The Viper, page 3
“Oh, yes,” Saxton said. “Of course. Come, come.”
One of those perfectly manicured hands motioned at a spare armchair.
V picked up the mahogany ass palace and put it at the edge of the desk. “Thanks.”
“You are so welcome. I enjoy the smell of it.”
As V parked himself, he took out his pouch of Turkish perfect and a pack of Rizla+ Black King Size Slim papers. “So what’s the verdict on outlawing the prison camp.”
“I’m still researching the issue.”
“I’ll say it again—why bother.” Rolling up a perfect pinch of leaves, V ran the tip of his tongue down the gum arabic strip. “Wrath’s gotten rid of blood slaves and sehclusion for females. He can do whatever the hell he wants.”
“Yes.” Saxton tapped the book of the Old Laws. “But the camp was not established by him. It was a construct of the Council. The Princeps were the ones who chartered, endowed, and serviced the facility.”
“Facility? Is that what that shithole is supposed to be called? Because when we got into the place, it was a fucking nightmare.”
“I gather its previous location was very grim.”
“We were so close to finding it in time. We missed it by like a night or two at most. Frustrating as hell.”
On that note, V glanced across the room. Rhage and Butch were still slapping each other’s dicks about Ed and Lorraine Warren movies as well as all manner of personal failings and inadequacies.
“But come on, the Council’s been disbanded.” V shrugged. “Most of the aristocracy is dead. Who the hell’s going to complain? And P.S., fuck the glymera.”
Saxton smiled as he stretched his arms overhead and moved his neck from side to side. The fact that his hair didn’t shift at all was not a fact of Aqua Net. It was because every inch of him was just that refined and well-behaved.
Likely down to his proverbial knickers, which were unlikely to be tweed.
“While I appreciate that sentiment,” the solicitor hedged, “nonetheless, we need to be of care. The King is of course free to do what he wishes, but it’s my job to ensure that any implications of his actions are presented to him for review.”
Even though Saxton was a born and bred aristocrat, he had no love for his class. Then again, he’d been kicked out of his bloodline because he preferred the company of his own sex. The good news was he had found a new family of choice with the Brotherhood and mated a helluva guy. Ruhn was good stuff.
So, yeah, fuck the glymera.
“What’re they going to do to us?” V started a second roll. “They have no power, and Wrath is democratically elected now. They can’t touch him.”
The attorney looked back down at the inked symbols on the open folio of parchment. “Yet if we proceed with precision, then there can be no rightful complaints.”
“We’re just going to raid the place and burn it down. Who’s going to rebuild it out of the dozen of the aristocrats that are left.”
Assuming they could find the new site. After years of losing track of the glymera’s private repository for vampires who pissed them off, the Jackal had gotten free of the place and come to the Brotherhood. By the time they’d all gone back to the underground location, however, the “facility” had been deserted: Whoever was running the camp now had somehow managed to disappear five or six hundred prisoners, an entire drug operation, and all staff and guards, right into thin air. Poof!
But to where? They couldn’t have gone far, considering.
“I say we cold-lab it.” V licked another strip. “Shut it all down with an edict and clean up the paperwork afterward.”
“Have you found the location—”
“No, but we’re going to. Even if it kills us.” He took out another rolling paper, and then barked across the dining room, “Jesus, will you two just look it up on the Internet!”
Butch and Rhage turned and looked at him as if he had suggested putting a “For Sale” sign in front of the mansion. And was prepared to deed Fritz, butler extraordinaire, along with the property.
V jabbed a hand into his ass pocket and took out his Samsung, waving it around. “Not sure if either of you are aware, but you have the world at your fingertips here. Typey-typey.”
Butch tugged at the sleeve of his Tom Ford jacket, prim as the good little Catholic boy he had been, and still was. “That’s not the point.”
“And you shouldn’t believe everything you read on the Internet.” Hollywood motioned with that bathtub-sized spoon. “Also, we don’t really care about what other people think.”
“So this is a private jerk-off,” V muttered.
“Exactly.”
“About a very important horror franchise,” Butch footnoted.
For some reason, the sight of the two of them standing there by one of the long windows, Rhage all big, blond, and beautiful, eating out of a Ben & Jerry’s container, Butch looking like he was waiting for someone from GQ to hand him his Best-Dressed Vampire of the Year award, made V remember the early days of the troika, the three of them single and hanging out in the Pit.
He wouldn’t return to that time, even if someone paid him with a lifetime supply of hand-rolleds that he didn’t have to twist and lick himself. But they were good memories. Just like the pair of airheads were very good males, very good brothers.
Very good fighters.
V checked the time on his phone. The three of them had been early for tonight’s audiences, some kind of buzzy animation making it impossible for them to hang out all the way through First Meal back at the mansion. Wrath would be arriving soon, and not long thereafter, the citizens for their appointments with their King.
V hated this part of his job, cooling his jets while he listened in on private conversations about matings, births, deaths, and property disputes. However, the Black Dagger Brotherhood had always functioned as both the defenders of the species and the King’s private guard.
So Wrath never did this on his own.
And who knew, maybe some night, the brothers might be needed.
In the meantime, he was staring down the barrel at six hours of twitching in his shitkickers. When he could be out looking for that fucking prison camp.
The more they couldn’t find that place, the more he was determined to hunt down the location. It wasn’t that he knew anybody who was currently incarcerated, and he was not a bleeding heart with a rescue complex. He really fucking hated the glymera, though, and even if the camp had been co-opted by some faction and wasn’t being run by that bunch of self-righteous snots anymore, there was satisfaction in taking a toy with their name on it away.
And okay, yeah… maybe he didn’t like the idea that there were people in there who’d done nothing wrong. According to the Jackal, there had been a number of murderers thrown behind bars, but there were others who’d been tossed in there who’d done nothing but break social rules that were total bullshit. Like females who had busted out of sehclusion or left abusive mates. Males who were competition, politically, socially, romantically.
People who were into their own kind.
FFS, his sex life had never been conventional, so it could have been him. Saxton. Ruhn. Blay and Qhuinn.
So fuck the glymera, he thought as he took another pinch out of the pouch.
“We’ll find it,” he vowed to the King’s solicitor. “And I’m going to enjoy blowing it the fuck up.”
CHAPTER THREE
In the prison camp’s new location, three stories below the abandoned tuberculosis hospital’s decaying floors of patient rooms, treatment areas, and administrative offices, two levels beneath where the drug processing was performed by the imprisoned and the private quarters for the Command had been built, and four flights of cracked concrete steps underneath the terrible sleeping conditions of the prisoners… a lone nurse draped from head to toe in dingy brown robing was changing the bedsheets on a thin, stained mattress with the kind of care usually reserved for the master suite in one of the aristocracy’s finest houses.
As Nadya moved about the rusted metal frame, tucking the rough sheets in between the creaking springs and the forty-year-old padded pallet, the falls of fabric she hid under swung loosely about her scarred face and crippled body. It was a strange contrast, her stiffness, jerks, and hobbles, compared with the flow of the cloth, and she reflected, not for the first time, that she wore what she did partially because it granted her something of what she had lost.
Ease of movement. Grace. Fluidity.
But there were other reasons she covered herself thus.
Flipping a clean blanket out of folds she had rendered it into, she let the woolen weight settle and then smoothed out any wrinkles. Then she bent down with a grimace and picked up the thin, hard pillow from the concrete floor. As she placed the headrest where it belonged, she stared down at the vacant bed.
Until she had to look away.
What she saw around her elevated none of her unsettled mood. Her makeshift facility for the sick, injured, or infirmed among the prisoners was in an abandoned storage room, tucked behind a forest of shelves that still bore the weight of supplies that had been outdated or antiquated twenty years ago. When the camp had been moved here to this old human hospital, it had taken her nights and days to clear the space to set up the row of treatment beds, and as much as she scrubbed the floors and laundered the linens and washed down the walls that she could reach, she did not bother with the dust on the shelves.
There were limits to her energy and she disregarded them at her peril.
She had had two patients thus far. No longer than a night ago, she had washed and remade the bed on the far end, where that human woman had been, where Lucan had watched over her.
Where the wolven had fallen in love with his fated mate.
From Nadya’s post in the shadows, she had witnessed the favor growing between them, and she’d recognized it for what it was: a blessing granted by destiny. A relief of suffering, a source of hope in turmoil, a direction when all seemed lost.
A destination when one had no home.
After the woman had left, Nadya had taken similar care with the washing of the sheets and blankets. She had known that Rio would not be back, assuming she survived the return to her people—and therefore she had known that Lucan would not return, for wherever that woman would be, he would go. Thus to honor them, she had stripped and reconstructed the bedding with precision, as if her efforts could somehow impact their future.
As if she held magic in her hands and could aid them along their journey.
Looking back down, she stared at the bed before her. Then she splayed her hands wide once more and ran them over the blankets. As the texture of the coarse wool registered, she pictured the patient who had lain there returning to her clinic, as if she could summon him by will alone. She visualized him coming back to her in the same manner he had first arrived, with Apex and Mayhem holding his weight up by the armpits, his feet not touching the concrete, his head loose, his body injured in shocking ways…
But his eyes seeking her out even though her face was hidden beneath her hood.
She imagined Kane with utter specificity, his raw burn wounds, his patchy hair, his mouth drawn tight from the suffering. His withered limbs. His clawed hands that were missing fingers.
She had done what she could for him, but her efforts had made little difference. He had remained on the verge of death until the night before, when the guards had taken him away roughly, with no regard for his compromised condition.
She’d tried to stop them. But the male who had manhandled him had put a gun to her head. She would never forget the look in those cold, pale eyes.
After Kane had been forcefully removed, she’d left the bed as it was, as if it were a beacon Kane’s destiny could locate only if she didn’t change the sheeting. Which was so stupid.
He was not coming back. And his end had been a terrible one.
She told herself he was finally at peace now. Up in the Fade. With his beloved mate, about whom he had spoken in his delirium.
Sitting down, the rusty springs creaked under her weight, and she had never heard a more lonely sound. Putting her hand on the freshly laundered case, she pictured what hair Kane had had left and tried to feel its texture, its softness, as if she could bring him back if her memories were clear enough.
But that was not how resuscitation worked. Or resurrection—
“Missing someone?”
Nadya jumped up and steadied herself as best she could. The female who loomed in the open doorway was framed by the aisle created by the two blocks of shelving rows. Standing over six feet tall and dressed for war, her powerful body was belted with weapons, her lean, intelligent face drawn in cunning lines. In a prison camp full of depravity and survival instinct run rampant, she was in charge of the guards, running the male squadrons with an iron fist.
Nadya’s heart skipped beats and she pulled her hooding down farther, even though it was already in place.
The head of the guards came forward. That she was alone was unusual. That she was utterly unconcerned with a lack of defense behind her was not.
She had taken over after the Executioner was killed, and there would be no one who would get uphill of her.
“You wait until spoken to,” she commented in her deep voice.
Nadya bowed slightly, and kept the truth to herself. It was not respect that made her silent, and also not fear. All she could think of was the way that guard had pulled Kane up off the bed by the arm, and even though Kane had cried out in pain, there had been no deference shown for his condition. For the fact that he was already suffering.
Instead, there had been cruel delight. And that horrible male had been sent down here by one and only one person.
Hatred was the reason for the silence.
“I have injured guards,” their leader announced. “I’m bringing them here to you. Tell me the supplies you don’t have and I’ll get them for you.”
Nadya cleared her throat. “What kind of injuries?”
“Does it matter? You’re going to have to save them one way or another.”
“If you want me to tell you what I need, you’re going to have to tell me what I’m treating.”
As a dark brow arched, Nadya realized that no one had ever called the female by a name. She was just referred to as the head of the guards, or “muhm” in the Old Language, in deference to her higher rank.
It was odd to hear the aristocratic term used to refer to someone like her.
“Gunshots. Contusions. Concussions.”
“How many patients.”
“A dozen.”
“I need antibiotics, bandages, and pain relief,” Nadya shot back. “Cephalosporin, all the pills you can get. Sulfa pills, too. I want hydrogen peroxide, as much as you can find, and Polysporin or Neosporin in tubes. I’ll take any pain relievers, pill form or liquid, even if they’re just over-the-counter. Also suturing kits and sterile bandages with tape. But I don’t know where you’re going to find it all—”
“That’s not going to be a problem.”
The arrogance wasn’t a surprise.
“Let me write it down.”
Moving as fast as she could, she went over to a battered desk in the corner and pulled out old stationery that had browned with age, but still bore the header of the hospital’s name and address. Her writing was messy, but her mind was clear.
Her mentor’s teachings remained with her, that bridge between the vampire and the human worlds still sound, still saving lives—even though she would see each of those guards bleed out if she had the choice.
Nadya returned to the other female and held out the piece of stationery. “Just so we’re clear, I can’t operate. I don’t have the skills beyond simple suturing. I’ll do what I can, but I—”
“No,” the female snapped as she took the list. “You’ll make sure they’re fully healed and back in commission. And before you ask, if they need to feed, I will have females brought here.”
“There are limits to what I can—”
The head of the guards took out a blade, the steel flashing with the same cold light that was in her eyes. “You better hope they all live. Every one of them. Their lives are yours. Their graves are your own. I’ll put a piece of you in each hole I have to dig for any of my males.”
Nadya stared through the mesh of her hood—and decided she was just about done with weapons being pointed at her.
“Where did my burn patient go?” she demanded as she pointed at the bed. “What happened to him?”
Weaknesses had to be hidden in the prison camp, and though her physical faults were obvious, she did what she could to camouflage her mental ones: Revealing to this killer that she had developed a tie with Kane was not smart.
But she had to know for sure what she feared in theory.
“He’s dead.” The head of the guards pivoted and walked out into the forest of shelves. “Your patients are arriving shortly. I’ll get you your supplies.”
Nadya listened to the retreating footfalls. And knew if she had been in another body, she would have gone after the female. In her mind, she had a fantasy of hand-to-hand combat, but that was never going to happen for so many reasons.
Kane had been a stranger. Yet in his suffering, he had become a part of her.
It was as if she had died, too.
And the prospect of going on without him cast her already gray world into a mourning that reached her soul.
CHAPTER FOUR
The sound of tires crackling over loose gravel entered Apex’s ears like shards of glass, the soft volume at odds with the pain the noise caused inside his skull. Meanwhile, in his nose, the smell of blood, gas, burned rubber, and fresh grass was likewise too much to handle. Groaning, he pushed at what was against his face—
He was back in the wheel well of the SUV. Except this time, it was vertical, not horizontal.
Shit, they’d rolled over. And those were more guards pulling up on the shoulder of the road.
