Tohrment had had that once, she thought.
“I wish there was some way of helping him,” she murmured. “I would do anything to see him with aid as opposed to alone in his suffering.”
“Do you mean that,” came a dark response.
“Of course.”
Lassiter put his face in her vision. “Do you really mean that.”
She went to take a step back, but found herself blocked by the jamb. “Yes…”
The angel put his palm out for her to clasp. “Swear to it.”
No’One frowned. “I do not understand—”
“You maintain you would do anything—I want you to swear to that.” Now those white eyes burned. “We’ve stalled out since the spring, and we didn’t have endless time back then. You say you want to save him, and I want you to commit to that—no matter what it takes.”
Abruptly, as if the memory had been purposely put in her mind—perhaps by the angel, more likely by her conscience—she remembered those moments after her birthing of Xhexania, when her physical pain and her mental anguish had been one and the same, the balance finally equalized as the agony in her heart for all she had lost was made manifest in her very core.…
Unable to bear her burdens, she had taken Tohrment’s dagger from his chest holster and used it in a way that had made him scream.
His hoarse cry had been the last thing she’d heard.
Staring up at the angel, she wasn’t stupid, and she was no longer naive. “You are suggesting I feed him.”
“Yeah. I am. It’s time to take this to the next level.”
No’One had to steel herself before she looked back at Tohrment. But as she took in his frail body, she came to a resolve: He had buried her… so surely she could force herself to accept him at her vein in order to give him life.
Assuming he would agree to take what was offered.
Assuming she could make herself.
Indeed, even in the hypothetical, her body trembled at the thought, but her mind rejected the response of her flesh. This was not a male interested in anything from her. In fact, he would be the only male she could safely feed.
“A Chosen’s blood would be purer,” she heard herself say.
“And get us nowhere.”
No’One shook her head, refusing to read anything into that statement. Then she took the angel’s hand. “I shall serve his blood needs, if he comes to me.”
Lassiter bowed ever so slightly. “I’ll take care of that part. And I’m going to hold you to this.”
“You shall not have to. My vow is my vow.”
TWENTY-ONE
Standing in the foyer with his brothers, Tohr had a bad feeling about the way the night was going to go. Then again, he’d woken up from that dream of his Wellsie and the young, the one he had had from time to time, but only truly understood since Lassiter had provided the context. He knew now that the two were in the In Between, huddled under a gray blanket in the midst of a dark gray landscape that was cold and unyielding.
They were gradually moving off into the distance.
The first time he’d had the vision, he’d been able to pick out each individual hair on his shellan’s head… and the quarter-moon whites at the tips of her fingernails… and the way the blanket’s rough fibers caught the strange, ambient light…
As well as the contours of the tiny bundle she cradled against her heart.
Now, though, she was yards off, the gray ground between them something that he tried to cross, but was unable to cover. And just as dire, she had lost all color, her face and hair now tinted with the gray of the prison she was trapped in.
Naturally, he’d been insane when he woke up.
For fuck’s sake, he’d done everything he could to move on in the last few months: Put the dress away. Gone down for First and Last Meals. Tried cocksucking yoga, transcendental bullcrap, and even gotten on the Internet to research grief stages and other psychobabble bullshit.
He’d attempted to not think of Wellsie consciously, and if his subconscious burped up a memory, he quashed it. When his heart ached, he pictured those f-in’ white doves released from cages, and dams bursting, and shooting stars, and a bunch of other dumb-ass metaphoricals that belonged on motivational posters.
And still he’d had that dream in shades of gray.
And still Lassiter was here.
It wasn’t working—
“Tohr? You with us,” Wrath barked out.
“Yeah.”
“You sure about that.” After a moment, Wrath’s wraparounds swung back to the rest of the group. “So we do this. V, John Matthew, Qhuinn, and Tohr on me. Everyone else in the field, ready to come in as backup.”
There was a shout of agreement from the Brothers, and then they were all filing through the vestibule.
Tohr was the last through the door, and just as he got to the jambs, something made him stop and look over his shoulder.
No’One had stepped out from somewhere, and stood on the edge of the depiction of the apple tree in the floor, her hood and robe making her seem like a shadow that had suddenly gone 3-D.
Time slowed and then ground to a halt as he met her eyes, some strange pull keeping him where he stood.
In the intervening months since the spring, he had seen her at meals, had forced himself to speak with her, had pulled out chairs and helped to serve her as he did the other females in the house.
But he hadn’t been alone with her, and he’d never touched her.
He felt like he was touching her now, for some reason.
“No’One?” he said.
Her arms unfolded from out of her sleeves and her hands lifted to the hood that covered her face. With grace, she revealed herself to him.
Her eyes were luminous and a little scared, her features as perfect as they had been back in the spring at the Sanctuary. And down lower, her throat was a perfect, pale column of flesh… which she touched lightly with fingertips that trembled.
From out of nowhere, hunger struck him hard, the need reverberating through his body, lengthening his fangs, parting his lips—
“Tohr? What the fuck?”
V’s sharp voice broke the spell, and with a curse, he looked over his shoulder. “I’m coming—”
“Good. ’Cuz the king’s waiting for you, true.”
Tohr glanced back across the foyer, but No’One was gone. As if she had never been.
Rubbing his eyes, he wondered if he’d imagined the whole thing. Had he exhausted himself to the point of hallucination—
If he was seeing things, it wasn’t exhaustion, some part of him pointed out.
“Don’t say another word,” he muttered as he brushed past his brother. “Not one goddamn thing.”
As V started talking under his breath, it was obviously a litany of all of Tohr’s faults, real and imagined, but whatever. At least that shit was keeping the fucker’s mouth busy as they strode out toward Wrath, John Matthew, and Qhuinn.
“Ready,” Tohr announced.
None of them needed to about-fucking-time him verbally. Their expressions were loud enough.
Seconds later, the five of them rematerialized on the rolling lawn of a house so big you could keep an army in it. Tragically, only the owner was in residence, because that was all that was left of the bloodline.
They had been to so many houses like this over the last few months. Too many. And the stories were all the same. Families decimated. Hope gone. Those left behind limping, not living.
The Brotherhood did not take for granted that these visits were welcome, even though, naturally, no one turned down the king. And they did not take chances: With their guns in their hands, the formation they assumed as they approached the door was with Tohr in front of Wrath, V to the rear, John at the king’s dagger hand, and Qhuinn on the other side.
Two more meetings like this to go and they could take a breather—