Blood Truth, page 4
She would shiver and offer herself, limp and willing and open, to him.
He would tremble because of the talhman, but she would assume it was on account of his arousal.
And when he got up under that long skirt, his thick, hard sex pushing deep into her, she would come, and in that little death, as the French called it, she would never know how close she was to her actual demise.
He would not climax.
He never did.
And provided his self-control held, she would never know how wrong she was to choose him. If he failed to control himself, however? Well, she was going to learn an important lesson—only once, of course. Because the dead not only had no tales to tell, there was no more education for them, either.
“Tell me what your name is,” she breathed.
The syllables vibrated against the pad of his finger, and his heated blood, his killing instinct, amplified the vision of her in her mask until he could see each individual hair on her head and every pump of her jugular vein.
The male focused on her lips.
Slipping his enormous palm around to the nape of her neck, he pulled her headfirst into him, her body following like water poured from a vase. But he did not kiss her. Even as she dropped her head back against his hold and leaned her lower body into his own, prepared to accept his mouth on hers, he stopped before contact was made.
With his free hand, he drew her wrist up. Maintaining eye contact with her, he hissed and bared his fangs.
The nick he gave her was a small one, but it was in the right place, blood welling up and running down the pale, soft skin of her inner arm.
Her breasts pumped in that tight bustier, that shimmery powder catching the light. “Now what will you do?” she breathed.
Shifting his grip on her hand, he extended his tongue and ran it up the flow he had created, lapping what had escaped her vein, swallowing the dark wine. Her taste was acceptable, not that his standards were high, so when he reached the knife-like incision he had made, he closed a warm seal around it with his mouth.
Sucking.
Licking.
He knew exactly when she orgasmed. Her eyes squeezed shut and she bit down on her lower lip, her hard, white canines making the soft, red-painted flesh plump in submission. Her hips pressed into him and then rotated, and he imagined the sweet stinging pulses that gripped her core were more tantalizing than satisfying.
“Take me downstairs,” she groaned.
So private down there on the subterranean level. No prying eyes.
Little foot traffic, and what passersby there might be would be drugged out and disinterested in anything other than themselves.
A bigger challenge.
The male picked her up, splitting her thighs around his torso, her breasts pushing against his chest. He carried her off using one arm. She didn’t weigh much.
The female didn’t bother looking at the crowd as they departed. He was the only thing on her mind now.
The way down to the lower level was easily located, and as he headed through the crowd in that direction, she nuzzled into his neck and worked her core against his torso. When he got to the steel door marked “EXIT,” he yanked it open. The stairwell was concrete and smelled of alkaline dirt and cold mold, and the temperature dropped precipitously as they got away from the radiating bodies and whatever heat system was in force in the open area.
“What’s your name?” the female said into his ear.
Down, down, down, the echoes of his heavy boots and heavier body rebounding around. At the bottom landing, he unlatched the steel door with his mind, his will opening the thing wide. The corridor beyond was strobed with old ceiling lights that flickered in their rusty, decrepit mounts, the dull illumination seizuring from above, making shadows dance in an evil waltz. The scents in the frigid, stale air suggested many others had used the corridor for the same purpose the female intended—
The male’s talhman stretched its clawed will under his skin, fresh aggression blooming throughout his body and making him wonder whether his control on this night might not fail him—
The blackout, when it came, only announced itself with its departure, the world returning unto the male in a rush of sensation, his lapse of awareness having stolen everything from him: eyesight, hearing, touch, and taste.
But he was still with the female—and she was alive.
He had pushed her up against an inset doorway, and his hands were trying to find a way under her skirt—
Well, one of them was. The other was feeling around for the latch to open the door.
From past experience, he knew that behind each of the many old wooden portals there were storage areas filled with discarded manufacturing equipment, decaying wooden crates, and colonies of rats that made homes out of the dank, dark caves.
Inside . . . he could do even more to her.
As the thought occurred to him, he wasn’t sure which part of him was talking. The sexual drive . . . or the monster. They were not one and the same, but at times, he had found it difficult to know the difference.
“Your name,” she demanded as she rubbed herself against him. “What is your name . . .”
“Syn,” he growled into her throat. “I am Syn.”
In the alley about fifteen blocks to the west of Pyre’s Revyval, Boone led with the tip of his blade, coming down on his lesser with the onetwo body punch of gravity and all his heavy weight. The steel dagger went into the undead’s eye socket, and as it cleaved through the pupil and sclera, penetrating the brain via the pathway of the optic nerve, he took a mental note down on his cognitive ledger.
This was a violation of training.
The rule for trainees was, whether you were working in pairs or were alone—and especially if it was the latter—you were to dispatch the enemy back to the Omega the instant you got a clear chest strike. Lessers, these sickly sweet-smelling, de-souled humans hell-bent on eradicating vampires, were essentially immortal in a Death Becomes Her kind of way: No matter how much damage you did to their bodies, they were still capable of cognition and movement. You could cut their heads off, lop limbs from their torsos, disembowel, destroy, debride—and they would remain animated, like a rattlesnake.
There was only way to “kill” them: a stab through the empty heart cavity with something steel. Then it was a case of pop, pop, fizz, fizz, relief, etc.
Back they went to their evil maker.
As someone newly trained, Boone didn’t have the wealth of experience that other fighters, and the Brothers themselves, possessed. So for a soldier like him, he shouldn’t be taking risks. A quick COD back to the Omega was the safest way to go—and for the first couple of weeks he was out working in the field, he’d been sure to follow that instruction. After a while, however . . .
He began to draw out the killing if he had the chance.
He could still remember the first time he’d deviated from the safety protocol. He had meant to nail a slayer in the chest, but it had rolled to the side unexpectedly and he’d sliced through its pectoral. As the undead had gone to sit back up, Boone had fumbled with his blade and, panicked, just started stabbing at anything.
Black blood had speckled, splashed, flowed. Pain had caused the lesser to cry out. Boone’s arm had become a jackhammer going up and down in a blur of movement.
It had all been such a revelation.
His brain had lit up in a strange new pattern, sectors of his mind that had been previously dark pierced with an illumination of excitement and nonsexual arousal that shocked him. The rush had been so sharp and so unexpected, he had figured it had to be an anomaly.
That assumption proved to be incorrect.
The second time he delayed the final moment, it had been just the same: A visceral experience that had turned the volume up on the whole world, every nuance of what he was doing, how the slayer reacted, what the start, middle, and end was like, engraved on his mind. The third instance? He validated the operating principle into a kind of law.
Since then, he’d sought these moments out, careful not to get caught.
All the murdered vampires who had lost their innocent lives to these soulless monsters? All the families destroyed? The suffering of his race at the hands of these killers?
Fuck the lessers.
Refocusing, Boone clamped a hold on the front of the undead’s throat and then he stared down into the slayer’s pasty white face. The dagger was still where he’d put it, sticking out of the orbital bed, the handle angled to reflect the arc of his stab. Black blood, glossy and awful-smelling, was dripping out the outer corner of the penetration like tears, sliding down the temple, pooling in the ear.
From out of nowhere, Boone remembered what it was like to be a young lying back in the bath, the water entering his ear canals, buffering things. Was that what the lesser was experiencing?
As the slayer’s mouth gaped like a fish’s, and the arms pinwheeled like it was trying to make snow angels at what could be argued was a very inopportune time, Boone squeezed even harder, crushing the windpipe.
The gurgling gasps rising up from the lesser’s lips made him want to do more. Drag this out for hours. Cut into the torso—
In the back of his mind, a warning bell sounded. Taking out a small portion of the race’s suffering on this slayer was one thing. What Boone’s brain was suggesting to him now . . . was another. It was torture. Still, he ignored the inner alarm as he wondered what it would be like to use his fangs to kill one. Even though that would be harder to explain to the Brothers, he imagined how good it would feel. How satisfying. How visceral.
Temptation tickled his jaw, his mouth cranking open, his canines descending.
All he wanted to do was hurt this motherfucker. And keep hurting it.
With his free hand, he reached out to the hilt of his dagger and secured his palm to the contoured grip. Slowly, he turned the blade back and forth, feeling the grit of the bone wear away as he turned, turned, turned—
“What the hell are you doing?”
Boone looked up in shock. Zypher was standing right in front of him, the Bastard’s leather fighting gear speckled with the black blood of the slayer he had engaged with, his gun down by his thigh, his silver dagger up like he was ready to use it.
“Just finishing the job,” Boone said as he retracted his blade.
Shifting back on the torso, he buried his dagger in the center of that chest, and then raised his forearms up to shield his eyes from the blinding flash. The popping was like that of a gun, echoing around the alley, and as the burst of illumination faded, Boone rose to his feet. There was no looking at Zypher. He kept his eyes trained on the melted hole in the snow, the black rim around on the burn mark part due to the explosion, part from the blood of the enemy.
Say something, Boone told himself.
“I’ll call mine in.” He went for his communicator. “And then I’m ready to go back on patrol—”
“The fuck you are. You’re injured.”
He looked down at his body, bending at the waist. “Where—oh.”
The knife that the lesser had thrown was still imbedded in the meat of his shoulder, the handle sticking out of him in the same way his had protruded from that eye socket. No, that wasn’t quite true. This knife was embedded straight into him. The one in that eye had been angled by thirty . . . maybe forty . . . degrees.
Dimly, he decided that was a strange thing to take note of. Then again, everything felt funhouse weird. From the moment that that other fighter’s presence had registered, it was as if he had split into two entities, one that had done the stabbing and was now standing upright in his boots next to the burn mark in the snow . . . and another that was observing himself from across the alley, an impartial, detached entity.
Like a reflection in a mirror, identical but not the real thing.
For some reason, he thought of Rochelle. Which was strange as it had been a long time since he had done that.
Keeping a curse to himself, he reached across and yanked out the lesser’s knife. As the blade released from his flesh, he should have felt something. Right?
A blaze of pain. A sting. A flare of . . .
There was nothing except maybe a warm rush under his leather jacket. His blood. Running into his athletic shirt.
Zypher triggered the communicator mounted on the lapel of his leather jacket. “I need a medic. STAT.”
Boone shook his head. “It’s nothing. I’m ready to keep fighting—”
“Not gonna happen on my watch.”
* * *
415 Summit Lane
Caldwell’s Millionaires’ Row
Tohrment, son of Hharm, entered an elegant parlor that was trashed like it had hosted a bar fight. Antique furniture and silk sofas were tipped over, shoved out of place, torn up. Porcelain plates were shattered. Lamps were on the Oriental, shades ruined, bulbs broken, bodies cracked.
He was careful where he put his shitkickers. No reason to add to the ruin.
The scent of fresh vampire blood was thick in the air. And that wasn’t all.
He stopped in front of a large oil painting of a bouquet of flowers. Dutch. Eighteenth century. The still life, with its hard-focus depiction of dew on petals, careful detailing of the mammoth vase, and color ful, head-cocked parrot off to one side, was a prime example of the famous style.
But you could not see much of the artist’s expertise. There was a black splatter across the canvas, all that old paint and timeless talent covered with a substance that was viscous and glossy—but did not smell like sweaty August trash.
So it was not lesser-based. But they already knew that.
Shadows. And not Shadows as in Trez and iAm, but shadows with a lowercase s: Entities that had appeared in Caldwell from out of nowhere, did not appear to be tied to the Omega and the Lessening Society, and which, in this instance, had attacked a gathering of glymera types.
With deadly consequences.
The Brotherhood had tried to save the guests. But they had only mostly succeeded.
Stepping over an armchair that was riddled with bullet holes, he went to the body of a male, aged approximately three hundred years. The tuxedo jacket the deceased had on was open, the two halves falling off to the side to reveal a narrow satin waistcoat, a pleated tuxedo shirt with pearl buttons, and a bow tie that was still knotted with watchmaker-worthy precision at the front of the throat.
Blood stained the brilliant white of that shirt in a bull’s-eye pattern that was no longer getting any larger in diameter. Which was what happened when the heart stopped beating and circulation ceased. No more leaking.
It was there that logic and standard operating procedures ended. In spite of the wound and its crimson signature, none of the clothes were ripped or torn: Unlike that chair, there were no bullet holes through that jacket, the waistcoat, the shirt. No tears or piercing holes from a stabbing, either.
“Makes no fucking sense,” Tohr muttered.
If he were to unfasten the waistcoat, unbutton those pearls, and open that shirt up? He would see the damage that had somehow spared the clothes and wrought the flesh beneath. The brothers had no idea how it worked. This new enemy who attacked with ruthless efficiency was a mystery, possessing powers that had never been seen before, an origin that couldn’t be determined, and an agenda that seemed related to the Omega’s but could not be verified as such.
As Tohr sank down on his haunches, both of his knees popped.
The face of the corpse was pale gray and getting waxier by the minute. Typical of the aristocracy, the bone structure was symmetrical and refined, the features not extraordinary but certainly attractive, if only because there was nothing wrong with any one part of the whole: The nose was in proportion. The jaw was fairly firm above the slit in the throat. The arch of the brows seemed purposely engineered for hauteur.
The lips were pursed as if the male did not approve of the manner of his death.
And who could blame him on that one.
That strange chest wound was not, in fact, what had killed him.
The bullet hole in the center of the forehead was out of place on so many levels, the tidy little round penetration sporting a scorched outer rim—which was what happened with a point-blank trigger pull. Vishous had been the shooter—and it had happened after the shadows’ deadly attack, after John Matthew and Murhder had blown up two of this new enemy, resulting in the Jackson Pollock overlay of that old painting and a bunch of other expensive antiques.
With all the chaos that had erupted, it had been impossible to track the details, but Tohr would be deconstructing the entire series of events as well as the crime scene over the next couple of hours.
Including the part where V’d had to cap this corpse in the frontal lobe to prevent it from reanimating and going on an attack of its own.
A side effect, they had all learned, of a mortal shadow attack.
Tohr glanced around the room again and remembered the aristocrats scattering as the shadows had entered the parlor from somewhere inside the mansion. The Brotherhood, having been tipped off that the party was going on, had broken in through windows and attempted to save the guests.
They’d been on the property to sniff out treason. But, like a lot of nights in the war and most of the dealings with the glymera, the door prize had been an unexpected one.
And not in a good way.
“He staying put?”
Tohr glanced over his shoulder at the dry mutter. Vishous was as he always was: dressed in black leather, draped in weapons, and sporting an expression like someone stupid had just done something ridiculous.
V’s laconic puss made resting bitch face seem like something that belonged on an inspirational poster.
“Let’s be respectful, okay?” Tohr said.
“Whatever, that guy’s a traitor.” V stroked his goatee. “I’m not sorry he’s dead, and I’m glad he’s staying that way. These fucking shadows and their TKO corpses.”
