would have done the damage himself if he'd been able to. But it was hard to coldcock yourself with any force.
Z slowly lowered the running shoes to the floor and leaned back against the locker, thinking about where his twin was. Up in the dining room. Next to Bella.
His eyes drifted to the phone that was mounted on the locker room wall. Maybe he should call up to the house.
A low whistle sounded right next to him. He flipped his eyes to the left and frowned.
The kid was there with a water bottle in his hand, and he came forward tentatively, his arm stretched way out in front of him, his head tilted away. Kind of like he was cozying up to a panther and hoped to leave the experience with his limbs still attached.
John placed the Poland Spring bottle about three feet from Z on the bench. Then he turned and ran away.
Z stared at the door the kid tore out of. As the thing eased shut, he thought about other doors in the compound. The front ones of the mansion, specifically.
God. Bella would be leaving soon, too. She might even be leaving now.
Right this very minute.
Chapter Twenty-five
"Apples? What the fuck do I care about apples?" O yelled into his cell phone. He was ready to crack heads, 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?"
"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 ISBN 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