carried the civilian further into the alley, a trail of bright red blood staining their boot prints in the dirty city snow. Laying the male facedown again, John took out a set of handcuffs and clicked the corpse’s wrists together.
The sound of Blay texting was a series of tip-tip-tips that made John’s nerves shimmy. Not that they needed the help. Standing over the remains with his gun out and pointed at the leaking head, he felt sick, especially as he looked at the stain that marked the path of the carry.
As of now, there was no additional scent of lesser.
Please, God, let things stay that way. Because the slayers used to work in squads, back when there had been more of them.
“I just texted Tohr,” Blay said as he put his cell away. “They’re going to send the surgical unit, ETA from the garage bunker is three and a half minutes.”
John could only nod. Even if one of his hands wasn’t busy holding his Smith & Wesson, he didn’t have anything to add.
He focused on the handcuffs that were biting into the flesh of those wrists and then on the back of the head. Ordinarily, if you were detaining someone and they were lying facedown, you wanted to make sure they had an air source. Not a problem here. The civilian’s nose and mouth were right in the snowpack, but it didn’t matter.
A great wave of sadness hit him as he thought about the mahmen and father who had brought this male into the world however long ago. In the vampire species, to have a successful live birth was a blessing given the incredibly high numbers of maternal and fetal deaths. The parents must have been so thrilled, assuming mom lived as well.
And yet all that ended here, in a shitty alley, in a rough part of town, facedown in the snow with fucking restraints on the corpse because no one was sure whether the term “dead” as applied in this case counted as a permanent thing.
I’m sorry, he mouthed to the body.
It struck John how random fate was with both its blessings and its curses. How he’d won a nick-in-time jackpot back as a pretrans whereas this poor male had gotten short-straw’d in the most terrifying of ways.
Who made those decisions, he wondered. Who doled out such cosmic wins and losses?
People said it had been the Scribe Virgin, but V’s mom was long gone now. So who was there to pray to when an innocent male died in such a gruesome way?
Maybe, like the arrangement of stars in the night sky, it was all just random, with only the minds of the afflicted and the affluent alike trying to make sense of the great swings of pain and grace … while the disinterested universe churned on through relentless, infinite time, on a journey to nowhere.
Who the fuck knew.
Murhder waited for Wrath to walk out of the dining room, but the King stayed where he was, under the chandelier. The Brotherhood were the ones who moved. They closed ranks and formed a wall facing their “guest.”
Impressive. Like being in a forest. Where the trees were made of tigers. And you had sirloin steaks as clothes.
“I signed the papers you wanted,” Murhder called out to his King through the breathing barricade. “And now you have to help me.”
Wrath didn’t reply to that, not that it had been a question. And in the crushing silence of the foyer, Murhder got impatient with the game—
“I don’t have to do shit for you,” Wrath said.
Ah, yes, that deep voice. Still autocratic in tone. Still aristocratic in the drawl.
Still with the vocabulary of a trucker.
The King was staring straight ahead, his black wraparounds positioned toward no one in particular—and the disconnect between focal point and head direction suggested that Wrath’s poor eyesight had faded into a true blindness.
To confirm this, Murhder tilted his body to the left. And indeed, that cruelly handsome face did not follow the movement.
Those nostrils flared, however, the King clearly testing his scent. “I want to see him alone.”
Big surprise, the Brotherhood voted no on that idea, a chorus of grunts and creative curses bubbling up those thick throats.
Not his problem. “Where do you want me.”
“Let him through, boys.” When none of Wrath’s guards complied, the growl that came out of the dining room sounded like someone had started a Ferrari. “Let him in, right fucking now!”
“You’re not seeing him alone—”
Murhder wasn’t sure who said that, but PDQ, the opinion didn’t