There was nothing except maybe a warm rush under his leather jacket. His blood. Running into his athletic shirt.
Zypher triggered the communicator mounted on the lapel of his leather jacket. “I need a medic. STAT.”
Boone shook his head. “It’s nothing. I’m ready to keep fighting—”
“Not gonna happen on my watch.”
* * *
415 Summit Lane
Caldwell’s Millionaires’ Row
Tohrment, son of Hharm, entered an elegant parlor that was trashed like it had hosted a bar fight. Antique furniture and silk sofas were tipped over, shoved out of place, torn up. Porcelain plates were shattered. Lamps were on the Oriental, shades ruined, bulbs broken, bodies cracked.
He was careful where he put his shitkickers. No reason to add to the ruin.
The scent of fresh vampire blood was thick in the air. And that wasn’t all.
He stopped in front of a large oil painting of a bouquet of flowers. Dutch. Eighteenth century. The still life, with its hard-focus depiction of dew on petals, careful detailing of the mammoth vase, and color ful, head-cocked parrot off to one side, was a prime example of the famous style.
But you could not see much of the artist’s expertise. There was a black splatter across the canvas, all that old paint and timeless talent covered with a substance that was viscous and glossy—but did not smell like sweaty August trash.
So it was not lesser-based. But they already knew that.
Shadows. And not Shadows as in Trez and iAm, but shadows with a lowercase s: Entities that had appeared in Caldwell from out of nowhere, did not appear to be tied to the Omega and the Lessening Society, and which, in this instance, had attacked a gathering of glymera types.
With deadly consequences.
The Brotherhood had tried to save the guests. But they had only mostly succeeded.
Stepping over an armchair that was riddled with bullet holes, he went to the body of a male, aged approximately three hundred years. The tuxedo jacket the deceased had on was open, the two halves falling off to the side to reveal a narrow satin waistcoat, a pleated tuxedo shirt with pearl buttons, and a bow tie that was still knotted with watchmaker-worthy precision at the front of the throat.
Blood stained the brilliant white of that shirt in a bull’s-eye pattern that was no longer getting any larger in diameter. Which was what happened when the heart stopped beating and circulation ceased. No more leaking.
It was there that logic and standard operating procedures ended. In spite of the wound and its crimson signature, none of the clothes were ripped or torn: Unlike that chair, there were no bullet holes through that jacket, the waistcoat, the shirt. No tears or piercing holes from a stabbing, either.
“Makes no fucking sense,” Tohr muttered.
If he were to unfasten the waistcoat, unbutton those pearls, and open that shirt up? He would see the damage that had somehow spared the clothes and wrought the flesh beneath. The brothers had no idea how it worked. This new enemy who attacked with ruthless efficiency was a mystery, possessing powers that had never been seen before, an origin that couldn’t be determined, and an agenda that seemed related to the Omega’s but could not be verified as such.
As Tohr sank down on his haunches, both of his knees popped.
The face of the corpse was pale gray and getting waxier by the minute. Typical of the aristocracy, the bone structure was symmetrical and refined, the features not extraordinary but certainly attractive, if only because there was nothing wrong with any one part of the whole: The nose was in proportion. The jaw was fairly firm above the slit in the throat. The arch of the brows seemed purposely engineered for hauteur.
The lips were pursed as if the male did not approve of the manner of his death.
And who could blame him on that one.
That strange chest wound was not, in fact, what had killed him.
The bullet hole in the center of the forehead was out of place on so many levels, the tidy little round penetration sporting a scorched outer rim—which was what happened with a point-blank trigger pull. Vishous had been the shooter—and it had happened after the shadows’ deadly attack, after John Matthew and Murhder had blown up two of this new enemy, resulting in the Jackson Pollock overlay of that old painting and a bunch of other expensive antiques.
With all the chaos that had erupted, it had been impossible to track