you. That’s the headaches. That’s the… confusion. The restlessness and the exhaustion. You are a secret that you don’t want me to know.”
Now Syn turned around.
His eyes were back to normal, but she couldn’t forget the way they’d been, flashing with an unholy red light.
There was nothing in the real world that did that. There were also no corpses that were not corpses in spite of the fact that they had been hacked open and drained of blood. There was nothing that smelled like this, or fought like that, either.
“Give me my memories back,” she said in a low voice. “Right now. You give me my fucking memories back. They were not yours to take, no matter how justified you think it is. They’re mine.”
The one with the Boston accent muttered, “Syn? You know her?”
“Oh, he knows me,” she said without looking away from her lover. “Don’t you. Or do you intend on taking those memories from me, too.”
Someone cursed. Again, the Bostonian. “What the fuck are you thinking.”
He was talking to Syn. Then again, so was she.
“I trusted you,” she said bitterly. “I let you into… my home. I took you in when you were fucked-up. You owe me the truth.”
“I’m sorry,” he whispered.
All at once, floodgates opened in her mind, and like birds released from a cage, images and sounds and smells fluttered forth into flight, revealing themselves as they dodged and weaved in the airspace of her consciousness.
Jo staggered back, putting her hands to her eyes. When she would have fallen, a strong hand took her arm and kept her from landing in the pools of black blood: She remembered it all. The research she had done. The sites she had visited. The pieces she had written on her blog that had been taken down. Conversations with Bill, speculation, questions.
She dropped her palms and looked up at Syn, who was holding her up.
With a shaking hand, she reached to his mouth. And though she expected him to jerk back, step back, push her away, he did not fight her or try to protect himself.
His upper lip gave way under her fingertip.
“This isn’t cosmetic,” she mumbled. “Is it.”
He didn’t have to answer. None of them did.
She had started on the trail of the supernatural in Caldwell on a whim, only for the work to become a necessary distraction. But never in her wildest imagination nor in her jumpiest paranoia… had she ever imagined she would stand in the presence of exactly what she had been looking for.
“Say it,” she demanded. “Say it!”
Syn closed his eyes. “Vampire.”
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
Balthazar left the battle site and re-formed in front of the Brotherhood mansion. There was lesser blood splashed across his leathers and dripping off one sleeve of his jacket. As he shook his arm, a black stain speckled the stone steps and he frowned at the glossy, stinky liquid.
Then he looked up at the great house’s gray expanse with its diamond-pane windows and slate rooflines—and thought of the people who lived inside the hundred-year-old walls.
No, he thought. Not here.
There should never, ever be any trace of a lesser here.
Taking a bandana out of his ass pocket, he bent down and wiped off the old granite. Just as he was finishing the job, a set of headlights rounded the hill from the back side and he squinted into the glare. The box van was white and solid-walled, and as the panel in the middle opened and slid back, Zypher leaned out the front window.
“You good?” he asked.
Balthazar nodded. “Let’s do this.”
As he got inside, it was shoulder-to-shoulder room only. With Syphon behind the wheel and Zypher riding shotgun, it meant that Blaylock, John Matthew, and Tohr had only the one bench seat to fit on.
“I’ll ride in the back,” Balz said as he dematerialized into the cargo space and sat his butt on the carpet.
The side door was shut again and Syphon hit the gas. As they started down the mountain, Balz ran some quick math in his head. Blaylock had dislocated his shoulder the night before in the field and suffered a minor concussion. John Matthew’s left leg had gotten kneecapped three nights ago, and still wasn’t right—har, har—and Tohr’d recently been stabbed in the gut.
But they had to use everybody and none of them complained that they’d been called out of mandatory R&R—
The van came to a hard stop on the decline, Syphon stomping on the brake. As everybody lurched forward and caught themselves on whatever they could, guns were taken