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Well, Wrath being back had been hand of God shit. Hand of… Rahvyn, that was. But everything else had been shit, and as a result, he and Bella had been up all day, worried about Nalla. The text she’d sent them an hour before dawn from one of the social workers’ phones hadn’t helped much—and he disagreed with hisshellan. He didn’t think theirdaughter needed space. The three of them needed to hash things out so that she saw he was right, stopped whatever the hell she was doing with Nate, and came the fuck home—
“And no, I’m not too hard on her.” A horn blared next to him and he sent the passing Volvo a glare even though the problem it was having was with someone else.
“I’m keeping her alive, goddamn it,” he said to a Kia who was also hitting its brakes.
On that note, he needed to get his head in the game.
As he pushed all his domestic fucking bliss away, it was a relief to focus on the war with the Lessening Society: Courtesy of alesserwho had fallen into Brotherhood hands, intel had been extracted that there was a slayer induction site down here somewhere. Interesting location choice, but he could see the logic. With so many people working from home, a lot of the downtown office space was just full of computer servers, data-mining farms, or robotic manufacturing for chips and processors.
Totally different than the way it had been back in the twenty-twenties. Back then, the skyscrapers had been choked with professionals who commuted in on the nine-to-five grind, with the only time things were quiet being on the weekends and after dark. But now, if you wanted privacy? You got it.
As he came up to the head of yet another alley, he double-checked the cross street and then randomly looked over at a building on the far side of the four-laner. The purple glow of a billboard was bathing the entire block in a grape soda kinda way, and he narrowed his eyes on the profile of a woman with long dark hair.
Resolve2Evolvewas the logo, and the tagline was real groundbreaking shit: Be Alive, Do More, Be More. Then there were details about some kind of conference that was coming to town.
Knock yourself out, he thought as he kept going, approaching that club Bathe and its blue-green entrance.
Several more blocks farther, he paused at the next intersection.Looking down the well-lit side street, he almost kept going. Some kind of echo inside of his body stopped him.
Figuring he’d scratch the itch, he sent out a ping on his location per protocol and made the turn, sticking to the right side of the brick-and-mortar valley, getting good and fucking quiet as he went about fifty yards into the flanks of some twenty-story spires and stopped. Tohr was two blocks over, Phury down one, Xcor over three. The intel hadn’t included a precise address, and even though he’d wanted to chase this lead down by himself, the coordination of effort was not just more efficient, it was better to have so many of them in a concentrated area.
If he was going to lecture Nalla on staying safe, he should at least do the same for himself.
But he didn’t like working with others.
When his instincts were certain there was nothing coming or going in the shadows, he started forward again. All the security lights were mounted at regular intervals, and he willed them off, the step-by-step extinguishing like the countdown of a horror movie. With a vampire in it. Who was hunting something.
“Yeah, but we’re the fucking good guys,” he muttered.
Up ahead, a set of plywood panels covered with graffiti was the first clue he might be in the right place. And then the wind changed directions and came from the bridge end of things… and the scent was unmistakable.
Baby powder and death.
Under his skin, the predator in him woke up sure as if the aggression was an “other” who lived inside of him, a separate consciousness all together. He was no shifter, though. It was just the duality of his nature, the civilized and the barbaric just a flip away, always.
In the past, there had even been a third part to him. But his Bella had healed that darkest fissure, only remnants of it remaining now—which was why he wasn’t like that fucker Nate. Z had things to lose, and they were so important to him, they’d brought him back from the brink of madness and kept him in place.
Broken, instead of ruined.
And this made him think of Nate’s history. That male had been raised in a human laboratory, treated like a pincushion and a petri dish for diseases, and then rescued after he’d watched hismahmendie. All things considered, his gruesome backstory was probably the only fact pattern on a par with Zsadist having been used and abused as a blood slave for a century by the Mistress. And on top of that torture, add in Nate’s immortality? You had an interpersonal H-bomb waiting to go off.
So no, he didn’t want the guy anywhere near Nalla.
Without Bella’s love, Z knew damn well that shit could very easily have gone a different way for him. But his good result was a one in a million, and he didn’t want his daughter rolling those odds.
Arriving at the boarded-up entry, he inhaled through his nose—and smelled fresh human blood.
“Nailed it,” he said into the darkness.
Gently testing the handles, he knew he should alert the others.
But he also needed a good outlet for his rage. If there was something to fight in there, he wanted first crack at whatever it was.
He was in a mood to slaughter the enemy.
Slowly.
On the other side of the plywood sheets, Evan heard the entrance rattle, and the soft sound brought his head up. He was sitting on the chipped, cold floor by the elevator, his back against the wall, his knees up, his arms around his middle. He had been in this position since dawn, and had passed the time watching a slice of daylight pinwheel across the black oily tracks on the marble.
