“Wrath?” Beth came over to his side, and he could tell by her tense tone that she was trying to keep the fear out of her voice. “Are you all right? Does your head hurt?”
“No.” Wrath tugged his queen back into his lap, the little chair creaking once again, its spindly legs wobbling. “I’m okay.”
Her hands brushed his hair from his face. “You don’t seem that way.”
“I just…” He found one of her hands and took it into his own. “Shit, I don’t know.”
“Yes, you do.”
He frowned hard and tight. “It’s not about me. At least, not really.”
There was a long pause, and then they both spoke at once:
“What is it?”
“How’s Bella?”
Beth cleared her throat as if she were surprised by his question. “Bella’s…doing the best she can. We don’t leave her alone much, and it’s good that Zsadist has taken some time off. It’s just so hard that she lost both of them within days of each other. I mean her mother and her brother…”
“That shit about Rehv was a lie.”
“I don’t understand.”
He reached around for the Caldwell Courier Journal she’d been reading him, and tapped the article she’d just finished. “I find it hard to believe that someone blew his ass up. Rehv was no dummy, and those Moors who guarded him? That head of security? No fucking way they’d let some cocksucker with a bomb anywhere near that club. Plus, Rhage said that he and V went to the Iron Mask the other night to drag John home, and the three of them are working there-iAm, Trez, and Xhex are still together. Usually people scatter after tragedy. Except that bunch is right where they always were, like they’re waiting for him to come back.”
“But there was a skeleton in the ruins, wasn’t there?”
“Could be anyone’s. Sure, it was male, but what else do the police know? Nothing. If I wanted to disappear from the human world-hell, even the vampire one-I’d plant a body and blow up my building.” He shook his head, thinking of Rehv lying in his bed up at the Great Camp, so fucking ill…and yet well enough to have his assassin take care of the guy who’d wanted to kill Wrath. “Man, that SOB was there for me. He had every chance in the world to fuck me when Montrag met with him. I owe him.”
“Wait…why in the world would he fake his own death? He loved Bella and her young so much. Hell, he practically raised his sister, and I can’t believe he would ever hurt her like that. Plus, where would he go?”
The colony, Wrath thought.
Wrath wanted to tell his queen everything that was on his mind, but he hesitated, because he’d been flirting with a decision that was going to complicate the shit out of things. Bottom line was, that e-mail about Rehv? Wrath’s intuition was telling him the guy had lied about it. It was just too coincidental that the thing came in and the next night Rehv “dies.” It had to have been legit. But with Montrag dead, who could have-
There was a sharp crack and a free fall and a hard-ass landing.
As Beth shrieked, Wrath cursed. “What the fuck?”
He patted around, feeling splinters of old, delicate French wood all around them.
“Are you okay, leelan?” he said sharply.
Beth laughed and got up to her feet. “Oh, my God…we broke the chair.”
“Pulverized it might be more accurate-”
The knock on the door had Wrath struggling up to his feet with grunts of pain. Which he was getting used to. Payne always went for the shins, and his left leg was killing him. But it wasn’t like he didn’t return the favor. After this last session, it was quite possible that she was nursing a concussion.
“Come in,” he called out.
The instant the door opened, he knew who it was…and that she was not alone.
“Who is with you, Mary?” he demanded, reaching for the knife he wore on his hip. The scent wasn’t human…but it wasn’t a vampire.
There was a subtle clinking and a long, lovely sigh from his shellan, as if she were looking at something that pleased her greatly.
“This is George,” Mary said. “Please put your weapon away. He won’t hurt you.”
Wrath kept his dagger in the palm of his hand and flared his nostrils. The scent was…“Is that a dog?”
“Yes. He’s trained to assist the blind.”
Wrath recoiled slightly at the b-word, still struggling to accept that classification as pertaining to him.
“I would like to bring him over to you,” Mary said in that level voice of hers. “But not until you put the weapon away.”
Beth stayed silent, and Mary stayed back, which was smart of them. His neurons were firing in all kinds of directions, thoughts racing everywhere. The past month had had a lot of triumphs and a lot of shitty losses: Back when he’d returned from his first meeting with Payne, he’d known it was going to be a tough road ahead, but it had been longer and steeper than he’d thought.
The two biggest problems were that he hated having to rely so much on Beth and his brothers, and he found relearning simple things was curiously exhausting. Like…for fuck’s sake, making toast for himself was now a production. He’d tried it again yesterday and succeeded in breaking the glass dish the butter was kept on. Which naturally had taken him forever to clean up.
Still, the idea of using a dog to get around was…too much.
Mary’s voice eased across the room with the vocal equivalent of an ambling, nonthreatening gait. “Fritz has been trained to handle the dog, and together he and I are prepared to work with you and George. There’s a two-week trial period, after which, if you don’t like it or it isn’t working, we can return the animal. There is no obligation here, Wrath.”
He was about to tell them to take the dog away when he heard a soft whine and more of that jingle.
“No, George,” Mary said. “You can’t go over to him.”
“He wants to come to me?”
“We’ve trained him using a shirt of yours. He knows your smell.”
There was a long, long period of silence, and then Wrath shook his head. “I don’t know if I’m a dog person. Besides, what about Boo-”
“He’s right here,” Beth said. “He’s sitting next to George. He came downstairs as soon as the dog entered the house, and he hasn’t left George’s side since. I think they kind of like each other.”
Damn it, even the cat wasn’t on his side.
More silence.
Wrath slowly sheathed his dagger and took two wide steps to the left so he could clear the desk. Walking forward, he stopped in the center of the study.
George whimpered a little, and there was that quiet ringing of a harness again.
“Let him come to me,” Wrath said darkly, feeling as if he were getting squeezed and not liking it in the slightest.
He heard the animal approach, the padding of paws and the chinking of the collar moving closer, and then…
A velvet-soft muzzle nudged at his palm, and a rasping tongue licked quickly over his skin. Then the dog ducked under his hand and eased up against his thigh.
The ears were silky and warm, the nap of the animal’s fur curling slightly.
It was a large dog with a big, boxy head. “What kind is he?”
“A golden retriever. Fritz was the one who picked him.”
The doggen spoke up from the door, as if he were afraid of entering the room, given how tense things were. “I thought it was the perfect breed, sire.”
Wrath felt along the dog’s flanks, finding the harness that went around his chest and the handle that the blind person would hold on to. “What can he do?”
Mary spoke up. “Anything you need. He can learn the layout of the house, and if you give him the command to take you to the library, he will. He can help you get around the kitchen, answer the phone, find objects. He’s a brilliant animal, and if you two are a fit, you and he can be as independent as I know you want to be.”
Frickin’ female. She knew exactly what had been bothering him. But was an animal the answer?