sessions had been with Blay, he and his buddy balling the women together. The pair of them hadn't actually been with each other during those bathroom orgies at the club--but there had been a lot of watching. And wondering. And maybe a private hand job from time to time when the remembering got too vivid.
At least on Qhuinn's part.
That had all ended, though, when Blay had put the kibosh on it by realizing that he was gay and that he was in love with someone. Qhuinn didn't approve of his choice. Not at all. Guy like Blaylock deserved somebody much, much better.
And it appeared he was heading down a road that would get him just that. Saxton was a male of worth. All the way around. The fucker.
Looking up at the mirror over the sink, Qhuinn couldn't see a thing 335
because it was totally dark in both the bathroom and the bedroom. And wasn't it just as well that he couldn't see his reflection. Because he was living a lie, and in quiet moments like this he knew it with such conviction he got sick to his stomach.
His plans for the rest of his days . . . oh, his glorious plans. Such perfectly "normal" future plans.
Involving a female of worth, not a long-term relationship with a male. The thing was, males like him, males with something wrong with them . . . like, oh, say, one iris that was blue and another that was green . . . were despised in the aristocracy as evidence of a genetic failure. They were embarrassments to be hidden away, shameful secrets to be buried: He'd spent years watching his sister and his brother get elevated on pedestals while everyone who crossed his path performed evil-eye rituals to protect themselves.
His own father had hated him.
So it didn't take a therapist with a diploma on the wall to see that he just wanted to be "normal." And settling down with a female of worth, assuming he could find one who could stand to be mated to somebody with a genetic glitch in the system, was mission-critical to that happy little tag. He knew if he got tangled up with Blay that wasn't going to happen. Knew also that all it would take was one fuck and he was never going to leave the guy.
It wasn't that the Brothers didn't accept homosexuals. Hell, they were cool with it--Vishous had been with males and no one blinked an eye, or judged him, or cared. He was just their brother, V. And Qhuinn had crossed the line every now and again just for shits and giggles and they all knew about that and didn't give a crap.
The glymera cared, though.
And it galled him that he still gave a crap about those motherfuckers. With his family gone, and the nucleus of the race's aristocracy scattered around the East Coast, it wasn't as if he had any contact with that stick-upthe-ass crowd anymore. But he was a dog too well trained to be able to forget they existed.
He simply couldn't come out.
Ironic. His outside was all about the hard-core. Inside? He was straight-up pussy.
Abruptly, he wanted to punch the mirror, even though all it was showing was a whole lot of shadow.
"Sire?"
In the darkness, he squeezed his eyes shut.
336
Shit, he'd forgotten Layla was still in his bed.
337
FORTY-NINE
Xhex wasn't precisely sure which farmhouse she was looking for, so she materialized in a wooded area off Route 149 and used her nose to tell her what direction to head in: The wind was coming out of the north, and when she caught the slightest whiff of baby powder, she tracked the scent, vaporizing herself at hundred-yard intervals through the scruffy, moweddown cornfields that had been lambasted by winter's winds and snow. The spring air tingled in her nose and the sunlight on her face warmed wherever the breeze didn't brush over her skin. All around, skeletal trees had halos of bright green, their tentative buds drawn out of hiding by the promise of warmer hours.
Lovely day.
For a killing spree.
When the stench of lessers was all she could smell, she unsheathed one of the knives Vishous had given her and knew that she was so close she could--Xhex took form at the next row of maples and stopped dead.
"Oh . . . fuck."
The white farmhouse was nothing to write home to Mom about, just a wilted structure next to a cornfield, surrounded by a ring of pines and bushes. Good thing it