The Beloved, page 31
“This is true,” L.W. piped in.
Shuli nodded at the guy. “Right? I mean, shit, if you’re going to risk your own life, at least do it for someone who matters to you.”
Rhage shook his head and hit the gas as the light turned green. “It’s in his DNA. He’s not going to leave anybody behind. You did the right thing, though, Shuli. Protecting the King or the heir apparent above all else is the correct impulse.”
L.W. laughed a little and motioned at Shuli. “This guy. He runs right into the line of fire—down that corridor. Did you see that hall?”
Rhage shook his head. “Not yet. Payne and I are going back to deconstruct the scene.”
“Fucking nuts. Steel-lined, nowhere to go, funneling right out into what was an ambush. It was suicidal.”
Holding up his forefinger, Shuli countered, “I’m not interested in killing myself. Just to be clear.”
“You could have stayed and defended our position right beside me.”
“And tell me, how would that have worked for us as a stream of lessers entered that open area? You think they were just going to take a load off while you breached the door?”
“It didn’t take me long!”
“It could have. We didn’t know what was going to happen—”
“Because you decided to be a hero.”
“Oh, so that’s why you came after me?” Shuli rolled his eyes. “A crown isn’t enough, you need a Superman cape, too?”
“Are you really still arguing with me?”
“Well, someone’s gotta stand up to your ass. Everybody else thinks you shit rainbows—”
The crack of laughter from the front shut down the second wave of bitey-face, and what do you know. As Shuli glanced at L.W. with annoyance, the heir to the throne looked back at him with a similar set of pursed lips.
But neither of them was going to tell the Brother to quit it with the giggles.
After all, Shuli might have been willing to run headfirst into a legion of lessers, but he was not interested in getting eaten alive by Rhage’s dragon. At least with the former, he had a chance at making it out alive.
“You guys are awesome together,” Rhage said with approval. “A real matched pair.”
Shuli and L.W. looked at each other again.
“We are not.”
“We are not.”
CHAPTER FORTY
Chaos.
Unmitigated chaos.
As Evan tore out of the scene, he ran harder and faster than he ever had in all of his life, and he had no idea, until he was a good seven or eight blocks away from the melee, that he had in fact made it out alive.
Or intact, was more like it.
Slowing his pace, he cut around a corner, put his back against the exterior wall of a brick building, and just stood still. Which was easy to do because he wasn’t breathing hard even with all the exertion. Putting his hand to his heart, he wished he could feel the pounding and the suffocation, the lethargy in his legs, the sting in his cheeks. Instead, he had more in common with what he was leaning on.
He had to keep moving. And he knew where to go.
The next thing he knew, he was under the bridges, heading for the doors he had seen the others go through before. When he came up to one, he tried the knob—
It opened.
Stepping through, he looked down at the stone floor. A black oil trail headed off to the left and he followed it, his boots tracking through the fresh blood. Not that it was blood.
Oh, God, what had he done.
What had been done to him.
When he arrived at a set of stairs that led downward, he breathed in, and knew he should have been smelling the dank and musky. And his legs should have been tired. And his feet should have hurt. And he knew he’d been hit with another bullet in the upper arm and in the calf and that should have slowed him down or made him dizzy.
At the bottom, there was a door half off its hinges and he pushed it aside.
There were lit candles in random places, and buckets, so many buckets. But the sound of sucking… that was what drew his attention to the far corner.
In the dim flicker, the trainer was bending over something on the floor, a black leather duster pooling around whatever was happening.
“What did you do to me,” Evan asked in a low tone.
That blond head came up from the body on the floor, and as it swiveled in Evan’s direction, there was red blood dripping from an open mouth with fangs.
The smile was as cold as the dead. “I’ve been looking for you.”
“What did you do to me.”
The monster with the fangs rose to its feet. “I gave you what you wanted. You wanted to be strong, you are. You wanted power, you have it. You wanted—”
Evan pounded his chest with his fist. “I didn’t want this!”
“You see one fight, and you’re running away? I give you everything you need to succeed and you fucking run?”
Evan took out both his guns. “I’m done talking. I want you to reverse whatever you did.” He nodded in the direction of the body that was lying in an oil slick, red blood pumping out of a neck wound. “Or I’m going to kill you.”
“Really.”
The villain walked forward, all stealth stride with that duster flaring out around him, and even though Evan was the one with the weapons, he backed up until he was, once again, against a brick wall. Except he wasn’t running anymore. He was fucking done with that.
“You make this right,” he said as his voice trembled with anger.
“Do you want to know why I was looking for you?” The nightmare stopped when they were only two feet away from each other. “It’s because I didn’t finish.”
With a casual hand, Lash pushed away the muzzles and put his palm on the center of Evan’s chest. “You have something that you no longer need.”
A searing pain lit off behind Evan’s sternum, and as he started to scream, the entity’s other hand clapped onto his mouth—
Cracking sounds, like dry sticks snapped in half over a knee, sounded loud in his ears, and then there was a messy, wet series of flaps. The agony was so bad, he thought he’d surely lose consciousness, but he didn’t.
He was utterly aware as a hand pushed into his heart’s cavity, and the organ that had kept him alive was taken out of its seat in his rib cage.
It was still beating as the trainer held the cardiac muscle up so Evan could get a good, clear look at the nasty black wedge.
“We were interrupted before,” Lash said. “But now we’ll be thick as thieves.”
Flashing white fangs, the mouth that had sucked him dry opened wide and took a bite of his heart.
Evan was pushed away, and as he fell on the floor, he tried to scream again, but had no air in his lungs: The gaping hole at his pecs was ragged as a bomb crater, and the black stains on his skin were like the blast zone around the detonation.
“You will listen to me when I call you,” came the command, “and you will go out there and do what you are programmed to do.”
“I did not ask for this,” Evan said on a rasp.
“Yes, you did. With every pathetic attempt at the weights in that gym, and each frustration you expressed about your family, and all the mediocrity you were in. You have a fucking future now. Go live it.”
Evan stared up at the horror before him, his brain refusing to process it all. “I want out—”
“Too late,” Lash said with that trademark arctic smile. “Now, get to work.”
The thing turned its back and headed over to the corner again. To finish its meal.
With a shaking hand, Evan lifted one of the guns—and pulled the trigger—
It happened so fast, he couldn’t track it. The monster was going back over to his prey—and then Lash was spinning around and snapping something out of the air. Sticking his fist out, he released what he’d caught—and the bullet hit the concrete with a chiming bounce.
Then he cast his arm in a sweep that somehow translated to where Evan was, his body caught in an explosive current that carried him end over end, as if he were a newspaper page in the wind.
He hit something so hard he was stunned into immobility.
Maybe he would die. But he feared that was a wish he would not be granted.
Lying just outside the glow of the candles, he stared into darkness… as the sucking sounds resumed.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Hours later, Nalla came awake, and for a split second, she had no idea what had woken her up. She knew where she was, though. She was in Nate’s bed, and he was—
A tortured sound rippled up next to her, and she rolled over with a flop. In the dim light thrown from the bathroom, he was asleep and facing her, and it was like he was contorted in pain: One hand was curled up under his chin in a claw, his chest was pumping up and down, and he was gripping the mattress with his other—
“No… please, no… not again…”
The voice that came out of him was a total distortion from how he normally sounded, the words strangled and vulnerable. Higher in pitch. As if he were a young.
“Nate?”
His face turned toward her, but he didn’t open his eyes. “Can you help me?”
Fishing through the covers, she took the hand that was under his chin. “Nate, you need to wake up—”
“Please take me with you…”
“Shh, it’s okay—”
“Can you get me out of here…” His head flipped back and forth on the pillow. “If you can take the needle out, you can…”
“Nate. You’ve got to wake—”
“I can’t stay anymore. She’s dead… mahmen escaped, but she’s dead… can you help me… take me… with you…”
He started crying in his sleep, the tears squeezing out of his lockeddown lids. “They hurt me… my stomach this time… help me… the humans won’t stop…”
As horror dawned on her and squeezed the air out of her lungs, Nalla tried to soothe him with touch. “You need to wake up, Nate, you’re safe—”
“Not… safe… humans won’t let us go… the men in white coats are going to kill me.”
All at once, his halting words melded with stories she had heard, of vampires taken by humans into labs and experimented on, viruses and diseases like cancer and Ebola and polio injected into them, their organs removed or dissected, their bodies violated in too many ways to contemplate.
There was no way someone dreamed of this randomly.
No way.
Trying to sharpen her voice, she said, “Nate, you’re not in the lab. You’re in your basement, under the cabin, on your property. You’re safe and you’re with me, Nalla.” She stroked his muscled forearm desperately. “Can you wake up for me? Nate, please… just wake up…”
With an abrupt spasm, he threw his head back like he was straining at a set of bars, and on his torso, the skull undulated with the movement, the ivy, and the snakes, and the—not clouds, she thought with terror. Gas. She’d gotten it all wrong. The elements of the design that she’d thought emanated to all other parts of him… they weren’t flowing from the skull—oh, God, they represented things forcing their way into the eyes and mouth, flooding, choking… bringing pain and suffering.
As he thrashed and kicked, she couldn’t stand it anymore. “I’ll take you with me,” she said in a rush. “I’ll take you out. Here, come with me…”
Her voice broke as she stifled a sob. But at least he stilled.
“You won’t let them hurt me?”
It was a little boy’s voice coming out of a grown male, someone who was powerless begging for mercy.
“No,” she said hoarsely as she blinked away tears, “I won’t let them hurt you. You’re safe, with me. Come away… with me.”
Giving up the fight, Nate curled into her, and she felt him trembling, his huge body shaking so badly, the mattress vibrated.
“Help me…” he whispered. “It hurts…”
Leaning over him, she rubbed his back, her eyes locking on the far wall. Then she looked around the room. She had thought it was neat before; now she saw the space for what it really was: Barren. No pictures or knickknacks, no mementos of vacations taken or fun nights out. Nothing personal, at all.
Because there was nothing personal in his own life.
She pictured him standing apart at the club—and standing apart at festivals and celebrations. If he came to them at all.
How did someone who had seen what he had of cruelty and calculation ever relate to anybody? He must always be jumping a divide when he was interacting with other people, ever on the far side, looking in… because the torture he’d been subjected to had broken something precious within him: His belief that there was kindness in the world that would safeguard a young when they could not safeguard themselves.
Instead, he’d been surrounded by humans who had tortured his mahmen and hurt him, over and over again.
Running her hand over the top of his head, feeling the new growth of his dark hair, she whispered, “Now I understand why you don’t want to talk about yourself—”
With no warning, Nate shoved himself away from her, his arms punching out, his eyes wide open and terrified as they looked at her, and yet didn’t seem to see her at all. And then he pushed himself all the way off the bed and crab-walked backwards into the far corner, keeping that vacant stare on her as if he expected to be flayed alive at any moment.
Her heart pounded and fear struck her in the center of her chest. What if she couldn’t get him to wake up?
“Nate, it’s me. Nalla.”
He was shaking again, his teeth rattling, and he drew his knees up to his chest, wrapping his arms around them and holding himself. The way he lowered his head so that most of his face disappeared behind the fortification he’d created with form, only his wide, wary eyes showing, was a young’s way of hunkering down.
He had done this before, she thought. Tried to disappear, while knowing he couldn’t hide from his captors.
“What you must have been through,” she said softly.
And she needed to help him snap out of it, but she had no idea how to get through to him—
From out of the recesses of her mind, the answer came, and it was not an exotic one.
Sitting up straight, she put her palms together, sharp and loud, twice.
Clap.
Clap.
All at once, Nate came awake, that blank stare filling with confusion, his brows dropping as he looked down at his arms as if he couldn’t figure out why they were locked on his bent legs—
With slow recognition, he released the grip on himself, his fighter’s hard body both uncoiling and tensing, all at the same time. Now, as he looked across at her, he seemed to know exactly who she was, but he was wary—like he wasn’t sure what she’d seen. How much had been revealed. How… bad it had been.
“It’s okay,” she said in a steady, calm voice. Which was not even remotely how she was feeling. “You’re all right.”
Inside, she was an absolute mess, but she knew what he’d be concerned about: This was what he hid from everybody, and he was worried she’d judge him in some way. Which was not going to happen.
And she did not blame him for keeping this all to himself. Troubles were shared. Tragedies were different. The former was a conversation, the latter was a stripping raw of someone who had been raw too much and too often.
Silence could be the only armor you had, sometimes. Because if you got talking? Your voice unlocked the dungeon, and the demons in your mind jumped you and you were never quite sure you’d be able to get free of them—
With an exhale, he looked away, staring across at the stretch of countertop where the sink was. “I…”
As he let things just hang there, she had a feeling he was trying to construct some kind of only-a-nightmare lie.
Nalla shook her head. “I’m not going to say anything to anybody. And I understand why you don’t talk about it.”
After a moment, he extended his legs out in front of himself and crossed his arms again, now over his lap. “It’s been a long time.”
“Since you’ve had a dream like that?”
Nate shrugged and didn’t look at her. “One that vivid, at any rate.”
There were so many questions to ask, but she was not going to pressure him—
“It’s just a nightmare,” he said. “Everybody gets them, you know. You probably have them, too, right?”
Yes, she thought. But not because she was reliving being an animal in a lab.
“I do.” She cleared her throat. “From time to time.”
“What are yours about?”
Struggling to focus, she tried to get her brain to plug into her own life. “Wasps. I dream of—wasps.”
“Oh, good one.” His voice became a little lighter, like he was trying to embrace normalcy, fuse it to his own experience. “Do you come up on a nest or something?”
“I, ah…” What the hell was she saying? “No, it’s not like that. I’m not in the woods or anything. The wasps are in my bed… under my pillow, actually. I roll over and flush them. I always wake up just as they start to sting me.”
“It happens when you’re stressed, right.”
“Yes. When I’m stressed.”
“I don’t like cramped places.” He shook his head. Then ran his palm over his skull, his biceps bunching up. “Claustrophobia does it to me every time. Common thing to worry about, like wasps in your bed, right?”
“Yes,” she said again, softly.
He nodded, but it was in an absent way, and he still wasn’t looking at her. When he finally got up in silence, then said something about taking a quick shower, she wasn’t surprised. She told herself it was fine, that he was still sorting through what was real and what wasn’t, and a rinse off would help that.
But as he shut the door firmly, she knew it was more than just the bathroom getting closed off.
See, this was why you couldn’t get too invested in the rosy start of a relationship, she thought.
There were always layers to people—and some of them went so deep, they created fault lines that couldn’t be repaired.
