Lover Avenged

TWENTY

Lash parked the Mercedes 550 under one of Caldwell’s bridges, the black sedan indistinguishable from the shadows thrown by the mammoth concrete supports. The digital clock on the dash told him that showtime was getting close.

Assuming there had been no fuckups.

As he waited, he thought about the meeting with the head of the symphaths. In retrospect, he really didn’t like the way the guy made him feel. He fucked chicks. Period. No guys. Ever.

That kind of shit was for cock jockeys like John and his weak-ass crew.

Switching tracks in his mind, Lash smiled in the darkness, thinking he couldn’t wait to reintroduce himself to those motherfuckers. In the beginning, right after he’d been brought back by his real father, he’d wanted to rush it. After all, John and his boys no doubt still hung out at ZeroSum, so finding them wouldn’t be a problem. But timing was everything. Lash was still figuring shit out with this new life of his, and he wanted to be solid when he crushed John and killed Blay in front of Qhuinn, then slaughtered the fucker who’d murdered him.

Timing mattered.

As if on cue, two cars pulled up between some pylons. The Ford Escort was the Lessening Society’s, and the silver Lexus was Grady’s wholesaler’s car.

Sweet rims on the LS 600h. Very sweet.

Grady was the first to get out of the Escort, and when Mr. D and the other two lessers followed, it was like watching the evac of a clown car, given the amount of meat that had been stuffed inside.

As they approached the Lexus, two men wearing slick winter coats got out of the 600h. In sync, the human males both put their right hands into their jackets, and all Lash could think of was, Better guns than badges coming out of those breast pockets. If Grady had fucked up and those were undercover cops pulling a modern day Crockett and Tubbs, things were going to get complicated.

But no…no CPD shields, just some conversation on the part of the coats, no doubt along the lines of, Who the fuck are those three ass-wipes you brought with you to a private business transaction?

Grady looked back at Mr. D with out-of-his-league panic, and the little Texan took the reins, stepping forward with an aluminum briefcase. After he put the case on the trunk of the Lexus, he popped it open to reveal what appeared to be stacks of hundred-dollar bills. In reality, they were just bundles of ones with a single Benji on the top of each stack. The coats looked down-

Pop. Pop.

Grady jumped back as the dealers hit the ground like mops, and his mouth opened wide as a toilet bowl. Before he could get a whole lot of oh-my-God-what-did-you-do rolling, Mr. D stepped up into his grille and bitch-slapped his lid shut.

The two slayers put their guns back into their leather jackets as Mr. D closed the suitcase, went around, and got behind the wheel of the Lexus. While he drove off, Grady looked up into the faces of the pale men like he was waiting to get plugged himself.

Instead, they just headed back to the Escort.

After a moment of confusion, Grady followed in a sloppy jog like all his joints had been overoiled, but when he went to open the back door, the slayers refused to let him get in the car. As Grady realized he was getting left behind, he started to panic, his arms flopping, his mouth shouting. Which was pretty fucking dumb, considering he was standing fifteen feet away from two guys with bullets in their brains.

Quiet would be good right about now.

Evidently one of the slayers thought the same thing. With a calm hand, he outted his gun and leveled the muzzle at Grady’s head.

Silence. Stillness. At least from the idiot.

Two doors shut and the Escort’s engine turned over on a crank and a wheeze. With a buzz of tires, the slayers took off, speckling Grady’s boots and shins with frozen dirt.

Lash hit the Mercedes’ lights, and Grady spun around, arms going up to shield his eyes.

There was the temptation to mow him down, but for the moment, the guy’s utility justified his heartbeat.

Lash started the Mercedes, pulled up to the SOB, and dropped his window down. “Get in the car.”

Grady lowered his arms. “What the hell happened-”

“Shut the fuck up. Get in the car.”

Lash closed the window and waited while Grady flopped into the passenger seat. As the guy put his belt on, his teeth were doing the castanets, and not from the cold. Fucker was the color of salt, and sweating like a tranny in Giants Stadium.

“You might as well have killed ’em in broad daylight,” Grady stammered as they headed out onto the surface road that ran beside the river. “There are eyes all over the place-”

“Which was the point.” Lash’s phone rang, and he answered as he accelerated up a ramp and onto the highway. “Very nice, Mr. D.”

“I think we done good,” the Texan said. “’Cept I can’t see no drugs. Must be in the trunk.”

“They’re in that car. Somewhere.”

“We still meetin’ back at Hunterbred?”

“Yes.”

“Hey, ah, listen, y’all plannin’ on doin’ anything with this here car?”

Lash smiled in the darkness, thinking greed was a great weakness for a subordinate to have. “I’m getting it repainted and buying a VIN and tags for it.”

There was silence, as if the lesser were waiting for more. “Oh, that’ll be good. Y’sir.”

Lash hung up on his disciple and turned to Grady. “I want to know all of the other big retailers in town. Their names, their territories, their product lines, everything.”

“I don’t know if I got all that-”

“You’d better find it out then.” Lash tossed his phone into the guy’s lap. “Make the calls you need to. Do the digging. I want every single dealer in town. Then I want the elephant that’s feeding them. The Caldwell wholesaler.”

Grady’s head fell back against the seat. “Shit. I thought this was going to be, like…about my business.”

“That was your second mistake. Start dialing and get me what I want.”

“Look…I don’t think this is…I should probably go home…”

Lash smiled at the guy, revealing his fangs and flashing his eyes. “You are home.”

Grady shrank back in the seat, then started pawing for the door handle, even though they were cruising down the highway at seventy miles an hour.

Lash hit the locks. “Sorry, you’re on the ride now, and there’s no getting off in the middle. Now dial the fucking phone and do me right. Or I’m going to carve you up piece by piece and enjoy every second of the screaming.”

Wrath stood outside Safe Place in a ball-numbing wind, not caring two shits about the nasty weather. Rising before him like something out of a Leave It to Beaver Rockwell daydream, the house that was a haven to victims of domestic violence was big and rambling and welcoming, the windows covered with quilted drapery, a wreath on the door, the mat on the top step reading WELCOME in cursive letters.

As a male, he couldn’t go inside, so he waited like lawn sculpture on the hard brown grass, praying that his beloved leelan was inside-and willing to see him.

After having spent all day in the study hoping that Beth would come to him, he’d finally gone through the mansion searching her out. When he hadn’t found her, he’d prayed she was volunteering here, as she often did.

Marissa appeared on the back stoop and shut the door behind herself. Butch’s shellan and Wrath’s former blood mate looked typically professional in her black slacks and jacket, her blond hair twisted into an elegant chignon, her scent like the ocean.

“Beth just left,” she said as he walked over to her.

“She go back home?”

“Redd Avenue.”

Wrath stiffened. “What the…Why’s she over there?” Shit, his shellan out alone in Caldwell? “You mean at her old apartment?”

Marissa nodded. “I think she wanted to go back to where things started.”

“Is she alone?”

“As far as I know.”

“Jesus Christ, she’s already been abducted once,” he snapped. As Marissa recoiled, he cursed himself. “Look, I’m sorry. I’m not real rational right now.”

After a moment, Marissa smiled. “This is going to sound bad, but I’m glad you’re frantic. You deserve to be.”

“Yeah, I was a shit. Big-time.”

Marissa tilted her head up to the sky. “On that note, a word of advice when you go over to her.”

“Hit me.”

Her perfect face leveled again, and as she refocused on him, her voice grew rueful. “Try not to be angry. You look like an ogre when you’re pissed, and right now, Beth needs to be reminded of why she should let her guard down around you, not why she shouldn’t.”

“Good point.”

“Be well, my lord.”

He nodded to her with a quick bob of the head and dematerialized directly to the Redd Avenue address where Beth had had an apartment when they’d first met. As he went, he got a good goddamn taste of what his shellan had to deal with every night he was out in the city. Dearest Virgin Scribe, how did she deal with the fear? The idea that everything might not be all right? The fact that there was more danger to be found out where he was than safety?

As he took form in front of the apartment building, he thought of the night he had gone to find her after her father’s death. He’d been a reluctant, unsuitable savior, tasked by his friend’s last will and testament to see her through her transition-when she hadn’t even known what she was.

His first approach hadn’t gone well, but the second time he’d tried to talk to her? That had gone very well.

God, he wanted to be with her again like that. Naked skin on naked skin, moving together, him deep inside of her, marking her as his.

But that was a long way off, assuming it ever even happened again.

Wrath walked around to the backyard; his shitkickers were quiet, his shadow large on the frosty ground beneath his feet.

Beth was huddled on a rickety picnic table he’d once sat on himself, and she was staring into the apartment straight ahead just as he had when he’d come for her. Cold wind blew her dark hair around, making it seem as if she were underwater and swimming amid strong currents.

His scent must have carried over to her, because her head snapped around. As she looked at him, she sat up straighter and kept her arms locked around the North Face parka he’d bought her.

“What are you doing here?” she said.

“Marissa told me where you were.” He glanced at the apartment’s sliding glass door, then back at her. “Mind if I join you?”

“Ah…okay. That’s fine.” She shuffled over a little as he came to her. “I wasn’t going to be here long.”

“No?”

“I was going to come see you. I wasn’t sure when you were going out to fight and thought maybe there was time before…But then, I don’t know, I…”

As she let the sentence drift, he got up on the table beside her, the supports squeaking as the thing accepted his heft. He wanted to put an arm around her, but hung back and hoped the parka was doing its job to keep her warm enough.

In the silence, words buzzed in his head, all of them of the apologetic variety, all of them bullshit. He’d already said he was sorry, and she knew he meant it, and it was going to be a long time before he stopped wishing there were more he could do to make it up to her.

On this cold night, as they sat suspended between their past and their future, all he could do was sit with her and stare at the darkened windows of the apartment she had once lived in…back before fate had put them together.

“I don’t remember being especially happy in there,” she said softly.

“No?”

She swept her hand across her face, clearing wisps of hair from her eyes. “I didn’t like coming home from work and being there alone. Thank God for Boo. Without that cat? I mean, TV only does so much for a person.”

He hated that she had been on her own. “So you don’t wish you could go back?”

“Christ, no.”

Wrath exhaled. “I’m glad.”

“I was working for that leering asshole, Dick, at the paper, doing the jobs of three people, getting nowhere because I was a young woman and the good old boys didn’t have a club-they were in a cabal.” She shook her head. “But you know what the worst of it was?”

“What?”

“I was living with this sense that there was something going on, something important, but I didn’t know what it was. It was like…I knew the secret was there, and it was a dark one, but I just couldn’t reach it. Nearly drove me mad.”

“So finding out you weren’t just a human was-”

“These last months with you have been worse.” She looked over at him. “When I think back over the fall…I knew something was wrong. In the back of my mind, I knew it, I could absolutely sense it. You stopped coming to bed regularly, and if you did, it wasn’t to sleep. You couldn’t settle. You didn’t really eat. You never fed. The kingship always stressed you, but these last couple of months have been different.” She went back to staring at her old apartment. “I knew it, but I didn’t want to face the reality that you might actually be lying to me about something as significant and terrifying as you going out alone to fight.”

“Shit, I didn’t mean to do that to you.”

Her profile was both beautiful and hard as she continued. “I think that’s part of the head fuck I’ve got going on now. The whole thing takes me back to the way I used to live every day of my life. After I went through the change and you and I moved in with the Brothers, I was so relieved, because I finally knew for sure what I’d always wondered about. The truth was incredibly grounding. It made me feel safe.” She turned back to him. “This thing with you? The lying? I don’t feel like I can trust my reality again. I just don’t feel safe. I mean, my whole world is about you. My whole world. It’s all based on you, because our mating is the foundation of my life. So this is about so much more than you fighting.”

“Yeah.” Fuck. What the hell did he say?

“I know you had your reasons.”

“Yeah.”

“And I know you didn’t mean to hurt me.” This was spoken with a lift at the end, the words a question, rather than a statement.

“I absolutely didn’t mean to.”

“But you knew it would, didn’t you.”

Wrath put his elbows on his knees and leaned into his heavy arms. “Yeah, I did. That’s why I haven’t been sleeping. It felt wrong not to tell you.”

“Were you afraid I’d refuse to let you go out or something? That I’d turn you in for violating the law? Or…?”

“Here’s the thing… At the end of every night I came home and told myself I wasn’t doing it again. And every sunset I found myself strapping on my daggers. I didn’t want you to worry, and I told myself I didn’t think it would continue. But you were right to call me on that. I had no plans to stop.” He rubbed his eyes under his wraparounds as his head started to pound. “It was so wrong, and I couldn’t face up to what I was doing to you. It was killing me.”

Her hand went to his leg and he froze, her kind touch more than he deserved. As she stroked his thigh a little, he dropped his sunglasses back in place and carefully captured her hand.

Neither said a thing as they held on to each other, palm-to-palm.

Sometimes words were less valuable than the air that carried them when it came to getting close.

As the cold wind blew across the backyard, causing some brown leaves to crackle by in front of them, the lights went on in Beth’s old place, illumination flooding the galley kitchen and the single main room.

Beth laughed a little. “They put their furniture right where mine was, the futon against that one long wall.”

Which meant they had a full view of the couple who came stumbling into the studio and beelined for the bed. The humans were locked lip-to-lip, hip-to-hip, and they landed on the futon in a messy scramble, the man mounting the woman.

As if embarrassed by the show, Beth got off the table and cleared her throat. “I guess I’d better get back to Safe Place.”

“I’m off rotation tonight. I’ll be at home, you know, all night.”

“That’s good. Try to get some rest.”

God, the distance was horrid, but at least they were talking. “You want me to see you back there?”

“I’ll be fine.” Beth burrowed into her parka, her face sinking into the down collar. “Man, it’s cold.”

“Yeah. It is.” As the time for parting came, he was anxious about where they stood, and fear made his vision fairly clear. God, how he hated the lonely look on her face. “You can’t know how sorry I am.”

Beth reached up and touched his jaw. “I hear it in your voice.”

He took her hand and placed it over his heart. “I’m nothing without you.”

“Not true.” She stepped out of his hold. “You are the king. No matter who your shellan is, you are everything.”

Beth dematerialized into the thin air, her vital, warm presence replaced with nothing but frigid December wind.

Wrath waited for about two minutes; then he dematerialized to Safe Place. She had so much of his blood in her after all their time of feeding from each other that he sensed her presence inside the stout walls of the security-laden facility, and he knew she was protected.

With a heavy heart, Wrath dematerialized again and headed back to the mansion: He had stitches to get removed and a whole night to pass alone in his study.