The Sinner (Black Dagger Brotherhood), page 17
Syn came around a tight corner and stopped dead.
Even as his eyes focused on the figure in dingy white robing, and his instincts told him what it was, his brain refused to believe the conclusion he drew.
Yet the draped figure with evil spilling out from under its hems could be one, and only one, entity. And the Omega was in attack mode, its form reared back as if it were gathering strength to throw something . . . at Butch.
Who was inhaling a slayer like he was trying to draw a tire through a straw.
Syn didn’t hesitate.
With a powerful surge, he bum-rushed the evil, taking three huge strides and throwing all his body weight at the damn thing. And the Omega, for all its omnipotence, didn’t seem to notice him—at least not until Syn was on the entity, his body tackling the master of all lessers off its feet.
Or whatever held it up off the ground.
Everything went in slow motion at that point. As whatever spell or magic the Omega had been aiming at Butch went haywire and blew a car off its tires, Syn was aware of a horrible feeling swamping through his body, waves of sickness and death and toxic, snarling pain going through him. And then Butch looked up from the slayer and yelled something, his arms reaching out as if he were trying to save someone.
Probably Syn. But no time to think about that.
The Omega slung Syn away like he weighed nothing, and the landing was rock hard as he bounced on his pecs and his palms, just barely keeping his face from being his tarmac as he went head-first toward a brick wall. Putting his hands out, he front-bumper’d the building just before he got his skull cracked open.
After which . . . silence.
Syn tried to lifted his head, but he was curiously weak, his body lax as a damp towel. The best he could do was roll over and try to get his eyeballs to work properly—and that was how he discovered that the alley had only two people in it.
Well, three if you counted the hot mess of the slayer Butch was still straddling.
No Omega.
Before Syn could say anything or check for injuries, his own or Butch’s, he was overcome with nausea. Turning back onto his stomach, he propped his hands and threw up what he’d eaten with Jo—and then kept going until he was dry heaving and seeing stars.
Hands reached out to him. Someone talked to him—Balz, his cousin. And then there were lots of people around.
He couldn’t hear anything, though, the rushing of the blood in his ears like nothing he’d ever experienced before. And meanwhile, his heart was doing bad things in his chest, its rhythm uneven and way too strong. As his awareness zeroed in on what was going on behind his sternum, he had an image of a boulder bouncing down a rocky hillside, boom!, ba-boom!, ba-ba-boom!—and then dizziness came on him like it was a physical force with three dimensions. As the world spun so badly he keeled over onto his side, he got a terrific close-up of his cousin’s shitkicker.
From a vast distance, he watched Balthazar holler at somebody, and Syn had a thought that his cousin was a good male, in spite of the thief stuff. Sure, the bastard might have a more narrow conscience than most, but that didn’t mean—
A dark-haired guy in surgical scrubs came running over and crouched down.
Well, this was handy. It was Dr. Manny Manello, the human surgeon mated unto Payne, V’s sister.
Syn was so knocked out, he almost greeted the healer. Which was a strange impulse as he was more of a Fuck-off than Cheerio-ol’-chap kind of person. Then again, he wasn’t in his right mind at the moment, and the doctor seemed to agree, shaking his head and holding up his hands as if there was nothing he could do.
Huh, Syn thought. Looked like he might be dying.
Driven by an impulse he couldn’t deny, he forced his arm out and slapped the pavement in front of Balz’s shitkicker. The male’s face immediately came down to level.
Syn started talking. At least . . . he thought he was talking. He still couldn’t hear anything—his cousin’s ears seemed to be working okay, though. The male’s face went from worried . . . to confused . . . to shocked.
Whatever. All that mattered was . . .
From out of nowhere, the brightest light Syn had ever seen coalesced right in front of him, and even in his delirium, he knew what it was. It was the Fade, arriving to claim him, and somehow, that was the biggest surprise of all. He had assumed he would go unto Dhunhd.
Then again, having just made the acquaintance of the Omega, maybe the evil didn’t want his sorry ass—
As he was bathed in the heavenly illumination, the relief that suffused his body was so complete it was unfathomable. It was as if the sickness inside of him was erased, and in its absence? An exhausted peace and calm, like he had come to the end of a long trial.
But that had been his life. A slog that had seemed infinite on a good night, and a curse on a bad one.
Giving himself up to the death, he waited for the door he had heard about to come through the light unto him . . . the door that ancient wisdom said you opened and stepped through, finding yourself in an eternity with your loved ones. Would his mahmen be there?
Would Jo be allowed there as a human?
Panic shot through him. He was leaving his female undefended; his death was not going to get her out of danger. Gigante would send someone else to kill her—
All at once, the light retracted, Syn’s vision cleared, and his ears came back online. Looking up, he wasn’t sure what he expected to see . . . but the Brother Vishous kneeling down with a torch was not it—
Wait. That wasn’t a torch. It was the male’s hand, the one that always had that black leather glove on it.
Maybe the illumination hadn’t been the Fade.
Maybe those rumors about V being the born son of the Scribe Virgin weren’t bullshit.
Maybe he should be nicer to the motherfucker, assuming he didn’t want to be turned into a s’more.
Syn pushed himself off the pavement, and as he cautiously got up on his feet, he expected the world to go around in circles again. It did not. And that was when he realized the Brother must have done to him what he did to Butch.
“You tackled the Omega?” V said. “What the fuck were you thinking, you crazy sonofabitch.”
Vishous punched Syn’s shoulders—and then Syn was being yanked forward against that huge chest, the embrace as unexpected as the Brother breaking into song with “Achy Breaky Heart.”
’Cuz V didn’t like anybody.
Guess if you saved his best friend’s life, it got you on his Good Guy list.
Syn felt himself get set back, and then both of his cousins were talking to him. Everyone was talking to him, the Brothers who were on site and all the other fighters. It was a blur, and he had some thought that they were making a hero out of him for no good reason. He just wanted to kill something, anything, and he wanted a good fight. The Omega was tailor-made for that shit.
“Where’s Syn?” he heard somebody demand. “Is Syn okay?”
Butch broke through the rugby huddle that had formed, and the former cop, former human, seemed to fall back into his role as civil servant. He was all about the Good Samaritan as he approached.
“Jesus, that was brave and stupid. But thank you. I’m serious.”
Syn met the hazel eyes of the Brother and shook his head.
Butch nodded, as if he knew what Syn was thinking, but Syn could guarantee he did not.
And to cut any further gratitud-inal shit, Syn tried to walk in a circle to get a sense of how steady he was. Yay. He didn’t weave. He didn’t throw up again. His body and strength were, like, five on a scale of ten.
Whereas before V had showed up with that searchlight of a palm? Try not even on the damn scale.
“Where are you going?” Butch asked.
Am I leaving? Syn wondered.
“I’m on rotation,” he heard himself say. “I’m going out to fight.”
Dr. Manello jumped in like he had a chip in the back of his neck that alerted him to dumb decisions. “Nope. You’re taking the rest of the night off.”
“I’m not injured,” Syn said as he motioned down his body. “And I’m not sick anymore. You have no reason to deny me.”
As V lit up a hand-rolled, the Brother looked over the cup of his hand. “Let him go. He’s more than earned the right to fight if that’s what he wants to do. Besides, I took care of him. There isn’t anything of the Omega left in him.”
Syn pegged the doctor in the eye. “I’m just going to go out anyway. No matter what you tell me.”
More conversations, especially as another round of Brothers arrived, Tohr, Z, and Phury needing to catch up on what had happened with the Omega.
Hoping to dematerialize out before his part in the story got more airtime, Syn took a step back from the crowd. And another. When Balthazar glanced over like he was going to put the brakes on the retreat, Syn glared at his cousin and dared him to get involved. When the guy just lit up one of V’s homemade cigarettes and cursed, it was clear the message was received.
His kin was not going to get in the way of him getting gone.
As the alley turned into a brother-convention, Butch went back over to the carcass of the lesser. He hadn’t gotten far into the inhale before Syn decided to play bowling ball with the Omega and there was a job to be finished.
And fuck no, he wasn’t going to honor that promise to the evil of stabbing the damn thing back to its master.
“You don’t have to, cop. You can take a break tonight.”
He looked over at V. The brother’s clear, cold eyes were like fresh air when you were sick to your stomach. And inside Butch’s head, thoughts started to spin, careening into each other, making hash of any logic.
“Cop, you just went through some shit.”
“Yeah, and the only way out of this whole thing is to do my fucking job.”
Butch dropped to his knees, and angled his face over what was left of the slayer’s mashed-in features. As he braced himself to take one of those long, strange inhales that he’d been pulling ever since the Omega had gotten into him, he thought—not for the first time—that he didn’t know how it worked. He didn’t understand the metaphysics of how he could drain the essence out of its vessel.
Then again, an explanation wouldn’t change reality and he wasn’t sure he really wanted to know the particulars. Besides, he had other issues to worry about . . .
“The Omega should have been able to kill me,” he said as he glanced up at V. “It was throwing shit at me . . . the magic should have blown me apart. And then there was its presence. I mean, I’ve been right up close with that thing before. I know how powerful it used to be. Not anymore . . . it’s dying.”
And you’d think he would have gotten a second wind—natch—from the bald evidence of his success. Instead? He only felt more exhausted.
V knelt down and exhaled over his shoulder. “That means it’s working. The prophecy is coming true.”
“Yeah.” Butch stared at the glistening mess of the slayer’s face, the cheekbones white under the inky stain of the black viscera. “I feel like a competitive eater in the last thirty seconds of Nathan’s Famous.”
V put his gloved hand on Butch’s shoulder. “We have time. It doesn’t have to end tonight. Send him back and let’s go home.”
Butch shook his head at the lesser. “The Omega should have been able to kill me.”
When another pair of shitkickers entered his field of vision, he glanced up. Qhuinn had come over, and the brother was white as a sheet, his hands trembling at the ends of the sleeves of his leather jacket. The male lowered himself down. His blue-and-green eyes were red-lined and watery, and he was blinking them like he had a fan right in front of his face.
“Butch, you saved my life,” the brother said. “And you’re spent. Let me stab it, and we’ll all go home.”
Butch wanted to do that. He was tired in a way unrelated to physical exertion. He wanted to call Marissa and hear her voice, ask her to cut work early, and just lie beside his shellan. He wanted to know that his brothers and the other fighters were on the mountain and behind the mhis, behind the thick stone walls of the mansion, behind the fortress Darius had built over a hundred years ago. He wanted to be certain that, if only until nightfall the following evening, everybody was safe.
But that was the thing, wasn’t it.
Safety was an illusion if it only lasted twenty-four hours. And those precious kids in that house, not just Lyric and Rhamp, but all of them, deserved to have their parents beside them. Hell, all of the mahmens and sires of all of the species should have that guarantee.
As long as the Omega was on the planet, normalcy was a fragile privilege for vampires, not a basic right.
Butch refocused on the slayer. It was still moving, the fingers flexing and curling on the asphalt, the legs churning in slow, faint motion.
Opening his mouth, Butch had to force himself to start inhaling.
So he could take the evil into his body once again.
Jo stood outside McGrider’s on the sidewalk, watching a car pass by. Stepping aside as two guys in what had to be plainclothes went into the bar. Checking her phone, even though who cared about the hour.
The next time Syn asked for her number, she was going to damn well give it to him.
Assuming she ever saw him again.
The night seemed especially cold as she walked back toward the CCJ offices—positively Baltic, in fact—and it was funny, she hadn’t noticed the temperature on the way over with Syn. And as she went along, she became aware that Caldwell had suddenly emptied out of life-forms. In spite of the people behind the wheels of the cars that went along the city streets, and the patrons she’d left behind at McGrider’s, and even her misogynistic boss, and dear, sweet Bill and Lydia, she felt post-apocalyptic alone, the sole survivor of a nuclear catastrophe.
Then again, someone significant could take everyone else with them when they left—
Okaaaaaaaaaay, time to put away the melodrama. This was not a grown-up episode of My So-Called Life, with her as Angela and Syn as Jordan Catalano.
“Hormones,” she muttered as she came up to the front of the CCJ building.
Instead of walking all the way round to the back, she took out her pass card and went in a side door. The sense that she wasn’t going to be working at the paper for much longer was both part of her weird emotional state, and not that big an extrapolation. And it sucked. The last forty-eight hours had been full of the crazy, but she was starting to love reporting. Blackmailing her boss to let her work was not her gig, though, and she wasn’t going to kid herself about Dick. She’d forced his hand for now, but that was sandbags against a storm surge. Sooner or later, the hold was going to break and he was going to find a way to fire her.
She hit the bathroom because she was in no hurry to go sit home alone—although the idea of binge-watching Angela Chase’s love life wasn’t a bad B plan to the prospect of sitting at her desk until dawn. After she came out drying her hands, she checked her email to see if the other photographs McCordle was going to send from his phone had come in. They hadn’t.
Before she started cleaning her desk out, and not because she was firing herself, she decided this was ridiculous. She couldn’t stay here all night. Putting the back exit to use, she ducked her head and hustled quickly to her car, aware of a ringing paranoia in her blood. Glancing around furtively, she didn’t unlock the Golf until she was four feet away from the driver’s side. But come on, like someone was going to sneak into her back seat otherwise? Throwing herself behind the wheel, she shut the door on her coat and left it there as she locked things back up.
Cranking the sewing machine engine over, she pulled her seat belt across her chest, put the gearshift in reverse, and hit the gas—
Jo slammed on the brakes.
In her rearview mirror, bathed in the red illumination of her taillights, a huge figure with a Mohawk was standing right behind her rear bumper.
Jo shoved the engine into park and jumped out.
A quip about long time/no see died in her throat.
“Are you okay?” she asked as she got a load of him.
When he nodded, she didn’t believe him. He was pale and shaken, and at the base of both sleeves of his leather jacket, his hands were trembling.
“I need a shower,” he said.
“What?”
“I don’t smell good.”
“Your cologne is all I can smell.”
“I need . . .”
She had the feeling he had no idea what he was saying, and she wanted to know what the hell had happened during the twenty minutes between when he’d run out of the bar and now. It couldn’t be second thoughts about leaving her. That wouldn’t leave a hard-ass like him in this dazed, disordered state.
Before she was aware of making a conscious decision, she went to him and took his hand. She meant to say, “Come with me.” But his skin was so icy, she worried about hypothermia.
“We need to get you warm.”
“Am I cold?”
She led him around to the passenger side and opened the door for him. “Sit.”
You know, in case he didn’t know what to do—although how in the hell was he going to fit his big body into that seat—
“Guess you’re retractable,” she muttered as she shut him in.
Going around the front bumper, she put herself back behind the wheel, aware that her heart was pumping hard and her blood was rushing. As she put the car in reverse for a second time, she glanced at the man she’d picked up off the street like a stray dog.
He barely fit into her car: “Retractable” was an overstatement. Cantilevered was more like it. His knees were practically up to his earlobes, his arms wedged in between his legs, his far shoulder squeezed against his door. He didn’t seem to care. Then again, he didn’t seem to know where he was.
“My apartment’s not far from here,” she said. Well, not compared to someone who lived in Vermont. “I mean . . .”
Syn stared straight ahead. As if he were in a different world.
