Throe and the others were standing in a semi-circle around him.
“Alas, as I live and breathe.” Except, in truth, he only felt dead. “How fare the new accommodations?”
“Where were you?” Throe demanded.
“Elsewhere.” As he blinked, he remembered searching that odd, foggy landscape, going around and around the base of that mountain. “The new accommodations—how are they?”
“Fine,” Throe muttered. “May I have a word with you?”
Xcor cocked a brow. “Indeed, you appear anxious to do so.”
The pair of them stepped to the side, leaving the others in the wind—and coincidentally, he happened to face the direction of the Brotherhood’s compound.
“You cannot do that,” Throe said over the loud, frosty gusts. “You cannot just disappear for the day again. Not in this political climate—we assumed you’d been killed, or worse, captured.”
There was a time when Xcor would have countered the censure with a sharp rebuff or something far more physical. But his soldier was correct. Things were different between the bunch of them—ever since he’d sent Throe into the belly of the beast, he had started to feel a reciprocal connection with these males.
“I assure you, it was not my intention.”
“So what happened? Where were you?”
In that moment, Xcor saw before himself a crossroads. One direction took him and his soldiers to the Brotherhood, into a bloody conflict that would change their lives forever for good or ill. The other?
He thought of his Chosen being held upright by those two fighters, as carefully handled as cut glass.
Which was it going to be.
“I was in the warehouse,” he heard himself say after a moment. “I spent the day in the warehouse. I returned there distracted, and it was too late to take myself anywhere else. I passed the daylight hours beneath the floor, and my phone had no reception. I came here as soon as I left the building.”
Throe frowned. “It’s well past sundown.”
“I lost track of time.”
That was the extent of information he was willing to give. No more. And his soldier must have sensed that line of demarcation, for although Throe’s brows remained tight, he followed up no more.
“I require only a short tally here and then we shall depart to find our enemies,” Xcor declared.
As he took out his phone, he could not read the screen, but he knew how to check his voice mails. There were some hang-ups—Throe and the others, in all likelihood. And then there was a message from someone he’d been expecting to hear from.
“It is I,” Elan, son of Larex, announced. There was a pause, as if in his head, he was piping in a trumpet fanfare. “The Council is meeting on the morrow at midnight. I thought you should know. The location is at an estate here in town, the owners of which having recently moved back from their safe house. Rehvenge was quite insistent with regard to the scheduling, so I can only guess that our fair leahdyre is carrying a message from the king. I shall keep you fully informed of what transpires, but I do not expect to see you. Be well, my ally.”
As he hit delete, Xcor bared his fangs, and the resurgence of his aggression felt good—a return to normal.
How dare that effete little aristocrat tell him to do anything.
“The Council is meeting tomorrow night,” he said as he put his phone away.
“Where? When?” Throe asked.
Xcor looked out over the city toward the mountain. Then he turned his back upon that compass point.
“The fine Elan has determined we shall not be there. What he fails to realize is that that will be my choice. Not his.”
As if neglecting to impart an address would keep him away if he desired otherwise?
“Enough conversation.” He strode over to the gathering of his soldiers. “Let us go down onto the streets and engage as warriors do.”
Between his shoulder blades, his scythe started talking to him once again, her voice keen and clear in his mind, her blood-thirsty words like a lover’s entreaty.
Her silence had been strangely unsettling.
It was with no small relief that he dematerialized from the lofty heights of the skyscraper, his iron will training his molecules toward the ground and into the field of engagement. In so many ways, the prior twenty-four hours had felt as though they had been lived by another.
He was back in his old skin now, however.
And ready to kill.
FORTY-SEVEN
Qhuinn was eleven miles into a twenty-mile run on the treadmill when the door to the training center’s workout room opened.
The second he saw who it was, he hopped off onto the side rails and banged on the stop button: Blay was standing in the jambs, his eyes jumping around, his face all fucked-up—and not because someone had beaten him or something.
“What happened?” Qhuinn demanded.
Blay shoved a hand into his red hair. “Ah, Layla’s down in the clinic—”
“Shit.” He jumped off and headed for the door. “What’s wrong—”
“No, no, nothing. She’s just in for a checkup. That’s all.” The guy stepped to the side, clearing the exit. “I figured you’d want to know.”
Qhuinn frowned and stopped where he was. As he scrutinized the other male’s expression, he came to a conclusion that made him anxious: Blay was fronting about something. Hard to pinpoint exactly how he knew that, but then again, after being friends with someone since childhood, you learned to read their minutiae.
“Are you okay?” he asked the guy.
Blay motioned in the direction of the clinic. “Yeah. Sure. She’s in the exam room right now.”
Right, clearly, the topic was closed. Whatever it was.
Snapping into action, Qhuinn jogged down the corridor, and nearly burst through the closed door. At the last minute, though, a sense of decorum pulled him up short. Some examinations of pregnant females involved very private places—and even though he and Layla had had sex, they certainly weren’t intimate like that.
He knocked. “Layla? You in there?”
There was a pause and then Doc Jane opened up. “Hi, come on in. I’m glad Blay found you.”
The physician’s face gave nothing away—and that made him psychotic. Generally speaking, when doctors did that professionally pleasant thing, it was not good news.
Looking beyond V’s female, he focused on Layla—but Blay was who he grabbed onto, snagging a hold on the guy’s arm.
“Stay if you can?” Qhuinn said out of the corner of his mouth.
Blay seemed surprised, but he complied with the request, letting the door shut them all in together.
“What’s going on?” Qhuinn demanded.
Checkup, his ass: Layla’s eyes were wide and a little wild, her hands jittery as they played with her loose, tangled hair.
“There’s been a change,” Doc Jane said with hesitation.
Pause.
Qhuinn nearly screamed. “Okay, listen up, people—if someone doesn’t tell me what the fuck is going on, I’m going to lose my goddamn mind all over this room—”
“I’m pregnant,” Layla blurted.
And this is a change how? he wondered, his head starting to hum.
“As in the miscarriage appears to have stopped,” Jane said. “And she’s still pregnant.”
Qhuinn blinked. Then he shook his head—and not as in back and forth, as in how someone would masturbate a snow globe.
“I don’t get it.”
Doc Jane sat on a rolling stool, and opened a chart on her lap. “I gave her the blood test myself. There’s a sliding scale of pregnancy hormones—”
“I’m going to be sick,” Layla cut in. “Right now—”
Everybody rushed at the poor female, but Blay was the smart one. He brought a wastepaper basket with him, and that was what the Chosen used.
As she was heaving, Qhuinn held her hair back and felt a little dizzy.
“She’s not okay,” he told the doctor.
Jane met his eyes over Layla’s head. “This is a normal part of being pregnant. For female vampires, too, apparently—”
“But she’s bleeding—”
“Not anymore. And I did an ultrasound. I can see the gestational sac. She is still pregnant—”
“Oh, shit!” Blay yelled.
For a split second, Qhuinn couldn’t figure out why the guy was cursing. And then he realized…huh, the ceiling had traded places with the wall.