“Wrath wants you-”
“Fuck Wrath. Talk!”
Blay’s eyes flicked to John before returning to their friend. “Your mother, father, and sister are dead. Your brother is missing.”
Qhuinn’s breath left him on a wheeze, like someone had kicked him in the gut. John and Blay both reached out for him, but he shrugged them off and stepped away.
Blay shook his head. “I’m so sorry.”
Qhuinn said nothing. It was as if he had forgotten English.
Blay tried to reach out again, and when Qhuinn only took another step back, he said, “Look, Wrath called me when he couldn’t reach either one of you, and asked me to bring you both back to the mansion. The glymera is going into seclusion.”
Let’s get to the car, John signed to Qhuinn.
“I’m not going.”
“Qhuinn-”
Qhuinn-
Qhuinn’s voice was full of the emotion his face refused to show. “Fuck all of this. Fuck-”
A light went on inside of Blay’s house, and Qhuinn’s head whipped around. Through the glass of the kitchen’s windows, they all saw a lesser walk into the room in plain sight.
There was no stopping Qhuinn. He was supersonic as he shot into the house through the back door with his gun up. And he didn’t blow slow mo once he was inside, either. He leveled his H amp; K at the slayer and popped the trig over and over and over again, driving the pale bastard back against the wall.
Even as the lesser slumped and bled black, Qhuinn kept shooting, the wallpaper behind the thing going Jackson Pollock.
Blay and John rushed over and John threw an arm around his friend’s neck. As he started hauling Qhuinn back, he grabbed the guy’s gun hand in case he tried to swing around and shoot.
Another lesser came barreling into the kitchen, and Blay manned up, grabbing a carving knife from a butcher-block stand of Henckels. As he faced off at the pale bastard, the slayer palmed a switchblade from out of nowhere and the two circled each other. Blay was twitchy, his big body ready to engage, his eyes sharp. Trouble was, he was still bleeding from injuries he’d sustained before he left, his face white and drawn from everything that had gone down.
Qhuinn lifted up his gun muzzle in spite of John’s lock hold on his arm.
As John shook his head, Qhuinn hissed, “Let me go. Right now.”
The voice was so dead calm, John obeyed.
Qhuinn put one perfect bullet right between the lesser’s eyes, dropping the thing like a doll.
“What the fuck?” Blay snapped. “He was mine.”
“Not going to watch you get sliced. Not going to happen. ”
Blay pointed a shaking finger at Qhuinn. “Don’t ever do that again.”
“I lost people I can’t stand tonight. Not losing someone I actually give a shit about.”
“I don’t need you to be my hero-”
John stepped in between the two of them. Home, he signed. Now.
“There could be more-”
“There’s probably more-”
All three of them went still as Blay’s phone went off.
“It’s Wrath.” Blay’s fingers flew over the keys. “He really wants us home. And John, check your phone, I think it’s not working.”
John took the thing out of his pocket. It was dead as a doornail, but now was not the time to figure out why. Maybe from the fighting?
Let’s go, he signed.
Qhuinn went over to the stand of knives, pulled out a carver, and stabbed both the lesser he’d turned into a sieve and the one he’d bull’s-eyed back to the Omega.
Moving quickly, they sealed up the house as best they could, triggered the alarm, and piled into Fritz’s Mercedes, with Qhuinn behind the wheel and Blay and John in the backseat.
As they headed over to Route 22, Qhuinn started to put up the partition. “If we’re going to go back to the mansion, you can’t know where it is, Blay.”
Which was, of course, only part of the reason that shield was going up. Qhuinn wanted to be alone. It was what he needed whenever he had a headfuck going on and why John had volunteered to Miss Daisy it.
In the dense darkness of the backseat, John glanced over at Blay. The guy was lying back in the leather seat as if his head weighed as much as an engine block and his eyes seemed to have sunk into his skull. He looked about a hundred years old.
In human terms.
John thought of the guy just nights ago, back at Abercrombie, going through racks of shirts, holding one or another up for assessment. Staring at Blay now, it was as if that red-haired guy in the store were a distant, younger cousin of this person in the Mercedes, someone with the same coloring and height, but having nothing else in common.
John tapped his friend on the forearm. We need to get Doc Jane to look you over.
Blay glanced down at his white shirt and seemed surprised to find blood on it. “Guess this was what my mom was going on about. It doesn’t hurt.”
Good.
Blay turned and stared out of his window even though they were impossible to see through. “My dad said I could stay. To fight.”
John whistled softly to bring the guy’s head around again. I didn’t know your dad could throw the sword like that.
“He was a soldier before he was mated to my mother. She made him stop.” Blay brushed at his shirt even though the blood had sunk into the fibers and stained them. “They had a big argument when Wrath called me and asked that I find you two. My mom worries that I’ll turn up dead. My dad wants me to be a male of worth when the race needs them. So there you go.”
What do you want?
The guy’s eyes flipped up to the partition and then scattered all around the backseat. “I want to fight.”
John eased back against the seat. Good.
After a long silence, Blay said, “John?”
John turned his head to the side slowly, feeling as exhausted as Blay looked.
What, he mouthed, because he didn’t have the strength to sign.
“Do you still want to be friends with me? Even though I’m gay.”
John frowned. Then he sat up, made a fist, and nailed his buddy in the shoulder with a full-on punch.
“Ow! What the fuck-”
Why wouldn’t I want to be friends with you? Other than the fact that you’re a fucking idiot for asking that?
Blay rubbed where he’d been hit. “Sorry. Didn’t know if it changed things or- Don’t do it again! I’ve got a cut there!”
John settled back into the seat. He was about to sign another, Stupid idiot, at the guy, when he realized he kind of wondered the same thing after what had happened in the locker room.
He looked at his friend. You’re just the same to me.
Blay took a deep breath. “I haven’t told my parents. You and Qhuinn are the only ones who know.”
Well, when you tell them or whoever, he and I will be right beside you. All the way.
The question John didn’t have the balls to ask must have been in his eyes, because Blay reached over and touched his shoulder.
“No. Not at all. I don’t believe there’s anything that could make me think less of you.”
The two of them let out identical sighs and closed their eyes at the same time. Neither said another word for the rest of the trip home.
Lash sat in the passenger seat of the Focus and had the frustrating sense that even with the hits he’d initiated on the aristocracy’s houses, the Society was not getting the picture. The lessers were taking orders from Mr. D, not him.
Hell, they didn’t even know he existed.
He glanced over at Mr. D, whose hands were at ten and two on the steering wheel. Part of him wanted to kill the guy just for spite, but his logical side knew he had to keep the bastard alive to be a mouthpiece-at least until he could prove who he was to the rest of his troops.