The Chosen

He and Tohr pulled their triggers at the same time—just as Xcor, being no fucking idiot, hit the ground.

With the storm raging, it was a chicken-and-egg situation, difficult to know what had come first, the duck or the impact of a bullet.

With his phone continuing to ring, Qhuinn and Tohr broke into a run, both pumping off rounds at where the Bastard had been standing as well as where he had fallen or landed while they charged forward through the driving snow.

“Sonofabitch,” Qhuinn spat as they reached where Xcor had been.

The fucker had disappeared. And no scent of blood.

Had they missed entirely?

He and Tohr looked around, and then the brother said, “Rooftop.”

The pair of them ghosted up out of the alley, to the top of the ten-story office building that was right in front of where the shooting had gone down. Nada. The visibility was so poor they couldn’t even see down to the street below, and Xcor wasn’t anywhere to be scented.

With the wind roaring in his ears even through the skullcap he’d pulled down tight, and his eyes watering from the cold, Qhuinn felt a frustration that went all the way to his marrow.

“He couldn’t have gone far!” he yelled over the din.

“Fan out. I’ll go—”

“Motherfucker!” Qhuinn felt his phone go off a second time. “Who the fuck is calling me!”

He jerked the zipper of his parka down and shoved his hand inside. Taking the fucking piece of shit out, he—

Immediately accepted the call. “Blay? Blay …?”

He couldn’t hear a thing and pointed to the alley below. As Tohr nodded, Qhuinn tried to focus—and a second later, dematerialized back to where they’d been.

Cupping his opposite hand over his free ear, he said, “Blay?”

His mate’s voice was thin over the crackling connection. “… help.”

“What?”

“… the Northway? Exit …”

“Wait, what?”

“… twenty-six …”

“Blay?”

And then one word came across loud and clear: “Accident.”

“I’m coming!” Qhuinn looked at Tohr. “Right now!”

He wanted to keep the connection open, but there was a risk that the snow was going to cause his phone to malfunction and he might need it.

Tohr spoke up. “Let’s fan out, I’ll take the north—”

“No, no, Blay’s in trouble. I have to go!”

There was a split second where they stared at each other. For Qhuinn, though, there was no question. Love versus vengeance.

And he would choose love.

Shit, he felt awful that Blay had been in an accident … but at least the male had called him: Blay had reached out when it counted, and fuck yeah, Qhuinn was going to go to where his heart was. Even if Xcor were bleeding from a chest wound and required only one last slug to put him in the Fade? Qhuinn was out of here.

Tohr, though, was another story.

Xcor could see the two Brothers from his vantage point on the rooftop across from where Qhuinn and Tohr were standing: Even with those white parkas, the gusts and snowfall shifted around their bodies, marking their outlines.

There had been a number of times during the course of Xcor’s life when he could have sworn some outside force was determined to keep him alive.

Tonight had been another one of them.

Both of those guns had been pointed at him, and they had discharged at the same time, as if those Brothers shared a brain—or at least a set of trigger fingers. And yet somehow, he hadn’t even needed the bulletproof vest that he’d strapped on before he’d shrugged into the black parka back at that ranch.

He blamed the wind.

Or credited, was more like it.

Even with him wearing the perfect target for clothes, and them being no more than fifteen yards away, those bullets had gone elsewhere.

And he hadn’t wasted a heartbeat dematerializing away.

Thank Fates he tended to get more focused instead of less so when it was crunch time, and he’d also guessed right, thinking that their move would be to go up on exactly the rooftop they had. Which was why he’d proceeded to the shorter building behind where they’d tried to gun him down. His advantage wasn’t going to last, however. They were going to fan out to find him so they could finish the job.

And this assassination attempt meant one of two things. The pair of them were either going rogue from the King … or Wrath had lied about his own intentions and all of the Brotherhood was out here looking for him.

The male had seemed sincere, but who could tell?

And who could argue with those forties—

As Tohr and Qhuinn dematerialized, Xcor crouched down and ghosted out himself, on the theory that a moving target was harder to hit.

He re-formed three blocks to the west on a tenement. And as he resumed his corporeal body, he triangulated his location vis-à-vis that map on those floorboards at the farmhouse. He was close, so close, to the location that had been illustrated.

And there was no better place to be than with his fighters if he were being hunted.

Traveling from rooftop to rooftop, he was reminded of his time in the trees, way back before the Bloodletter had come unto him in that forest. Indeed, he might well have to fall once more upon his thieving skills, depending on how all this went over time.

He had little ammunition and no money—and that was a problem requiring a solution. But he was getting ahead of himself.

On that note, he transitioned down to an alleyway that was narrow and dark as the inside of his skull. The wind could not reach into this crevice created between the brick buildings, and snow had built up in great drifts at both ends with a lagging in the middle. He stuck to one side, crouching and shuffling quickly past inset doorways and the occasional Dumpster.

He knew he had the right entrance when he saw three deep stab marks in the upper right-hand corner of the doorjamb—and when he tried the battered old knob, he didn’t expect it to turn. It did.

Glancing left and right, and then checking up above, he pushed his shoulders into the panels and shifted his body indoors.

As he shut himself in, he didn’t say a word. His scent would announce his presence—just as the scents that greeted his nose told him that his males had been here very recently. Within hours.

This was where they were staying.

With boarded-up windows and that door closed, he decided to take a chance and light the second of the flares. As that red, fluttering light exploded from the tip, he moved the stick around slowly.

It was an abandoned restaurant kitchen, all kinds of utensils and old pans, crates, and plastic buckets covered with a thick dust. There were signs of his males’ inhabitation, however, vacant places against the walls where large bodies had stretched out for rest.

The Domino’s boxes made him smile. They always liked their pizza.

After he had gone through the entire kitchen, and then proceeded out to the restaurant in front, finding the latter similarly boarded up, disordered, and empty, he returned to the door he had entered through.

And slipped back out into the storm.

FORTY-ONE

It had been a good plan.

And as with all good plans that eventually went into the crapper, things had started out okay: Blay had taken the wheel of his pop’s new Volvo sedan, with his dad riding shotgun and his mom in the back sitting against the door with her bad foot across the seat. Yeah, sure, they’d had a little fun getting out of the driveway, but they’d made it to the main road and even onto the Northway with no trouble.

Now, naturally, the highway was closed, but as it was New York State, people had fucked that off and created a set of parallel tracks that ran right down the center of the two lanes heading north. All you had to do was bump your way into them and hold a steady pace as the windshield in front of you turned into what Han Solo saw every time the Millennium Falcon went into hyperdrive.

So yup, all good in the beginning. They’d listened to old-school Garrison Keillor, and sang along with his version of “Tell Me Why,” and were almost able to forget the fact that they were heading toward the long exits, the ones where there was no way to get off for ten or fifteen or even twenty miles at a stretch.

The turn for the worse came without preamble or a courtesy announcement that maybe they needed to call Houston with a problem. They were going a modest thirty-five, sticking in the tracks, descending a rise … when the Volvo hit a stretch of ice that didn’t agree with any of its tires, traction control, or four-wheel drive.