No clue. And even more impressive? For nearly a century, Darius had somehow been able to keep humans from prying into the private property, the lessers locked out of it … and the symphaths clueless as to its coordinates: This location, and its underground training center, had not been compromised in all its history. Even during the raids.
Quite an accomplishment. Quite a legacy.
God, he wish he’d known his father. Wished the Brother was still around—because he could sure as hell have used some advice on how to tell Wrath what was going on.
Pausing in the middle of the depiction of an apple tree in full bloom, John let Fritz go right ahead, the butler mounting the Buckingham Palace–worthy staircase at a spry jog.
Wrath was undoubtedly upstairs in his study—but first, he needed to get a translator.
Fuck.
Who the hell could he ask to—
“Where is she?”
John closed his eyes at the demand … and it was a minute before he could turn to the billiards room: Sure enough, standing right under the arch, the King was dressed in black leather, his hands locked on his hips, his jaw jutting forward.
Even though he was blind, and his eyes were hidden behind those wraparounds, John felt like the male was staring right. Fucking. At. Him.
All at once, the ambient noise John had been unaware of hearing went dead quiet: The Brothers who were playing pool behind Wrath suspended all movement, all talk, until only tracks from Eminem’s The Marshall Mathers LP 2 were left thumping in the background.
“John. Where is my mate.”
In the face of that glare, John walked forward. Yup, nearly all of the Brothers were in there with Wrath—no doubt they’d tweaked to his mood and had circled the wagons.
Sifting through the big bodies, he locked eyes with V and signed, I need you.
Vishous nodded and handed his cue off to Butch. Crushing his cigarette out in a crystal ashtray, he came over.
Wrath bared his fangs. “John, as God is my fucking witness, I will cut you if you don’t—”
“Easy, there, big guy,” V gritted out. “I’m going to translate. You want to hit the library where we can—”
“No, I want to fucking know where my shellan is!” Wrath boomed.
John started signing, and whereas most of the time people translated half sentences sequentially, V waited until he’d finished the whole report.
A couple of the Brothers muttered in the background as they shook their heads.
“In the library,” V ordered the King in a way John never could have. “You’re gonna wanna do this in the library.”
Wrong thing to say.
Wrath wheeled on the Brother and went for him with such speed and accuracy no one was prepared: One minute V was standing next to the King; the next he was defending himself against an attack that was as unprovoked as it was … well, vicious.
And then things went shit-wild.
Like Wrath knew he was on the thin edge of a bad ledge, he broke off from V, and went total wrecking ball on the billiards room. The first thing he ran into was the pool table Butch was chilling next to—and there was barely any time for the cop to get that ashtray up off the side rails: Wrath grabbed the gunnels and flipped the thing like it was nothing but a card table, the mahogany and slate-topped behemoth flying up so high, it wiped out the hanging light fixture above, its weight so great it splintered the marble floor beneath on landing.
Without missing a breath, the King EF5’d into his next victim … the heavy leather sofa that Rhage had just leaped up off.
Talk about your couch-icopters.
The entire thing came at John at about five feet off the floor, the pair of ends trading places as it spun around and around, cushions flying in all directions. He didn’t take it personally—especially as its mate do-si-doed with the bar, smashing the top-shelf bottles, liquor splashing all over the walls, the floor, the fire that was crackling in the hearth.
Wrath wasn’t finished.
The King picked up a side table, hauled it overhead, and pitched it in the direction of the TV. It missed the plasma screen, but managed to shatter an old-fashioned mirror—although the Sony didn’t last. The coffee table that had been in between the two sofas did that deed, killing the muted image of the two Boston guys and the old man from Southie with the baseball bat shilling for DirectTV.
The Brothers just let Wrath go. It wasn’t that they were afraid of getting hurt. Hell, Rhage stepped in and caught the first couch before it tore a hunk off of the archway’s molding. They just weren’t stupid.
Wrath - Beth × Overnight = Psycho-hose Beast
Better to let him wear himself out trashing the place. But, man, it was painful to watch—
John jumped to the side as an entire keg came flying at his head. Fortunately, Vishous was able to grab it before the thing hit the mosaic floor out in the foyer—which would have been a bitch to fix.
“We gotta keep him contained,” someone muttered.
“Amen,” somebody else replied. “He gets free in the house, and it’ll be shit even Fritz won’t know how to clean up.”
“I’ll take care of it.”
Everyone turned and stared at Lassiter. The fallen angel with the bad attitude and even worse taste in just about everything had appeared from out of nowhere—and was looking serious, for once.
“What the fuck is that?” V demanded as the angel put a thin gold pen up to his own mouth.
Turned out it wasn’t a fancy Bic. With a quick puff, Lassiter discharged a tiny dart across the room—and when it hit Wrath in the shoulder, the impact was as if the King had been struck by a bullet in the chest.
He went down hard, his body stiffening and then falling like an oak.
“What the fuck did you do!” V pulled a Wrath and went for the angel. But Lassiter got right back in the Brother’s face.
“He was going to hurt himself, the house, or one of you assholes! And don’t get your fucking panties in a wad. He’s just going to have a little nap—”
Wrath let out a soft snore.
Moving carefully, the Brotherhood closed in like they were checking out a grizzly and John went with them. As a circle formed around Sleeping Beauty, there was a lot of cursing under breaths.
“If you’ve killed him—”
Lassiter put his gold whacker away. “Does he look dead.”
No, actually, the poor bastard looked like he was at peace with himself and the world, his coloring strong, his body so relaxed his shitkickers were lolling to the sides.
“Dearest … Virgin … Scribe…”
Everybody looked to the archway. Fritz was standing there with a Louis Vuitton duffel in one hand and the expression of someone witnessing a car accident on his face.
John closed his eyes.
He hoped like hell Beth had gone into that house, locked the door like she promised, and laid low during the daytime.
One of the pair of them was down hard. No one needed a second.
TWENTY-ONE
After Fritz and John left, Beth finally stepped into her father’s house—and as she entered, time’s relentless forward movement reversed itself. In the work of a moment, minutes, hours, days … then weeks and months … disappeared.
Abruptly, she was who she had been before meeting Wrath—a twenty-something human woman living with her cat in a cramped studio apartment, trying to make a go in the world with nothing and no one behind her. Sure, she had loved parts of her job, but her boss, Dick the Prick, had been a leering, misogynistic nightmare. And yeah, she’d been paid okay, except there hadn’t been much left over after her rent—or chance of advancement at the Caldwell Courier Journal. Oh, and romance of any kind had been as fictional and far-off on the horizon as the Lone Ranger.
Not that she’d been interested in men, really. Or women, at all.
But then this one time, at band camp …
Shutting the door, she was careful to lock herself in. Fritz had a key, so whenever he arrived with her stuff he’d be able to get in—but no one else would.
As the silence in the house surrounded her, it felt like bars on a cage. How in the hell had she ended up here? Spending an entire day without Wrath? As early as the night before, at their place in NYC, a separation like this would have been unthinkable.