he was so pissed off, and U was nattering on about goddamn fruit? "I just told you we've got three dead Betas.
Three of them."
"But tonight there were fifty bushels of apples bought from four different-"
O had to start pacing around the cabin. It was either that or so help him he was going to hunt down U just to burn off his edge.
As soon as O had returned from the Omega he'd gone to the farmhouse, only to find two scorch marks on the lawn as well as the busted-up back door. Looking through a window into the kitchen, he'd seen black blood all over the place and another burn mark on the tile.
Damn it to hell, he thought, picturing the scene again. He knew a Brother had done the work, because given the mess in the kitchen, the lesser who'd been finished off on that floor had been shredded before he'd been stabbed.
Had his wife been with the warrior at the time? Or had the visit been about her family trying to move her stuff out and a Brother had just been guarding them?
Goddamn those Betas. Those three lousy-ass, weak-balled, useless motherfuckers of his had gotten themselves killed, so he'd never have answers. And whether his wife had been there not, sure as hell if she were alive she wasn't going back there anytime soon, thanks to the fighting that had gone down.
U's bullshit came back into focus. "... the shortest day of the year, December twenty-first, is coming up next week. The winter solstice is-"
"I have an idea," O snapped. "Why don't you cut the calendar crap. I want you to go to that farmhouse and pick up that Explorer those Betas left behind in the woods. Then-"
"Listen to what I'm saying. Apples are used in the solstice ceremony to honor the Scribe Virgin."
Those two words, Scribe and Virgin, got O's attention. "How do you know this?"
"I've been around for two hundred years," U said dryly. "The festival hasn't been held for... Christ, I don't know, a century maybe. The apples are supposed to represent the anticipation of spring. Seeds, growth, that kind of renewal shit."
"What type of festival are we talking about?"
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"In the past hundreds of them gathered, and I guess they did some chanting, some ritual stuff. I don't really know. Anyway, for years we've been monitoring certain buying patterns in the local marketplace during specific times of the year. Apples in December. Raw sugarcane in April. It's been more out of habit than anything else, because those vampires have been so damn quiet."
O leaned back against the cabin's door. "But now their king has ascended. So they're firing up the old ways."
"And you've got to love the system. Much more efficient than just asking around, which is what we used to have to do. As I said before, a huge load of Granny Smith apples has been purchased at various locales.
Like they're spreading the orders around."
"So you're saying that in a week a bunch of vampires are going to get together in one place. Do a little song-and-dance thing. Pray to the Scribe Virgin."
"Yes."
"Do they eat the apples?"
"That's what my understanding is."
O rubbed the back of his neck. He'd been reticent about bringing up the whole turning-his-wife-into-a-teer thing during his session with the Omega. He needed to find out if she was alive first, and then he had to work up some spin for the concept. Obviously, the potentially insurmountable problem was that she was a vampire, and the only counterpoint he could make on that was that she'd be the ultimate secret weapon. A female of their own species? The Brotherhood would never see that coming...
Although, of course, that was just rationale for the Omega. His wife would never fight anyone but him.
Yeah, the proposal was going to be a hard sell, but one thing he had going for him was that the Omega was open to flattery. So wouldn't a big, splashy sacrifice in his honor do wonders to soften him up?
U was still talking. "... thinking was that I could check out the markets..."
As U droned on, O started thinking about poison. A whole lot of poison. A vat of the stuff.
Poisoned apples. How Snow White was that?
"O? You there?"
"Yeah."
"So I'm going to go to the markets and find out when-"
"Not right now you're not. Lemme tell you what you're going to do."
As Bella left Wrath's study she was shaking with rage, and neither the king