With a curse, Tohr stood up and went over to turn on the shower, hoping that if he refused to look at the loudmouth, Lassiter would get bored more quickly and move on to ruin someone else’s afternoon.
“Question,” the angel said. “When are we going to cut that rug that’s growing out of your head? Shit gets any longer, we’re going to have to mow it down like hay.”
As Tohr stripped out of his T-shirt and boxers, he enjoyed the only consolation to be had in suffering Lassiter’s company: He flashed the motherfucker.
“Man, flat ass is right,” Lassiter muttered. “You’re sporting a pair of deflated basketballs back there. Makes me wonder…Hey, I’ll bet Fritz has a bicycle pump. I’m just saying.”
“You don’t like the view? You know the door. It’s the one you never knock on.”
Tohr didn’t give the water time to warm up; he just got under the spray, and he cleaned himself for no good reason he knew of-he had no pride, so he didn’t give a shit what anyone thought of his hygiene.
The throwing up had a purpose. The showering…maybe it was simply habit.
Closing his eyes, he parted his lips and stood facing the nozzle. Water licked into his mouth, whisking away the bile, and as the sting left his tongue, a thought walked into his brain.
Wrath was out fighting. Alone.
“Hey, Tohr.”
Tohr frowned. The angel never used his proper name. “What.”
“Tonight is different.”
“Yeah, only if you leave me alone. Or hang yourself in this bathroom. Got six showerheads to choose from in here.”
Tohr picked up the bar of soap and went over his body, feeling the hard, jabbing thrusts of his bones and joints coming through his thin skin.
Wrath out alone.
Shampoo. Rinse. Turn back to the spray. Open mouth.
Out. Alone.
He ended the shower, and the angel was front and center with a towel, all manservant and shit.
“Tonight is different,” Lassiter said softly.
Tohr looked at the guy truly, seeing him for the first time, even though they had been together for four months. The angel had black-and-blond hair that was as long as Wrath’s, but he was no cross-dresser in spite of all the Cher dripping down his back. His wardrobe was straight-up army/navy, black shirts and camo pants and combat boots, but he wasn’t all soldier. Fucker was pierced like a pincushion and accessorized like a jewelry box, with gold hoops and chains hanging from holes in his ears and wrists and eyebrows. And you could bet the mountings were on his chest and below the waist-which was something Tohr refused to think about. He didn’t need help throwing up, thank you very much.
As the towel changed hands, the angel said with gravity, “Time to wake up, Cinderella.”
Tohr was about to point out that it was Sleeping Beauty when a memory came to him as if it had been injected into his frontal lobe. It was the night he’d saved Wrath’s life back in 1958, and the images came to him with the clarity of the actual experience.
The king had been out. Alone. Downtown.
Half-dead and bleeding into the sewer.
An Edsel had nailed him. A piece-of-shit Edsel convertible the color of a diner waitress’s blue eye shadow.
As near as Tohr could figure out later, Wrath had been on foot in pursuit of a lesser and barrel-assing around a corner when the boat of a car had plowed into him. Tohr had been two blocks away and heard the screeching brakes and the impact of some sort, and he’d been prepared to do absolutely nothing.
Human traffic accidents? Not his problem.
But then a pair of lessers had run past the alley he’d been standing in. The slayers had been hauling nut through the fall drizzle like they were being pursued, except there was no one riding their bumpers. He’d waited, expecting to see one of his brothers. None had come pounding along.
Didn’t make any sense. If a slayer had been hit by a car in the company of his cronies, they wouldn’t have left the scene. The others would have killed the human driver and any passengers, then packed their dead up in the trunk and driven off from the scene: The last thing the Lessening Society wanted was an incapacitated lesser leaking black blood on the street.
Maybe it was just coincidence, though. A human pedestrian. Or someone on a bike. Or two cars.
Only one set of squealing breaks though. And none of that would explain the pair of paled-out flip-heels who’d passed him like they were arsonists running from a fire they’d lit.
Tohr had jogged onto Trade and around the corner and caught sight of a human male in a hat and trench coat crouched over a crumpled body twice his size. The guy’s wife, who had been dressed in one of those petticoated, frothy fifties numbers, stood just beyond the headlights, huddled into her fur.
Her brilliant red skirt had been the color of streaks on the pavement, but the scent of the spilled blood hadn’t been human. It was vampire. And the one who’d been struck had long dark hair…
The woman’s voice had been shrill. “We need to take him to the hospital-”
Tohr had stepped in and cut her off. “He’s mine.”
The man had looked up. “Your friend…I didn’t see him… Dressed in black-he came out of nowhere-”
“I’ll take care of him.” Tohr had stopped explaining himself at that point and just willed the two humans into a stupor. A quick thought suggestion sent them back into their car and on their way with the impression that they had hit a trash can. He’d figured the rain would take care of the blood on the front of their car, and the dent they could fix on their own.
Tohr’s heart had been going as fast as a jackhammer as he’d leaned over the body of the heir to the race’s throne. Blood had been everywhere, leaking fast from a gash in Wrath’s head, so Tohr had shrugged out of his jacket, bit into the sleeve, and ripped off a strip of leather. After wrapping up the heir’s temples and tying the makeshift bandage as tight as he could, he’d flagged down a passing truck, pulled a gun on the greaser behind the wheel, and been chauffeured by the human out to Havers’s neighborhood.
He and Wrath had ridden in the back bed, with him keeping pressure on Wrath’s head wound, and the rain had been cold. A late-November rain, maybe December. Good thing it hadn’t been summer, though. No doubt the chill had slowed Wrath’s heart and eased his blood pressure.
Quarter of a mile from Havers’s, in the ritzy part of Caldwell, Tohr had told the human to pull over and brainwashed him on his way.
The minutes it had taken Tohr to walk to the clinic had been among the longest of his life, but he’d gotten Wrath there, and Havers had closed what had turned out to be a temporal artery slice.
It had been touch and go that next day. Even with Marissa there to feed Wrath, the king had lost so much blood, he hadn’t rebounded as expected, and Tohr had stayed for the duration, sitting in a chair by the bedside. As Wrath had lain so still, Tohr had felt as if the whole of the race were tipping between life and death, the only one who could take the throne locked into a sleep that was only a few firing neurons off a permanent vegetative state.
Word had gotten out and people had come undone. The nurses and the doctor. The other patients who had stopped by to pray over the king who would not serve. The Brothers, who had used rotary phones to call every fifteen minutes.
The collective sense was that without Wrath, there was no hope. No future. No chance.
Wrath had lived, however, waking up with the kind of crankiness that made you sigh in relief…because if a patient had the energy to be that pissy, he was going to pull through.
The following nightfall, after having been out cold for twenty-four hours straight and having scared the shit out of everyone around him, Wrath had unplugged the IV, dressed himself, and left.
Without a word to any of them.
Tohr had expected…something. Not a thank-you, but an acknowledgment or…something. Hell, Wrath was a gruff son of a bitch now, but back then? He’d been downright toxic. Even so…nothing? After he’d saved the guy’s life?
Kinda reminded him of the way he’d been treating John. And his brothers.
Tohr wrapped the towel around his waist and thought about the more important point of the memory. Wrath out there fighting alone. Back in ’58, it had been a stroke of luck that Tohr had been where he had and found the
