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As she went flat to the asphalt, he fired two bullets into the slayer who’d come out of the shadows behind her. The thing fell back like a sack of potatoes, landing with a thump, but the job wasn’t done. You had to stab them though the sternum, driving a length of steel into the empty cavity where their heart had once been, if you wanted to eliminate them.
“I’m totally not threatened by you.” Holstering his gun, Nate took out a blade of his own and looked at the female who was prone at his feet. “Not in the slightest—”
Pop!
Okay, that sound didn’t make any sense. Who the hell was shooting?
“Nate! Shit!”
“What?”
As the female pointed at his waist, he looked down and things got real fuzzy, real fast. Sure enough, there was a strange fire in his gut, like he’d eaten a ghost pepper or two, and as he put a hand over a red smudge on his Hanes t-shirt, he felt a fresh warmth and wetness.
“Do Ialwayshave to get hit in the stomach?” he muttered as his knees started to go loose.
And fucking hell, thelesserhe’d just dropped had a gun.
“Run,” he croaked. “You gotta get… out of… here…”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Zsadist got to the 1075 Cedar Post Road location first. Re-forming in the darkness, he did a quick instinct check in the glen of birches, and when nothing pinged his radar, he stepped out of the tree line and stared across the winter meadow that rose to meet a two-story cottage. With the fresh snow that had fallen, the acreage was like a vanilla sheet cake.
Up ahead, the stone structure had little old lady written all over it. From the exterior, it looked like the kind of place where cookies were baked in the oven every day, there were doilies under everything, and housekeeping was done scrupulously and by hand. The fact that the curtains were never opened because there weren’t any real windows, and there were cameras mounted on the perimeter like it was a sting operation in full swing?
Nothing to see here. Nope. Nada.
Instead of ruining the perfect snow—because its pristine nature was like a security camera for the ground—he dematerialized onto the back porch. Exactly three seconds afterward, the copper lock was remotelysprung and he opened the first of the steel-reinforced panels. The outside one had been faced with a wooden faker that, like the front entry, always had a seasonally appropriate wreath hanging on it. The other two in the short hallway beyond had no camouflage because why bother. If you got to them, you were either welcome or you were going to be killed.
Each lock released for him and then reengaged behind him as he passed through, and finally, he was in the kitchen with its rustic table and chairs, the Aga, and the deep-bellied porcelain sink. Nodoggenkeeping the coffee and Danish coming because there were no civilians in the waiting room tonight—and just as well. He was rank-mooded and best left to his own devices, and the last thing anybody needed was him making the pastry chef cry because he’d turned down a cherry-filled something and a cup of java with a tone that was less than airline-stewardess pleasant.
Helping himself to a Granny Smith from a bowl of mixed varieties, he unsheathed a black dagger and started peeling things on a oner as he opened the way into the sealed corridor. This restricted-access, fireproof, bombproof hallway formed the steel-wrapped core of the structure, and there were four reinforced doors opening off of it as well as one down at the far end.
The front half of the Audience House was cut up into a jigsaw circuit of rooms and hallways that were controlled remotely by V’s off-site security staff. Civilians were let in the main entry into reception on the right, where they were greeted and signed in. They were then shown farther down into one of the confidential triage offices, where Saxton’s team of paralegals registered their causes of action, determined whether there was a civil or criminal issue, and assigned them a case number—or if the audience was about a mating or the blessing of a young, set into production a certificate with ribbons. When it was time, the civilians were taken back around to see “Wrath,” and then the final room, out in front on the left, was the disposition of the audience,including whatever kind of follow-up was required, whether that was an official investigation or a filing receipt or some kind of collections activity—or the presentation of the finished mating or blessing certificate set with the King’s seal.
Saxton had developed the process, Tohr had designed the spaces and the layout, and Vishous had wired everything up with security, monitoring, and good old-fashioned booby-traps. There were lots of doors and hallways. Lots of dedicated off-site security staff. Lots of moving civilians around the central sealed corridor. Lots of secret things that could be triggered to defend against any kind of attacker.
It was all about protecting Rahvyn as she pretended to be Wrath.
And it had been working well for the last decade since they’d relocated from the safe house they’d been using as a stopgap measure. As far as any of the civilians knew, their audiences with the King were better run, better tracked, and more efficient than they’d ever been. And not one of them knew about the explosion that had changed everything thirty years ago. The repair on Darius’s former principal residence had been started immediately, the rear entry rebuilt and repainted within a day bydoggencarpenters, a ruse that it had been a gas leak goneboom!fed to the humans in the neighborhood and the cops that had come to investigate.
The reality that the King had been killed was a secret that had been protected for a long time now—so long that the nights when the real Wrath had seen members of the species and mediated their disputes and conferred royal favor upon their milestones seemed like something that had been done back in the Old Country. Hell, the second generation of young didn’t even know the truth. They’d all been little kids when it had happened—well, except for Bitty. But her memories had been altered because it was safer for them to all live the lie.
L.W. was the only one who knew. After all, it was one thing for the King and Queen to be formal with each other in public. When your moms was sleeping alone every night?
Rahvyn and Beth had saved the species in so many ways, all so that L.W. could take the reins. Like father like son, though. The male had no interest in the throne. All he wanted to do was fight, and every night he rolled the dice with greater recklessness. So maybe they were stuck with this lie permanently—and by permanently, until someone noticed that Wrath was two thousand years old or something, and showing no signs of the sharp decline that vampires exhibited at the end of their lives.
It was wrong, all wrong. The whole damned thing, but what could you do?
Other than killlessers, of course. And hunt Lash down.
As a spike of anger nailed Z in the chest, he checked the clock on his phone and then went back to working on his apple peeling. When he was finished, he dropped the bright green spiral into a trash can and took his first cleave off the rounded swell of fruit.
Sweet and tart at the same time, with a molar crunch that was satisfying. Candy from a tree, and maybe it would bring up his blood sugar levels and cut the crankies a little.
There were a couple of stools against the unadorned wall and he took a load off to wait for the others. The fact that he was stuck with an emergency meeting of the Brotherhood—which wasn’t an emergency at all because, as usual, something bad had happened and that male Nate had been involved in it—was the way the night was going. He’d been boots-on-the-ground downtown for only about ten minutes when he’d watched a very familiar iridescent white Tesla stop in the middle of the fucking four-laner, get approached by a cop-bot—and then take off after a bullet had been discharged into the law enforcement robot from a gun that had no silencer on it.
“At which point things went from crap to shit…” he muttered as he took another slice off the black blade with his fangs.
