Lover Enshrined

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.

Troops. He loved that word.

It was second only to his.

Maybe he could cook himself up a uniform. Like a general ’s or something.

He sure as hell deserved it, given how tight his military strategy was. He was a straight-up genius-and the fact that he was using what the Brotherhood had taught him in training against them was goddamn glorious.

For the past however many centuries, the Lessening Society had been just picking away at the vampire population. With little intelligence to go on, and an uncoordinated soldier force, it was a hunt-and-peck strategy that had yielded minor successes.

He, however, was thinking big, and had the knowledge to rock his plans.

The way to eliminate vampires was to break the collective will of the society, and the first step was destabilization. The heads of four of the six founding families of the glymera had been wiped out. There were another two to go, and once they were hit, the lessers could start in on the rest of the aristocracy. With the glymera attacked and decimated, what was left of the Princeps Council would turn on Wrath as king. Competing factions would form. Power struggles would ensue. And Wrath, as a leader forced to deal with civil unrest, challenges to his authority, and an active war, would make compounding errors in judgment. Which would exacerbate the instability.

The fallout wouldn’t just be political. More looting of homes meant fewer tithes to the Brotherhood due to erosions in the tax base. Fewer aristocrats meant fewer jobs for civilians, which would cause financial distress in the lower classes and an erosion of their support for the king. The whole thing would be a vicious circle that would inevitably lead to Wrath being deposed, killed, or relegated to a castrated figurehead-and to the vampire social structure going even further into the shitter. With everything in total shambles, that was when Lash would go in and broom up what was left.

Only thing better would be a vampire plague.

His plan was working so far, with this first night having been largely successful. He’d been pissed that that fucker Qhuinn hadn’t been home when they’d raided his house, as he would have liked killing his cousin, but he’d learned something interesting. On his uncle’s desk had been renunciation papers kicking Qhuinn out of the family. Which meant that poor wittle mismatched fuckup Qhuinn was out on the loose somewhere-although evidently not at Blay’s as that home had been hit as well.

Yeah, it sucked that Qhuinn hadn’t been home. But at least they’d taken his brother alive. That was going to be fun.

There had been a number of Society losses, mostly at Blay’s house and Lash’s own, but on the whole the tide was strongly in Lash’s favor.

Momentum, however, was critical. The glymera would be running for their safe houses, and though he knew some of the areas those places were in, most of them were upstate, which meant travel time for his men. To expedite the killings, they had to hit as many addresses as possible here in town.

Maps. They needed maps.

As the thought occurred to him, Lash’s stomach let out a whine.

They needed maps and food.