them and you’re sorry. For all the… miscommunication and distance.”
“I’m… okay…”
The sound of that raspy voice made her pull shit together, and she wiped her sleeve across her face. “What about a girlfriend or a lover. Jesus Christ, stop wasting your energy being pissed off at me and stupid about yourself.”
On that compassionate, totally noncritical note, she scrolled up, triggered a call, and put the phone to her ear. Then she went back to staring at Nate—as if that was going to do fuck all? Like there was anything to be done? There was no resuscitating him. She sure as hell couldn’t plug the holes inside of him by doing chest compressions—
A male voice cut into her spiral. “Nate?”
“Nonoit’sNallayougottahelpmehe’s—”
“Slow down,” Dr. Manny Manello said. “Who is this?”
“N-n-nalla—he’s been shot. In the chest and the abdomen. He’s dying! We’re in an alley off—”
There was a soft cursing. “Listen, take a deep breath for me—”
“You need to come now! We’re off Market between—”
Right on cue, Nate went into some kind of seizure, the spasms in his torso contorting him and turning him on his side on the pavement. The blood that flowed out of his open mouth was a copper bloom in the air and a red stain on the grimy snow, and as tears waved up her vision again, she knew she had to pull it together.
“We are off of Market Street. Get our location from this call—”
“Can you get to a safe place? I want you to dematerialize if you can—”
“Fuck that! You need to come save him—”
“He’s going to be all right.”
The statement was so strident, so out of left field, that she took the phone from her ear and checked the Samsung to see if it was malfunctioning. Had the man decided he didn’t like the M.D. after his name all of a sudden?
She put the thing back into place. “He’s dying!”
“No. He’s not. Look, you just leave him, and I’ll send someone now—”
“I’m not leaving and good, get your ass here! Get somebody here!”
As a strangled sound vibrated up, Nalla dropped the phone, and captured Nate’s face in her hands. She thought about when she’d noticed him earlier, out in front of the club. She’d give anything to get annoyed by that big-swinging-dick energy again. How were they here? Why had… this all happened?
It was her fault. If she hadn’t come out tonight, she—
“You fucking stay with me,” she choked. “Help is coming. They’re on their way.”
“Doesn’t matter…”
Those blue eyes swung up and clung to her own. Then his blood-speckled lips turned gray. He had very little breath left, very little life left.
Nate softly whispered his last words: “You’re so beautiful… that I hate looking at you.”
She sucked in a bolt of shock. But there was no following that up. His eyes rolled back in their sockets, and he dragged in a deep inhale that wasn’t followed by any coughing. It wasn’t followed by… anything.
Her tears fell onto his bloody cheeks, and she now wasn’t breathing either. “Nate…?”
The stillness in him brought the world to a screeching halt, the lack of movement in his chest the kind of thing that stopped her heart, too.
“Nate.” Like she was so powerful, she could call him back from the Fade? “I’m so sorry…”
Gathering him up, she shifted his heavy torso into her lap and draped herself around him. As she squeezed her eyes closed, she replayed those final words and wanted to scream. What he’d spoken was a starting place, an out-of-the-blue confession that could have changed everything.
Hatred struck a chord, deep inside of her. The war had always seemed far away, even as it had touched so much of her life.
It was breathing down the back of her neck now. Especially as she endlessly replayed the way she’d tried to kick that gun, her foot missing, always missing. She might as well have shot him herself—
“What the fuck is going on here.”
Nalla jerked her head up. Her father stood over her, tall, strong, dressed in black leather and black blades, with an expression on his scarred face like he was prepared to kill the entire Lessening Society with one hand behind his back: Zsadist was as he had always been, and maybe because of that, and definitely because of what had just happened when she’d failed to redirect that gun, Nalla became the young she had not been for a very, very long time.
Her voice was small and soft, a child’s. “He’s dead, Daddy. Oh, my God, he’s dead and it’s my fault—”
“What are you doing out here?” Then Zsadist pointed to the asphalt with the phone he had in his hand. “Are those lesser ashes on the pavement? And what are you doing with that?”
Nalla’s brain was lagging so badly, she couldn’t connect his words to any coherent meaning. Although she had a feeling he might have just referred to Nate as an inanimate object.
“I don’t understand—”
“Get up.” Her sire grabbed her arm and tried to drag her to her feet, even though Nate was still in her lap. “I want you to dematerialize right now—”
She pulled against his hold, refusing to budge. “Nate is dead—”
“We should be so lucky.”
Like a rubber band snapping back from a stretch, her mind caught up with the conversation—and so did her anger.
Nalla ripped her arm free. “What did you say.”
“You heard me.” Zsadist started texting on his phone. “Now get out of here, and let me handle cleanup—”
“No.”
Her father froze and looked up from the screen. “Excuse me.”
“I’m not leaving him.” She tightened her hold on Nate’s shoulders, the red stains on his white t-shirt like something she heard instead of saw: Screams woven into the cheap fabric. “I’m not leaving here.”
Off in the distance, she heard the din of traffic, the laughter of humans out on Market Street, a car alarm going off. But none of that mattered. She could only smell the fresh blood and feel the heat of her fury in her face. And even as her sire’s eyes went from the yellow they usually were to a black that seemed as evil as anything in the Lessening Society, she wasn’t fazed.
“Go home.”
Shaking her head slowly, she said in a voice that broke, “This was why I didn’t call you.”
“Well, Manny was about to operate when you interrupted him with this bullshit. Now, will you be part of the solution instead of the problem, and get the fuck out of this alley—”
“I don’t have to listen to you anymore. And I’m not leaving him.”
Those evil eyes shifted to Nate and then returned to her face. “Who is he to you.”
“None of your business. Just like the rest of my life is none of your business.”
“You are my daughter.”
There was a pause that seemed to last a lifetime.
“But all you really care about is your shellan and the war.”
“Where’d that come from?” Zsadist nodded at Nate. “Is he putting shit in your head?”
“What? You don’t know anything about me, do you.”
Dimly, she realized this showdown had been coming for a long time. She just could never have guessed the two of them would do the knockdown-daughter/dad-drag-out over the remains of a male she barely knew.
Those black eyes narrowed. “This male isn’t worth blowing your life up.”
“Well, first of all, he’s dead, so aren’t you relieved. And secondly, you’re not responsible for keeping my life together, and after this—I don’t even want your opinion—”
“He’s already tried to kill a buddy of his tonight, and now he’s working on getting his girlfriend into a grave. You might as well be dating a goddamn grenade—are you really this bored.”
