Lover Enshrined

back.” They glowered at each other until she said, “Fine, leave out the double-dipping. Just let Havers look at your arm. One word: sepsis.”

As if the doc wouldn’t figure out what was doing when he saw the thing?

Rehv palmed his cane and slowly pushed up off his chair. “I’m too hot… for the coat.”

“And I’m bringing it so that when the dopamine kicks in and you cool off you won’t get a chill.”

Xhex offered him her arm without looking at him because she knew he was too much of a pride-filled dickhead to lean on her otherwise. And he needed to lean on her. He was weak as shit.

“I hate when you’re right,” he said.

“Which explains why you’re usually so short-tempered.”

Together they walked slowly out of the office and into the alley.

The Bentley was there waiting, with Trez behind the wheel. The Moor asked no questions and made no comments, as was his way.

And, of course, all the crushing quiet always made you feel worse when you were being an ass.

Rehv ignored the fact that Xhex settled him into the backseat and slid in next to him as if she were worried he would get carsick or some shit.

The Bentley took off with the smoothness of a magic carpet ride, and that was so fucking apropos, because he felt as if he were on one. With his symphath nature battling his vampire blood, he was doing the seesaw between his bad side and his halfway decent one, and the shifts in moral gravity were making him nauseous as fuck.

Maybe Xhex was right to be concerned about the throwing-up thing.

They hung a left on Trade, hooked up with Tenth Avenue, and shot down toward the river, where they got on the highway. Four exits up, they turned off and glided through a high-rent district, where big houses on parklike lots were set back from the road, kings waiting to be knelt before.

With his red, two-dimensional vision Rehv didn’t see much with his eyes. With his symphath side, he knew too much. He could sense the humans in the mansions, knew the inhabitants by the emotional footprint they emitted, thanks to the energy their feelings released. Whereas his sight was flat as a TV screen, his sense of the people was in three dimensions: They registered as psychic grid patterns, their interplay of joy and sadness, guilt and lust, anger and hurt creating structures that to him were as solid as their houses.

Though his stare couldn’t penetrate the retaining walls and well-planted trees, couldn’t breach the stone-and- mortar of the manses, his evil nature saw the men and women inside as clearly as if they stood before him naked, and his instincts came alive. He focused on the weaknesses percolating in those emotional grids, finding the loose parts in the people’s boxes and wanting to rattle them even more. He was the canny cat to their meek mouse, the clawed stalker who wanted to toy with them until their little heads bled with their dirty secrets and their dark lies and their shameful worries.

His evil side hated them with calm detachment. To his symphath nature, the weak were not to inherit the earth. They were to eat it until they choked to death. And then you were to grind their carcasses in the mud of their blood to get to your next victim.

“I hate the voices in my head,” he said.

Xhex glanced over. In the glow of the backseat, her hard, smart face was curiously beautiful to him, probably because she was the only one who truly understood the demons he fought, and that connection made her lovely.

“Better to despise that part of you,” she said. “The hate keeps you safe.”

“Fighting it’s a bore.”

“I know. But would you have it any other way?”

“Sometimes, I’m not so sure.”

Ten minutes later, Trez pulled them through the gates of Havers’s property, and by then the numbness in Rehv’s hands and feet was returning, and his core temperature had dropped. As the Bentley went around back and stopped at the clinic’s entrance, the sable duster was a godsend, and he huddled into it for warmth. When he got out of the car, he noted that the red vision receded as well, the world’s full palette of colors returning to his sight, his depth perception putting objects in the spatial orientation he was used to.

“I’m staying out here,” Xhex said from the backseat.

She never went into the clinic. But then, considering what had been done to her, he could understand why.

He palmed his cane and leaned into it. “I won’t be long.”

“You’ll be as long as it takes. And Trez and I’ll be waiting.”

Phury returned from the Other Side and poofed his ass right to ZeroSum. He made his buy from iAm as Rehv was out and the Moor had been left in charge, and then he went back home and jogged up to his bedroom.

He was going to have a blunt to take the edge off before he knocked on Cormia’s door and told her she was free to return to the Sanctuary. And when he talked to her, he was going to give her his vow that he would never call on her as Primale, and tell her that he would protect her from comment or criticism.

He was also going to make it clear that he was sorry for shutting her out on this side.

As he sat on his bed and picked up his rolling papers, he tried to practice what he would say to her… and ended up thinking of her undressing him the night before, her pale, elegant hands tugging at his belt before taking on the waistband of his leathers. In a rush, a shot of red-hot rabid-erotic nailed into the head of his cock, and though he did his best not to dwell on it, pretending he was calm and cool was like being in the kitchen of a house that was on fire.

You tended to notice the heat and all the smoke alarms that were going off.

Ah… but it didn’t last. The fire engine and its crew of masked and gloved arrived in the form of an image of all those empty cribs. The memory of them was like a loaded gun to his head, and sure as shit put the douse on his flames.

The wizard appeared in his mind, standing in his field of skulls, silhouetted against the gray sky. When you were growing up, your father was drunk night and day. Do you remember what that made you feel like? Tell me, mate, what kind of papa are you going to be to all of these young of your loins, considering you’re smoked out twenty-four/seven?

Phury stopped what he was doing and thought of the number of times he had picked his father up out of the weeds of the garden and dragged him back into the house right as the sun was rising. He’d been five when he’d first done it… and terrified that he wouldn’t be able to get his father’s tremendous weight to shelter soon enough. What a horror. That messy garden had seemed big as a jungle, and his little hands had kept losing their grip on his father’s belt. Tears of panic had streamed down his face as he’d checked the sun’s progress over and over and over again.

When he’d finally gotten his father into the house, Ahgony ’s eyes had opened, and he’d slapped Phury across the face with a hand as big as a frying pan.

I’d meant to die there, you idiot. There had been a beat of silence; then his father had burst into tears and grabbed him and held him and promised never to try and kill himself again.

Except there had been a next time. And a next time. And a next time. Always with the same exchange at the end.

Phury had done the saving, because he’d been determined that Zsadist would come home to a father.

The wizard smiled. And yet that wasn’t what happened, was it, mate. Your father died anyway, and Zsadist never knew him.

Good thing you took up smoking so that Z got to experience the family legacy firsthand after all.

Phury frowned and looked through the double doors of the bathroom to the toilet. Closing his fist around the bag of red smoke, he started to get up, ready to do some serious flushing.

The wizard laughed. You won’t be able to do it. There’s no bloody way you can quit. You can’t even make it for four hours in the afternoon without getting panicked. Can you honestly imagine never having another smoke for the next seven hundred years of your life? Come on, mate, be sensible.

Phury sat back down on the bed.

Oh, look, he has a brain. What a shock.