The Beast (Black Dagger Brotherhood #14) - J. R. Ward Page 0,16

downtown side of the bridge, and the directional signal sounded loud in the interior of the station wagon. Heading north, Mary stayed at the speed limit and got passed by a couple of eighteen-wheelers doing eighty in a sixty-five. From time to time, lights marking merger zones flared overhead in a rhythm that never lasted long, and what little local traffic there was thinned out even more as they continued onward.

When they got home, Mary decided she was going to try to feed the girl something. Bitty hadn’t had First Meal, so she had to be starving. Then maybe a movie until dawn, somewhere quiet. The trauma was so fresh, and not just the stuff around losing her mother. What had happened at Havers’s had to be bringing up everything that had come before—the domestic abuse, the rescue where Rhage, V and Butch had killed the father to save Bitty and her mom, the discovery that the mother was newly pregnant, the loss of the baby, the lingering months afterward where Annalye had never fully recovered—

“Ms. Luce?”

“Yes?” Oh, God, please ask me something I can answer decently. “Yes, Bitty?”

“Where are we going?”

Mary glanced at a road sign coming at them. It read, Exit 19 Glens Falls. “I’m sorry? We’re going home. We should be there in about fifteen minutes?”

“I thought Safe Place wasn’t this far away.”

“Wha—?”

Oh, God.

She was heading for the damn mansion.

“Oh, Bitty, I’m sorry.” Mary shook her head. “I must have lost track of the exits. I…”

What had she been thinking?

Well, she knew the answer to that—all the hypotheticals she’d been running through her head about what they were going to do when they got out of the car were things involving the place where Mary lived with Rhage, the King, the Brothers, the fighters and their mates.

What the hell had she been thinking?

Mary got off at exit nineteen, went under the highway, and hopped back on going south. Man, she was just hitting it out of the park tonight, wasn’t she.

At least things couldn’t get any worse.

Back at the Brownswick School for Girls, Assail, son of Assail, heard the roar even through the sensory overload of battle.

In spite of the chaos of all the gunshots and the cursing and the mad sprints from cover to cover, the thunderous sound that rolled out across the abandoned campus was the kind of thing that got one’s attention.

As he wrenched around, he kept his finger on the trigger of his autoloader, continuing to discharge bullets straight ahead at a line-up of the undead—

For a split second, he fell off from his shooting.

His brain simply could not process what his eyes were suggesting had magically appeared a mere fifty yards away from him. It was … some kind of dragon-like creature, with purple scales, a barbed tail, and a gaping mouth set with T. rex teeth. The prehistoric monster was a good two stories high, long as a tractor trailer, and fast as a crocodile as it went after anything that ran away—

Free fall.

Without warning, his body went flying forward and a searing pain streaked down the front of his calf and sliced across his ankle. Twisting in midair, he landed face up in the tangled grass—and a breath later, the partially wounded slayer who’d gotten him with a knife lurched up onto his chest, that blade arc’d over its shoulder, its lips curled into a snarl as black blood streamed out all over Assail.

Right, fuck this, mate.

Assail grabbed a fistful of still-brown hair, shoved his muzzle into that wide-open maw, and hit the trigger, blowing open the back of the skull, incapacitating the body such that it fell on him as a writhing deadweight. Kicking the animated corpse off, he sprang to his feet.

And found himself directly in the cross hairs of the beast.

His movement up to the vertical was what did it, the dragon’s eyes snapping to him and narrowing into slits. Then, with another roar, the killer came at him, pounding over the ground, crushing slayers under its massive hind feet, its front claws curled up and ready to strike.

“Fuck!”

Assail surged forward, no longer worried about where his gun was pointed and absolutely unconcerned about the fact that he was now headed directly into an advancing line of lessers. The good news? The beast took care of that little problem. The slayers, likewise, garnered one look at all the hell-hath-no-fury coming at them and scattered like leaves unto the autumn wind.

Naturally, there was naught directly up ahead that