“I feel sleepy.”
“That’s my plan.”
Doc Jane went over and whispered to Blay for a moment… and though the guy tried to hide his reaction, his eyes widened.
Ah, so he was in deep shit, Qhuinn thought.
After the doc left, he didn’t bother to ask what had been said, because there was no way Blay was going to go there. His face was a closed cupboard.
But there was still plenty of other stuff to cover, thanks to the shit storm they were all in. “What did you tell your parents?” Qhuinn asked.
“You don’t have to worry about a thing.”
In spite of the exhaustion that was dragging at him, he shook his head. “Tell me.”
“You don’t-”
“You tell me… or I’m going to get up and start doing fucking Pilates.”
“Whatever. You’ve always said that was for pansies.”
“Fine. Jujitsu. Talk before I pass out, would you?”
Blay took a Corona out of the little fridge. “My parents guessed it was us coming in. They’re just back from the glymera’s big party. So Lash’s folks must be finding out now.”
Fuck. “You tell them… about me?”
“Yeah, and they want you to stay.” The beer made a gasping sound as Blay opened it. “We’re just not going to say anything to anybody. There’ll be speculation about where you’ve gone, but it’s not like the glymera’s going to do a house search for you, and our doggen are discreet.”
“I’m only staying today.”
“Look, my parents love you, and they’re not going to toss you out on your ass. They know what Lash was like, and they also know your parents.” Blay stopped there, but the tone he’d used added a lot of adjectives to the words.
Prejudicial, judgmental, cruel…
“I’m no one’s burden.” Qhuinn glowered. “Not yours. Not anyone’s.”
“It’s not a burden, though.” Blay’s eyes dropped to the floor. “I just have my parents and me. Who do you think I’d go to if something bad happened? John and you are all I have in this world apart from my mom and dad. The two of you are my family.”
“Blay, I’m going to jail.”
“We don’t have any jails, so you’re going to need a place to be under house arrest in.”
“And you don’t think that’ll be public record? You don’t think I’ll have to disclose where I stay?”
Blay swallowed half his beer, got out his phone, and started texting. “Listen, can you stop playing spot-the-obstacle? We’re going to have enough problems of our own without you pulling more out of your ass. We’ll figure a way for you to stay here, okay?”
There was a beep.
“See? John agrees.” Blay flashed the screen, which read, GREAT IDEA on it, then polished off his beer with the satisfied expression of a male who had sorted out both his basement and his garage. “This is all going to be fine.”
Qhuinn eyed his friend through lids that had become heavy as tile roofs. “Yeah.”
As he passed out, his last thought was that, sure, things were going to work out… just not how Blay had it planned.
Chapter Twenty-two
LASH, son of the Omega, was reborn on a scream that ripped out of his throat.
In confused madness, he returned to the world as he had come into it twenty-five years before: naked and gasping and bloodied, only this time his body was that of a full-grown male, not an infant.
His quick moment of conscious awareness passed fast, and then he was in agony, his veins filled with acid, every inch of him corroding from the inside out. He put his hands on his stomach, jacked over to the side, and threw up black bile onto a worn wooden floor. Too consumed by the retching, he didn’t bother to wonder where he was or what had happened or why he was voiding stuff that looked like old crankcase oil.
In the midst of the swirling disorientation and the crippling heaves and a blind panic he couldn’t control, a savior reached out to him. A hand smoothed down his back and stroked him over and over again, the warm palm falling into a rhythm that slowed his racing heart and calmed his head and eased his stomach. When he could, he rolled onto his back again.
In the midst of a blurry visual field, a black translucent figure came into focus. Its face was ethereal, a vision of male beauty in the bloom of its early twenties, but the malevolence behind the shadowy eyes made the visage horrible.
The Omega. It had to be the Omega.
This was the Evil his religion and folklore and training had described.
Lash started to scream again, but the shadowed hand reached out to him and gently touched his arm. He calmed.
Home, Lash thought. I am home.
His head flickered in hysteria at the conviction. He was not home. He was… Sure as hell he’d never seen this decrepit room before.
Where the fuck was he?
“Be of ease,” the Omega murmured. “It shall all come back to you.”
And it did, in a rush. He saw the locker room at the training center… and John, that frickin’ pansy, getting all freaked out when his dirty little secret was exposed. Then it was the two of them pounding it out until… Qhuinn… Qhuinn had sliced his throat open.
Holy shit… he could even feel himself going down onto the floor in the shower, the tiles a hard, wet landing pad. He relived the cold shock and remembered putting his hands to his throat and starting to gasp as a suffocating, choking squeeze overtook his chest… his blood… he’d been drowning in his own blood… but then he’d been stitched up and sent to the clinic, where…
Shit, he’d died, hadn’t he. The doctor had brought him back, but he had definitely died.
“Which was how I found you,” the Omega murmured. “Your death was the beacon.”
But why would the Evil want him?
“Because you are my son,” the Omega said in a reverent, distorted voice.
Son? Son?
Lash shook his head slowly. “No… no…”
“Look into my eyes.”
When the connection was made, more scenes were shown to him, the visions like pages flipped in a picture book. The story that unfolded made him both cringe and breathe easier. He was the son of the Evil. Born of a vampire female held against her will in this very farmhouse over two decades ago. After his birth he had been left at a gathering site for vampires, found by them, and taken to Havers’s clinic… where he was later adopted by his family in a private exchange that even he didn’t know about.
And now, having reached his maturity, he had returned to his sire.
Home.
As Lash grappled with the implications, a hunger swirled in his belly, and his fangs protruded into his mouth.
The Omega smiled and looked over his shoulder. A lesser the size of a fourteen-year-old stood in the far corner of the shitty room, his ratlike eyes trained on Lash, his small body tense as a coiled snake.
“And now for the service you shall provide,” the Omega said to the slayer.
The Evil extended his shadowy hand and beckoned the guy forward.
The lesser didn’t so much walk as move in a block, as if his arms and legs were paralyzed and his body were being lifted and carried upright over the floor. Pale eyes popped wide and rolled with panic, but Lash had other things on his mind than the fear of the man being presented to him.
As he caught the sweet scent of the lesser, he sat up, baring his fangs.
“You shall feed my son,” the Omega said to the slayer.
Lash didn’t wait for consent. He reached up, grabbed that little fucker around the back of the neck, and dragged the guy to his tingling canines. He bit hard and sucked deep, the blood sweet as treacle and just as thick.