To him, she was the unforgettable woman, the one he'd never had and never would but who nonetheless reached into the core of him.
Man, he was so fricking tired.
He opened his eyes and took action before he really knew what he was doing. Reaching up to his inner forearm, he peeled the clear plastic tape off the skin around the IV insertion site. Sliding the needle out of his vein was easier than he'd thought it would be, but then again, the rest of him hurt so bad, messing around with that little piece of hardware was a drop in the bucket.
If he'd had the strength, he'd have gone looking for something with a little more punch to off himself. But timetime was the weapon he was going to use because that's what he had at his disposal. And going by how shitty he felt, it wasn't going to take long. He could practically hear his organs coughing up their livelihoods.
Closing his eyes, he let go of everything, only dimly aware that alarms were going off in the machinery behind the bed. A fighter by nature, the ease with which he gave up was a surprise, but then a heavy tide of exhaustion crashed over him. He knew instinctually that this was not the exhaustion of sleep but rather of death, and he was glad that it came so fast.
Drifting free of everything, he imagined that he was at the start of a long, blinding hallway at the end of which was a door. Marissa was standing in front of the portal and as she smiled at him she opened the way into a white bedroom full of light.
His soul eased as he took a deep breath and began to walk forward. He'd like to think he was going to heaven, in spite of all the bad things he'd done, so this made sense.
It wouldn't be paradise without her.
Chapter Six
Vishous stood in the clinic's parking lot and watched as Rhage and Phury pulled out in the black Mercedes. They were going to grab Butch's phone from the alley behind Screamer's, then pick up the Escalade from the ZeroSum lot and head home.
It went without saying that V wasn't going back into the field tonight. The remnants of the evil he'd handled lingered in his body, making him weak. But more than that, seeing Butch worked out and nearly dead had done some kind of inner damage. He had the sense that a part of him had become unhinged, that some inner escape hatch was hanging open and segments of him were fleeing the core.
Actually, he'd had this feeling for a while now, ever since his visions had left him. But this horror movie of a night made it so much worse.
Privacy. He needed to be alone. Except he couldn't stand the idea of going back to the Pit. The silence there, the empty couch where Butch always sat, the weighty knowledge that there was something missing, would be unbearable.
So he went to his undisclosed place. Taking form again thirty stories in the air, he materialized on the terrace of his penthouse at the Commodore. The wind was howling and it felt good, biting through his clothes, making him feel something other than the gaping hole in his chest.
He went to the terrace's edge. Bracing his arms against the railing, he looked over the lip of the skyscraper, down to the streets below. There were cars. People going into the lobby. Someone reaching into a cab, paying the driver. So normal. So very normal
Meanwhile, he was up here dying.
Butch was not going to make it. The Omega had been inside him; that was the only explanation for what had been done to him. And although the evil had been taken out, its infection was beyond deadly and the harm was done.
V rubbed his face. What the hell was he going to do without that smart-ass, tough-talking, Scotch-sucking SOB? The rough bastard somehow smoothed the edges of life, probably because he was like sandpaper, a scratchy, persistent wrong-way-rub-that left everything more even.
V turned away from the three-hundred-foot drop to the pavement. Going over to a door, he took a gold key out of his pocket and pushed it into the lock. The penthouse beyond was his private space, for his private endeavors. And the scent of the female he'd had the night before lingered in the darkness.
At his will, black candles flared. The walls and the ceilings and the floors were black and the chromatic void absorbed the light, sucking it in, eating it up. The only true piece of furniture was a king-sized bed that was likewise covered in black satin sheets. But he didn't spend a lot of time on the mattress.
The rack was what he relied on. The rack with its hard table-top and its restraints. And he also used the things hanging beside it: the leather straps, the lengths of cane, the ball gags, the collars and spikes, the whipsand always the masks. He had to have the females anonymous, had to cover their faces as he tied up their bodies. He didn't want to know them as anything more than the equipment for his deviant workouts.
Shit, he was depraved about sex and he knew it, but after trying out a lot of things, he'd finally found what worked for him. And fortunately there were females who liked what he did to them, craved it as he craved the release he got when he mastered them singly or in pairs.
Except tonight as he looked at his equipment, his perversions made him feel dirty. Maybe because he never came here unless he was ready to use what he had, so he'd never given the place a look-see when his head was clear.
His cell phone's ring startled him. As he glanced at the number, he numbed out. Havers. "Is he dead?"
Havers's voice was all professional-doctor sensitive. Which was the tip-off that Butch was hanging by a spider's thread. "He coded, sire. He pulled the IV out and his vitals dipped. We brought him back, but I don't know how long he can keep going."
"Can you restrain him?"
"I did. But I want you to be prepared. He's just a human"
"No, he is not."
"Oh of course, sire, but I didn't mean it like"
"Shit. Look, I'm coming back. I want to be with him."
"I would prefer you didn't. He gets agitated whenever anyone's in the room and that doesn't help things. Right now he's as stable as I can make him and as comfortable as possible."
"I don't want him dying alone."
There was a pause. "Sire, we all die alone. Even if you were in the room with him, he would still leave unto the Fade alone. He needs to be kept calm so his body can decide whether it's going to revive. We're doing everything we can for him."
V put a hand over his eyes. In a small voice that he didn't recognize, he said, "I don't I don't want to lose him. I, ah yeah, don't know what I would do if he" V coughed a little. "Fuck."
"I shall care for him as mine own. Give him a day to try and stabilize."
"Nightfall tomorrow, then. And you will call me if his condition gets worse."
V hung up the phone and found himself staring at one of the lit candlewicks. Over its black wax torso, the captured little head of light weaved in the currents of the room.
The flame got him thinking. The bright yellow of it was well, it was kind of like the color of blond hair, wasn't it.
He whipped out his cell, deciding that Havers was wrong about the no-visitors thing. It just depended on who the visitor was.
As he dialed, he resented the only option he had. And knew that what he was doing probably wasn't fair. Probably would cause a helluva lot of trouble, too. But when your best friend was doing the tombstone two-step with the Reaper, you kind of didn't give a shit about a lot of things.
"Mistress?"
Marissa looked up from her brother's desk. The seating chart for the Princeps dinner was in front of her, but she couldn't concentrate. All that searching of the clinic and the house and she'd come up with nothing. Meanwhile, her senses were screaming that something was wrong.
She forced a smile for the doggen in the doorway, "Yes, Karolyn?"
The servant bowed. "A call for you. On line one."
"Thank you." The doggen inclined her head and left as Marissa picked up the receiver. "Hello?"
"He's in the room down by your brother's lab."
"Vishous?" She jumped to her feet. "What?"
"Go through the door marked housekeeping. There's a panel to the right that you push open. Make sure you put on a hazmat suit before you go in to see him"
Butch dear God, Butch. "What"
"Do you hear me? Put the suit on and keep it on."
"What ha"
"Car accident. Go. Now. He's dying."
Marissa dropped the phone and ran from Havers's study, nearly mowing down Karolyn out in the hall.
"Mistress! What's wrong?"
Marissa shot through the dining room, punched open the butler's door, and stumbled into the kitchen. As she made the corner to the back stairs, she lost one of her high heels, so she kicked off the other and kept going in her stocking feet. At the bottom of the steps, she entered the security code to the rear entrance of the clinic and burst into the ER's waiting room.
Nurses called out her name, but she ignored them as she raced for the lab's corridor. Tearing past Havers's laboratory, she found the door marked housekeeping and slammed it open.
As she panted, she looked around at nothing. Just mops and empty buckets and smocks. But Vishous had said
Wait. There were faint marks on the floor, a little pattern of wear that suggested a hidden door opening and closing. She shoved the smocks out of the way and found a flat panel. Clawing with her nails, she forced it open and frowned. It was some kind of dimly lit monitoring room with a high-tech setup of computers and vitals readouts. Leaning in to the blue glow of one of the screens, she saw a hospital bed. On top of it, a male was lying spread-eagled and restrained with tubes and wires coming out of him. Butch.
She barged past the yellow hazmat suits and facial masks hanging next to the door and pushed into the room, the air lock breaking with a hiss.
"Virgin in the Fade" Her hand went to her throat.
He was definitely dying. She could sense it. But there was something elsesomething frightening, something that set off her survival instincts sure as if she were confronted by an attacker with a gun. Her body screamed for her to run, get out, save herself.
But her heart brought her to his bedside. "Oh God."
The hospital johnny left his arms and his legs bare, and it seemed as if he was bruised everywhere. And his face good Lord, he was desperately battered.
As he made a groaning noise in the back of his throat, she reached out to take his handoh, no, not there, too. His blunt fingers were swollen at the tips, the skin purple, some of the nails missing.
She wanted to touch him, but there was no place that she could. "Butch?"
His body jerked at the sound of her voice and his eyes opened. Well, one of them did.
As he focused on her, a ghost of a smile pulled at his lips. "You're back. I just saw you at the door." His voice was weak, a tinny echo of the bass it normally was. "I saw you then lost you. But here you are."
She sat gingerly on the edge of the bed and wondered which nurse he thought she was. "Butch"
"Where did the yellow dress go?" His words were garbled, his mouth not moving much, as if his jaw were broken. "You were so beautiful in that yellow dress"
Definitely a nurse. Those suits hanging next to the door were yelloshoot. She hadn't put one on, had she? Holy hell, if his immune system was compromised, she needed to protect him.
"Butch, I'm going to go out and get a"
"Nodon't leave me don't go" His hands started twisting in the binds, the leather restraints creaking. "Please dear God don't leave me"
"It's okay, I'll be right back."
"No woman I love yellow dress don't leave me..."
Not knowing what else to do, she leaned down and softly laid her palm on his face. "I won't leave you."
He dragged his bruised cheek into her touch, his cracked lips brushing her skin as he whispered, "Promise me."
The air lock broke with a hiss and Marissa looked over her shoulder.
Havers burst into the room as if he'd been torpedoed inside. And through the yellow mask he wore, the horror in his stare was as obvious as a scream.
"Marissa!" He swayed in the protective suit he had on, his voice muffled and frantic. "Sweet Virgin in the Fade, what are youyou should have a hazmat on!"
Butch started to struggle on the bed, and she lightly stroked his forearm. "Shh I'm right here." When he'd calmed a little, she said, "I'll put one on right now"
"You have no ideaoh, God!" Havers's whole body shook. "You're compromised now. You could be contaminated."
"Contaminated?" She looked down at Butch.
"Surely you felt it when you came in!" Havers launched into all kinds of words, none of which she heard.
As her brother kept at it, her priorities realigned themselves, steel locking into steel. It didn't matter that Butch had no idea who she was. If the mistaken identity kept him alive and fighting, that was all that mattered.
"Marissa, are you hearing me? You're contam"
She glanced over her shoulder. "Well, if I'm contaminated, then it looks like I'm staying with him, doesn't it."
Chapter Seven
John Matthew squared off at his target and tightened his grip on his blade. On the far side of the gym, across a sea of blue mats, there were three punching bags hanging from the bottom lip of the bleacher section. As he concentrated, the middle one became a lesser in his mind. He pictured the white hair and the pale eyes and the pasty skin that haunted his dreams, and he started to run, his bare feet slapping over thick plastic skin.
His little body had neither speed nor strength, but his will was enormous. And sometime in the next year or so, the rest of him would catch up to the power of his hatred.
He. Couldn't. Fucking. Wait. For his transition to hit.
Lifting his blade over his head, he opened his mouth to scream a war cry. Nothing came out, because he was a mute, but he imagined he was making a whole lot of noise.
As far as he was concerned, the lessers had killed his parents. Tohr and Wellsie had taken him in, told him what he really was, showed him the only love he'd known. When those bastard slayers had murdered her and Tohr had disappeared, John had been left with nothing but his revengerevenge for them and the other innocent life that had been lost back in January.
John approached the bag running flat out, with his arm above his shoulder. At the last instant, he ducked into a ball, rolled on the mats, then shot up off the ground with the blade, hitting the bag from underneath. If it had been a real combat scenario, the knife would have gone into the lesser's gut. Deep.
He twisted the hilt.
Then he sprang to his feet and spun around, imagining the undead falling to its knees, holding on to the hole in its abdomen. He stabbed the bag from up top, seeing himself bury the blade in the back of the neck
"John?"
He whirled around, panting.
The female who approached made him trembleand not just because she'd surprised the shit out of him. It was Beth Randall, the half-breed queen, the female who was also his sister, or so blood tests proved. Strangely, whenever she was around, his head went on a little vacation, his brain seizing up, but at least he didn't pass out anymore. Which had been his first reaction to meeting her.
Beth came across the mats, a long, lean female dressed in jeans and a white turtleneck, her dark hair the exact color of his. As she came closer, he could smell Wrath's bonding scent on her, a dark perfume specific to her hellren. John suspected the marking happened through sex, as the spice was always strongest at First Meal when they came down from their bedroom.
"John, will you join us up at the house for the last meal of the night?"
I have to stay and practice, he signed in American Sign Language. Everyone in the household had learned ASL, and the concession to his weakness, to his lack of voice, irked him. He wished they didn't have to make any allowances for him. He wished he were normal.
"We'd like to see you. And you spend so much time here."
Practice is important.
She eyed the blade in his hand. "So are other things."
As he continued to stare at her, her dark blue eyes looked around the gym as if she were trying to find an appealing argument.
"Please, John, we're I'm worried about you."
At one time, three months ago, he would have loved to have heard those words from her. From anybody. But no more. He didn't want her concern. He wanted her to get out of his way.
When he shook his head, she took a deep breath. "All right. I'm going to leave more food in the office, okay? Please eat."
He inclined his head once, and when she lifted her hand as if to reach out, he stepped away. Without another word, she turned around and walked back across the blue mats.
When the door shut behind her, John jogged back to the far side of the gym and crouched to start running. As he took off once again, he lifted his blade high, rank hatred powering his arms and legs.
Mr. X flipped into action at high noon, walking into the garage of the house he recharged in, getting into the don't-notice-me minivan that disguised him among Caldwell's human traffic.
He had no interest in his assignment, but you acted when the master called in a command and you were the Fore-lesser. It was either that or you got canned, something Mr. X had been through once before and not enjoyed: Having the Omega slap a pink slip on you was about as much fun as eating a barbed-wire salad.
The fact that Mr. X was back on the flipping planet and in this role once again was still a shocker to him. But it seemed as if the master had grown tired of his revolving door of Fore-lessers and wanted to make one stick. As Mr. X had evidently been the best of the lot in the last fifty or sixty years, he'd been called into service for another round.
Reissued out of hell.
And so he was going to work today. As he pushed the key into the ignition and the Town & Country's anemic engine coughed over, he was utterly uninspired, no longer the leader he'd first been. But it was hard to get motivated in this kind of lose/lose situation. The Omega was going to get pissed off again and take it out on his number one. It was inevitable.
In bright noonday sun, Mr. X headed out of the fresh and perky subdivision, passing by Monopoly houses that had been built in the late 1990s. The things all shared a common architect, the gene pool of features locking the homes into cheap variations on duck-and-bunny adorable. Lot of front porches with insubstantial molding. Lot of plastic shutters. Lot of seasonal decorations, this time themed out on Easter.
Perfect hiding place for a lesser, a bramble of frazzled soccer moms and hassled midmanagement daddies.
Mr. X took Lily Lane out to Route 22, pausing at the stop sign to the big road. Using a GPS tracker, he got a ballpark location on the place in the woods that the Omega had asked him to pay a visit to. Travel time to destination was twelve minutes and that was good. The master was all impatient, eager to see if his plan with that Trojan human had worked, all jonesing to know if the Brotherhood had taken their little pal back.
Mr. X thought about the guy, sure that the two of them had met before. But even as he wondered about the where and when of it, none of that mattered today. And it hadn't mattered when Mr. X had been working the tough bastard over, either.
Jesus, that had been a hard SOB. Not one word about the Brotherhood had passed the man's lips, no matter what was done to him. Mr. X had been impressed. Guy like that would have been quite an asset if they could have turned him.
Or maybe that had already happened. Maybe that human was one of them now.
A little later, Mr. X parked the Town & Country on Route 22's shoulder and hoofed it into the woods. Snow had fallen last night in some freak March storm, and it padded the pine boughs, like the trees had geared up to play football with each other. Kind of pretty, actually. If you were into the nature shit. The farther he went through the forest, the less he needed the tracker because he could feel the master's essence, sure as if the Omega was up ahead. Maybe the human hadn't gotten picked up by the Brothers
Well, what do you know.
As Mr. X emerged into a clearing, he saw a scorched circle on the ground. The heat that had flared there had been great enough to melt the snow and mud-up the ground for a time and the now refrozen earth showed the contours of the burst. All around, remnants of the Omega's presence lingered, like the stink of summer garbage long after the trash had been picked up.
He breathed in through his nose. Yup, there was something human in the mix, too.
Holy shit, they'd killed the guy. The Brotherhood had exterminated that human. Interesting. Except why hadn't the Omega known the man was dead? Maybe there hadn't been enough in him to have him get called home to the master?
The Omega wasn't going to like this report. He was allergic to failure: it made him itchy. And itchy led to bad things for Fore-lessers.
Mr. X knelt down to the withered earth and envied the human. Lucky bastard. When a lesser bit it, what waited for him on the other side was an endless liquid misery, a horror bath that was every Christian's vision of hell times a thousand: After slayers were killed, they returned to the veins of the Omega's body, circling and recircling in an evil swill of other dead lessers, becoming the very blood the master put in you when you were inducted into the Society. And for these reconstituting slayers there was no end to the burning cold or the driving starvation or the crushing pressure because you remained conscious. For eternity.
Mr. X shuddered. An atheist in life, he hadn't thought of death as anything other than a dirt nap. Now, as a lesser, he knew exactly what was waiting for him when the master lost patience and «fired» him again.
And yet there was hope. Mr. X had found a little loophole, assuming the pieces fell together right.
By a stroke of luck, he might have found a way out of the Omega's world.
Chapter Eight
Butch took three long, trippy days to wake up and he resurfaced from his coma in the manner of a buoy, popping out of the depths of nothingness and wobbling on top of reality's lake of sights and sounds. Eventually, he put things together enough to understand that he was looking at a white wall in front of him and hearing a soft beeping in the background.
Hospital room. Right. And the ties on his arms and legs were now gone.
Just for kicks and giggles, he rolled over onto his back and pushed his head and shoulders off the bed. He kept himself upright because he liked the sensation of the room going around. It distracted him from his Whitman's Sampler of aches and pains.
Man, he'd had bizarre, wonderful dreams. Marissa at his bedside caring for him. Stroking his arm, his hair, his face. Whispering to him to stay with her. That voice of hers had been what kept him in his body, what kept him back from the white light that any idiot who'd seen Poltergeist knew was the afterlife. For her, he'd somehow hung on, and going by the steady, strong beat of his heart, he knew he was going to make it.
Except, of course, the dreams had all been a gyp. She wasn't here and now he was stuck in this bag of skin of his until the next badass thing took him down.
Goddamn it, just his rotten luck to have kept breathing.
He looked up at the IV pole. Eyeballed the catheter bag.
Then glanced over at what appeared to be a bathroom. Shower. Oh, God, he'd give his left nut for a shower.
As he shifted his legs around, he was aware that what he was about to do was probably a very bad call. But he told himself, as he hung up the catheter bag next to his IV meds, that at least the room spins had mostly stopped.
A couple of deep breaths and he grabbed the IV pole to use as a cane.
Feet hit the cold floor. Weight eased onto his legs.
Knees buckled without hesitation.
As he fell back on the bed, he knew he wasn't going to make it to the bathroom. With no hope of hot water, he turned his head and eyed the shower with naked lust
Butch inhaled like he'd been cracked on the back of the head.
Marissa lay sleeping on the floor in the corner of the room, curled up on her side. Her head rested on a pillow and a beautiful gown of pale blue chiffon spilled over her legs. Her hair, that incredible waterfall of pale blond, that medieval romance novel rush of waves, was all around her.
Holy shit. She had been with him. She had truly saved him.
His body had newfound strength as he stood and lurched across the linoleum. He wanted to kneel down but knew he'd probably get stuck on the floor, so he settled for standing over her.
Why was she here? Last thing he knew, she didn't want to have anything to do with him. Hell, she'd refused to see him back in September when he'd come to her hoping for everything.
"Marissa?" His voice was shot to shit and he cleared his throat. "Marissa, wake up."
Her lashes flicked open and she snapped upright. Her eyes, those pale blue, sea-glass-colored eyes, shot to his. "You're going to fall!"
Just as his body swayed backward and he toppled off his heels, she leaped to her feet and caught him. In spite of her willowy body, she took all of his weight easily, reminding him that she was no human woman and was likely stronger than he was.
As she helped him back onto the bed and pulled the sheets over him, the fact that he was weak as a child and she was treating him like one out of necessity bit into his pride.
"Why are you here?" he asked, his tone as sharp as his embarrassment.
When her eyes didn't meet his, he knew she also was uncomfortable with their situation. "Vishous told me you were hurt."
Ah, so V had guilted her into this Florence Nightingale routine. That bastard knew Butch was a simpering idiot for her and that the sound of her voice would do exactly what it did and bring him around. But it was a helluva position for her to be in, a reluctant rope to the proverbial lifeboat.
Butch grunted as he rearranged himself. And also from the knock his pride was taking.
"How do you feel?" she said.
"Better." Comparatively. Then again, he could have been dragged under a bus and still been miles ahead of what the lesser had done to him. "So you don't have to stay."
Her hand drifted off the sheet and she took a slow breath, her breasts rising under the expensive bodice of her gown. As she wrapped her arms around herself, her body became an elegant s-curve.
He looked away, ashamed because part of him wanted to take advantage of her pity and keep her with him. "Marissa, you can go now, you know."
"Actually, I can't."
He frowned and glanced back at her. "Why not."
She paled, but then lifted her chin. "You're under"
There was a hiss and an alien walked into the room, the figure dressed in a yellow suit and a breathing mask. The face behind the molded plastic was female, but the features indistinct.
Butch looked back at Marissa with horror. "Why the fuck aren't you wearing one of those getups?" He had no idea what kind of infection he had, but if it was bad enough that the medical staff was pulling a Silkwood, he had to imagine he was deadly.
Marissa cringed, making him feel like a total thug. "I I'm just not."
"Sire?" the nurse interrupted gently. "I'd like to take a blood sample if you don't mind?"
He kicked out a forearm while still glaring at Marissa. "You were supposed to be wearing one of those when you came in, weren't you? Weren't you?"
"Yes."
"Goddamn it," he snapped. "Why didn't you"
As the nurse nailed him a good one in the crook of his elbow, Butch's strength ran out of him like she'd popped the balloon of his energy with that needle of hers.
Dizziness slammed into him and his head fell back against the pillow. But he was still pissed off. "You should have one of those on."
Marissa didn't respond, just paced around.
In the silence, he glanced over at the little vial that was plugged into his vein. As the nurse swapped it for an empty one, he couldn't help noticing that his blood seemed darker than usual. Much darker.
"Good God what the hell's coming out of me?"
"It's better than it was. Much so." The nurse smiled through the mask.
"Then what color was it before," he muttered, thinking the shit looked like brown sludge.
When the nurse was done, she shoved a thermometer under his tongue and checked the machines behind the bed. "I'll bring you some food."