Soul’s vehicle left the driveway, made a circle half on the verge, and tilted. Almost leisurely, its front end slanted down and slid off the raised drive, down into the trees. It hit two small trees that should have stopped it, but lack of friction and momentum sent it sideways, into more trees, crumpling the passenger door and sending showers of ice and snow from branches to cover the windshield and roof.
The car wasn’t stopped; it twisted and spun farther, down into the denser trees, wedging itself in, finally coming to rest facing back up the driveway, the headlights brightening the gray day. On the screen to the left, I could make out Eli following Bruiser through the snowfall. Bruiser moved like a vamp, fast and graceful. Even with a body full of vamp blood, Eli was less nimble than usual and a lot slower, falling behind in the half-mile sprint. Brute was nowhere to be seen.
Alex put something in my hand and I pulled on a communication unit by muscle memory. This one fitted my cat-situated and shaped ears. Eli had been making me custom-fitted headgear, in his copious spare time. My eyes got teary at the thought, but I never took them from his slow, jerky lope through the snow-crusted trees. I couldhear both men breathing deeply, but they communicated by hand signals, not speech. Bruiser moved right and down. Eli moved left and to higher ground. They disappeared from the screen, Alex working to find them again.
The two chasing cars came to a stop on the driveway. Headlights illuminated the falling snow. Two females leaped from the first car. Two men from the second car. They were wearing winter gear, holding weapons. Agile and fast. Well-fed blood-servants.
The women reached the undented car doors and wrenched them open. I expected Soul to leap away as an arcenciel. To attack as a tiger. Or even an African lion. Nothing happened. The bigger blood-servant reached into the car, holding something in her hand. Clear and iridescent.
She had a scale from a rainbow dragon. There was a smear on it. Blood? If so,whose?
Over the headset, I heard weapons fire and saw the two male blood-servants drop behind their opened car doors. Like that ever helped in real life.Not.Eli, however, was behind the trunk of a decent-sized tree, protected. Firing. Pinning the men down. Alex had found his brother’s vest camera and pinned it to the screen.
On the other side of the screen Bruiser appeared. He practically flew along the low-lying ridge. Firing.
The woman without the scale slid and fell. It didn’t look clumsy. It looked dead. The woman with the scale turned, her weapon tracking for the threat.
Bruiser leaped, weapon out front. Firing high.Cover fire.The woman didn’t fall or duck. She lifted the weapon to Bruiser. Still in the air, Bruiser fired. Collided with the woman. They rammed into the roof and side supports of the car.
Fell into the snow.
On the screen showing the chasing cars, the men ducked into their vehicle and backed down the driveway. Eli didn’t pursue them, but he did place three centered shots where the driver’s head should be and three more where the passenger’s head should be. The car kept moving away.
Eli eased from behind the tree and across snowdriftsto Bruiser. Together they zip-tied the hands of the two women with extrawide ties, which meant the woman I thought had been killed hadn’t been. Soul, wearing jeans and a sweater, and not her usual flowing garb, left the safety of her car but didn’t shift, even now. She looked cold. Miserable. Pale. Her silver hair was tangled. Something was wrong, but that would have to wait. We had prisoners. That meant we had info.
***
I left the TV room, the sotto voce argument between Big Evan and Molly, the louder discussion by the Everhart witch sisters about anchoring thehedge of thorns, and the puzzle the kids were playing. Walking around the last cottage toward the creek where Soul waited, I could make out the soft drone of voices and made a cone of my hands on the window to see inside the unfinished, unheated space.
The inner walls were two-by-fours and the outer walls were uninsulated, but it kept the wind out, which seemed good enough for Eli and Bruiser. They were talking to one prisoner,talkingbeing a euphemism for a combo of military interrogation techniques and mind bending. My business partner/brother was asking the questions; Bruiser was standing behind the human woman with his hands on her head, whispering, pushing with his magic. Onorio energies had a scent and a texture—hot and burning and prickly. There was no mistaking it. The only other time I’d been around when he did this, the stink of burning things had been so strong I hadn’t noticed the sensory components of his magic. His mind bending. That was my word for Bruiser’s reordering of her thoughts, brainwashing her the hard-fast way, to force her to become his. He hated it; I could see that from the tension in his shoulders, the stress on his face and tears in his eyes. But...
The same old excuse military commanders had used for eons still held true here. Lives were at stake and she was our enemy. She would have killed us or Soul in an instant. She had value only because of what she might give us. Which sucked.
The woman was talking. Baring her heart and soul. Ihad known my honeybunch could twist vamps to love him. That was the Onorio superpower. But I hadn’t known he could twist humans. From his body language, I was pretty sure he hadn’t known he could either. The smell was distantly familiar enough to make me wonder if the other Onorios I had known had tried that with me. I remembered a fight in a workout room once, where the scents had been vaguely similar to this. And right after that I had claimed I was Leo’s Enforcer.Dang, dang, dang.Had the other Onorios tried to tie me to Leo? Or worse, to Grégoire? Was this ability why Leo had been so mad at Bruiser, because he refused to use this talent on me?Crap.I hated to be so suspicious.
Eli caught my eye and nodded to Bruiser, hand gestures saying he’d be right back. He left the cottage, silent, officially my second, which meant half bodyguard, half champion. My friend and chosen brother. He was pulling on a cold coat when he closed the door, leaving Bruiser inside with his prey, alone.
“Is Bruiser okay without you?” I asked.
“Yeah. He’s good, in control. He doesn’t like what he is or what he can do, but he understands it’s necessary. Bruiser has access to Alex via comms. If something goes wrong, it will likely be magical in nature and nothing I can help with. But.” Eli looked to the tree line rather than at me. “George’s acting in opposition to his basic nature. He’s doing things by choice that he was forced to do when he was under Leo’s thrall. Things he did to you. Once again he’s doing things he isn’t proud of. He’s not going to be a happy man for a while after this.”
It was odd hearing Bruiser referred to by his real name, and I gave a belated truncated nod. “I didn’t ask him to. Or make him.”
“Course not. And that might be even worse. He’s doing it out of necessity, not under compulsion.”
“Yeah. I get that. I just don’t know what to do about it.”
“Be human for him a little more often.” Eli barked with quiet laughter. “Give him some of that sweet, sweet lovin’.”
“You’re an idiot.”
“But a good-looking, hunky, amazeballs idiot, right?”
I laughed, which he had surely intended.
“On the other hand,” he said, “there’s Shaddock.”
“What about him?”
