V rose to his feet and stared at what he knew now were not only his competitors for scarce food and comforts, but now his enemies. The cohesion between the gathered boys as they stood shoulder-to-shoulder told him that however contentious they were within the camp's dry womb, they had been bonded over one like mind.
He was an outcast.
V blinked and thought about what had come next. Funny, the turn in the road you anticipated was never the one with the black ice on it. He'd assumed that the other pretrans would drive him out of the camp, that one by one they would go through their change, then gang up on him. But fate liked surprises, didn't it.
He rolled on his side and became determined to get some sleep. Except as the door to the bathroom opened, he had to crack an eyelid. Jane had changed into a white button-down shirt and a pair of loose black yoga sweats. Her face was flushed from the heat of her shower, her hair spiky and damp. She looked amazing.
She glanced over at him briefly, a quick cursory review that told him she assumed he was asleep; then she went over and sat in the chair in the corner. As she drew her legs up, she wrapped her arms around her knees and lowered her chin. She seemed so fragile that way, just a twist of flesh and bone within the embrace of the chair.
He shut his eye and felt wretched. His conscience, which had been all but unplugged for centuries, was awake and aching: He couldn't pretend he wasn't going to be fully healed in another six hours. Which meant her purpose was over and he was going to have to let her go when the sun went down tonight.
Except what about the vision he'd had of her? The one of her standing in the doorway of light? Ah, hell, maybe he'd just been hallucinating…
V frowned as he caught a scent in the room. What the hell?
Inhaling deeply, he hardened in a rush, his cock thickening, growing heavy on his belly. He looked across the room at Jane. Her eyes were closed, her mouth a little open, her brows down… and she was aroused. She might not have felt entirely comfortable with it, but she was definitely aroused. Was she thinking of him? Or the human male?
V reached out with his mind with no real hope of getting into her head. When his visions had dried up, so too had the running tickertape of other people's thoughts, the one that could be forced on him or picked up at his will-
The vision in her mind was of him.
Oh, fuck, yeah. It was so totally him: He was arching on the bed, his stomach muscles tightening, his hips pushing up as she worked his sex with her palm. This was right before he came, when he'd removed his gloved hand from what was doing below his cock and made a grab for the duvet.
His surgeon wanted him even though he was partially ruined and not her kind and holding her against her will. And she was aching. She was aching for him.
V smiled as his fangs punched out into his mouth. Well, wasn't this the time to be a humanitarian. And relieve some of her suffering…
Shitkickers planted in a wide stance, fists curled at his side, Phury stood over the lesser he'd just knocked stupid with a nasty shot to the temple. The bastard was lying facedown in a dirty slush pile, its arms and legs flopped to the side, its leather jacket torn up the back from the fighting.
Phury took a deep breath. There was a gentlemanly way to kill your enemy. In the midst of war, there was an honorable manner to bring death upon even those you hated.
He looked up and down the alley and sniffed the air. No humans. No other lessers. And none of his brothers.
He bent down to the slayer. Yeah, when you took out your enemies, there was a certain standard of conduct to be upheld.
This was not going to be it.
Phury picked the lesser up by its leather belt and its pale hair and swung the thing headfirst into a brick building like a battering ram. A muffled, meaty thunch lit out as the frontal lobe shattered and the spinal column pierced through the back of the skull.
But the thing was not dead. To kill a slayer you needed to stab him in the chest. If left as it was now, the bastard would just be in a perpetual rotting state until the Omega eventually came back for the body.
Phury dragged the thing by an arm behind a Dumpster and took out a dagger. He didn't use it the weapon to stab the slayer back to its master. His anger, that emotion he didn't like to feel, that force that he didn't permit to attach to people or events, had started to roar. And its impulse was undeniable.
The cruelty of his actions stained his conscience. Even though his victim was an amoral killer who had been about to take out two civilian vampires twenty minutes ago, what Phury was doing was still wrong. The civilians had been saved. The enemy was incapacitated. The end should be brought cleanly.
He didn't stop himself.
As the lesser howled in pain, Phury stuck with what he was doing to the thing, his hands and blade moving swiftly through skin and vitals that smelled like baby powder. Black, glossy blood ran onto the pavement and covered Phury's arms and oiled up his shitkickers and splashed onto his leathers.
As he kept going, the slayer became a StairMaster for his fury and his self-hatred, an object to work out the feelings. Naturally his actions made him think even less of himself, but he didn't stop. Couldn't stop. His blood was propane and his emotions were flame and the combustion was inescapable now that it had been ignited.
Focused on his gruesome project, he didn't hear the other lesser come up from behind. He caught the whiff of baby powder right before the thing struck, and just barely wheeled out of the way of the baseball bat that was aimed for his skull.
His rage shifted from the incapacitated slayer to the one that was up on its feet, and with his warrior DNA screaming in his veins, he attacked. Leading with his black dagger, he ducked low and came up for the abdomen.
He didn't make it. The lesser clipped him in the shoulder with the bat, then laid in a solid backswing to Phury's good leg, catching the side of his knee. As he crumpled, he concentrated on keeping hold of his dagger, but the slayer was all José Conseco with that aluminum number. Another swing and the blade went flying away, twirling end over point, then dancing away across a stretch of wet pavement.
The lesser jumped on Phury's chest and held him down by the throat, squeezing with a one-handed grip that was strong as wire cable. Phury clapped a palm on the thing's thick wrist as his windpipe compressed, but then suddenly he had issues other than hypoxia to worry about. The slayer switched his grip on the bat, choking up until he was holding it in the middle. With deadly focus he lifted his arm high and brought the butt of the bat down square on Phury's face.
The pain was a bomb burst in his cheek and eye, its white-hot shrapnel ricocheting throughout his whole body.
And it was… curiously good. It overrode everything. All he knew was the heart-freezing impact and the electric throbbing that came right afterward.
He liked it.
Through the one eye that was still working right, he saw the lesser lift the bat up again, piston-style. Phury didn't even brace himself. He just watched the kinetics at work, knowing that the muscles that were coordinating to elevate that piece of polished metal were going to tighten up and bring that thing back down on his face again.
Death blow time, he thought dimly. His orbital bone was already shattered, in all likelihood, or at the very least fractured. One more belt and it wasn't going to protect his gray matter anymore.
An image of the drawing he'd done of Bella came to him, and he saw what he had put to paper: her sitting at the dining room table turned toward his twin, the love between them as tangible and beautiful as silken cloth, as strong and enduring as tempered steel.