Spikes. Dull spikes that would grip the flesh like teeth.
Getting himself back with the program, he marched through the place, checking in all the nooks and crannies . . . and found a little tiny computer chip on the kitchen counter. It was the kind of thing that no one but V would know how to remove from a cell.
“Son of a bitch.”
So there was no way of knowing where—
When his phone went off, he checked the screen. Thank God. “Where the hell are you?”
V’s voice was tight. “I need you down here. Ninth and Broadway. Stat.”
“Fuck that—why is your GPS in your kitchen.”
“Because that’s where I was when I took it out of my phone.”
“What the hell, V.” Butch tightened his grip on his cell and wished there were an app that let you reach through a phone and bitch slap someone. “You can’t—”
“Get your ass down here to Ninth and Broadway—we’ve got problems.”
“You’re kidding me, right? You go untraceable and—”
“Someone else is killing lessers, cop. And if it’s who I think it is, we’ve got problems.”
Pause. Big-time. “Excuse me?” he said slowly.
“Ninth and Broadway. Now. And I’m calling in the others.”
Butch hung up and rushed for the door.
Leaving the SUV in the parking garage, he took a mere five minutes to run over to the correct coordinates on Caldwell’s street grid. And Butch knew when he was getting close because of the sickening scent in the air and the tingling resonance of the enemy deep inside of him.
As he rounded the corner of a short-and-squat, he hit a wall of mhis and penetrated the shit, coming out on the other side to a whiff of Turkish tobacco and a tiny orange flare in the way-back of the alley.
He jogged over to V, slowing only when he got to the first of the bodies. Or . . . part of the first. “Hello, halvsies.”
As Vishous came up and offed his glove, Butch got a quick impression of dead-meat legs and leaking innards. “Yum.”
“Clean cut,” V muttered. “Real hot-knife-through-butter time.”
The brother was too right. It was practically surgical.
Butch knelt down and shook his head. “Can’t be the result of Lessening Society politics. They’d never leave the bodies out in the open like this.”
God knew, the slayers regularly went through shifts in leadership, either because the Omega got bored, or because of internal power struggles. But the enemy was incented to keep their biz off the human radar screens as much as vampires were—so no way would they have abandoned this mess for the CPD to find.
As Butch sensed the arrival of the other brothers, he rose to his feet. Phury and Z came out of the ether first. Then it was Rhage and Tohr. And Blay. That was everyone for tonight: Rehvenge often fought with the Brotherhood, but this evening, he was up in the symphath colony playing King of the Damned, and it was Qhuinn’s, Xhex’s, and John Matthew’s rotation off.
“Tell me I’m not seeing this,” Rhage said grimly.
“Your eyes are working just fine, true.” V stabbed his hand-rolled out on the sole of his boot. “I couldn’t believe it, either.”
“I thought he was dead.”
“He?” Butch asked, glancing at the pair. “Who’s ‘he’?”
“Where to start on that one,” Hollywood muttered as he checked out another hunk of lesser. “You know, if I had a stake, we could make lesser-kebabs.”
“Only you could think of food at a time like this,” someone drawled.
“I’m just sayin’.”
If there was more conversation at that point, Butch didn’t hear it because his internal alarm suddenly started to ring-a-ding-ding. “Boys . . . we’re about to have company.”
Pivoting around, he faced the alley’s open end. The enemy was approaching. Fast.
“How many?” V asked as he came forward.
“At least four, maybe more,” Butch said, as he thought of the fact that there was no way out behind them. “This may be a trap.”
Back at the Brotherhood’s training center, Manny was paying special attention to his patient.
As he worked Payne’s breast with his hand, she writhed under him, her legs bicycling with impatience on the mattress, her head thrown back, her body glowing like the moon on a cloudless winter night.
“Do not stop, healer,” she moaned as he thumbed her nipple in circles. “I feel . . . everything. . . .”
“You don’t worry about my stopping.”
Yeah, he was so not putting the brakes on this anytime soon—not that they were going to have sex. But still . . .
“Healer . . .” she said against his lips. “More, please.”
Licking his way into her mouth, he pinched her nipple ever so slightly. “Let me get this off you,” he said as he found the bottom of her johnny with his other hand. “I’m going to take care of you down below.”
She worked with him as he stripped her bare and discreetly removed her equipment. When she was utterly and completely naked, he was momentarily dry mouthed and immobile at the sight of her. Her breasts were perfectly formed, with little pink nipples, and her long, flat stomach led down to a bare cleft that had his head pounding.
“Healer . . . ?”
When all he did was swallow hard, she reached for the sheet to pull it across and hide her body.
“No . . .” He stopped her. “Sorry. I just need a minute.”
“To what?”
Climax, in a word. Unlike her, he knew precisely what all this naked was heading toward—in about a minute and a half, his mouth was going to be all over her. “You’re incredible . . . and you have nothing to be shy about.”
Her body was insane, all lean muscle and luscious, smooth skin—as far as he was concerned, she was the perfect female, bar none. Christ, he’d never been even half this desperate for those sticks-and-stones social X-rays, with their hard-as-nails boob jobs and their stringy arms.
Payne was powerful, and that was pure sex as far as he was concerned. But she was absolutely going to leave this experience with her virginity intact. Yeah, she wanted what he was giving her, but it wasn’t fair, under these circumstances, to take something she was never getting back: In the quest to return her legs to some sort of functioning, she might well go farther than she would have if it was just sex for the enjoyment of it.
This shit between them was all about purpose.
And the fact that that left him a little hollow was nothing he wanted to look too closely at.
Manny leaned into her. “Give me your mouth, bambina. Let me in.”
As she did what he asked, he inched his hand back to her perfect breast.
“Shh . . . easy,” he told her as she nearly jacked off the bed.
Fucking hell, she was lightning in a bottle, and for a moment he imagined what it would be like to ride those rocking hips and take her hard.
Cut that shit right now, Manello, he told himself.
Disengaging from her mouth, he nuzzled his way down the side of her neck and briefly sank his teeth into her collarbone—just enough so that she felt it, not enough to hurt. And as her hands dug into his hair, he knew by the strength of her grip and the way she panted that she wanted him to go exactly where he was heading.
Palming the outside of her breast, he extended his tongue and dragged a slow trail down to that tight pink top. Circling her nipple, he watched her bite down on her lower lip, her fangs cutting into the flesh and drawing a sliver of bright red blood.
Without conscious thought, he surged up and captured what had been shed, lapping it and swallowing—
His eyes slammed shut at the taste: rich and dark, thick and smooth on the back of his throat. His mouth tingled . . . and then so did his gut.
“No,” she said in a guttural voice. “You must not do that.”
As he forced his lids open, he watched her own tongue come out and do away with what little was left.