The Bloodline War (3 page)

Jaċken sipped his coffee as he marked Vinz’s progress; Thomal’s, too. The lower screen showed that Thomal-the-male-nurse was just arriving at Antoinetta’s room. Passing by the door, Thomal continued down the hall about ten more feet and stopped beside a gurney.

Jaċken narrowed his eyes at Thomal’s half-screen. What the hell was the man doing?

“Good morning, I’m Dr. Bernard,” Vinz was saying to a busty nurse with the name Barbara Hollowitz stamped on her ID tag.

“Um, Jaċken,” Thomal said in a low tone. “The subject’s awake.”

Jaċken furrowed his brow. “At 3:45 in the morning?”

Vinz cleared his throat pointedly. “Yes, Miss Hollowitz, I see by the patient’s chart that Dr. Parthen has a concussion and is being awakened periodically according to proper procedure.”

“Ahhhh”—Thomal elongated the sound in understanding—“that explains it. You want me to go in there and charm her, chief?”

Jaċken plunked his coffee cup down. “It’s why I put up with your annoying personality, Costache.”

Thomal half-stifled a laugh. “Well, no prob on this one. I caught a whiff of the lovely Miss Parthen on the way past and…damn, she smells hot.”

The busty nurse tsk-tsked sympathetically. “My, Dr. Bernard, you’re certainly getting an early start this—”

“Just get moving before I call in Arc to replace your ass.” Arc was Thomal’s older brother, taller and longer-haired but with the same blond “dreamboat” attractiveness. He was currently hanging out in the downstairs parking garage with the other backup team members, probably chewing gum and playing hacky sack, not a worry in their heads about this mission. Jaċken grunted. “He’s better looking than you are, anyway.”

“That hurts me, man.” Thomal strode into Room 506, switching to a cheery, “Good morning, Dr. Parthen.” He moved over to Antoinetta’s bedside, giving Jaċken his first glimpse of her: the soft lines of an elegant profile, shimmering strawberry blonde hair spread out across the pillow. The muscles in his stomach tightened. Even with her image pixelized by the computer screen—not to mention she probably wasn’t at her best in a hospital—she was a knockout.

Then things got moving. He shifted his gaze back and forth between screens as he kept track of his two main players, the babble of multiple voices filling his earpiece.

“…sure you’ll find everything complete, Miss Hollowitz,” Vinz assured the nurse, “with the transfer request….”

“…change in doctor’s orders, Dr. Parthen,” Thomal was saying in a chipper tone. “He’d like you to get some solid sleep now.” Thomal’s hands reached for Antoinetta’s IV.

“Wait, what are you doing?” Antoinetta interceded.

“If you’d sign here, Dr. Bernard,” Nurse Hollowitz crooned, “then we’ll just head down to Room ....”

“I have a concussion, Nurse. I’m not supposed to sleep deeply.” Antoinetta’s voice turned authoritative. “I’d like to see your badge.”

Ah, shit
. “You need to throttle back, Vinz,” Jaċken hissed. “The target isn’t knocked out yet.”

Vinz’s voice suddenly mellowed into warm honey. “You know, Barbara, that’s a very beautiful necklace you’re wearing. Do you mind if I take a closer look at it?”

Jaċken saw Thomal plunge the syringe of Special K into Antoinetta’s IV tube.

“My God!” Antoinetta blasted. “What did you just give me?” She started to yank the IV needle out of her arm.

Thomal grabbed her wrist.

A loud
crack
rang out as she slapped Thomal across the face with her free hand. “Let go of me!” She reached for her needle again, and they started to struggle.

“Oh, ho, my fun meter is pegged now,” Thomal panted out.

“…a lovely stone, Barbara. Is it an opal…?”

Jaċken gritted his teeth. “For Chrissake, Thomal, is this what you call charming the target? Get moving!”

“Ah!” Thomal exhaled, straightening from a limp Antoinetta. “Target is sacked out, gentlemen.”

Jaċken released a pent breath. “You hear that Vinz?”

Apparently, yes. Vinz’s video image started down the hall again. “Well, I should probably see to my patient,” he said to the nurse, both of them entering Room 506. “Don’t want to get stuck in San Diego rush hour traffic if—oomph!” The picture in Vinz’s quadrant fell to the floor, blanking to fuzzy snow. A second later, the nurse screamed once, then went abruptly silent.

Jaċken stiffened on the couch.
What the
—?! “Costache!?” he barked.

But the image in Thomal’s quadrant was jiggling wildly, the sounds of scuffling and cursing exploding into Jaċken’s earpiece.
Holy shit
! He jumped over his laptop and the coffee table in one leap and ran from the waiting room, moving down the hall with absolute silence in his heavy boots. Pressing his back flat against the wall just outside of Room 506, his breathing tight, he peered around the jamb.

A low curse snarled past his lips. Vinz’s body was sprawled out on the floor in a stain of spreading blood, a knife sticking out of his chest, that busty nurse flopped over the top of him with her ass in the air. Two other men were in the room, both large, both dressed in the type of metal-accessorized aggressive black leather usually saved for BDSM parties. One had a shaved head with black flame tattoos curling up from his temples to the top of his skull. The other guy had spiked black hair and the same tattoos, his climbing the length of his neck.

It was this asshole, Spike Boy, who was clutching a blue-faced Thomal by the throat.

Louder alarm bells went off in Jaċken’s head. Whatever power these men were wielding was something outside the norm. Thomal was one of the fastest of his kind, and Jaċken had never seen anyone get a firm grip on the man unless he allowed it in training.

Hissing under his breath, Jaċken reached to the back of his belt and eased a long knife out of its sheath. He stepped through the doorway and, keeping to his maxim of
fuck up an enemy first, ask questions later
, he threw the weapon with a sharp snap of his wrist. Aiming for a point as far away from a collision with Thomal as possible, he sent the blade thwacking into the meaty part of Spike Boy’s shoulder.

With a scream, Spike Boy stumbled backward into a medical cart, sending metal drawers clattering, scissors, gauze, forceps tumbling to the floor. Thomal crumpled out of the man’s hands, and then Spike Boy himself dropped.

Jaċken turned on the other one, Skull—just as that peckerhead let fly his own knife. Jaċken hit the deck and rolled, hearing the knife swoosh just past his head, then thunk into the floor. A moment later, it exploded, geysering up ragged pieces of linoleum. Holy Christ. Only one type of knife exploded. A Bătaie Blade! Who the hell
were
these assholes? There wasn’t time for a Q&A. Powering to his feet in front of the bed, Jaċken plowed a hard right cross over the mattress into Skull’s face, landing the punch dead center. Skull’s head snapped back, the bones in his nose splintering beneath Jaċken’s fist. The man hit the wall, bounced forward, then grabbed Jaċken by the shirtfront.

Jaċken shouted as Skull hauled him off the floor with impossible strength, tossing all 215 pounds of him over Antoinetta’s bed and into the far wall. His shoulder rammed out a hole in the drywall, the plaster blasting apart into a dense white cloud around him. Landing unsteadily on his feet, he struck out blindly and missed, his head spinning. His upper gums throbbed ruthlessly in primitive reaction to the violence.

Spike Boy was on his feet now, too, Jaċken’s knife still sticking out of his shoulder, white liquid oozing from the wound. White…?

Spike Boy slammed a fist into Jaċken’s gut.

Air whooshed out of Jaċken’s lungs. Jesus Christ, these guys were strong. “I need backup!” he yelled, hoping like hell Thomal’s fountain pen would pick up his shout, his own mic being inconveniently attached to his laptop back in the waiting room.

Skull and Spike Boy exchanged looks.

“Bloody fuck!” Skull whirled and snatched up Antoinetta.

Jaċken bolted forward, but Spike Boy’s fist flying into his peripheral vision stopped him. Ducking the punch, he came up with a brutal uppercut that evidently sloshed Spike Boy’s brain in his skull; the asshole made a second trip down to the linoleum, this time in an unconscious heap.

Jaċken grabbed Antoinetta out of Skull’s arms, pulling so hard he fell backward onto the bed with her.

Skull jumped on top of him, toppling Antoinetta to one side of the mattress, her body wedging against the bedrail. Skull grabbed Jaċken by the collar and cranked back a fist.

Two things pinged Jaċken’s senses in rapid succession: one huge holy-shitter was that Skull’s eyes were as black as his own. Not just very dark brown, but as black as if the pupils had eaten up the irises—and only one breed of man owned black eyes. Second, Skull stank…like corroded metal or transmission fluid. Not at all like blood. Not at all like the way he should’ve smelled with the black eyes of an Om Rău.

Jaċken dodged the punch Skull threw at him. Skull countered by trying to put him in a headlock. Jaċken grappled with the man, grunting and cursing, their arms and legs tangling. Muscling Skull underneath him, Jaċken hit the fucker hard enough to split the skin on his knuckles. Skull rolled Jaċken back over, both men landing on Antoinetta’s feet, and punched Jaċken in return, a ring on his finger tearing a line of flesh out of Jaċken’s cheek in a streak of pain.

Jaċken snarled, grabbing Skull by the throat and—

“Well, heck, looks like I’m missing all the fun.”

Jaċken and Skull stopped fighting and snapped their eyes up to the door in unison. Relief jackhammered Jaċken’s heart. Nỵko!

His older brother was standing in the doorway, looking super bad-assed
huge
with his tall, broad, muscular body filling the entire frame. Eyes as cold and dark as black glaciers peered out from a tumble of shaggy black hair, and a savage array of black interlocking teeth tattoos ran the length of his forearms and ringed his neck. Nobody would guess that on the inside Nỵko was pure marshmallow, because on the outside, he looked one hundred percent psycho serial killer.

Thank crap for that
. “About damned time,” Jaċken growled.

Eyebrows lifting, Nỵko started into the room, but made it only one step inside when there was a blur of motion off to the left.

From out of nowhere, Skull suddenly had a pair of medical scissors sticking out of his neck, a disgusting gurgling sound coming from him.

Thomal stood next to the bed, a nasty sneer on his face. “Sorry, guys, but I owed these bitches a spanking.”

A white foamy substance like shaving cream oozed from Skull’s wound. Some of it blopped onto Jaċken’s chest and began to eat through his shirt. “Jesus!” He heaved Skull off, letting the man crash unaided to the floor, and shot to his feet, tearing his shirt off and hurling it aside. “What the
hell
?”

Nỵko shook his head, his expression troubled as he crouched down next to Vinz and checked for a pulse. Nỵko rolled the nurse off the fallen warrior, her removal exposing a unique sunflower burst of blood on the wall.

A startled curse came out of Thomal’s mouth.

Nỵko carefully pulled the knife out of Vinz’s upper chest and held it up with one hand, the other jammed to Vinz’s wound.

The hilt was carved with intertwining black flames, not like the interwoven black teeth they were used to seeing on their pain-in-the-ass Om Rău neighbors’ knives, but still with the boiling red crystal on it that marked it a Bătaie Blade.

“Yeah, I saw it,” Jaċken said grimly.

Thomal hissed a breath. “What the hell are these jagoffs doing with an Om Rău blade?” The man already looked like warmed-over shit, both eyes red from blown capillaries and dark bruises forming around his throat.

“Maybe because they
are
Om Rău,” Jaċken returned.

Thomal’s blond brows arched high. “The only Om Rău in existence live next door to us.”

Jaċken tossed Nỵko a roll of gauze. “These slimeballs have black eyes, Bătaie Blades, tribal tattoos, and were strong as fuck.”

“They also bleed acid,” Thomal pointed out.

“Then we need to look into the possibility that they’re a different genetic branch of Om Rău.”

Nỵko looked up from bandaging Vinz. “A branch that just so happens to be after our women, too?”

Thomal made a guttural noise in his chest, his protective hackles going up.

Women like Antoinetta carried a bloodline that was key to the salvation of their race. Jaċken and his men of the Warrior Class protected and guarded any they found like the rare and precious commodity they were.

“We’ll debrief further when we get back to Ţărână.” Jaċken grabbed a bag and started shoving Antoinetta’s personal effects into it. “We’ve got to get out of here. Sunrise is riding up our asses, and we don’t want to get stuck in the safe house with Vinz needing to see Dr. Jess right away.” He looked at Nỵko. “What’s the SITREP?”

“No more bad guys are en route,” Nỵko replied. “I put the backup team on the stairwell to keep an eye on that. Couple of nurses heard some noise coming from this room, but Arc is pulling a flirt ’n divert.” Nỵko pushed to his feet, tossing Vinz over his shoulder as if the warrior weighed no more than a CPR dummy. “Still, we should get going PDQ.”

“Agreed.” Jaċken reached for Antoinetta. “Let’s get our target safely down to— Whoa!” He jerked back a step.

Thomal stepped up beside him. “Told you she smells really good.”

Really good
? That was a massively enormous understatement. He hadn’t been able to tell before, what with so much of Vinz’s blood masking her scent, but…
Jesus
.

Thomal glanced at Jaċken’s bare chest. “You sure you want to be the one carrying her, chief?”

Jaċken exhaled a short breath. Right, the feel of this woman’s fragrant body pressed close to his, with only her thin hospital gown as a barrier between them, would probably make it right to the top of the Bad Idea Column. “You take her,” he ordered.

But as soon as Thomal scooped up Antoinetta and settled her snugly against his chest, Jaċken had the sudden, savage—and totally irrational—urge to tear out Thomal’s perfect blond entrails.