When he didn’t look back, V came around and glared up at him, those fucking pale eyes a twin set of nuclear blasts that spelled mushroom cloud forward and backward. “I want you to go home. Now.”
Rhage opened his mouth. Clapped it shut. Opened it again—and had to remind himself to keep his voice down. “Look, it’s not a good time for your one-eight-hundred psychic headquarters shit—”
The Brother snapped a hold on his arm and squeezed. “Go home. I’m not fucking you.”
Cold terror washed through Rhage’s veins, bottoming out his body temperature—and yet he shook his head again. “Fuck off, Vishous. Seriously.”
He was so not interested in testing out any more of the Scribe Virgin’s magic. He wasn’t—
“You’re going to fucking die tonight.”
As Rhage’s heart stopped, he stared down into that face that he’d known for so many years, tracing those tattoos, and the tight lips, and the slashing black brows … and the radiant intelligence that was usually expressed through a filter of samurai-sword sarcasm.
“Your mother gave me her word,” Rhage said. Wait, was he actually talking about him kicking it? “She promised that when I die, Mary can come with me unto the Fade. Your mother said—”
“Fuck my mother. Go home.”
Rhage looked away because he had to. It was either that or have his head explode. “I’m not leaving the brothers. Ain’t going to happen. You could be wrong, for one thing.”
Yeah, and when was the last time that had happened? Eighteen hundreds? Seventeen hundreds?
Never?
He spoke over V. “I’m also not going to run scared from the Fade. I start thinking like that, and I’m finished with a weapon in my hand.” He put his palm all up in that goatee so the brother cut the interrupting. “And the third fuck off? If I don’t fight tonight, I’m not going to make it through the day locked in the mansion—not without my purple friend coming out for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, you feel me?”
Well, and there was a number four, too. And the fourth rationale … was bad, so very bad that he couldn’t entertain it for more than the split second required for the piece of shit to come to mind.
“Rhage—”
“Nothing’s going to wreck me. I got this—”
“No, you don’t!” V hissed.
“Okay, fine,” Rhage bit out as he tilted forward on his hips. “So what if I die? Your mother gave my Mary the ultimate grace. If I go unto the Fade, Mary just meets me there. I don’t have to worry about ever being separated from her. She and I will be perfectly fine. Who really fucking cares if I kick it?”
V did some lean-in of his own. “You don’t think the Brothers will give a shit? Really? Thanks, asshole.”
Rhage checked his watch. Two minutes to go.
Might as well be two thousand years.
“And you trust my mother,” V sneered, “with something that important. I never thought you were naive.”
“She managed to give me a fucking T. rex alter ego! That’s some good fucking credibility.”
All at once, a number of birdcalls sounded out around them in the darkness. If you hadn’t known better, you’d have assumed it was just a bunch of night owls going Pitch Perfect.
Damn it, the pair of them were yelling over here.
“Whatever, V,” he whispered. “You’re so goddamn smart, worry about your own life.”
His last conscious thought, before his brain went Zero Dark Thirty and nothing else registered outside of the aggression, was of his Mary.
He pictured the last time they’d been alone.
It was a ritual of his before he engaged with the enemy, a mental talisman that he rubbed for luck, and tonight he saw her as she had stood in front of the mirror in their bedroom, the one that was over the tall bureau where they kept their watches and their keys, her jewelry and his Tootsie Pops, their phones.
She was up on her tiptoes, angled over the top, trying to put a pearl stud into her earlobe and missing the hole. With her head tilted to the side, her deep brown hair flowed over her shoulder and made him want to put his face into the freshly shampooed waves. And that wasn’t the half of what impressed him. The clean cut of her jaw caught and held the light from the crystal sconce on the wall, and her cream silk blouse draped over her breasts and was tucked into her tight waist, and her slacks fell to her flats. No makeup on her. No perfume.
But that would be like touching up the Mona Lisa or hitting a rosebush with a shot of Febreze.
There were a hundred thousand ways to detail his mate’s physical attributes, and not one single sentence, or indeed an entire book, that could come close to describing her presence.
She was the watch on his wrist, the roast beef when he was starving, and the pitcher of lemonade when he was thirsty. She was his chapel and his choir, the mountain range to his wanderlust, the library for his curiosity, and every sunrise or sunset that ever was or would ever be. With one look or the mere syllable of a word, she had the power to transform his mood, giving him flight even as his feet stayed on the ground. With a single touch, she could chain his inner dragon, or make him come even before he got hard. She was all the power in the universe coalesced into a living, breathing thing, the miracle that he had been granted in spite of the fact that he had long been undeserving of anything but his curse.
Mary Madonna Luce was the virgin Vishous had told him was coming for him—and she was more than enough to turn him into a God-fearing vampire.
On that note …
Rhage took off without waiting for the Go Now from his team. Rushing headlong across the field, he had both guns up in front of him and premium, high-test gas funneling into his leg muscles. And no, he didn’t have to hear the precise curses of frustration as he blew their cover and started the attack too soon.
He was used to the boys being pissed off at him.
And his demons were way harder to deal with than his brothers.
SAFE PLACE, MARY’S OFFICE
As Mary Madonna Luce hung up the phone, she kept her hand on the receiver’s smooth grip. Like a lot of the equipment and furnishings at Safe Place, the set was a decade old, a used AT&T leftover from some insurance company or maybe a real estate agent’s upgrade. Same with the desk. Her chair. Even the rug under her feet. At the vampire race’s only domestic violence shelter and resource for females and their children, every penny that came from the King’s generous coffers was spent on the people receiving support, treatment and rehabilitation.
Victims were allowed to come free of charge. And stay in the large, roomy house for however long they needed to.
Staffing, of course, was the largest expense … and with news like what had just come through that old phone, Mary was really fricking grateful for Marissa’s priorities.
“Fuck you, death,” she whispered. “Fuck you so goddamn hard.”
The squeak that her chair let out as she leaned back made her wince even though she was used to the complaint.
Looking up at the ceiling, she felt an overwhelming urge to take action, but the first rule of being a therapist was that you had to control your own emotions. Half-cocked and frantic did the patient no good, and contaminating an already stressful situation with drama that was self-infused on the part of the professional was utterly unacceptable.
If there had been time, she would have gone to one of the other social workers to get debriefed, re-centered and perma-composed. Given what was happening, though, all she could spare was a minute’s worth of Rhage’s patented deep breathing.
No, not the sexual kind.
More his yoga variety that had him inflating his lungs in three separate draws, holding the oxygen, and then releasing it all along with the tension in the muscles.
Or trying to release the tension.
Okay, this was getting her nowhere.