Lover Awakened (33 page)

Even though he wasn't going to eat, he headed for the dining room, only to stop in the shadows. Bella was at the table, sitting next to Phury. There was a plate of food in front of her, but she was paying more attention to the cat in her lap. She was petting Boo, and didn't miss a stroke as she looked up at something Phury said. She smiled, and when her head dropped again, Phury's eyes stayed on her profile as if he were drinking her in.

Z walked quickly over to the stairs, not about to fall into that scene. He was almost free when Tohr emerged from the hidden door below the first landing. The brother looked grim, but then he never was a party.

"Hey, Z, hold up."

Zsadist cursed, and not under his breath. He had no interest in getting waylaid by some policy-and-procedure shit, and that was all Tohr talked about lately. The guy was cracking down on the Brotherhood, organizing shifts, trying to turn four loose cannons like V, Phury, Rhage, and Z into soldiers. No wonder he always looked like his head hurt.

"Zsadist, I said,
wait
."

"Not now—"

"Yeah,
now
. Bella's brother sent a request to Wrath. Asking that she be assigned
sehculsion
status with him as her
whard
."

Oh, shit
. If that happened, Bella was as good as gone. Hell, she was as good as luggage. Not even the Brotherhood could keep her from her
whard
.

"Z? Did you hear what I said?"

Nod your head, asshole
, he told himself .

He barely managed a chin dip. "But why are you telling me this?"

Tohr's mouth tightened. "You want to front like she's nothing to you? Fine. Just thought you'd want to know."

Tohr headed for the dining room.

Z gripped the banister and rubbed his chest, feeling like someone had replaced the oxygen in his lungs with tar. He looked up the stairs and wondered if Bella would come back to his room before she left. She would have to, because her diary was there. She could leave her clothes behind, but not that journal. Unless, of course, she'd moved out already.

God
… How would he tell her good-bye?

Man, there was one conversation to bail on. He couldn't imagine what he'd say to her, especially after she'd seen him do his nasty magic all over that slayer.

Z went into the library, picked up one of the phones there, and dialed Vishous's cell number by its pattern on the buttons. He heard the ring through the receiver as well as from across the foyer. When V answered, he told the Brother about the Explorer and the cell phone and the undercarriage antics.

"I'm on it," V said. "But where are you? There's a funky echo on the phone."

"Call me if that car moves. I'll be in the gym." He hung up and headed for the underground tunnel.

He figured he could scrounge up some clothes down in the locker room and run himself into a state of utter depletion. When his thighs were screaming and his calves had turned to stone and his throat was sore from the gasping, the pain would clear his mind, cleanse him… He craved the hurt more than he craved food.

When he got to the locker room, he went to the cubicle assigned to him and pulled out his Air Shod and a pair of running shorts. He preferred going shirtless anyway, especially if he was alone.

He'd disarmed and was about to strip down when he heard something moving around the lockers. Tracking the sound in silence, he stepped out into the path of—a half-pint stranger.

There was a metal bang as that little body slammed into one of the locker banks.

Shit. It was the kid. What was his name? John something.

And John-boy looked as if he was going to faint as he stared up with bugged-out, glassy eyes.

Z glared down from his full height. His mood was utterly vicious at the moment, black and cold as space, and yet somehow, ripping the kid a new asshole for doing nothing wrong wasn't appealing.

"Get out of here, kid."

John fumbled with something. A pad and pen. As he put the two together, Z shook his head.

"Yeah, I don't read, remember? Look, just go. Tohr's up at the house."

Z turned away and yanked off his shirt. When he heard a gasp, he looked over his shoulder. John's eyes were on his back.

"Christ, kid… get the fuck out of here."

As Z heard the patter of feet leaving, he ditched his pants, threw on the black soccer shorts, and sat on the bench. He picked his Nikes up by the laces and let them dangle between his knees. As he stared at the running shoes, he had some stupid thought about how many times he'd shoved his feet into them and punished his body on the very treadmill he was headed for. Then he thought about how many times he'd deliberately gotten himself hurt in fights with the
lessers
. And how many times he'd asked Phury to beat him.

No, not asked. Demanded. There had been times when he'd demanded that his twin hit him over and over again until his scarred face swelled up and the pounding ache in his bones was all he knew. In truth, he didn't like having Phury involved. He'd have preferred the pain to be private and would have done the damage himself if he'd been able to. But it was hard to coldcock yourself with any force.

Z slowly lowered the running shoes to the floor and leaned back against the locker, thinking about where his twin was. Up in the dining room. Next to Bella.

His eyes drifted to the phone that was mounted on the locker room wall. Maybe he should call up to the house.

A low whistle sounded right next to him. He flipped his eyes to the left and frowned.

The kid was there with a water bottle in his hand, and he came forward tentatively, his arm stretched way out in front of him, his head tilted away. Kind of like he was cozying up to a panther and hoped to leave the experience with his limbs still attached.

John placed the Poland Spring bottle about three feet from Z on the bench. Then he turned and ran away.

Z stared at the door the kid tore out of. As the thing eased shut, he thought about other doors in the compound. The front ones of the mansion, specifically.

God
. Bella would be leaving soon, too. She might even be leaving now.

Right this very minute.

Chapter Twenty-five

"Apples? What the fuck do I care about apples?" O yelled into his cell phone. He was ready to crack heads, he was so pissed off, and U was nattering on about goddamn
fruit
? "I just told you we've got three dead Betas.
Three
of them."

"But tonight there were fifty bushels of apples bought from four different—"

O had to start pacing around the cabin. It was either that or so help him he was going to hunt down U just to burn off his edge.

As soon as O had returned from the Omega he'd gone to the farmhouse, only to find two scorch marks on the lawn as well as the busted-up back door. Looking through a window into the kitchen, he'd seen black blood all over the place and another burn mark on the tile.

Damn it to hell
, he thought, picturing the scene again. He knew a Brother had done the work, because given the mess in the kitchen, the
lesser
who'd been finished off on that floor had been shredded before he'd been stabbed.

Had his wife been with the warrior at the time? Or had the visit been about her family trying to move her stuff out and a Brother had just been guarding them?

Goddamn those Betas
. Those three lousy-ass, weak-balled, useless
motherfuckers
of his had gotten themselves killed, so he'd never have answers. And whether his wife had been there not, sure as hell if she were alive she wasn't going back there anytime soon, thanks to the fighting that had gone down.

U's bullshit came back into focus. "… the shortest day of the year, December twenty-first, is coming up next week. The winter solstice is—"

"I have an idea," O snapped. "Why don't you cut the calendar crap. I want you to go to that farmhouse and pick up that Explorer those Betas left behind in the woods. Then—"

"Listen to what I'm saying. Apples are used in the solstice ceremony to honor the Scribe Virgin."

Those two words,
Scribe
and
Virgin
, got O's attention. "How do you know this?"

"I've been around for two hundred years," U said dryly. "The festival hasn't been held for… Christ, I don't know, a century maybe. The apples are supposed to represent the anticipation of spring. Seeds, growth, that kind of renewal shit."

"What type of festival are we talking about?"

"In the past hundreds of them gathered, and I guess they did some chanting, some ritual stuff. I don't really know. Anyway, for years we've been monitoring certain buying patterns in the local marketplace during specific times of the year. Apples in December. Raw sugarcane in April. It's been more out of habit than anything else, because those vampires have been so damn quiet."

O leaned back against the cabin's door. "But now their king has ascended. So they're firing up the old ways."

"And you've got to love the ISBN system. Much more efficient than just asking around, which is what we used to have to do. As I said before, a huge load of Granny Smith apples has been purchased at various locales. Like they're spreading the orders around."

"So you're saying that in a week a bunch of vampires are going to get together in one place. Do a little song-and-dance thing. Pray to the Scribe Virgin."

"Yes."

"Do they eat the apples?"

"That's what my understanding is."

O rubbed the back of his neck. He'd been reticent about bringing up the whole turning-his-wife-into-a-teer thing during his session with the Omega. He needed to find out if she was alive first, and then he had to work up some spin for the concept. Obviously, the potentially insurmountable problem was that she was a vampire, and the only counterpoint he could make on that was that she'd be the ultimate secret weapon. A female of their own species? The Brotherhood would never see that coming…

Although, of course, that was just rationale for the Omega. His wife would never fight anyone but him.

Yeah, the proposal was going to be a hard sell, but one thing he had going for him was that the Omega was open to flattery. So wouldn't a big, splashy sacrifice in his honor do wonders to soften him up?

U was still talking. "… thinking was that I could check out the markets…"

As U droned on, O started thinking about poison. A whole lot of poison. A vat of the stuff.

Poisoned apples. How Snow White was that?

"O? You there?"

"Yeah."

"So I'm going to go to the markets and find out when—"

"Not right now you're not. Lemme tell you what you're going to do."

As Bella left Wrath's study she was shaking with rage, and neither the king nor Tohr tried to stop her or talk sense into her. Which proved they were highly intelligent males.

She pounded down the hall in her bare feet to Zsadist's room, and after she slammed the door shut, she went for the phone as if the thing were a weapon. She dialed her brother's cell.

Rehvenge picked up and snapped, "Who are you and how did you get this number?"