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CHAPTER SIX
As Quinn’s eyes drift shut, I reconfigure my fingers on the guitar and start a gentle version of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. First because it’s guaranteed to send any normal human being into the most oblivious valleys of sleep.
But second, and most crucially, because I know the song backwards and forwards.
Because maybe that familiarity will stop my hands from shaking.
The hands that have to start cooperating much more than this. They’ll soon have an important part to play in things.
Very soon.
But not yet. No, damn it.
I lean over, looking at my strings like I’m taking my first fucking lesson. Or a kid playing with his phone before a dentist appointment.
Or the guy who has to exterminate the sleeping beauty on the couch across from him.
Not yet.
I keep it very much to myself. I have no idea what access Kaz has granted himself to my phone, but his text from fifteen minutes ago came with disturbingly good timing. How did he just know I’d be out at the bar, fetching cold drinks for Quinn and me?
How did he also know the words, glaring from his chat bubble, that would turn me right back into that skittish kid in the waiting room?
K:Mission accomplished?
I didn’t reply. And I don’t intend to now, as the device rattles again. The only reason I bother to pick it up from the table is so it won’t wake Quinn. Why does the bastard think he’s helping here?
Unless, on the plaza at LACMA this afternoon, my cousin observed what I already knew.
Taking Quinn Lemarr’s life is going to be a thousand times more difficult than I imagined. And by now, my imagination is pretty damn big.
Decades of preparation will do that to a man.
Fairly much from the day, somewhere in the 1920’s, that Kaz and I finally put the pieces together and realized there was a way to actually reverse our condition. The thing that so many in our family hailed as a miracle. Immortality itself.
A miracle.
But not to Kaz and me.
We’d crisscrossed the globe, the original dynamic duo, in search of what—of who—we needed to fulfill our purpose. To define our existence by finally putting a limit on it. To end the imprisonment of our own DNA.
But to make that happen, I have to end the woman across from me.
Oh yes, her.
The one we’ve waited so long for.
The one with her sweet sleeping face and her shiny, sprawled curls and her barely-covered nudity. The one who also has the lineage we’ve carefully traced—all the way back to the corrupt ancestors who originally did this to us. The one who possesses the pair of birthmarks, one on her neck and one inside her right thigh, to prove it.
The fact that I irrefutably confirmed before filling her womb with my seed. Blending enough of our bloodlines to reverse this damn curse.
It’s all happened exactly as planned.
So why do I feel stabbed once more by Horatio La Marca’s syringe of poison? Why is this moment a thousand times more awful than that night in the man’s stable-that-really-wasn’t? Why do I bellow louder than I did then, hoping my plea for help would reach my cousin, only to hear Kaz crying with twice the volume?
Somehow I keep it all swallowed down, the decibels burning back down my throat until they’re a ball of acid in my gut. At least that gets me out of my chair, rushing me to the bathroom off the pool deck to retch like I’ve been on a debauchery diet for the last three days. But I can only claim that about the last three hours, wrapped in more decadence and brilliance than my memory has a right to record.
And cling to.
