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“If you’re this bitched,” Nate remarked, “you coulda just left me where you found me—”
“Do you haveanyidea what tonight is?”
“Thursday. We’re both off rotation—”
“It’s my fucking birthday.”
He didn’t bother looking over because he knew when he saw all theno-reaction, it was going to make him feel like even more of a pussy, and that was not the kind of present he was interested in. Nice bottle of wine? A blow job—not from Nate. Some cake and coke? Great.
This bullshit? Hard pass.
“You were my best friend for a long time.” Or more like, a long time ago, he amended. “People go out for birthdays. Their buddies come and people drink. There doesn’t necessarily have to be presents or balloons. Just a good time.”
The light turned green, and as he pressed down on the pedal, their acceleration was smooth and quiet, the headlights illuminating the double-laned one-way. Two blocks up, he hung a right onto a both-way four-laner. Like the highway, traffic was spotty, only the occasional car pulling out of a parking garage, most of the vehicles flowing with him on a thirty-mile-an-hour tide in between sixty-floor-tall glass spears. The sidewalks were empty because of the midnight and the cold—
A lone pedestrian approaching on the left-hand side of the road got his attention, and not because of the solitary thing. The figure was dressed in black, and it wasn’t so much their size, it was the way they walked, with head lowered, shoulders forward on their hips, each footfall a punch through concrete into the earth itself: An animal, on the hunt, not a human out for a walk.
Shuli frowned as he recognized the scarred face in his headlights. The Black Dagger Brother Zsadist.
A frontline fighter, who was so much more than just one of the soldiers in the war like Nate and Shuli. The Brotherhood’s training program was great and all; it taught you to shoot with accurate aim, stab with good follow-through, and know your way around bombs, poisons, and basic IT shit. But all that, even with the continuing education and performance reviews, couldn’t take the place of the superior blood in that kind of male’s veins.
Well, and then there was the Brother’s personality disorder. He made Nate look like a fucking game show host. There were rumorsabout what Z had been like before he’d been mated and become a sire to his daughter, Nalla: murdering prostitutes for sport, killing vampires andlessersindiscriminately, living on the fringes because he was off the chain, to use an old expression. Sure, all of the Brothers had darkness in them—Rhage had that dragon with the pica problem, and Vishous had a glare that was like an ice spear, and you really didn’t want to get Butch teed up—but Shuli had always worried about Zsadist the most.
Something about the way the male was always off in a corner, watching, made a guy feel hunted even though they were on the same team.
On that note, Shuli’s eyes drifted over to Nate’s hands. They were resting on the guy’s thighs, the long fingers splayed out like he was about to palm up a basketball. Or someone’s head before he popped it off the spine like a dandelion. Under the nails? Blood that, going by the subtle copper scent that lingered, was drying slowly.
When Nate had finally come around the side of that crappy log cabin, he’d been wiping his hands off on a whole-ass bath towel, the folds of the terrycloth waving in the flurries and the flashes of lightning. Shuli had smelled the soap, but underneath the Dial, the fresh blood had been obvious.
As it was from a human, he hadn’t felt like he had the right to pry, and he’d thought of the rumors he’d heard about Nate working some kind of side hustle with Caldwell’s black market. No doubt a reminder that vampires shouldn’t be fucking with those rats without tails wouldn’t have been appreciated.
So he’d made a joke about running water outside in the dead of winter. Nate hadn’t laughed. But when did he ever?
Shuli thought of when he’d first met the guy. They’d both been doing construction on Luchas House, getting it ready for the initial group of residents to move in. Nate had been just out of his transition, and earnest as a goddamn Boy Scout. Now? He was bulked up with muscle, covered in iridescent tattoos, and had last cracked a smile backwhen AI had been considered a technological advance and paper money had still been a thing.
There had been a time Shuli could have asked the male anything—and only one reason for why everything was different.
“Christ, Nate. Hasn’t it been long enough.”
“This car ride? Yeah, it has. It’s probably the only thing you and I are gonna agree on tonight—”
Shuli slammed on the brakes. As traffic skidded around him and blew their horns, he strangled the steering wheel and stared out over the hood. “Enough.”
“I thought you liked this car—”
“Get out.” He released the locks and glared across the seats. “I’m done with this tortured loner bullshit of yours. Rahvyn is not coming back to you. She was mated thirty fucking years ago, okay? And she was never yours to begin with. Grow up and get over it.”
The change in the other male’s stare was split-second, and Shuli couldn’t believe the depth of hatred shooting out of his best friend’s eyes.
Not that they had been friends for years. Jesus, and he was accusing the guy of not getting over something? He needed to take his own fucking advice.
With profound, but stupid, sadness, Shuli said roughly, “You’ve lost the plot, man. And I’m done trying to keep you tethered to the planet—”
Flashing blue lights strobed the interior, picking out the hard angles of Nate’s face. He was leaned out on account of refusing to feed from anything but the artificial stuff his adoptive human mother had engineered in that lab of hers—and also maybe because he didn’t want to concede to anything soft at all.
Probably shit barbed bricks into the toilet bowl.
“Fucking wonderful,” Shuli muttered as he looked into the rear view mirror.
