Lover Enshrined (40 page)

Trouble was, he knew what was inside that house. With the bodies of his parents and the
doggen
in it, he was staring at a mausoleum, and the idea of desecrating the place, of sending in a swarm of
lessers
to defile it, was too wrong.

“I want to get out of here.”

“We’ll come back then?”

“Just get me the fuck out of here.”

“Whatever you like.”

“Right answer.”

Moving like an old man, Lash walked back around to the front of the house and kept his eyes straight ahead, avoiding the windows he passed.

When he’d slaughtered the
doggen
in the kitchen, there had been a roasting chicken in the oven, the kind that had one of those little popup thingies that let you know when it was done. After he’d bled out the last of the servants, he’d stopped by the Viking stove and turned the light on. The chicken’s popper had gone off.

He’d opened the slim drawer to the left of the stove and taken out two white-and-red-striped oven mitts that had Williams-Sonoma tags on them. Turning the oven off, he’d slid the roasting pan from the heat and put it on the gas burners. Golden brown with corn-bread stuffing. Giblets were in the bottom, on their way to spicing up the gravy.

He’d turned off the potatoes that were boiling in water, too.

“Get me out of here,” he said as he slid into the car. He had to move his legs inside using his hands.

A moment later, the Focus’s sewing-machine engine turned over, and they started down the driveway. In the dense silence of the shit box, Lash took his father’s wallet out of his fresh cargo pants, flipped the thing open, and checked through the cards. ATM, Visa, Black AmEx ...

“Where you want to go?” Mr. D asked as they came to Route 22.

“I don’t know.”

Mr. D glanced over. “I kilt my cousin. When I was sixteen. He was a bastard, and I liked it while it was happening and it was the right thing to do. But afterward, I felt bad. So you got nothing to apologize for if you done feel like you wronged ’em.”

The idea that someone knew even a little about what he was going through made the whole thing seem less like a nightmare. “I feel . . . dead.”

“It’ll pass.”

“No . . . I’m never not going to feel like— Oh, fuck it, just shut up and drive, okay?”

Lash slipped the last card free as they took a right on Route 22. It was his father’s fake driver’s license. As his eyes hit the picture, his stomach rolled. “Pull over!”

The Focus shot onto the shoulder. As a massive SUV passed them, Lash opened the door and heaved some more black shit onto the ground.

He was lost. Utterly lost.

What the hell had he just done? Who was he?

“I know where to take you,” Mr. D said. “If y’all just shut the door, I can get you to where you’ll feel better.”

Whatever
, Lash thought. At this point, he would take suggestions from a bowl of Rice Krispies. “Anywhere . . . but here.”

The Focus pulled a U-ie and headed toward downtown. They’d gone a couple of miles when Lash glanced over at the little
lesser.
“Where we headed?”

“Place where you can catch your breath. Trust me.”

Lash looked out of the window and felt like a total pussy. Clearing his throat, he said, “Tell a squadron to go back there. And take everything that isn’t nailed down.”

“Yes, suh.”

As Z pulled the Escalade up to the Tudor mansion Lash and his parents lived in, Phury frowned and sprang his seat belt free.
What the hell?

The front door was wide-open to the summer night, the light from the chandelier in the front foyer casting a golden yellow glow over the stoop and the pair of topiaries standing at attention on either side of the entrance.

Okay, this was just wrong. You expected colonials with porch pots and gnomes in their flower beds to have their doors languishing open like that. Or maybe ranch houses with bikes in front of the garage and chalk drawings on the sidewalks. Or, hell, even trailers with busted windows and decrepit plastic chairs dotting their weed lawn.

But Tudor mansions on manicured grounds didn’t look right with their grand front doors wide open to the night. It was like a debutante flashing her bra thanks to a wardrobe malfunction.

Phury got out of the SUV and cursed. The smell of fresh blood and
lessers
was all too familiar.

Zsadist palmed one of his guns as he shut his door. “Shit.”

As they walked forward, it was pretty damn evident they were not going to be talking to Lash’s parents about what had happened to their son. Chances were good he and Z were going to be finding bodies.

“Call Butch,” Zsadist said. “This is a crime scene.”

Phury already had his phone in his hand and was dialing. “I’m on it.” When the brother answered, he said, “We need backup here, stat. There’s been an infiltration.”

Before the pair of them walked into the house, they paused to check out the door. The lock hadn’t been busted open, and the security system wasn’t blaring.

Made no sense. If a slayer had come to the door and rung the bell, he wouldn’t have been let in by a
doggen
. No way. So the
lessers
must have broken in by some other route and left through the front door.

And sure as shit they’d been busy. There was a path of blood on the grand Oriental rug in the marble foyer—and it wasn’t made up of drops; it was like someone had used a paint roller with the shit.

The red streak ran between the study and the dining room.

Z went left toward the study. Phury pulled a rightie and went into the dining—

“I found the bodies,” he said gruffly.

He knew when Z saw what he was looking at, because the brother growled, “Holy motherfucker.”

Lash’s slaughtered parents were sitting upright in chairs at the far end of the table, their shoulders tied back so they’d stay upright. Blood had leaked from stab wounds in their chests and necks, pooling on the glossy floor at their feet.

Candles were lit. Wine was poured. On the table between the bodies was a beautiful roasted chicken, so fresh from the oven you could smell the meat over the stench of blood.

The bodies of two
doggen
were seated in chairs to the left and the right of the sideboard, the dead to serve the dead.

Phury shook his head. “How much you want to bet there are no other bodies in the house. Or they’d be lined up here as well.”

The fine clothes of Lash’s parents had been carefully straightened, his mother’s three strands of pearls lying as they should, his father’s tie and jacket all arranged. Their hair was a mess and their wounds were Rob Zombie raw, but their bloodstained clothes were perfect. They were like two morbid Kewpie dolls.

Z pounded his fist into the wall. “Sick fucking bastards . . . those fucking
lessers
are ill.”

“For real.”

“Let’s go through the rest of the place.”

They checked the library and the music room and found nothing. The butler’s pantry was untouched. The kitchen showed evidence of a struggle consistent with two killings, but that was all—there was no sign of where the break-in had occurred.

The second floor was clean, the lovely bedrooms right out of
House Beautiful
with their toile drapes and their antiques and their luxurious duvets. On the third floor, there was a suite worthy of a king that, going by the textbooks on guns and martial-arts fighting, as well as the computer shit and the stereo system, had been Lash’s crib. It was neat as a pin.

In the whole house, save for where the killings had been committed, nothing was disturbed. Nothing was stolen.

They went back downstairs, and Zsadist quickly examined the bodies while Phury ran a check on the security system’s master board out by the garage.

When he was finished, he went back to his twin. “I hacked into the alarms. Nothing was triggered or circumvented either through a code or a power outage.”

“Wallet’s not on the male,” Z said, “but the guy’s Ebel is still on his wrist. Female has her diamond on her finger and a pair of dime-sized flashers in her earlobes.”

Phury put his hands on his hips and shook his head. “Two infiltrations, here and at the clinic. Both with no looting.”

“At least we know how they found this place. I mean, shit, Lash was abducted and tortured until he talked. Only way. He wouldn’t have had ID on him when he was taken from the clinic, so the addy had to have come from his own mouth.”

Phury looked around at all the art on the walls. “Something ’s just not right here. Normally they’d be looting.”

“But assuming they took the father’s wallet, the real assets are no doubt in the bank. If they can get access to those accounts, it would be a cleaner way to rob.”

“But why leave all this shit?”

“Where are you?” Rhage’s voice echoed through the foyer.

“In here,” Z called out.

“We have to let the other families in the
glymera
know,” Phury said. “If Lash has given up his own address, God only knows what else was peeled out of him. This could be a leak of unprecedented implications.”

Butch and Rhage walked into the room and the cop shook his head. “Shit, this takes me right back to Homicide.”

“Man . . .” Hollywood sighed.

“Do we know how they got in?” the cop asked, walking around the table.

“No, but let’s go through the house again,” Phury said. “I just can’t believe they walked right through the front door.”

When the four of them got upstairs to Lash’s room, they were all shaking their heads.

Phury looked around the room, his brain churning. “We’ve got to get word out.”

“Well, look at this,” Z murmured, nodding to a window.

Down at the foot of the driveway, a car turned in. Then another. Then a third.

“There’s your looters,” the brother said.

“Fuckers,” Rhage bit out with a grim smile. “But at least they have good timing—I need to work off dinner.”

“And it’d be so damn rude not to greet them at the door,” Butch muttered.

Instinctively, Phury reached to open his coat, but then remembered there were no guns or daggers to get to.

There was a split second of awkwardness, during which no one would look at him, so he said, “I’ll go back to the compound and contact the other families in the
glymera
. I’ll also let Wrath know what’s doing.”

The three nodded and jogged for the stairs.

As they pounded down to welcome-wagon the
lessers
, Phury took one last look around the bedroom, thinking that he wanted to be with the others, killing the sons of bitches who had done this.

The wizard faced off at him in his mind.
They won’t fight with you anymore because they can’t trust you. Soldiers don’t want to be backed up by someone they have no faith in.

Face it, mate, you’re finished on this side. The question is, how long until you ruin it with the Chosen?

Just as Phury was about to dematerialize, he frowned.

Across the way, on the dresser, there was a smudge of something on one of the brass drawer pulls.

He went over for a closer look. Dark brown . . . it was dried blood.

When he opened the drawer, there were bloody finger-prints on the objects inside: the Jacob & Co. iced-out watch Lash had worn before his transition had smudges on it, and so did a diamond chain and a heavy stud earring. Something had obviously been taken out of the little drawer, but why would a
lesser
leave such expensive things behind? It was hard to imagine what would be worth more than all those diamonds and still fit in a small space.

Phury glanced around at the Sony VAIO laptop and the iPod . . . and the dozen other drawers in the room that were divvied up between the desk and the bureau and the bedside tables. All of them were closed tight.

“You have to leave.”

Phury turned around. Z was standing in the doorway, gun drawn.

“Get the fuck out of here, Phury. You’re not armed.”

“I could be.” He glanced over at the desk where a couple of knives lay on the textbooks. “In a heartbeat.”

“Go.” Z bared his fangs. “You’re not helping here.”

The first sounds of the fighting drifted up the staircase in a series of grunts and barked curses.

As his twin took off to defend the race, Phury watched Z go. Then he dematerialized from Lash’s bedroom, bound for the desk in the training center’s office.

Chapter Thirty

"You need to rest,” Cormia said as Bella yawned again.

Fritz had just come in and taken away their First Meal dishes. Bella had had steak and mashed potatoes and mint-chocolate -chip ice cream. Cormia had had the potatoes . . . and some of the ice cream.

And she’d thought the M&M’s had been delightful?

Bella snuggled more deeply into her pillows. “You know, I think you’re right. I am tired. Maybe we can finish up the marathon later tonight?”

“Sounds lovely.” Cormia slid off the bed. “Do you need anything?”

“No.” Bella’s eyes closed. “Hey, before you go. What are those candles made of? They are incredibly soothing.”

The female seemed awfully pale against her white lace pillowcase. “They’re made of sacred things from the other side. Sacred, healing things. Herbs and flowers mixed with a binding made with water from the Scribe Virgin’s fountain.”

“I knew they were special.”

“I’m not going to be far,” Cormia blurted.

“Which is good.”

As Cormia stepped out of the room, she was careful to shut the door quietly.

“Madam?”

She looked behind her. "Fritz? I thought you’d left with the tray.”

“I did.” He lifted the bouquet he was holding. “I needed to deliver these.”

“What lovely flowers.”

“They are for the second-floor sitting room.” He plucked out a lavender rose and offered it forward. “For you, mistress.”

“Why, thank you.” She took the delicate petals to her nose. “Oh, how lovely.”

Cormia jumped as something brushed her leg.

Bending down, she ran her hand over the black cat’s silky, resilient back. “Why, hello, Boo.”