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“The rules are different for him.”
“Because he’s a male.”
“No, because for him, it’s never too late—”
The gasp that exploded into the charged air between them was so unexpected, Nalla spun around, expecting to see another slayer behind her. Except the enemy hadn’t made the sound.
Down on the asphalt, Nate sat up and took another deep breath as he wiped the blood from his mouth. With his legs out in front of him and his torso so stiff and vertical on his hips, he was like a puppet whose strings had been picked up by his puppeteer.
“Nate…?” she said weakly.
His head swiveled in her direction and then angled so he could look at her. “I told you. Just… gimme a minute.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The stench wasterrible.
As Evan hesitated at the entrance to the abandoned office building, he pinched his nose and propped open the boarded-up glass door with the toe of his snow boot. Did he even have the right address? He leaned back out and looked up to confirm the number. Yes, he did. But why would the seminar be here in this run-down location?
God, the stench was like a three-day-old crime scene with someone baking sugar cookies in the back.
No wonder whoever owned the place left the front unlocked. Anyone with a functioning nose would turn around and walk out.
“Hello?” he said into the darkness.
The echo of his voice suggested that the lobby was vast and empty, and instinctively he put his hand to his brow as a sailor would, like the sun was glaring in his eyes and that was why he couldn’t see the sea before him. Of course that didn’t help.
A lack of light was the problem.
Easing back out, he looked around at the other twenty-story-tallbuildings rising up from this spin-off from Market Street like the trees of some futuristic world. The road he’d run down seemed like a cattle chute leading to here and here alone, the sidewalk pavers laid solely to deliver him to this door, this entry: Even though none of this made sense… all of it struck him as inevitable. As soon as he’d sent that DM and received this address and nothing more in response, it was like he’d been locked in. Or maybe this had been set in motion with Uncle at the club. Or even earlier with Mickey in the car driving out to that cabin.
Maybe it went all the way back to the moment of his birth, a coward put upon the earth to suffer until he finally grew a set and decided to become a real man.
And yet he hesitated.
You’re such a pussy.
He couldn’t even remember which of his family members had told him that or whether it was specifically from tonight or another time. Perhaps it was finally his own voice in his head, the flagellation caught like the common cold from those around him and brought inward, the tide finally turned, the acceptance made.
And with it had come something he’d never felt before: Anger.
Fuck. Them.
“Hello?” he repeated into the darkness.
God, what was thatsmell—
Bing!
Across the hollow space, light bloomed as a set of elevator doors opened, the illumination revealing an empty corporate-America landscape of busted waiting area chairs and litter. As for the Otis, there was nothing inside the steel box but the remnants of mirrored panels that had been shattered by vandals, only their ragged remains retained in their frames.
With that rhyme in his head, he took a step forward, and then he had to choose whether or not to release the door and let it close behind himself.
You’ve come here. So get what you want, what you need.
The voice entered his head from somewhere outside of him, no memory this time, not even a conglomeration of derision.
He pictured the blond-haired man who had approached him at the gym a couple of weeks ago, so strong, so handsome, a Ken doll who lived and breathed, a personal trainer who seemed to know just what to say to a loser like Evan who wanted to be more than what he was.
