Chapter Thirty-Seven
Some of the best in famous last words:
I checked. It’s not loaded.
It’s deep enough, don’t worry.
Hey, you guys, watch this!
And now a new one for the annals, the BEST of the fucking best:
You’re going to want to sit down for this, John.
Ten words. Ultimate destruction.
John aimed a hostile glare at the television set, where a rerun of How I Met Your Mother was playing. The guy on the screen, that Ted Mosby architect dude. Wanna punch him. John wanted to punch everyone, though. Destroy something, just like his life had been totally annihilated by a hard-up skank who manipulated and used him when he had no idea about the choices his new biology was making.
He sneered his upper lip higher. Looked like the revenge deal he’d struck with MoonRiderOne really had pissed off God. Because why else would John have just found his way to a life where he could be healthy and fine, only to be immediately stripped of the one thing he wanted in life: his true love, Toni.
Who he couldn’t ever have now.
As in, ever, ever, EVER.
He’d received the news sitting rigid in a spindly parlor chair, his tone going embarrassingly high-pitched and pleading when he’d asked Toni if there was a chance the bond wouldn’t take due to his not-fully-vampiric state. Would this—please—provide him with an out clause?
Toni offered him the kind of overly-patient smile John had seen doctors use on unruly mental patients. “Maybe.”
Meaning, doubtful.
He’d held on.
After all, Shaston—a full-blooded vampire—was way worse off than he was, right? Every night of their “bonding week” so far, she’d begged him to sleep in the same bed with her, her face pale, her eyes full of bruises.
Every night, he would let her suffer alone. Unfortunately—and not a good sign—he suffered too, just about gnawing his fists raw while he didn’t sleep, plagued with feelings of wrongness and anxiety. He hated the woman who’d ruined him down to his core, marrow, and soul, so the constant pull he felt toward her didn’t make sense.
Unless what Toni told him was true, and he and Shaston were physically bonded…as in, permanently. No getting out of it.
Teeth gritted, John squeezed off a few channel changes, one hand locked around the remote control, the other arm crooked beneath his head, propping it against the pillow on his bed. Selfish and immoral whore.
Damn her. Just…damn her.
The little ho-nasty stepped into his bedroom doorway. Unfortunate timing.
“What?” he growled at her. He was a champion growler now.
She jumped. “Um…” She screwed her fingers into the hem of her T-shirt. “Thomal is downstairs asking for you.”
“What does he want?” he snapped.
“I don’t know.”
John launched himself off the bed, and Shaston scurried away. Their bond prevented him from tanning her hide like he wanted to do, but she still didn’t trust him not to hurt her. Smart girl. He wouldn’t trust him, either. Damn her all to fuck.
He tromped downstairs.
Blondie Thomal was waiting in the living room, dressed all in black with a long knife in a hip-holder on his waist. John’s heightened vision picked up on the two small scars on his face; a thin one clipping some hair out of his right eyebrow and a thinner one arcing across the slope of his left cheekbone. The man had eaten lemongrass chicken for lunch.
John gave him a sour look. “Yeah?”
Blondie Thomal didn’t completely succeed in hiding his surprise.
John was a different man in more ways than on the inside. He was gaining strength and energy at an exponential rate, and in the last three days, he’d packed on at least a good fifteen pounds of muscle. His skin was clear; his vision and mind were sharp; and his hair was turning black—now that he’d “realized his true nature,” he was taking after Dear Ol’ Bio Dad.
Every day more of his Vârcolac superpowers came online. Lights, noises, scents: all were experienced with un-blunted senses. It could be overwhelming at times, his surroundings as well as this becoming-a-new-being thing. How he felt about it remained a mystery. All of the necessary processing he should probably have been doing was taking a back seat to his need to stew and boil in rage and regret.
“Dr. Jess wants to see you.” Thomal rested one hand casually on his belt, not far from the hilt of the long blade. “He’d like to give you a checkup now that you’ve popped your fangs. Are you able to leave Shaston?”
John’s gut howled no. “With joy.”
“Let’s go, then.” Thomal escorted him.
Yeah, to add insult to John’s circumstances, after his sit-down with Toni left his life a nuclear waste, he was put under house arrest in a furnished model home in the community’s family neighborhood. He’d done nothing wrong to deserve that. He was the victim here. But he supposed if the roles were reversed, he wouldn’t have let a man who’d tangled with many of the male members of this hosed place wander wherever he pleased either. Considering, also, that John had spent the last three days doing nothing but stew and boil, he probably wasn’t the safest person to be around right now.
John and Thomal walked the whole way in silence—so probably the shouting they heard when they entered the hospital seemed louder than it actually was.
“Shit.” Thomal hurtled through a pair of swinging double doors.
John ran after him.
They raced down a long hallway. The bestial shouting was coming from an open door at the end, and there was a yellow alarm light flashing just inside.
A young woman with curly black hair hurried out the door. As soon as she saw Thomal, she waved frantically at him. “Hurry! Jacken’s gone insane.”
Jacken—Teeth-Tattooed Asshole! John picked up speed, racing inside the room just behind Thomal. He slewed to stop, panting, and—what the fuck? He couldn’t believe what he was seeing.
Teeth-Tattooed Asshole had Toni jammed back against the wall behind her large desk, his inked-up arms planted on either side of her, imprisoning her with muscles that bulged aggressively under his flesh. His hair was a wild mess, as if he’d just rolled out of bed before coming here. Congratulations again on Jacken being in hibernation.
“How dare you,” he snarled, and John had never heard a voice like it—deep and glottal, like it was coming up directly from the sewers of Hell.
Closing her eyes, Toni turned her head aside. Her chin quivered.
The sight thinned John’s blood to water, jacked his pulse into a furious rhythm, and hit him with that spring-release feeling in his upper gums he now recognized as his fangs coming out of their chutes.
Heavy bootsteps thundered down the hallway. A second later Nichita entered the office, along with another man, both dressed in similar blackness to Thomal. They shoved past John into the room.
“What’s going on?” Nichita demanded.
“I don’t know,” Thomal retorted. “I just got here. But Jacken’s unsheathed on her.”
Nichita’s lips flattened against his teeth, and his expression darkened.
John edged a step sideways for a better view of Asshole. Sure enough, a set of sharp fangs were spiked down into his mouth.
Toni wasn’t so much as fluttering an eyelash.
“Step off, Jacken,” Nichita warned. “Right now.”
Asshole didn’t. The tendons on the side of his jaw were on the verge of bursting through his skin. Then a single tear slipped down Toni’s cheek, and he snapped his hands off the wall and jolted back a step. His eyes were as black as someplace nobody would ever want to go.
Toni kept her face turned aside, like she didn’t dare risk looking at him.
But Asshole looked at her. Glared at her in a pure hellfire way that pushed John’s heart into even faster speeds.
“How dare you,” Asshole repeated, hissing the words, the muscles along his shoulders standing out. He pivoted sharply, and with fluid, muscular coordination, hefted the big desk and hurled it through a frosted door.
The glass sheered apart with acidic screams, and Toni clutched her palms over her ears and grimaced. The three men in the room surged back from the flying debris.
Booming to the ground inside a courtyard, the large piece of furniture rolled once, then trundled to a halt. Plaster dust swirled.
As the last jarring clatter of brittle hail-fall quieted, Asshole stalked out this new, larger exit he’d made, his broad silhouette parting the fog of dust, then being swallowed up in it.
He was gone.
Toni slid down the wall, her legs collapsing beneath her. Her butt hit the floor, and she hugged her knees, crying softly.
John prowled the length of his bedroom, pacing the space in quick, restless strides. He absently patted his breast pocket, searching for a pack of Marlboros. He didn’t have any. Smoking wasn’t allowed in this bumblefuck town—something about keeping the underground air quality clean. Not that he even craved cigarettes anymore, not since he’d “realized his true nature.” He supposed that meant his nicotine fits had never really been about cigarettes in the first place, but were just another disguised craving for blood.
Only out of habit did he want to smoke now, do something with his hands while he tried to figure out what the hell he’d just witnessed at the hospital between Toni and Teeth-Tattooed Asshole.
Thomal had shuttled John out of there and back to this stupid house-prison before he’d been able to get any answers.
Was Toni okay?
Was Asshole currently being drawn and quartered in retribution for what he’d—
“John.” The mousey voice came from his doorway.
He whirled on Ho-nasty, his hands curled into fists. “Leave me the fuck alone.” He glared at her with eyes that felt like hot coals.
A swallow moved down her throat like knots on a pulley rope. “I-I’m sorry, but there’s something I have to tell you.” She stepped carefully into the room, and he caught a scent coming off her he didn’t recognize: stronger, sweeter, demanding.
It washed a strange, cloudy haze over his vision and momentarily flicked out the lights in his brain, like he’d lapsed into narcolepsy. He shook his head.
“I know this is the last thing you want to hear or…or do, but… I have to tell you.” She nibbled the side of her lip. “I tested myself, and I’m ovulating right—”
“Get out!” he roared.
She paled, but didn’t leave.
Red smeared like grease paint across his vision. “I mean it, you cow. If you don’t—”
“Please, listen to me,” she pleaded. “Vârcolac females only ovulate about every six months. I know you hate me, but if you don’t impregnate me now, we’ll never have children. By the time I’m fertile again, you’ll be fully vampiric, and then—”
“Hate,” he cut in coldly, “is too light a term for what I feel for you.”
Ho-nasty’s eyelashes flapped.
“You’re a vein to me, and that’s it. You think I want to fuck that rank pussy of yours? It’s attached to a lying, manipulative bitch. A mold spore, a pustule, a maggot.”
Ho-nasty’s mouth flopped open. Unflattering.
“I guess you should’ve picked a different man to destroy.”
Her throat clicked with what sounded like a half-checked swallow. “I-I tried to find a mate. First Dev couldn’t marry me, then the Dragon I was dating last year broke—”
“What did you just say? Dev?” John laughed: curt, bitter, wintry. “Are you telling me I ended up with Nichita’s cast-off for a wife? Oh, the hits just keep on rollin’, don’t they?”
Her brow clouded. “Can’t you…can’t you just make the best of this, and…and…?”
“Good God, you can’t be that naïve, can you?”
She wrung her hands. “You didn’t even have a girlfriend before this happened. Why can’t you—?” Her sentence ended on a squeak as he stomped toward her.
She scuttled backward, but he lashed out his hands and grabbed her upper arms in a crushing grip. “I’m in love with Toni,” he shouted into her face.
“You’re…?” Ho-nasty blinked owlishly.
Now that he was closer to her, his dick was hardening. What the hell was the matter with him?
“But she…Toni’s married to Jacken.”
Shock loosened John’s hold. Married? His fingers slipped down Ho-nasty’s arms several inches before he retightened them. “What? You mean…” No. No way. “The guy with the tattoos on his forearms?”
Ho-nasty nodded. “They’ve been married for nearly five years. They have a daughter.”
It was as if Ho-nasty hit him in the stomach as violently as she could with a roll of quarters in her fist. “No,” he hissed. No. Fucking. Way had Toni married that asshole. She had too much taste. Too much good sense. “I saw the two of them together earlier in the hospital. The guy looked like he was about to beat Toni’s brains in.”
“Oh, no. Jacken would never hurt her. If they were fighting, they were just, you know, having a marital spat.”
And John had also seen the two of them together in the hospital when he first arrived. Teeth-Tattooed Asshole had brushed up against Toni, and she hadn’t pulled away.
“They love each other.”
John snapped his chin up. Ho-nasty had hurled that at him too much like a weapon. He regarded her narrowly. “Where does she live?”
“Who? Toni?”
“Yes, Toni, you moron.” He needed to talk to her, hear a confirmation about this from her own mouth.
Ho-nasty’s forehead wrinkled. “You’re not allowed to leave here unescorted, John. You’re still under house—ow!”
John clutched her arms down to the bone. “Where?!” He shook her hard.
Ho-nasty’s lips went blubba-blubba. “Two doors down,” she cried out as she tried to struggle free.
In the safe house kitchen, Ho-nasty had been stronger than he was. Not anymore.
“B-but Hadley texted me that Toni didn’t go home today when she left the hospital. She’s at her brother’s house. Across the street and three over.”
John released Ho-nasty, giving her a good shove, then shouldered past her into the hallway and started for the staircase.
He heard shuffling steps behind him. “Like it or not,” Ho-nasty called to his retreating form, “I’m your only choice.”
He stopped at the top of the stairs, glowering down the dominoes-like stack of steps. He didn’t move.
“If you don’t have children with me now, you will never, ever have children, John. Do you hear me?”
He turned around, strode back over to Ho-nasty, and backhanded her across the face, hard enough to send her reeling into the wall. Bam!
She fell to the floor and whimpered.
A snare drum thumped the inside of his cranium, exploding his skull into two pieces. He staggered backward, hissing in air, so many of his neurons firing punishing messages at him for hurting his mate that he actually had to squint through the frenzied electrical impulses.
He braced his legs wide to find his balance and paused for another breath.
“Yes,” he told Ho-nasty, sotto voice. “I hear you.”