The Beast

SIXTY-EIGHT

As Rhage went back home after his meeting at I’ve Bean, he was feeling like a fucking boss.

Rhym had even given him a hug at the end of the interview. And that had to mean something, right?

The first thing he wanted to do, as he headed up the mansion’s grand staircase, was call his Mary, but she was in her meeting now, so he’d have to wait. Whatever, he could get changed and maybe go downtown to do some hunting and burn off some—

His phone went off with a bing! just as he hit the second floor and saw that the King was sitting on the throne at his desk—as opposed to being at the Audience House, where he should have been.

Ignoring the text, Rhage strode forward and knocked on the open door. “My Lord?”

Wrath’s head jerked up as if he’d been surprised by the interruption—which was the first clue that something big had happened: That brother might have been blind, but he had the instincts of the keenest predator.

“You’re early,” Wrath muttered. “The meeting doesn’t start for another twenty minutes.”

“I’m sorry?”

“You get V’s text?”

Rhage entered the frilly pale blue room with its French furniture and its air of butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-my-mouth. The study or parlor or whatever it was the most ludicrous environment to plan fights and wars and strategy in, but now, like so much of Darius’s mansion, it was a tradition that no one wanted to change.

Patting his chest where his phone had vibrated, he murmured, “Guess that’s what just came through. What’s doing?”

Wrath sat back in his father’s great ornate chair, and beside him on the floor, George lifted his boxy blond head in inquiry, as if the dog wanted to know whether they were going somewhere or staying put.

The King reached down and stroked the retriever. “You’ll find out soon enough with the others. You got something on your mind, my brother? You came by when V was talking to me earlier.”

Rhage glanced around the empty room. “Actually, yeah.”

“Talk to me.”

The story came out in a rush of sound bites: Bitty, her mom, Mary, him, the GTO—yup, for some reason, the fact that the girl liked his car made it in there. He also explained that he’d had his interview with Rhym, that Mary was having hers, that they needed Wrath’s approval.

Blah, blah, blah.

When he ran out of nouns and verbs, he discovered that he’d wandered around and ended up sitting in the chair on the far side of the throne, he and his brother separated by the expanse of desk, all those carved figures and sacred symbols marking the divide between their stations.

And yet he felt as though he and Wrath were one and the same as the male smiled. “You got it, my brother. Whatever you need, it’s yours. And if they want to do a site visit, or whatever you call it, the social worker is welcome here. We’ll have Fritz bring her in.”

Rhage was exhaling a fuckload of tension as Butch and Phury walked in. “Thank you,” he said hoarsely. “Thank you so much.”

“You’ve come a long way from being that asshole I once knew and tolerated.”

When Wrath extended the black diamond ring of the King, Rhage got up and leaned over to kiss it. “Yeah, we all have—”

Just as he was straightening, someone goosed him so hard in the ass, he nearly face planted all over that desk. Wheeling around, he saw Lassiter smiling.

“Sorry,” the angel said. “Couldn’t help it.”

Rhage bared his fangs. “Lass, seriously, could you be anymore annoying.”

The fuck-twit put his forefinger to his chin and tapped as he tilted his head. “Hmm, I don’t know. But I’m willing to try.”

“I swear to God, one of these days . . .”

Except it was a lie. He wasn’t going to do shit. The trouble with the current asshole crown holder was that it was impossible to truly hate him. Not when on a regular basis he proved there was a stand-up guy under all that goddamn, fucking irritation.

The rest of the Brotherhood filed in and took their customary places in the room. As Rhage camped out with Butch on one of the spindly sofas, it took him a minute to realize someone was missing.

Nope, here was Vishous. With Payne at his side.

One look into the pair of grim faces, and Rhage cursed under his breath. And he wasn’t the only one.

The doors were shut, and then everyone got dead quiet—

Before something could be said, Zsadist burst into the room and everybody recoiled.

“What the fuck happened to you?” V demanded.

The brother had steam rising up off of him—and not because he was pissed. There was, like, actual smoke curling from the shoulders of his leather jacket and the bottoms of his shitkickers. And, Jesus Christ, the stench—he smelled like burned rubber, bad chemicals, and a three-day-old campsite.

“Nothing,” the guy said as he sauntered over to his twin. “Just roasting marshmallows.”

“Is that my flamethrower?” somebody asked indignantly.

“How many square feet was the marshmallow,” someone else muttered.

“Hey, was it a Stay Puft?” Lassiter cut in.

The King cursed. “Oh, for fuck’s sake, did you burn that bitch’s house down?”

Well, hello, everyone clearly thought as they went quiet and stared at Z.

“Technically, it was her old man’s,” Rhage felt compelled to comment. “Assuming we’re talking about the cunt who held that blood slave in her basement.”

Wrath shook his finger in Rhage’s direction. “Hey, no ‘See you next Tuesdays’ if you’re going to be a father. You need to drop that shit right now and get used to it before you bring that little girl into this fucking house.”

Annnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnd now everyone and their uncle turned around to eyeball him.

Fantastic.

Can we go back and talk about the marshmallow? he thought to himself.

As he hoped for a change of subject, and absolutely nothing like that happened, he shook his head. Wasn’t this just like the Brotherhood mansion, where news traveled faster than . . . well, a bonfire, for instance.

“Okay, A,” he said to the crowd, “I don’t know if we can adopt Bitty yet. Two, that holier-than-thou, no-cussing speech would have been a lot more effective if it didn’t have ‘shit’ and an f-bomb in it. And D, yes, Mary and I are trying to become parents, and no, I don’t want to talk about it yet. Can we be done.”

Lassiter came over. “High five for the Home Alone ref.”

“I did it for you, you piece of shit.” Rhage clapped palms with the douchebag. “And thanks for your support. Now let’s move on to the next crisis. Does anyone want to drop their trousers and admit to having a thong on? Or are we going to get serious and start sharing pedicures.”

Wrath spoke up. “Rhage is right. We got problems. V and Payne, take it away.”

Instantly, the vibe in the room changed, everybody getting serious as the siblings went over and stood in front of the fire. Man, you could see the family resemblance between them, with that jet-black hair and those diamond eyes. V was a little taller than his sis, broader, too, of course, and then there were those warning tattoos at his temple and the goatee. Payne was no slouch, however, her fighter’s body covered in exactly the same leather as her brother’s was, her muscled arms and legs making Ronda Rousey look like someone’s shrunken grandmother.

“The Scribe Virgin is dead.”

As V dropped the bomb, there was a momentary period of silent saaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay-whaaaaaaaaaaaaat. Then a shit-ton of gasps and cursing in the room, all kinds of WTF hitting the airwaves.

Vishous put his palms out. “Before you ask any questions, we don’t know more than that. I went up to see her, found all of her shit gone, and a missive in the Chosen cemetery. She said she was going to appoint a successor in due time. That’s it.”

Rhage glanced back and forth between the pair of them. Payne’s face was a mask of not-gonna-go-there, like she had been fed up with the drama about two hundred years ago and was peacing out over her mother. V was much the same.

“How can she die if she’s immortal?” somebody asked.

Vishous lit up and shrugged. “Look, I don’t mean to blow this off, but I got nothing else to offer you all at this point.”

Rhage whistled softly and took a Tootsie Pop out of his pocket. As he saw that he’d outed a grape one, he thought, Well, maybe it was all going to work out somehow.

Fuck. Who was he kidding.

Down in the training center, Layla was going to the bathroom. Again.

Ever since the young had been born, she felt as though she had been peeing, and sure enough, her body was showing the change of not just having jettisoned the infants’ weight, slight though it was, but apparently seven hundred thousand gallons of water.

Unbelievable.

Why hadn’t anyone told her about this? Then again, there had been a lot more important things to talk about.

And there still were, she thought grimly as she changed the pad in the mesh underwear she’d been given and got back on her feet. As the toilet flushed, she walked across to the sink and washed her hands with the fragrant French soap that Fritz stocked even the clinic rooms with.

As she emerged, she was waddling on account of the size of the pad she needed, but all in all, she was feeling so much stronger.

“How we doing, little ones?”

Even though she was exhausted, every time she was up and around she paid them a visit, and it was so magical: even through the Plexiglas, they seemed to hear her, recognize her, their little heads turning to her voice.

“Lyric, are you breathing better? Yes? I think you are.”

The little girl had had some difficulty several hours ago, the ventilation machine increasing its pump automatically in response to a drop in blood oxygen, but now, according to the monitors that Layla found herself reading like a doctor, everything was well.

“And you, Mr. Man? Oh, you’re doing very well indeed.”

Heading back to the bed, she stretched out and put her hand on her flattening stomach. It was amazing to see the swelling go down by the hour, her body bouncing back thanks to all the feeding she had been doing.

Qhuinn and Blay had been so generous with their veins, to the point that she was convinced she must be bleeding them dry.

There remained a period of recovery ahead for her, however. From what she understood, human women took far longer, even though their pregnancies were shorter—for vampire mothers, it was less in terms of time, but there were still all kinds of things, hormonally speaking and otherwise, that her body needed to do to recalibrate.

Funny, she had wanted her body back. Now? It seemed kind of lonely to just be by herself in her skin.

When a knock sounded, she said, “Come in?”

Visitors were good. Visitors were a respite from the questions buzzing in her head, questions about what she needed to do about Xcor—

Tohrment and Autumn came in with hesitation, and oh, the look on the Brother’s face as his deep blue eyes went to the young. Such pain. Such sadness for what he had lost.

And yet he smiled when he glanced at her. “Hello, mahmen. You are looking well.”

Layla inclined her head, and smiled back. “You are too kind. Autumn, hello.”

As Autumn came forward for a hug, Layla studied Tohr’s face as she embraced his shellan, searching for features that linked him with his half brother.

There were so few. But the color of the eyes . . . exactly the same. Why had she not noticed before now?

For both he and Xcor had sprung forth from the same loins.

“I’ve come to offer you my vein,” Tohr said roughly. “I received permission to approach you from your males? But obviously, if you’d prefer to use only them, I understand.”

“Ah, no. No, please, and thank you. I’ve been concerned that I’m taking too much from them.”

Tohr’s stare returned to the young.

“You can go introduce yourself,” Layla said gently.

Autumn went with her male to the incubators, and the two stood for the longest time, looking at the little ones.

“I always wondered what having a blooded brother or sister would be like,” Tohr remarked.

Keeping her voice calm, Layla said, “Have you none?”

He shook his head. “My father undoubtedly spread his seed far and wide, as they used to say, but no one’s ever come out of the woodwork.”

Until now, she thought.

“Tohrment, I need to—”

“But enough about me.” He turned around with resolve. “Let us take care of you. As Autumn says, it’s a balm to help others.”

While the Brother’s female smiled and said something, Layla retreated into her own head.

This was not going to hold much longer, she thought as Tohr began to roll up his sleeve.