Nothing like a little spoiled sushi whipped up with some old school Johnson & Johnson baby powder.
He wasn’t turning his head away, though, even to spit. And he certainly wasn’t moving either of his hands to wipe at anything.
The slayer he had pinned against a filthy brick wall was bleeding out. The lower part of its leg looked like the thing’d been in a mangler, and of course, the fact that L.W.—a.k.a. Wrath, son of Wrath, the great Blind King—had his fingers shoved into that open wound like he was looking for his car keys was having the opposite effect of plugging the leak. But that wasn’t even the worst of the undead’s injuries.
Still, thelesserremained dangerous, its shrewd, nasty eyes alert and looking for its best chance for retaliation.
“Where.”
As L.W. spat out the word, he was kneeling at the feet of the enemyas if he were about to propose. The position was not the norm for the hulking male, who was no more likely to bow down than settle down, but needs must and all that jazz.
On that note, the heir to the throne leaned in closer, his bicep thickening under his leather jacket, his upper lip peeling all the way off his fangs. In response, thelessermoaned in pain, the dead head lolling on its shoulders, the torso jerking and not getting far.
Thanks to Shuli.
He resecured the hand he had locked on the base of the slayer’s throat, but the other was doing just fine as it was: It was cranked around the hilt of the steel blade he’d impaled that abdominal cavity with—which was how he’d gotten his facial. Lot of sputtering involved when you disrupted the GI tract like that.
“Where, you fucker,” L.W. growled as he relented a little.
And then went right back into the meat of that leg.
As the second verse of suffering bubbled out of thelesser’s mouth, Shuli glanced around. The alley they were in was on the fringes of downtown. With abandoned apartment buildings on both sides, no CPD civilian monitoring systems in play, and empty streets all around, this was where the war between the Lessening Society and the vampires had played out for the last century.
Privacy mattered. It was the only thing both sides agreed on.
So they were not likely to get interrupted by anything other than backup for the piece of shit—and this was what Shuli was worried about.
“Not… telling…” Thelesserdrew in a ragged breath. “… shit.”
The former human still had the dark hair and hazel eyes he’d been born with, which meant his induction was fairly recent, i.e., within the last couple years. The longer the inductees were in the Lessening Society, the more they lost their natural pigmentation until they were pasty white and had OxiClean locks growing out of their heads. The discoloration thing was a good barometer for how advanced their training and technique was going to be, so yes, the bitch had been pretty easy to overtake. But it also meant thelesserwouldn’t have been let out alone.
Sooner rather than later, whatever it’d been partnered with was going to show up.
“Let’s move on.” Shuli glanced over to the left as his instincts prickled. “This is going nowhere—”
“Where’s your master.” L.W. outed a steel dagger. “You’re gonna fucking tell me—”
“Hold up,” Shuli hissed as he narrowed his eyes on the far corner of the decayed apartment building. “We’ve got fucking company.”
Overhead, cloud cover was choking out the moonlight, and it wasn’t like there were any outside lights to go by—or inside ones, either. But at least there was enough ambient bleed from the rest of the city that he could see well enough… to know that there was a shadow lurking at the end of the block.
As the slayer started laughing in a series of gurgles, Shuli moved his grip up and cut off that windpipe completely.
“Stab the fucker or I will,” he whispered to L.W. “We gotta get out of here.”
Unlike this undead, backup for him and his boy was going to be harder to come by tonight. He wasn’t about to pull a Fredo and speak candidly against the family in front of the enemy, but for some unknown reason, there was just a handful of their fighters in the field this evening, both the Brotherhood and the Band of Bastards being tied up at the same time. The reasons for whatever it was were totally above Shuli’s pay grade, although he knew without asking that it had to be something to do with the King.
Except who gave a fuck about the why’s, if they got ambushed by a squadron of slayers.
L.W.’s head cranked to the left as the male assessed what kind of bad news had shown up on that street corner. And then the movement was so fast, there was no tracking it. The male jerked his arm—
Pop!
The flash was bright enough to freeze-frame the scene on the backs of Shuli’s eyelids—maybe fucking permanently—and the heat was likeopening the top of a grill when you were flipping a dozen burgers at once. That was it for thelesser. Gonzo, and not in a Hunter S. Thompson kind of way.
So Shuli fell face-first into the bricks.
He managed to catch himself right before he turned into a pug, and immediately pinwheeled around. Too late. L.W. was already jogging down toward whatever was waiting for them over there.
