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The male rose to his feet, and tugged his black combat sweater down so that it was smooth over his chest. There were guns at his hips, but he had not taken them out. Of course he hadn’t. This operation, like cleaning his quarters or preparing his own food, was beneath his efforts.
No, he was saving the glory for himself. The dirty work, for others.
“How did… you find out,” Blade asked as his cousin came in close. “About me and the labs.”
“I followed you one night. I couldn’t understand why you were disappearing with such regularity. At first I assumed that your sister’s lower standards had infected you and you were forging relations with a vampire down in Caldwell. But you were not, wereyou. You were out in the field. In the mountains. By the sea and in the desert. I must commend you for your thoroughness. You were quite effective.”
“Why’d it… take you so… long.”
“For things to come to this?” Kurling shrugged easily, sure as if he were showing off his freedom of movement. “Well, firstly, I needed my own army. You used humans, I wanted to improve on that, and it took me some time to gather the necessary contacts. You inspired me to start looking into the underground, actually. It’s amazing what you can buy, what secrets are available to the highest bidder. These units”—he indicated the soldiers that were standing all around like radios ready to be turned on, or laptops prepared to be booted up, or cars itching for a driver—“are the future of human warfare. It’s just going to take those rats without tails a decade or two to get the technology cheap enough and the squabbling over rights settled. Issues with you aside, we in the Colony will of course need to have our own stockpile of these weapons, and I have a production facility going already. Further, some of the technological problems the humans hadn’t quite worked out needed to be solved. Battery life is such a difficulty.”
“My heart bleeds for you,” Blade muttered.
“Oh, it will.”
The knife came out from behind his cousin’sback, having obviously been nestled in a holster there. And the blade was solid gold, the precious metal gleaming.
“This is your weapon, cousin.” Kurling held the thing up. “I stole it from your quarters two years ago, but you never noticed. You were too busy being weak—do you have any idea what would have happened if the Colony found out you wereahvengingyour whore of a sister? Who fucked a vampire? She brought shame upon the whole of our bloodline—especially those of us who have led our lives in the right and proper way. I have no mate, no prospects, no life because of her, and then you”—the tip was angled forward—“youdo something even worse.Youare going to get all of us killed. Rehvenge may have reset some of the rules, but the Colony has its own underground and the assassins will come for each one of us.Youmust be eradicated for the rest of the bloodline to survive.”
Blade’s belly pumped in and out as the point of the gleaming golden knife came to rest against his naked abdomen.
“And as long as I kill you, the infection can be controlled. The rest of us will not be tainted by your inexplicable actions—”
“Not… inexplicable.”
“No? What else would you call them? Xhexania brought shame to your immediate family, and after she was dealt with appropriately, you go off anddestroy the very thing that cleansed our bloodline of her infection? I cannot fathom why you would do such a thing.”
Blade stared into eyes that were the color of his own, and thought for an instant of the two of them as youngs, playing outside one of the disguised kiosks that fed into the Colony’s maze of subterranean tunnels.
Now they were here, enemies by circumstance and action.
“Because I am not like you,” he heard himself answer. “That is why I did it. That is why it is anything but inexplicable.”
Kurling blinked as if the response was as confusing as the deeds that had been done in the name of love for a sister who had been treated unfairly by those who should have stood by her the most.
“Well, enough with the catch-up, cousin,” thesymphathsaid. “Let us commence this so that we shall both get our due.”
With that, the knife was driven in hard, the gold cleaving through clothing, skin, and organ, smooth as a surgical strike.
And then came the twist.
As Kurling jerked his fist, the knife bored a bigger hole through Blade’s lower abdomen—
His scream ripped through the foyer, echoing throughout the house, the acreage… the whole world:
“Xhexxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.”
If Blade was going out, he wanted his beloved sister’s name to be the last thing he uttered—
In his delirium, things that couldn’t possibly be true seemed to happen—
This wasnotpossible. There was no way that the doors of the mansion exploded open and the very female he had called out to burst through curls of smoke as if she had answered to her name.
Except itwashis sister. And she was not alone.
Warriors, strong of back, with black daggers strapped, handles down, to their chests, flooded the foyer and engaged with the animatronic soldiers, the fighting propagating like an immune response to cancer in an otherwise healthy person.
Xhex went right for their cousin.
