The Beast (Black Dagger Brotherhood #14) - J. R. Ward Page 0,31

happened?”

Xcor ended the connection, put the phone in his jacket, and leaned over the lip of the roof. The three lessers he’d come in with hadn’t made it far from their food truck. They seemed dumbfounded by what they were surrounded by, incapable of responding given the magnitude of the losses.

Best he address them first before they took off.

Stepping over the collapsed male, he jumped off the building, dematerializing as he fell, and rematerializing on the ground before he crash-landed and killed himself.

The slayers saw him, and that was exactly what he wanted.

It would make the killing of them a bit more of a challenge.

As the three raced to get back into their truck, he ghosted himself on top of the one in the rear, stabbing it in the chest on a reach around and sending it back to the Omega on a brilliant flash and a pop! Next, he lunged forward and grabbed the second one around the shoulders, wrenching it off balance and slitting its throat before casting it aside. The third he captured by the hair just as it attempted to shut itself in the truck on the driver’s side.

“No, mate,” he growled as he jerked the thing off its feet. “All for one, one for all.”

The lesser landed flat on its back, and before it could respond, Xcor drove his boot into its face, crushing the bone structure, collapsing the features, rendering the eyes nothing but loose pools of fluid.

Xcor looked over his shoulder. It would be unlike the Brotherhood to leave a mess like this for humans to find. Even though the campus was abandoned, soon enough, random Homo sapiens of the youthful variety would breach the untidy landscape. Just as the one on that roof had.

Something must have happened during the course of the fighting. A critical injury, perhaps, that precluded clean-up, at least in the short term—

Xcor never saw it coming. Never heard a thing.

One moment, he was fully cognizant of his environs.

And the next, someone or something had done unto him what he had wrought upon that human on the roof.

He didn’t even have time for a last thought, so decisive was the blow to his head.

Vishous lowered his arm slowly as he stared down at the massive male who had just collapsed at his shitkickers.

Then he immediately brought his gun back up, two-handing the thing and moving it in a circle around himself.

“Where ya boys at, true?” he said under his breath. “Huh, motherfuckers? Where you at?”

There was no way Xcor, head of the Band of Bastards, had come here alone. No fucking way.

V just wasn’t that lucky.

Except nothing came at him. No one counter-attacked. Nobody ran out from a building or from behind a tree with a gun up, shooting. All there was were slayer parts and torsos on the ground, the cold wind hitting him in the face, and a whole lot of quiet.

The sound of a whistle over on the left alerted him to Butch’s position. And then there was another from the right. A third from way up ahead.

V whistled back and his brothers came jogging over.

He kept his eyes on Tohr, and as soon as the fighter was within range, V pointed his gun directly at that leather-clad chest. “Stop. Right there.”

Tohr pulled up short. Lifted his palms. “What the hell are you doing?”

“Butch, roll him over,” V gritted, nodding to the vampire at his feet.

The instant Tohr saw who it was, his hands dropped and his fangs got good and bared.

“Now do you get it,” V muttered. “I know it’s your right to kill him, but you can’t. Do we understand each other. You’re not going to off him here, true.”

Tohrment growled. “That’s not your call to make, V. Fuck you, that fucker is mine—”

“I will fucking shoot you. Are we clear? Stop right there.”

Apparently, the Brother wasn’t aware of having stepped forward. But Butch and everyone else caught it right away—and the cop approached Tohr cautiously.

“The kill can be yours,” Butch said. “But we take him back with us first. We talk to the bastard, get the intel—then he’s yours, Tohr. No one else is going to do the final deed but you.”

Phury nodded. “V’s right. You kill him now, we lose the interrogation. Be logical about this, Tohr.”

Vishous glanced around. The four of them had returned to the campus with the idea of stabbing as much as they could back to the Omega and doing what clean-up they were able—but this little discovery