His father looked over with a sharp jerk of the head.
And then he actually did a double take. Which was a rather… human?… response.
Mortal, was more like it.
The vampire was instantly forgotten, cast aside across the space to crumple into an oozing mess of black blood and gore in the corner.
At which point, Dev squared off at the evil.
Lash.
The Omega’s son.
His sire.
In an effort to block any intrusion into his mind, Dev kept the titles circulating over and over again in his thoughts. If he was successful in redirecting his every conscious awareness back at his father, there were no weak points to get inside, no chance of infiltration and manipulation.
“The prodigal son returns,” Lash said in a low voice.
“Hello, Father.”
There was a moment of sizing up, on both sides. And then Dev stepped into the house, making sure that he was hyperaware of his surroundings, ready for anything.
“You know,” his sire said with an autocratic accent. “Of all the places I expected you to turn up, after all these years, some random aristocrat’s house in the mountains is not it.”
Blue pupils with black rims, the reverse of his own coloring, stared across at him. He’d brought no conventional weapons with him, and of course, his father didn’t need any. But that didn’t mean things weren’t going to get very deadly, very quick.
“I cannot read your mind.” The evil smiled. “You are very strong. Tell me, how ever is yourmahmen?”
As the memory of standing in front of the demon and seeing her truly for the first time struck a chord, Dev felt an odd need to protect the female.
“I wouldn’t know,” he lied.
“Do not tell me you’ve come here for some Shakespearean reason.” Lash lowered his chin and looked out from under lowered brows. “That would be so unoriginal of you—”
The evil stopped. And glanced out of the open glass slider.
“I think we have a visitor, son.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
Lyric would later wonder why she traveled the way she did, how she managed it—even though she would know the why of her magical trip in real time.
When it was all happening, however, she was aware of only that one moment, she was in the hospital bed at the Brotherhood’s training center. And then in another, she started thinking of Dev and remembering things they had each said, the two of them arguing while he had looked so brokenhearted, her anger rising along with her own shattered dreams of what they could have been—
And then she was just gone.
It was not unlike the swirling trip to the Fade, the appearance up at the Sanctuary, or the twisty twirl of death itself. All she was sure about was that there was a spark of Dev inside of her, and it suddenly yearned to be reunited with the whole of him to such a degree that she was pulled along through the night air with it. Instinctually, she fought the tide, recognizing that she was out of her own control. And yet…
She wanted to see him. She needed the closure.
Rhamp’s parting words haunted her.
When the trip came to an end, it was like stepping off a train’splatform, the movement over, the disorientation gone as if it had never been. Yet she was in a totally different place, on a porch that overlooked a frozen lake and a mountain view.
Glancing down at herself, she was still in the same flannel nightgown hermahmenhad brought from home to the clinic. Then she looked around and recognized nothing of the modern house that was mostly glass. She felt Dev’s presence, however—and she followed it as a light in the darkness, a homing signal that she could not ignore.
Even though it was cold, she felt nothing of the wind or the chill, and she couldn’t decide whether that was because she was numb or if it was part of this whole strange experience.
