Lover Enshrined (9 page)

Hard to know what was more horrific: that it was there or that he hadn’t noticed.

Suddenly, the
lesser
’s pupils shot to the left. “Thank . . . fuck.”

Phury froze as a gun muzzle pressed against his left kidney and a fresh wave of baby powder shot into his nose.

Not more than five blocks to the east, in his private of fice at ZeroSum, Rehvenge, aka the Reverend, cursed. He hated the incontinent ones.
Hated
them.

The human man dangling in front of his desk had just pissed in his pants, the stain showing up as a dark blue circle at the crotch of his distressed Z Brands.

Looked like someone had nailed him in the hey-nanny-nannies with a wet sponge.

“Oh, for God’s sake.” Rehv shook his head at his private guard of Moors, the ones who were playing hanger to the piece of shit. Trez and iAm both sported the same disgusted expressions that he did.

Only saving grace, Rehv supposed, was that the guy’s pair of Doc Martens seemed to function okay as a pair of punch bowls. Nothing was dripping.

“What’d I do?” the guy squeaked, the pitch of his voice suggesting his balls were somewhere north of his wet boxers. Any higher and he could have been a contralto. “I didn’t do noth—”

Rehv cut the denial off. “Chrissy showed up with a busted lip and black-and-blues. Again.”

“You think I did that? Come on, the girl whores out for you. It could have been any—”

Trez raised an objection to the testimony, cranking the man’s hand into a ball and squeezing the forced fist like an orange.

As the defendant’s bark of pain trailed off to a whimper, Rehv idly picked up a sterling-silver envelope opener. The thing was shaped like a sword, and he tested the point with his forefinger, quickly licking off the dot of blood it left behind.

“When you applied for work here,” he said, “you gave an address of Thirteen-eleven Twenty-third Street. Which is Chrissy’s addy, too. You arrive and leave at the end of the night together.” As the guy popped open his piehole, Rehv held his hand up. “Yes, I’m aware that’s not dispositive. But you see that ring on your hand— Wait, why are you trying to put your arm behind your back? Trez, you mind helping him plant that palm of his on my real estate over here?”

As Rehv tapped the tip of the opener on his desk, Trez muscled the beefy human over like the guy weighed nothing more than a laundry bag. With absolutely no effort at all, he flattened the bastard’s hand out in front of Rehv and held it in place.

Rehv leaned forward and traced a Caldwell High School class ring with the opener. “Yeah, see, she’s got a funny mark on her cheek. When I first saw it, I wondered what it was. It’s this ring, isn’t it? You backhanded her, didn’t you. Caught her in her face with this.”

As the guy sputtered like a bass boat, Rehv ran another little circle around the blue stone of the ring, then took the razor-sharp point and stroked the man’s fingers one by one, from the bony knuckles on the hand to the flat nail beds at the ends.

The two biggest knuckles were bruised, the pale skin purple and swollen.

“Looks like you didn’t just backhand her,” Rehv murmured, still petting the man’s fingers with the opener.

“She asked for—”

Rehv’s fist pounded into his desk so hard, his multiline office phone did a jump and scramble, the receiver bouncing free of the cradle.

“Don’t you
dare
finish that sentence.” Rehv fought not to bare his fangs as they punched out into his mouth. “Or so help me God I will feed you your own balls right now.”

The ass-wipe went inanimate as a subtle
beep-beep-beep
replaced the phone’s dial tone. iAm, cool as always, calmly reached forward and replaced the receiver.

As a bead of sweat dripped off the human’s nose and landed on the back of his hand, Rehv smoothed out his anger.

“Right. Where were we before you almost got yourself castrated? Oh, yeah. Hands . . . we were talking about hands. Funny, I don’t know what we would do without two. I mean, you couldn’t drive a stick-shift car, for example. And you have a stick, don’t you? Yeah, I’ve seen that tripped-out Acura you tool around in. Nice car.”

Rehv laid his own hand down on the glossy wood, right next to the guy’s, and as he made comparisons, he pointed to the salient distinctions with the envelope opener.

“My hand’s bigger than yours in length . . . and width. Fingers are longer. My veins stand out more. You have a tattoo of . . . what is that at the base of your thumb? Some kind of . . . ah, the Chinese symbol for strength. Yeah, my tats are elsewhere. What else, now . . . your skin’s lighter. Damn, you white boys really need to think about tanning. You look like death without some UVs.”

As Rehv glanced up, he thought of the past, of his mother and her collections of bruises. It had taken him far, far too long to do right by her.

“You know the biggest diff between you and me?” he said. “See . . . my knuckles aren’t bruised from beating a woman.”

In a quick move, he drew the envelope opener up and slashed it down so hard the tip didn’t just go through flesh; it penetrated the teak of the desk.

The hand he stabbed was his own.

As the human screamed, Rehv didn’t feel a thing.

“Don’t you dare pass out, you fucking lightweight,” Rehv spat as the asshole’s eyes started to roll. “You’re going to watch this carefully so you remember my message.”

Rehv yanked the opener free of the desk by jacking up his palm so that it caught the scabbard and popped the blade out. Putting his hand up where the man could watch, he twisted the opener back and forth with grim precision, creating a portal in his skin and bones, widening the puncture into a little window. When he was finished, he withdrew the blade and put it carefully beside the phone.

As blood dripped down the inside of his sleeve and pooled at his elbow, he looked at the man through the hole. “I’ll be watching you. Everywhere. All the time. She turns up with another ‘bruise’ from ‘falling down in the shower’ and I’m going to mark you up like a calendar, feel me?”

The man jerked to the side and threw up down his pant leg.

Rehv cursed. He should have known something like that was coming. Fucking pansy-ass bully bastard.

And good thing this fool with the partially digested pasta dripping onto his piss-laden Doc Martens didn’t know what Rehv was really capable of. This human, like all the other humans in the club, had no idea the boss of ZeroSum was not just a vampire, but a
symphath
. Motherfucker would have shit himself, and what a mess that would have been. It was already wet-obvious he wasn’t sporting Depends.

“Your car is now mine,” Rehv said as he reached over to the phone and dialed housekeeping. “Consider it repayment plus interest and penalties on the cash you’ve been skimming from my bar. You’re fired for that, and for side-dealing H in my private zip code. PS, next time you try to crop off someone else’s turf? Don’t mark your packs with the same eagle you wear on your fucking jacket. Makes it too easy to figure out who the rogue dealer was. Oh, and like I said, that lady of mine had better not show up with so much as a chipped nail or I’ll be coming for a visit. Now, get the fuck out of my office and don’t ever come in this club again.”

The guy was so shell-shocked, he didn’t argue as he was frog-marched toward the door.

Rehv slammed his bloodied fist into the desk again to get everyone’s attention.

The Moors halted and so did the meat. The human was the only one who looked over his shoulder, and there was absolute terror in his eyes.

“One. Last. Thing.” Rehv smiled tightly, keeping his sharp canines to himself. “If Chrissy quits, I’m going to assume its because you forced her to, and I will come after you for my pecuniary losses.” Rehv leaned forward. “And bear in mind, I don’t need the money, but I’m a sadist, so I get a hard-on hurting people. Next time, I’ll be taking my piece out of your hide, not your wallet or what’s parked in your driveway. Keys? Trez?”

The Moor crammed his hand into the back pocket of the guy’s Z Brands and tossed over a key chain.

“Don’t worry about getting me the title,” Rehv said as he caught it. “Where your Ass-cura is ending up, we don’t need paperwork to transfer ownership. Bye for now.”

As the door shut behind the drama, Rehv glanced at the key ring. The tag hanging off of it read, SUNY NEW PALTZ.

“What?” he said without looking up.

Xhex’s voice was low, seeping out from the dark corner of the office, where she always watched fun and games go down. “If he does it one more time, I want to take care of it.”

Rehv fisted the keys and leaned back in his chair. Even if he said no, if Chrissy got cracked again his chief of security would probably roll out a beat-down anyway. Xhex was not like his other employees. Xhex wasn’t like anybody.

Well, that wasn’t entirely true. She was like him. Half
symphath
.

Or half sociopath, as was the case.

“You watch the girl,” he said to her. “If that sonofabitch gets busy with his class ring again, we’ll do a coin toss for who gets to fuck him up.”

“I watch all your girls.” Xhex walked over to the door, moving with smooth power. She was built like a male, tall and muscular, but she wasn’t coarse. In spite of her Annie Lennox haircut and her tight body, she wasn’t some bulky she-male bitchsicle in her standard uniform of black muscle shirt and black leathers. No, Xhex was lethal in the elegant way of a blade: quick, decisive, sleek.

And like all daggers she loved drawing blood.

“It’s the first Tuesday of the month,” she said as she put her hand on the door.

As if he didn’t know. “I’m leaving in a half hour.”

The door opened and closed, the sound of the club on the other side flaring, then getting cut off.

Rehv lifted his palm. The blood flow was already stopping, and the hole would be closed in another twenty minutes. By midnight nothing would show of the penetration.

He thought of the moment when he’d impaled himself. To feel nothing of your body was an odd kind of paralysis. Although you moved, you didn’t recognize the weight of the clothes on your back or whether your shoes were too tight or if the ground beneath your feet was uneven or slippery.

He missed his body, but either he took the dopamine and dealt with the side effects or he tangoed with his evil side. And that was one MMA fight he wasn’t sure he could win.

Rehv palmed his cane and carefully eased himself up out of his chair. As a result of his numbness, balance was a bitch and gravity wasn’t his friend, so the trip over to the panel on the wall took longer than it should have. When he got over to it, he placed his palm on a raised square and a door-sized panel slid back, all
Star Trek
and shit.

The black bedroom-and-bath suite that was revealed was one of his three crash pads, and for some reason it had the best shower. Probably because with only a couple hundred square feet, the whole place could go tropical just by running the damn thing.

And when you were cold all the time, that was a serious value-add.

Stripping off his clothes and starting the water, he did a quick shave while he waited for the spray to get nuclear hot. While he ran the razor down his cheeks, the male staring back at him was the same as always. Cropped mohawk. Amethyst eyes. Tattoos on his chest and abs. Long cock lying loose between his legs.

He thought about where he had to go tonight and his vision changed, a red haze gradually replacing all the colors of his sight. He wasn’t surprised. Violence had a way of coaxing his evil nature free, like food laid out to the starved, and he’d had only a sweet lick of the plate back in his office just now.

Under normal circumstances, it would be time for more dopamine. His chemical savior kept the worst of his
symphath
urges at bay, swapping them for hypothermia and impotence and numbness. The side effects sucked, but you had to do what you had to do, and lies required upkeep.

As well as performance.

His blackmailer demanded performance.

Palming his cock, like he could protect it from what it was going to have to do later tonight, he went over and tested the water. Even though steam was thickening the air until he felt like he was breathing cream, the shit wasn’t hot enough. It never was.

He rubbed his eyes with his free hand. The red in his vision persisted, but it was a good thing. Better to meet his blackmailer on like terms. Evil to evil.
Symphath
to
symphath
.

Rehv stepped under the spray, the blood that he’d spilled washing away. As he soaped up his skin, he felt dirty already, totally unclean. The feeling was just going to be worse by the time dawn came.

Yeah . . .he knew precisely why his working girls steamed up their locker room at the end of their shifts. Whores loved hot water. Soap and hot water. Sometimes that and a wash-cloth were all that got you through the night.

Chapter Six

John tracked cormia with his eyes as she raced and twirled over the grass, her white robing flowing behind her, part flag, part wing. He didn’t know that ing behind her, part flag, part wing. He didn’t know that Chosen were allowed to run around all willy-nilly in their bare feet, and had the feeling that she was breaking rules.

Well, good for her. And beautiful for him to watch. With her joy, she was in the night but not part of the darkness, a firefly, a brilliant dancing spot against the forest’s dense horizon.

Phury should see this, John thought.

His phone went off with a beep and he took it out of his pocket. The text from Qhuinn read:
can u gt fritz 2 t8 u 2 blays now? wr redy.
He hit his buddy back:
yup.

He put the BlackBerry away and wished like hell he could dematerialize. You were supposed to try it for the first time a couple weeks after your transition, and Blay and Qhuinn had had no problem with the up and disappearing. Him? It was like when he’d started training and was always slowest and weakest and worst. All you had to do was concentrate on where you wanted to go and will yourself there. At least in theory. Him? He’d just spent a lot of time with his eyes shut and his face twisted up like a shar-pei’s, trying to force his molecules across his room, staying exactly where he was. He’d heard it could sometimes take up to a year after your transition before you could pull it off, but maybe it was something he’d never be able to do.