Frowning, his first thought was… how in the hell had she gotten that traditional doggen to eat with her? And now it looked like she was teaching the old male gin rummy?
Anne let out a sudden laugh, throwing her head back—and Fritz smiled sheepishly as he pointed a gnarled finger at the draw pile. When she nodded, he took a card, and as he figured out where to put it into his fan, she absently sipped from her glass. Then he said something, and she clapped with approval.
As Fritz flushed with happiness, his face showed a kind of joy that Darius couldn’t remember ever seeing on the butler’s face.
Without a conscious cue, Darius’s hand reached up and rested on the old antique glass—
The moment he made contact, the butler glanced over, as if he had sensed his master’s presence—and Darius shook his head sharply. With a subtle nod, Fritz resumed his concentration on the card game.
I should go… Darius told himself.
And yet as he stared at Anne, he couldn’t seem to move—especially as he realized… she was what was missing in his life. She was his greater good, his higher calling. Forsaken by his King, and disaffected by his larger purpose for the race, he knew that he could be in service to this human female. Yes, he could take care of her…
He would take care of her.
As he smelled dark spices in the cool spring air, he knew that Vishous was right and the bonding had locked him in—but that really wasn’t a news flash. The difference now was that he didn’t mind the shackles. Not at all.
Turning away from the window, he marveled at the way the Scribe Virgin worked, how that sacred female he didn’t particularly care for or think about much had nonetheless managed to provide him what he needed to go on.
This destiny with Anne was going to sustain him.
Yes, it was.
On that note, he got his hustle on so he could return to her.
Going through the side door into the garage, he was so distracted by thoughts of fate and the human female at his kitchen table that the sight of his ruined brand-new BMW barely registered—except then it dawned on him that the steel-and-leather projectile had set him on his present course with Anne.
To show his thanks for the sacrifice it had made, he paused and put his hand on the crinkled hood.
Then he went to the rear of the garage and picked up two gasoline tanks. This wasn’t going to take long, and thank God for it.
Closing his eyes, he dematerialized back to the farmhouse’s side flank. Glancing up at the flaking and pitted expanse, he wondered if the humans who had shown up here during the day had had any idea what they were signing on for. Usually, the Fore-lesser in charge snowed them, making all kinds of false promises… only to serve the duped masses up like finger food to the Omega: Whenever the Brotherhood interrogated a slayer, nine times out of ten, they cried about how they’d been double-crossed, lied to, tortured—and ultimately forced to kill vampires. Except that kind of verbal diarrhea couldn’t be an excuse when he and his brothers had to bury innocents. Track down their parents. Destroy lives by sharing tragic news.
Not when every time you entered that cycle of death and grief, a little piece of you died, too, because you were supposed to be the one protecting the species—and clearly you and your fellow fighters were doing a shit job of it.
Refocusing, he wasn’t about to battle past the mess around the front door this time. Darius dematerialized through the fragments of a window—and what do you know. Vishous was where he’d left him, smoking at the foot of the stairs, those diamond eyes circling the desecration with a notable lack of interest.
Like he might as well have been waiting for a bus. Or maybe a pizza.
When Darius tossed one of the cans over, the brother caught the red handle easily; then he put his cigarette butt out on the tread of his shitkicker and headed up for the second floor. It didn’t take long to douse both levels, the sweet bloom of the gasoline fumes mixing with the stench of lesser blood. The nose cocktail was both familiar and awful, and Darius got himself out as soon as he could.
Re-forming on the overgrown, torn-up lawn next to the front porch, he had to wait for only a second or two before Vishous appeared next to him. The prevailing wind was blowing at their backs, carrying the odor into the farmland to the east, so they had to move quick. Humans were known to be nosy.
Har-har.
Without a word of discussion, Vishous put a fresh cigarette between his lips, lit the thing, and took a long draw on his hand-rolled. Then he flicked the butt into the air, the tiny torch getting caught by the breeze, and carried, end over end, through one of the parlor’s open windows.
The combustion was instantaneous, the fireball blowing out the remaining intact windows in the room and licking up the sides of the house’s lower level, its brilliance lighting the surrounding landscape bright as noontime—
A cold rush of warning shot through Darius, sure as if someone had drawn him a road map that led to his own grave and asked him what the destination was going to be:
A second sun, not during the day.
“Holy shit!” he hollered. “We gotta move! The second floor is going to explode!”
Grabbing on to his brother’s jacket, he yanked at the male. “Run, it’s going to kill us! This is your vision!”
V started to argue, but then something clearly clicked in his head. With a powerful surge, both of them lunged into a retreat, but the forward momentum didn’t last long. Darius’s boot got locked into some kind of gopher hole, and as his weight pitched forward, a great woofing sound permeated the acreage as oxygen was sucked into the farmhouse—
Just as he landed hard on his chest, Vishous grabbed him around the waist and hefted him up off the ground—and as Darius’s boot came free, the other brother ran like a bat out of hell.
Until suddenly, he didn’t have to run anymore.
The second explosion was so great, it sent them both airborne, the hot breath of a dragon more deadly than Rhage’s curse ushering them into flight. Propelled over the ground, Darius had an impression of scrubby weeds moving underneath his body and then the tire gouges in the driveway rushed up to eat him.
He landed on a skid, tasting dirt and getting punched in the eye with a stray rock—
Jesus, the heat of the blaze was so great, he could feel it even from this distance—
“You’re on fire!” Vishous shoved him over. “Roll! Roll!”
Oh. So he was the source of the roasty-toasty.
As he struggled to follow orders, he had to rely on Vishous for most of the rotation, his vision going sky to earth to sky to earth to sky to earth while he was pushed along, the bonfire that was still on him spinning with—
Eventually, he threw an arm out and stopped it all. Making one last quarter turn, he settled on his side—and just happened to be facing the farmhouse.
Billowing black and gray smoke curled up into the dull night sky, orange and yellow flames tickling the undersides of the clouds that coalesced over the inferno. And goddamn, he could swear that just looking at it all made his back feel hotter.
“We gotta get out of here,” Vishous said. “The humans are going to come, especially if this spreads to the forest.”
“Okay.”
Except when Darius went to sit up, he felt like someone had draped his shoulders and spine in a cape of pain, the contours of his upper torso a tuning fork for agony.