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“Amore. Go to the side entrance.”
He kissed her once more, and this time, when he stood in front of the open window, he was able to close his eyes and concentrate.
Flying away from the farmhouse in a scatter of molecules, he re-formed on his own property, between his log cabin and his barn. For a moment, he glanced at the red outbuilding. A wild impulse had him picturing what was in there, under its cover. But then he picked up one boot and glanced at the snowpack in his treads.
All-season tires only went so far, and besides, if you couldn’t floor your horses, why bother taking your toy out at all.
Heading for the cabin’s front door, he had places to go, but first a shower and another set of clothes—
As soon as he opened things up, he went for his gun and pointed it at the male across the interior. The good news was that his guest wasn’t an enemy. At least… not in the conventional sense.
His father, Murhder, was sitting in the ratty old armchair in front of the cold hearth. The Brother’s black-and-red hair was braided high on his head, like he’d come ready for some ground game aerobics, and he was dressed to be out in the field.
“We need to talk about what happened down on Market last night,” the Brother said grimly. “And after that, we’re going to cover why the hell you aren’t answering your phone—and then, for shits and giggles, our chaser is going to be why you’re half naked and holding a burned jacket in your hand.”
Fucking perfect, Nate thought.
But at least he could get this goodbye out of the way. Even though it was the one he’d been planning on finishing with.
At the downtown induction site, Evan exited the tunnel by jumping out and landing in a crouch with both of the guns he’d boosted front and center. With quick eyes, he scanned the well-lit parts of the basement. The elevator was still sitting open and at the ready, but there was no alarm anymore. Other than that?
Nothing out of place, no one in the space.
Leaving the shadows, he was prepared for an attack, and when he came up to the Otis box, he was surprised he wasn’t shooting. Peering in, he saw that someone had discharged a bullet into the control panel.
Keeping his guns up, he went silently over to the emergency exit. Sidestepping the door that had been blown out of its hinges, he leaned around the jamb and assessed the stairwell. It was dangerous to go up it, but he was as ready as he would ever be for that scarred vampire who was after him. On the ascent, he was careful to remain as quiet as possible—but he didn’t know whether that was his mind being smart, or his body making decisions for him.
He was hoping it was the latter as the autopilot thing was probably better at keeping him alive.
Or… less dead?
Whatever, whichever, who the fuck cared. He just kept going. At the first-floor landing, he paused and glanced at the big 1 that had been painted on the concrete wall. This fire door had had a limited breach, just the lock blown, the black blast ring localized by the bolting mechanism. Taking a deep breath, he pulled the panel hard, the hinges resisting because of the warping from the explosion, and he jumped out once again.
The lobby was still dim, and as he rounded the corner, he looked to that oily trail that led out from that fucking elevator.
His body paused, even though he told his feet to keep walking. As his head turned from side to side, he saw nothing out of place,nothing lurking, nothing… anywhere. The only difference was that the plywood panel that had been blown off the entrance had been put back on somehow.
The scarred killer had left. Evan could feel it.
Now he moved fast, but he still kept things as silent as he could, putting his new high-performance boots down carefully because there was debris and cracked mirrored glass that would be loud if he walked on it. At the building’s entry, he stopped for a moment. When nothing pinged his instincts, he used the side of the door that had stayed in place. The last thing he needed was the other plywood sheet falling in again.
As soon as he was out, his head jerked left. Right. And up.
Reholstering one of the guns, he fell into yet another run and retraced the path he’d taken the night before, shooting out onto Market, dodging cars that honked at him, ignoring pedestrians that looked his way. He felt nothing of the cold, and still no hunger or need to take a piss. He had plenty of anger, though, and it seemed, like his physical abilities, to be getting stronger by the moment.
Maybe it was just an effect of the toxic shit in his veins.
He didn’t care.
Up ahead, the blue glow of Bathe was like a semicircular rainstorm that misted out into the street, and he avoided the illumination by sticking to the opposite side of things, skirting the edge of the light show. The alley on the far side of the club was what he was after, and he jaywalked at a run and shot down into its shadows.
The side entrance to the club, which led into the VIP lounge, was smack in the middle of the building’s long wall, and he continued past it.
In the rear, there was a shallow parking lot, with wedges of dirty snow framing the beaters that were parked with all the organization of dropped Legos. In another couple of weeks, the available spaces were going to be taken up by even more of the plow’s work, those brown-and-black piles growing like tumors.
But not everything was out of order. There was a pair of vacantspaces set in the midst of the mess, and they had been properly cleared of ice and snow, and salted with a heavy hand, to the point where the spots’ yellow lines even showed on the ground.
Evan tucked himself into a fan-shaped shadow created by one of the security lights being out. Fishing a hand into the pocket of the black coat he’d stolen, he took out one of the suppressors. Even with his eyes forward on the back lot, his hands found the end of his gun’s barrel without any inefficiency, the rims of the two pieces joining as if they were something you clicked into place instead of screwed—and then, as he rotated the extension until it locked in, he heard the nearly imperceptible metal-on-metal sounds in spite of the bass that reverberated out of the club, and the whistle of the wind, and the loudwhrrrringof the HVAC system.
