and end was like, engraved on his mind. The third instance? He validated the operating principle into a kind of law.
Since then, he’d sought these moments out, careful not to get caught.
All the murdered vampires who had lost their innocent lives to these soulless monsters? All the families destroyed? The suffering of his race at the hands of these killers?
Fuck the lessers.
Refocusing, Boone clamped a hold on the front of the undead’s throat and then he stared down into the slayer’s pasty white face. The dagger was still where he’d put it, sticking out of the orbital bed, the handle angled to reflect the arc of his stab. Black blood, glossy and awful-smelling, was dripping out the outer corner of the penetration like tears, sliding down the temple, pooling in the ear.
From out of nowhere, Boone remembered what it was like to be a young lying back in the bath, the water entering his ear canals, buffering things. Was that what the lesser was experiencing?
As the slayer’s mouth gaped like a fish’s, and the arms pinwheeled like it was trying to make snow angels at what could be argued was a very inopportune time, Boone squeezed even harder, crushing the windpipe.
The gurgling gasps rising up from the lesser’s lips made him want to do more. Drag this out for hours. Cut into the torso—
In the back of his mind, a warning bell sounded. Taking out a small portion of the race’s suffering on this slayer was one thing. What Boone’s brain was suggesting to him now . . . was another. It was torture. Still, he ignored the inner alarm as he wondered what it would be like to use his fangs to kill one. Even though that would be harder to explain to the Brothers, he imagined how good it would feel. How satisfying. How visceral.
Temptation tickled his jaw, his mouth cranking open, his canines descending.
All he wanted to do was hurt this motherfucker. And keep hurting it.
With his free hand, he reached out to the hilt of his dagger and secured his palm to the contoured grip. Slowly, he turned the blade back and forth, feeling the grit of the bone wear away as he turned, turned, turned—
“What the hell are you doing?”
Boone looked up in shock. Zypher was standing right in front of him, the Bastard’s leather fighting gear speckled with the black blood of the slayer he had engaged with, his gun down by his thigh, his silver dagger up like he was ready to use it.
“Just finishing the job,” Boone said as he retracted his blade.
Shifting back on the torso, he buried his dagger in the center of that chest, and then raised his forearms up to shield his eyes from the blinding flash. The popping was like that of a gun, echoing around the alley, and as the burst of illumination faded, Boone rose to his feet. There was no looking at Zypher. He kept his eyes trained on the melted hole in the snow, the black rim around on the burn mark part due to the explosion, part from the blood of the enemy.
Say something, Boone told himself.
“I’ll call mine in.” He went for his communicator. “And then I’m ready to go back on patrol—”
“The fuck you are. You’re injured.”
He looked down at his body, bending at the waist. “Where—oh.”
The knife that the lesser had thrown was still imbedded in the meat of his shoulder, the handle sticking out of him in the same way his had protruded from that eye socket. No, that wasn’t quite true. This knife was embedded straight into him. The one in that eye had been angled by thirty . . . maybe forty . . . degrees.
Dimly, he decided that was a strange thing to take note of. Then again, everything felt funhouse weird. From the moment that that other fighter’s presence had registered, it was as if he had split into two entities, one that had done the stabbing and was now standing upright in his boots next to the burn mark in the snow . . . and another that was observing himself from across the alley, an impartial, detached entity.
Like a reflection in a mirror, identical but not the real thing.
For some reason, he thought of Rochelle. Which was strange as it had been a long time since he had done that.
Keeping a curse to himself, he reached across and yanked out the lesser’s knife. As the blade released from his flesh, he should