The Beast

TWENTY-TWO

Usually Rhage had something in his mouth during meetings with the King. Tootsie Pops were his favorite, but in a pinch, he’d rock a pack of Starburst, or maybe a thing of Chips Ahoy!—the old-school ones in the blue bag, crunchy, not chewy and no nuts. His stomach wasn’t up to handling anything like that, though—and not because of the beast shit.

But at least his vision was even better than it had been after V had hit him.

As the shutters came down for the day, he took up res in the corner by the double doors while his brothers settled in their usual places around the room: Butch and V on one of the spindly French sofas, the pair of them settling into nearly identical, ankle-over-knee poses; Z against the wall in the best defensible position with Phury right next to him; John, Blay and Qhuinn grouped together by the fire. Rehvenge, meanwhile, was in front of Wrath’s ornate desk, the leader of the symphaths being one of the King’s closest advisers, and Tohr was sitting at Wrath’s dagger hand due to his position as head of the Brotherhood, a first lieutenant in all things.

Lassiter wasn’t around, and Rhage guessed the fallen angel was watching T.V. somewhere. And Payne, who had taken to attending these sorts of things? She was probably watching Xcor.

’Cuz God knew the female could handle herself, and any male on the planet.

As always, Wrath was the focal point of it all, sitting in the ornate throne his father had used, the Brother’s black wraparound sunglasses surveying the room even though he was blind, his hand resting on the boxy head of his golden retriever service dog.

Qhuinn was doing the talking this morning, however.

“—have two people down there getting care, Layla and my brother. Neither of them is in any shape to defend themselves if he gets free, and Doc Jane, Manny and Ehlena are medical people, not fighters.”

“With all due respect, Xcor’s seriously guarded,” Butch said. “Twenty-four-seven.”

“If Marissa were carrying your kid, would that be good enough?”

The cop opened his mouth. Then shut it and nodded. “Yeah. Too right.”

Qhuinn crossed his arms over his chest. “Personally, I don’t give a fuck if he’s in a Hannibal Lecter, I don’t want him anywhere near that clinic.”

As the Brother went quiet, Wrath asked, “What’s Xcor’s condition now?”

Vishous stroked his goatee. “Still in a coma. Vital signs aren’t strong, but they’re not slipping. No movement on his right side. I’m thinking stroke.”

“But you don’t know for sure?”

“Not without dragging his ass to Havers’s for a CAT scan. But I don’t want to move him across town just to figure out what I’m pretty damn confident of already—and yes, both Jane and Manny agree with my conclusion.”

“Any idea how long the coma’s liable to last?”

“Nope. He could be waking up now. Or be under for a month. Or go the persistent vegetative state route. There’s really no telling. And if he does wake up? Depending on the severity of the stroke, he could be cognitively impaired. Physically fucked. Or completely normal. Or somewhere in between the extremes.”

“Goddamn it,” Tohr muttered.

Wrath leaned to the side and picked George up off the ground, resettling the dog in his lap. As a cloud of blond fur tufted into the air, the King picked a piece out of his mouth before speaking.

“Qhuinn’s right. We can’t keep him there, especially if the new trainees are coming in. For one thing, you assholes are going to need the gun range, but more to the point, we sure as shit don’t want any of those little fuckers waking up dead at the end of class because our door prize woke up and got out of its cage. The question is, where do we take him? I want him close enough so we can have immediate back-up, but we gotta get him off this property.”

There was a bunch of discussion, not all of which Rhage tracked. The truth was, as critical as the issue about Xcor was, the biggest part of his brain was back in that bathroom with his Mary as he deliberately reminded himself how good she felt under him, how amazing her moans were, how much he loved being inside of her.

Nothing was lost between them, or gone from their sex life, if they couldn’t reproduce. Nothing.

Really.

“—of Bastards have to be searching all over downtown,” somebody said. “Looking for a body or a burn mark.”

Vishous cut in. “I have two cell phones that I took off of him. One had a garden-variety password and I got into it no problem—there was nothing except details about drug deals and we all know that’s over with. The other unit went dead on me as soon as I cracked its code, and I’m guessing that was Xcor’s—clearly, the Bastards have some rudimentary security precautions in place.”

“Will you be able to get the cell working again?” Wrath asked.

“Depends on how bad the fry job is and I still need to make that assessment. I may be able to extract some data, but it could be a while.”

“The Band of Bastards will not rest until they find Xcor,” someone muttered.

Tohr’s voice was a growl. “So let me give them his body.”

“Not yet, my brother.” Wrath glanced over at the guy. “And you know that.”

“But if he’s brain-dead, there’s nothing to interrogate—”

Wrath talked over the male. “I want everyone downtown for the next three nights. Xcor’s disappearance will flush the Bastards out of hiding. We got one of them. I want them all.”

“We also better keep sweeping for slayers,” somebody muttered. “Just because we won last night doesn’t mean the war’s over.”

“The Omega will make more,” Wrath agreed. “That’s for shit sure.”

Butch spoke up. “When it comes to the lessers, though . . . I think we’re focusing on the symptom, not the disease. We need to take the Omega out. I mean, that’s the Dhestroyer prophecy, right? I’m supposed to be the one who does it, but I couldn’t have absorbed all those down-and-outers at the campus. No fucking way.”

V gave his BFFL’s shoulder a squeeze. “You do enough.”

“Obviously not—how long’s it been now? And their numbers are lower, but there was still a shitload coming after us on that campus.”

“My mother is so goddamn useless,” V bitched as he lit up. “We’ve been fighting the Lessening Society for centuries and centuries. Even with the prophecy, I’ve seen no indication that we can eradicate them—”

“I know where we can put Xcor,” Rhage cut in.

As all the eyes in the room focused on him, he shrugged. “Don’t freak out. But the solution is clear.”

Down in the training center, Layla recognized the feeling that had plagued her since the night before.

As she sat on the edge of her hospital bed, she knew exactly what the ringing sense of destination meant, the burn in the center of her chest, the nagging, unrelenting itch.

It just made no sense.

So she had to be misinterpreting things. Maybe this was yet another pregnancy symptom and it just felt like the other thing?

Well, one way or the other, she was going to find out, she thought as she shifted off the mattress and shuffled over to the door. Her most recent twelve-hour wait had passed so it was time to stretch her legs once again—and with no Brothers babysitting her and Qhuinn and Blay in a meeting, she was going to use her relative freedom to the fullest.

Stepping into the corridor, she looked around. There was nobody outside her room. No sounds from the clinic. And the gym and weight room way down the hall both seemed quiet as well.

Ostensibly, there was no one around at all. And that went for Brothers, servants and medical staff. So really . . . how was it possible that she was sensing Xcor’s presence down here?

That Bastard couldn’t possibly be in the Brotherhood compound. He was the enemy, for godsakes—which meant if he had infiltrated the property, there would be an attack going on, all hell breaking loose, the Brothers at arms.

Instead? A whole lot of nada, as Qhuinn would have said.

This had to be some pregnancy-related strangeness—

No, she thought. He was here. She sensed him in her own blood—which was what happened if you fed someone: an echo of yourself was in them and it was kind of like catching your reflection in a mirror across a distance.

You couldn’t mistake it for something else. Any more than you wouldn’t recognize your own image.

Picking up the front of her Lanz nightgown—out of habit, rather than necessity because of her big belly—she waddled over the bare floor of the corridor in her slippers, going by the newly constructed ladies’ bathroom, the males’ locker room, the weight room.

Nothing particularly registered in any of them. But when she got past the gym to the entrance of the pool, she stopped.

Straight ahead. It felt as though he were straight ahead—

“Hey, girl, what are you doing?”

Layla wheeled around. “Qhuinn, hello.”

The sire of her young strode up to her, his eyes roaming around her face, her belly. “Are you okay? What are you doing all the way back here?”

“I just . . . it’s my stroll time.”

“Well, you don’t need to be over here.” Qhuinn took her by the elbow, steered her around and led her away. “In fact, maybe we should move you back to the mansion for a little while.”

“What—why?”

“It’s homier there.”

In less than a minute, she was back at the door to her room. And she wasn’t stupid. He’d been the biggest supporter of her staying down here in the clinic, because it was better for her and the young, safer. Now he was changing his mind?

Heart pounding, head spinning, she knew damn well her instincts weren’t lying. Xcor was here somewhere in the training center. Had they captured him in the field? Had he been injured and they’d brought him in as they had that soldier of his?

Qhuinn leaned forward to open her door. “Anyway, I’ll just talk to Doc Jane about—”

“Talk to me about what?”

“Speak of the devil,” Qhuinn said smoothly as he turned around.

V’s mate was coming out of the utility room, a stack of surgical scrubs in her arms. “Look, don’t tell Fritz about this, ’kay? But doing laundry clears my head, and sometimes you just need to chill.”

Qhuinn smiled for a split second. “I actually came down to see you. I was thinking that Layla might enjoy a visit back to her regular room.”

Doc Jane frowned. “At the house?”

“It’s so damned clinical down here.”

“Ah, yeah, that’s the point, Qhuinn.” Doc Jane shifted her load, but not her forest green stare. “I know that we’ve had quite a period of smooth sailing with the pregnancy, and I hope this trend continues. But we can’t take any chances, and every night that passes, we’re getting closer, not further away, to the big moment—”

“Just for the next twenty-four hours.”

Layla looked back and forth between the pair of them. And felt like a lying hypocrite as she said, “I’d feel safer here.”

“How long have you been on your feet?” Doc Jane asked.

“I just walked down the hall toward the gym—”

“We can move some equipment to the house,” Qhuinn suggested. “You know, monitoring stuff. That kind of thing. Besides, it won’t be for long.”

Doc Jane shook her head like she couldn’t believe she’d heard him correctly. “An OR? You think we can move an OR up there? I don’t mean to be alarmist—but she’s carrying twins, Qhuinn. Twins.”

“I know.” Qhuinn’s mismatched eyes locked on the doctor’s. “I’m fully aware of what is at stake. And so are you.”

Doc Jane opened her mouth. Then hesitated. “Listen, I’m going to take these to my office. Meet me there, okay?”

As the doctor took off, Layla stared at Qhuinn. “Who else is down here.”

Qhuinn put his hand on her shoulder. “No one, why do you ask?”

“Please. Just tell me.’”

“It’s nothing. I don’t know what she’s talking about. Let’s get you settled.”

“You don’t have to protect me.”

Those dark brows got so tight, he wasn’t frowning; he was glaring. “Really. Really?”

Layla exhaled and put her hand on her belly. “I’m sorry.”

“Shit, no, don’t apologize.” He pushed his hair back, and for the first time, she got a good look at the black bags under his eyes. “Everyone is . . . you know, it’s the war. It’s so fucking stressful.”

Putting his arm around her shoulders, he led her into her room and back to the bed where he set her down as if she were made of porcelain.

“I’ll come check on you at the end of my—later. Ah, I’ll be back later.” He smiled in a way that did not reach his eyes. “Let me know if you need anything, okay?”

As the familiar waves of guilt and fear crested over her, Layla couldn’t say anything, her jaw literally locking place and her lips squeezing tight. But what could she do? If she told him that she knew Xcor was here . . .

Well, he’d want to know how. And it would be impossible to lie to him and tell him that it was from her having fed the Bastard all those months before . . . back when she’d been duped by Xcor’s soldier into going out to that meadow to take care of what she had assumed was a civilian fighter working with the Brotherhood. She had already confessed her unintentional sin to the King; what she hadn’t told anyone was that she had gone on to meet Xcor many times after that—ostensibly to keep him from attacking the compound when he’d discovered its location.

In truth, it was because she had fallen in love with him.

And the fact that the visits had ended? The reality that Xcor himself had been the one to terminate the meetings? That hardly mattered.

The truth was that she had craved that time with him. And that was her treason, regardless of how much she had tried to paint herself as a victim.

“Layla?”

With a curse, she shook herself back into focus. “I’m sorry? What?”

“Are you all right?”

“No. I mean—yes, yes, I am.” She put her hands on the small of her back and stretched. “I’m just tired. It’s the pregnancy. But everything’s fine.”

Qhuinn stared at her for a long moment, his mismatched eyes searching her face. “Will you call me? Even if you’re just . . . you know, going stir crazy?”

“I will. I promise.”

As the door closed behind him, she knew what he was going to do. He was going to go talk to the other Brothers—if he hadn’t already done so. And soon, very soon, she was going to find that she no longer sensed Xcor’s presence.

Either because she was relocated or he was.

Putting her head in her hands, she tried to breathe and found that it was impossible. Her throat was tight, her ribs were like iron bars, her lungs were burning. She just kept telling herself that getting upset was not going to help things. It certainly wasn’t going to be good for her or the pregnancy.

Besides, she wasn’t meeting Xcor anymore.

Because that was what happened when you called a male on his feelings. Or at least, a male like him.

And he hadn’t attacked the compound—

Unless that was how he’d been captured? Oh, dearest Virgin Scribe, had he brought his soldiers here with arms? Had that been the chaos of the evening before?

Her mind promptly went into a tailspin, her thoughts merging together in patterns that made no sense thanks to too much velocity, and not enough proper reasoning.

Sometime later, she dropped her arms, and glanced across at the bathroom door. It was a hundred miles away. But she did have to pee, and maybe some cold water on her face would help her calm down.

Shifting her legs off the mattress, she steadied herself on her feet and—

Wetness. There was . . . an abrupt wetness between her thighs.

Her hands went to the front of her nightgown as she looked down.

And screamed.