Mary picked a little stick off the ground and bent it up and down to give her fingers something to do. “I, ah, I wish I’d known how worried your mom was about the resources at Safe Place. I would have worked really hard to reassure her.” She glanced over at the girl. “Are you worried about any of that?”
Bitty put her hands in her coat pockets and looked around. “I don’t know. Everyone’s really nice. You especially. But it’s scary, you know.”
“I know. Just talk to me, okay? If you get scared. I’ll give you my cell phone number. You can call me at any time directly.”
“I don’t want to be a burden.”
“Yeah, I guess that’s what worries me. Your mom didn’t want to be one, which I can absolutely respect—but the end result was that things were much harder on her, and you, than they had to be. Do you know what I mean?”
Bitty nodded and fell silent.
After a while, the girl said, “My father used to hit me.”
Deep in the grungy heart of downtown, Rhage ran through an alley, his shitkickers landing on the asphalt like thunder, his autoloader up, his rage in check so that it was an engine that drove him on, not a disaster that flipped him out.
As his target darted across another street, he stuck to the fucker like glue, that sickly sweet lesser smell like the vapor trail of a jet across the night sky, easily trackable.
It was a new recruit. Probably from out at that abandoned factory.
He could tell because the thing was all panicked, tripping and slipping before scrambling away in a mess of arms and legs, no weapons on him, no one coming to his rescue.
He was a lone rat without a mischief.
And as the slayer fell for the umpteenth time, his feet knocked out from under him by what looked like a carburetor, he finally didn’t get up again. He just held his leg to his chest and moaned, rolling onto his back.
“No, p-p-p-please, no!”
As Rhage pulled up to his prey and stopped, for the first time in recorded history, he hesitated before the kill. But he couldn’t not stab the fucker. If he left the damn thing on the streets, it was just going to heal up and find others of its kind to fight with … or it was going to get discovered by a human and end up on some fucking YouTube video.
“Nooooooo—”
Rhage shoved the thing’s arms out of the way and buried his black dagger right in the center of that now-hollow chest.
With a flash and a pop!, the slayer disappeared into thin air, nothing but a greasy stain of the Omega’s blood on the pavement and an acrid burn left behind—
Rhage jerked around, switching his dagger for an autoloader. Flaring his nostrils, he sniffed at the air and then let out a growl.
“I know you’re there. Show yourself.”
When nothing moved in the shadows at the far end of the alley, he took three steps back so that he had cover in the doorway of an abandoned tenement building.
In the distance, sirens howled like stray dogs, and on the next block over, some humans shouted at one another. Closer by, something was dripping off the fire escape behind him, and there was a rattling higher up, as if the gusts coming from the river were agitating the scaffolding’s tenuous hold on the brick.
“You fucking pussy,” he called out. “Show yourself.”
His natural arrogance told him he could handle whatever this was all by himself, but some vague unease he couldn’t put a name to had him signaling for back-up by triggering a beacon located on the inside of his jacket’s collar.
It wasn’t that he was frightened—fuck, no. And he felt stupid the second he’d done it.
But there was another male vampire hiding over there, and the only thing he knew for sure? It wasn’t Xcor.
Because they knew where that bastard was.
The rest of those sonsabitches were an open question.
FORTY-FOUR
Naturally, getting Naasha naked was the work of a moment.
In fact, she volunteered for it.
As soon as Assail and his cousins stepped into that sex dungeon of hers, she began peeling herself out of her red dress, kicking the haute couture out of the way as if the thing were worth nothing more than a paper napkin. She left her high heels on, however, and her basque.
Ehric’s and Evale’s arousals were instantaneous, a one-two punch of sexual aggression that made the female laugh in that husky way of hers.
She didn’t go to either of them, however. She approached Assail.
Leaning in, she pressed herself against his chest and put her arms around his neck. “I am in need of you first.”
Silly female. She confessed too much, transferring her power to him.
But that was a good thing.
Setting her aside, he tugged at the knot of his Hermès tie, loosening the silk. As he removed the length, she did a little spin and went across to one of the bedding platforms, lying out flat and stretching her arms over her head. With her body forming an erotic S-curve on the mattress, one breast popped out of its cup and her bare sex gleamed as she parted her legs.
Assail prowled over to her, all-fouring up her body until he sat on her pelvis, trapping her. Stretching the tie out between two fists, he stared down at her.
“You are so trusting,” he murmured. “What if I did something bad with this? No one would hear you scream or struggle, would they.”
For a moment, fear flared in her eyes. But then he smiled.
“It is a good thing I am a gentlemale, is it not.” He leaned down with the silk. “Close your eyes, my darling. And not to sleep, no, not to rest.”
He covered her eyes with the tie, knotting the silk into place. Then he looked over his shoulder and nodded for his cousins to descend upon her. They were, as ever, more than obliging, ridding themselves of shirts and slacks, getting naked before they reached out to touch and lick, stroke and penetrate.
As Naasha began to moan, he dismounted, grabbed the nearest wrist—Ehric’s, as it turned out—and scored it with his own fangs. Drawing the welling blood to Naasha’s mouth, the female gasped and latched on, nursing at the vein as her body began to writhe in ecstasy.
Obviously she was not living off the blood of her hellren—and Assail assumed that was why she required the likes of Throe’s company. But vampires, particularly horny ones, oft enjoyed partaking whilst in the midst of pleasure, even if they were otherwise well fed. Like alcohol or drugs, the drinking amplified everything in a most satisfactory way.
With his cousin’s blood in the air and on her tongue, she was so distracted, Assail was able to get over to the door without her being aware of his withdrawal. Reaching into his coat, he took out a tiny old-fashioned oil can, the kind with the poppable bottom and a short-necked nose.
Pocka-pocka. Pocka-pocka. Up above.
Pocka-pocka. Pocka-pocka. Down below.
The lubricant didn’t smell like much because he’d loaded the thing with brand new Pennzoil 10W-40 for motorcars—and after his ministrations, the massive door opened in utter silence. With a sly smile, he slipped out of the playroom and re-closed the heavy panels. Replacing his oil can into the pocket of his cashmere jacket, he looked both ways. Then he proceeded to the left, following the path Throe had taken the previous evening.
The basement walls and floor were made of rough-cut stone, with electrical lights tacked onto wooden ceiling beams casting dim shadows. He tried every door he came to and discovered storage room after storage room, some filled with lawn-care equipment from the forties and fifties, others with travel trunks from the turn of the twentieth century in them, and yet another with festival decorations that had wilted and spoiled in the damp and mildew.
No sign of Throe’s quarters, and that was truly not a surprise; he would not deign to stay down here in this window-less land of forgotten utility objects. No doggen, either, the house clearly having been modernized, with the supplies and sundries of the servants moved up to higher levels. No wine cellar, but then he would imagine that that, too, would have found a home on the first floor, closer to the hub of social activity.
All of which was why she had kitted that space out as she had.
There was privacy to be had down here.