Since leaving Montrag’s Connecticut safe house, he’d pulled his Bentley over to the side of the road and shot himself up with dopamine twice. His miracle drug, however, was failing him again. If he’d had more of the shit in the car, he’d have fired up another syringe, but he was out.
The irony of a drug dealer having to go to his dealer at a dead run was not lost, and it was a damn shame there wasn’t more of a demand for the neurotransmitter on the black market. As it stood now, Rehv’s only supply was through legitimate means, but he was going to have to fix that. If he was smart enough to funnel X, coke, weed, meth, OxyC, and heroin through his two clubs, surely he could figure out how the hell to get his own vials of dopamine.
“Ah, come on, move your ass. It’s just a goddamned exit ramp. You’ve seen one before.”
He’d made good time on the highway, but now that he was in town, traffic slowed his progress, and not just because of congestion. With his lack of depth perception, judging bumper distances was tricky, so he had to go far more carefully than he liked.
And then there was this fidiot in his twelve-hundred-year-old beater and his overactive braking habits.
“No…no…by all that is holy don’t change lanes. You can’t even see out your rearview mirror as it is-”
Rehv punched on the brakes because Mr. Timid was actually thinking he belonged over in the fast lane and seemed to think the way to get into it was to come to a dead stop.
Usually, Rehv loved to drive. He even preferred it to dematerializing because it was the only time when he was medicated that he felt like he was himself: fast, nimble, powerful. He drove a Bentley not just because it was chic and he could afford one, but for the six hundred horses under the hood. Being numb and relying on a cane for balance made him feel like an old, crippled male a lot of the time, and it was good to be…normal.
Of course, the no-feeling thing had its benes. For example, when he banged his forehead into the steering wheel in another couple minutes, he was just going to see stars. The headache? No prob.
The vampire race’s stopgap clinic was about fifteen minutes past the bridge he was just getting on, and the facility was not sufficient for the needs of its patients, being little more than a safe house converted into a field hospital. Still, the Hail Mary solution was all the race had at the moment, a bench player brought in because the quarterback’s leg was snapped in half.
Following the raids over the summer, Wrath was working with the race’s physician to get a new permanent location, but like everything it was taking time. With so many places sacked by the Lessening Society, no one thought it was a good idea to use real estate currently owned by the race, because God only knew how many other locales had been leaked. The king was looking to buy another place, but it had to be secluded and…
Rehv thought of Montrag.
Had the war really come down to murdering Wrath?
The rhetorical, initiated by his mother’s vampire side, rippled through his mind, but triggered no emotion whatsoever. Calculation carried his thoughts. Calculation unencumbered by morality. The conclusion he’d reached as he’d left Montrag’s did not waver, his resolution only growing stronger.
“Thank you, dearest Virgin Scribe,” he muttered as the beater slid out of his way and his exit presented itself like a gift, the reflective green sign a tag with his name on it.
Green…?
Rehv looked around. The red wash had started to drain out of his vision, the other colors of the world reappearing through the two-dimensional haze, and he took a deep breath of relief. He didn’t want to go juiced to the clinic.
As if on schedule, he started to feel cold, even though the Bentley was no doubt a balmy seventy degrees, and he reached forward and cranked the heat. The chills were another good, if inconvenient sign the medication was starting to work.
For as long as he had been alive, he’d had to keep secret what he was. Sin-eaters like him had two choices: They either passed as normals or they got sent upstate to the colony, deported from society like the toxic waste they were. That he was a half-breed didn’t matter. If you had any symphath in you, you were considered one of them, and with good reason. The thing about symphaths was, they liked the evil in themselves too much to be trusted.
For fuck’s sake, look at tonight. Look at what he was prepared to do. One conversation and he was pulling the trigger-not even because he had to, just because he wanted to. Needed to, was more like it. Power plays were oxygen for his bad side, both undeniable and sustaining. And the whys behind his choice were typically symphath: They served him and no one else, not even the king who was a friend of sorts.
This was why, if an everyday, average vampire knew of a sin-eater who was out and about in the gen pop, by law they had to report the individual for deportation or face criminal action: Regulating the whereabouts of sociopaths and keeping them away from the moral and the law-abiding was a healthy survival instinct for any society.
Twenty minutes later, Rehv pulled up to an iron gate that was downright industrial in its function over form. The thing was without any grace whatsoever, nothing but solid shafts bolted together and topped with a curly wig of barbed-wire coil. To the left there was an intercom, and as he put down his window to hit the call button, security cameras focused on the grille of his car and the front windshield and the driver’s-side door.
So he was not surprised at the tense tone of the female voice that answered. “Sire…I was not aware that you had an appointment?”
“I don’t.”
Pause. “As a nonemergency walk-in, the wait time could be rather long. Perhaps you would like to schedule-”
He glared into the closest camera eye. “Let me in. Now. I have to see Havers. And this is an emergency.”
He had to get back to the club and check in. The four hours he’d blown already this evening were a lifetime when it came to managing the likes of ZeroSum and the Iron Mask. Shit didn’t just happen in places like those, it was SOP, and his fist was the one with Buck Stops Here tatted on the knuckles.
After a moment, those ugly-ass, rock-solid gates slid free, and he didn’t waste time on the mile-long driveway.
As he came around the last turn, the farmhouse up ahead didn’t warrant the kind of security it had, at least not if you took it at face value. The two-story clapboard was barely a colonial, and it was totally pared-down. No porches. No shutters. No chimneys. No plantings.
Compared to Havers’s old crib and clinic setup it was the poor relation to a garden shed.
He parked opposite the detached bank of garages where the ambulances were kept and got out. The fact that the cold December night made him shiver was another good sign, and he reached into the Bentley’s backseat to take out his cane and one of his many sable dusters. Along with numbness, the downside of his chemical mask was a drop in core temperature that turned his veins into air-conditioning coils. Living out his nights and days in a body he couldn’t feel or warm was not a party, but it wasn’t as if he had a choice.
Maybe if his mother and his sister hadn’t been normals, he might have Darth Vadered himself and embraced the dark side, living out his days fucking with the minds of his comrades-in-harm. But he’d put himself in the position of being head of his household, and that kept him in this stretch of neither here nor there.
Rehv walked around the side of the colonial, pulling the sable in close to his throat. When he came up to a nothing-looking door, he rang the button that was tacked onto the aluminum siding and stared into an electronic eye. A moment later, an air lock popped with a hiss, and he pushed his way into a white room the size of a walk-in closet. After he stared into a camera’s face, another seal popped free, a hidden panel shifted back, and he descended a set of stairs. Another check-in. Another door. And then he was in.
The reception area was every clinic’s patient-and-family parking lot, with rows of chairs and magazines on little tables and a TV and some plants. It was smaller than the one at the old clinic, but it was clean and well-ordered. The two females sitting in it both stiffened as they saw him.
“Right this way, sire.”
Rehv smiled at the nurse who came around the reception desk. For him, a “long wait” was always one in an exam room. The nurses didn’t like him spooking the folks in those rows of chairs, and they didn’t like him around themselves, either.
Worked for him. He wasn’t the socializing kind.
The exam room he was led down to was located on the nonemergency side of the clinic, and it was one he’d been in before. He’d been in all of them before.
