The Shadows

He didn’t give them a chance to reel him back into their drama. He had enough of his own. He’d left maichen buck-ass naked in his bed and he was worried she was going to take off without his getting back.

Rushing down to the foyer, he bolted through the vestibule, broke out into the night, and dematerialized to the Commodore.

As he assumed form on the terrace, he yanked back the glass door and rushed across to the corridor that led to the bedrooms.

“maichen,” he called out.

Just as he rounded the door to his bedroom, she said, “Yes?”

He took a deep breath as he saw her reclining against the pillows, her bare shoulders emerging from the cover of the duvet.

“Oh, thank fuck,” he said.

“Are you all right?” She sat up. “iAm?”

Kicking off his shoes, he didn’t answer her. He couldn’t. There was too much to say about things he couldn’t change and hated.

Instead, he pulled back the sheets and got in fully clothed. Her body was warm and naked and yielding as he brought them heart-to-heart.

As her arms came around him, and she stroked the back of his head, he shuddered—and realized that in all the years he’d had on the planet, this was the first time he’d had somewhere to go when he felt like the world was a shitty place and time was nothing more than torture to be endured.

It was so much better than even the sex.

This moment where he sought and was given haven? It made him understand why the Brothers lit up every time their shellans came into the room, and why those males would lay down their lives for those females.

“Thank you,” he heard himself say.

“For what?” maichen whispered.

“Being here.”

“Is Selena unwell?” she asked. Because he’d told her why he’d needed to go.

“Not acutely so. But she and my brother got into it.”

“Why?”

“There’s nothing like your fiancée finding out you’re betrothed to another while she’s dying. That is just such an awesome conversation to have.”

maichen stilled. “This has to end.”

“The shit with Trez and that fucking Princess? I agree—if you come up with any bright ideas … let me know,” he said starkly.

SIXTY-FIVE

It was very easy to escape from his own house.

Assail simply cracked the window on the upper floor and departed his premises with all the fuss and circumstance of a draft escaping into the night.

He had been tracking the movements of the Brothers in his woods with his night-vision cameras, the huge shapes of the males moving like T. Rexes through his property, their presences sticking to the trees.

Following the sun’s disappearance, he had kept the illusion blinds in place, effectively preserving the daytime, vacant appearance of his interior. It would give the Brothers something to do as they contemplated the where and when of his and his cousins’ nocturnal reappearance aboveground.

Which would not be until he had completed a specific endeavor.

With alacrity, he traveled to the east, to a prearranged location at an abandoned strip mall approximately five miles outside of the downtown area.

The Hertz rental car was parked grille-out against the rear wall of a building that had a faded BLUEBELL’S BIRTHDAY BOUTIQUE, DELIVERIES ONLY sign hanging cockeyed from above a paint-chipped reinforced door.

Ehric put the driver’s-side window down as Assail reformed. “Are you driving?”

“Yes, I am.”

As his cousin got out and Assail assumed the male’s place behind the wheel, Evale spoke up from the backseat. “What do you want us to do?”

“Nothing.”

He put the engine in gear and headed off, moving swiftly, but obeying all traffic laws. He’d gone but a couple of miles when the cocaine that he’d taken about two hours earlier began to wear off in earnest.

But he was not going to reload. He needed to be focused enough to dematerialize if need be.

He took the three of them and the pedestrian Ford Taurus through the sprawling suburbs and out farther from the metro hub, into the farmland that formed a skirting around the Adirondack Mountains. As he went along, the roads became narrower, the yellow line in the middle and the white lines at the shoulders growing so faint, the headlights failed to pick them out. And still he continued onward, no one behind him, no cars or trucks coming toward him.

Some miles later, he arrived at the dairy farm he was looking for. Like Bluebell’s Birthday Boutique, it, too, was abandoned, and the sedan bumped along as he transitioned off the asphalt onto a dirt lane that went out into the overgrown fields. Crossing through the bramble and cornstalk tangle, he drove all the way to the forest’s edge and found shelter among the birch trees and maples that retained few of their leaves. With quick circles of the wheel, he turned the rental around so they were facing out and waited, leaving the car running. He hated that the headlights remained aglow, but there was naught to be done about that.

The Brothers’ presence had made taking his Range Rover impossible.

“He’s late,” Ehric said a little later.

“He’ll be here.” There was too much at stake for the Forelesser not to show. “He shall not fail us.”

And sure enough, moments later, a dark shape came forward through the field, following their path. No running lights. So he knew it was the one for whom they were waiting.

“You know where to go,” he said softly as he cracked one of the back windows an inch.

Just like that, the cousins dematerialized out of the backseat … and the Forelesser arrived, coming to a stop. As usual, Assail and his business associate both put their windows down at the same time.

“Where’s your Range Rover, vampire?”

“In the shop.”

“Be fucking real. Have you been trailed?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

The slayer frowned, his dark brows falling down over his dark eyes. For a moment, Assail mourned the Old Country, where you knew the bastards not just from their stench, but because they had been in the Lessening Society long enough for their coloring to pale out. Not in the New World. No, here, in the disposable culture of American humans, the undead did not last long enough to have their pigments fade.

“ATF?” the slayer demanded. “Or CPD.”

As if during his years as a human he had often found inconvenience from those two organizations.

“By the Black Dagger Brotherhood. And the Blind King, Wrath.”

The undead threw his head back and laughed. “Whatever, my man, that’s on you.”

“No, I’m afraid that shall be on you, mate.”

Without warning, Assail lunged out of his window and stabbed the slayer in the eye, using the dagger he had discreetly placed upon his thigh. As the Forelesser screamed, Assail wrenched the blade free and slashed across the front of the throat. Gurgling sounds and copious amounts of black blood filled the interior of the slayer’s SUV, and Assail was forced to awkwardly extract his upper body or be drenched in the mess.

Ehric rematerialized with his cousin and made quick work of searching the vehicle as Assail looked around, ensuring that there were still no witnesses. As the slayer choked and clawed at the second mouth that had been made in his neck, Ehric emerged with three AKs and many rounds of ammunition. Without conversation, the weapons and lead were placed in the trunk of the Taurus, and the cousins opened both rear doors and got back into that vehicle.

Assail reached through the window and pulled one of the Fore-lesser’s arms out. Finding an unstained section of sleeve, he wiped off his dagger, reholstered the thing … and extracted a serrated hunting knife from his belt.

Quick work to sever the head completely.

He left the body where it was, behind the wheel of the SUV, its hands and feet as yet moving, the right hand even flopping up and gripping the wheel.

Going to be rather difficult to drive, considering there was no brain and no vision to direct things.

No, he had the CPU by the hair.

Walking around to the front passenger’s-side door, he opened things up and placed the still-blinking, still-mobile head into the cardboard Amazon.com box that had been lined with Hefty bags.

Then he went across and got back behind the wheel of the Taurus. Before the interior lights extinguished themselves, he peered over the lip of the box and met the rolling, shocked eyes.

“You were a fine partner,” Assail murmured. “Such a shame we must needs part association.”

With that, he put the sedan in drive and headed off.

SIXTY-SIX

Trez let himself fall back on his brother’s bed, his arms flopping out to the sides, his eyes focusing on the ceiling above. Goddamn it, that frickin’ curse of his was never going to stop haunting him. Here he was, trying to do right by the one female who had ever mattered to him … and that s’Hisbe shit was, as ever, a noose around his neck.

“You have been … without a female?” Selena asked. “Since…”

He lifted his head and stared across the empty bedroom at her. “Why would I have been with one? Ever since I had you? Nobody’s been of interest.”