The first thing Syn saw when he was able to focus was the one thing he never wanted to see. As the black-ink blood of lessers dripped off his fangs and his fingers, off his chin and his clothes, as the still-alive, half-destroyed bodies of his victims moved slowly on the blood-covered concrete, as the smoke cleared and the skirmish quieted . . . he discovered that he had turned to Jo and was staring at her.
Revealing the realest part of him.
To her.
The horror on her face. The hands up to her cheeks. The slack mouth and pale skin.
Yes, she saw him. She saw all of him, including his talhman, and she saw everything he did.
Wiping his mouth on the back of the sleeve of his leather jacket, he whispered something. It didn’t carry. He didn’t want it to.
And then the Brotherhood came rushing in: familiar, heavy boots pounding over the concrete and stopping behind him, breathing that was heavy, scents that were intermingling with the stench, shadows that were long from those headlights shining in through the blast hole.
“Syn,” someone said. “How you doin’?”
When somebody tried to walk by him, his arm snapped out and stopped them by grabbing a hard hold.
“Do not touch her,” he growled. “She is mine.”
Another voice. Different than the first. “Okay, my guy. We won’t go near her. But listen, you’re leaking, and this is not a secured site. We’ve got shit we have to deal with and you need some stitches.”
Please, he thought at Jo. Even though he didn’t know what he was begging for.
Bullshit, he knew exactly what he needed from her. He wanted her to forgive him for being his father. For revealing to her the fact that he was a terrifying killer. For showing her why he didn’t care that everyone else knew, but what he wished she had never discovered.
Jo shook her head. Then she focused over his shoulder and her face changed.
“Oh, shit,” one of the Brothers said.
“I’ve seen you before,” Jo said hoarsely. “Coffee shop.”
Syn looked over his shoulder. Rhage was standing a couple of feet away, and the Brother ran his palm down his face.
“Does she know what’s going on?” Hollywood asked.
“No,” Syn muttered. “She does not.”
“Motherfucker.”
“That about covers it.”
Syn stepped off and tried to walk around, hands on his hips, head lowered, heart pounding. He didn’t get far. His boot knocked into something . . . a torso that was bent backward, its limbs moving in slow motion, like the thing was a remote control robot whose batteries were running out.
Out of the corner of his eye, he was aware that everybody was staring at him, and he knew what the questions were. Too fucking bad. The only ones that mattered were from Jo, and he had no good answers for her.
The arm of the slayer at his feet flopped over on its own accord, and he watched as the black-stained hands clawed uselessly at his boots.
With nothing to lose, and Jo having already seen the worst, he unsheathed one of his steel daggers, tossed it in the air, and caught the hilt with a smack of his palm. Vicious point down, he lifted the weapon over his shoulder as he dropped onto one knee to stab—
Rhage caught his wrist. “No. We wait for Butch.”
Right about the time Syn was trying to shoot his way out of that groundskeeping building, before the explosion, Butch was attempting to get out of the office building downtown. He punched the bar on an interior fire door, breaking the thing open on its hinges. As it swung wide, he burst out into yet another corridor—even though he didn’t know what the fuck he was rushing for. He was still going to end up in that mail receiving area with no IT MacGyver flashy shit to get him out smoothly.
Then again, he didn’t need to be smooth, right? Did he really care if the whole goddamn building lit up with alarms and the cops came with sirens blaring? He was going to be long gone, running back to the garage, getting the R8 and going 0–60 in 3.2 seconds to the conflict location.
Thank God V got the engine upgrade to the performance—
The smell of fresh air was not good news. As he rounded the final corner before the receiving bay, the scent of the night was a shocker and meant someone had already come in. Cops? Maybe the alarms were silent.
Skidding to a halt in front of the last door, he unholstered one of his guns and back-flatted it against the wall. There were no sounds of anyone moving around on the other side. Nobody talking. But he didn’t want to be someone’s target practice just because he was distracted and not reading the situation right.
He was quiet about his penetration this time, slipping through the last panel.
“What . . . the fuck?”
One of the bays was wide open, and parked right in front of it, ass in to the building, ready to go with the powerful engine already running . . . was V’s R8.
Like Butch was Tony Stark and had summoned the fucking thing with a remote.
“Lassiter?” he said as he looked around the dreary mail room.
Whatever. No time, no time.
Butch covered the distance in three big strides, leaped out of the bay like a parachuter, and would have Dukes of Hazzard’d it into the driver’s seat of the R8 except for: (1) the window wasn’t down; (2) there was no way in hell he could fit himself through the aperture of the top half of the door; and (3) if he left so much as a smudge on the paint, the leather, the trim, the seat, the center console, whatever V did to Lassiter after the containment spell was going to look like a Sandals vacation in Cancún.
Five minutes later, he was out of the congested streets and tall buildings of downtown. Five minutes after that, he was in the sprawling retail-urbs, blowing through red lights and dusting the few cars on the road with him in the passing lane. If he’d met a cop, it would have gotten nasty, but he didn’t.
When he made the turn to go up to the Adirondack Outlets Mall, even the Quattro couldn’t keep the supercar on the pavement, the heavy back end of the car fishtailing. At the top of the rise, he shot forward to the stores—and nearly bought the farm in a front-end collision with a gray Ford Taurus.
The inside of the older sedan was dark so he couldn’t see the driver, but there was no time to follow up on that shit, either.
He went around to the back, as instructed, and got a load of a scene out of a Schwarzenegger movie circa 1987. You want to talk about chaos? There were cars and trucks full of holes, slayers on the ground still moving, gunpowder—and in this case, gasoline, too—thick in the air. Oh, and a whole corner of the building was gone. Slamming on the brakes, he got out, and the stench of lesser was so intense, he fell back against V’s precious car.
Qhuinn came jogging over. “We got some enemy down on the ground, all ready for you.”
“How many?”
“Nine. Maybe ten.”
Butch kept his groan to himself. “Any of us hurt?”
“We’ve got one with a leak—even if he refuses to admit to the shit. Manny’s on the way.”
“Who’s injured?” Butch looked around. “And what the fuck happened to the building?”
“Bike blew up. Oopsie.” Qhuinn calmly unholstered one of his guns and put three shots into the head of a slayer who’d reached for his pant leg. “I believe it’s being classified as a Honda-plosion.”