Almost too cooperative, well-trained red-haired William, despite the resulting awkwardness of prime tactical terrain removed from both combatants’ use.
Maximus’s new capacity for emotion was both an advantage and its opposite. Possessive instincts rose in a blinding crimson wave, threatening to throw him from mistform, send him plunging into open violence, tearing through any who woulddareapproach his prize. Set against the urge was cold experience born of battles uselessly won; it was one thing to conquer, quite another matter to hold what was gained.
She was safe enough, though thoroughly sieged. If others knew of or suspected a leman’s existence—the hotel had been a calculated, unavoidable risk—the worst thing he could do was verify her current location.
He had intended to visit his original target this evening, ascertaining whether William had managed to erase Esmond the Varangian. Now paying that particular social call was the only proper move, for either way it would draw attention away from this seemingly abandoned villa.
So long as he remained undetected while leaving and returning, that was. There was no way to smile in mistform, but the sensation of baring his true teeth was still marked.
Maximus drifted free of encirclement; orange citylight bounced from thickening clouds moving from the east and a seashore within a few hours’ steady movement; both sky and ground were seething with unease. Sanguinant eyes could easily pierce a veiled sky to find the river of stars and a waxing, almost-full moon smiling beneficently behind the mask; he wondered what Leila would think of the view.
So much to show her, to anticipate her wonder. A piercing pleasure, even as he realized the sharp edge of his perceptions were already slightly dulled. Calcification would return swiftly; he could not be away for long.
Best to get started, then.
A wholly natural prickling discomfort intensified as Maximus slipped through outlying urban areas, working towards the city’s core and avoiding steadily thickening bands of unfriendly attention, occasionally hearing a rumble of thunder many miles distant.
No rain tonight, he decided.But soon.And finally, he reached what he suspected was the first battlefield of the evening.
The street where he had first sighted his ambrosial nymph was alive with mortal merrymakers, even more crowded than it had been that memorable eve. Steady heart-thumps of music throbbed through the clubs, taverns with live shows adding layers to cacophony, a bolus of vehicle traffic partially blocked yet forcing its way through orange cones and fluttering yellow tape, a great beast’s digestion sluggishly performing its duty. Perhaps the mortal authorities were still attempting to discern what precisely had happened, though no few were the modern cities where nocturnal—or even daylight—gunfire was hardly a matter for notice or comment.
More tellingly, the entirety of downtown was under heavy sanguinant watch. Shadows flickered upon rooftops, in alleys, and the sounds of mortal celebration or intoxication held a hard, almost-bitter edge.
Maximus ignored the ring of fidgeting fledglings—so much heedless, intoxicated prey milling about was an invitation to glut, no matter how well-fed the predator. He paused only to mark the locations of scattered elders placed to keep rein upon the appetites of youth, and the dogsbodies standing guard at theBlue Moon Spot’s open doors felt only a brief piercing chill as he slipped past.
The dogs reeked of newness, a scant mouthful of their Master’s ichor still working outward through mortal tissues to grant strength, speed, a modicum of greater awareness. Nothing compared to a leman’s natural sensitivity, of course; the memory of her scent, held close to his skin in order to not alert demimonde passers-by, was at once a balm and deadly distraction.
He had not expected ossification to return quite so quickly once he stepped from her charmed circle. An elegant, object lesson; the thrall was already waking inside his bones as well, the beast in him dissatisfied with her absence, craving another blinding, wonderful possession.
Soon,he promised.When these enemies are dead.
Two floors brimful of carousing children, the music an assault no less than the flashing lights, constant pressure of warm damp mortal flesh, the reek of alcohol, stimulants, adrenaline, sex.
Above all, blood. Their pulses rising and falling in surf-roar waves, their breath full of information on health and lifestyle choices, their bright gazes roving, their chatter yelled over pounding electronic bass. It would have been agonizing temptation save for his leman’s taste upon his tongue, the burning addiction proofing him against any other vintage.
He could easily drink without the kill now, another hard-won skill rendered effortless as breathing by the simple fact of her existence. All other blood, even that of fellow predators, had become mere water. Nutritious, certainly, and of value both for his own needs as well as carrying nourishment back to his prize.
But there was no mounting, tempting urge to gorge, to bathe in hot red saltflood. Only the icy knowledge that every sanguinant in this building—and there were quite a few uponthe third floor—must be erased before dawn, along with several combat groups in other key areas of the greater urbs.
His battle tonight was both feint and winnowing.
Any survivors of Esmond’s line or allegiance must think Antinous had struck in order to widen his territory; if Father sent others in William’s wake, they must assume Nemesis or one of his lieutenants simply carrying out the work. Neither could suspect a leman, and if they already had intimations of her existence tonight must introduce uncertainty of the prospect.
The more they doubted her existence, the better.
A first breath of doom was visited upon two elders standing guard in opposite, darkened corners of the ground floor. The male was a stocky fellow with dark hair cut in a thick leonine ruff, the female slight, thin-lipped, and dun-haired, bearing the marks of malnutrition in a mortal childhood about her eyes and mouth despite the burnish of the Gift. Praetorians both, since this was a post of high dignified responsibility, requiring of great control; he paid them the honor of swift painless passage. First the woman, whose dark gaze stuttered upward in disbelief the moment he appeared; she managed a claw-swipe which almost touched his sweater before his right hand pierced her abdomen, thrust upward, grasped the cardiac muscle, and gave a swift squeeze. His left, claw-freighted, sheared through her neck, snapping reinforced bone, and her tissues were dry enough the fatal burst of glimmering dust went unremarked in the dimness.
At least, unnoticed by the mortals. But Nemesis was already away, using every erg of whispering speed to blink across the dancefloor in a single leap, treating the male to a swift, stunning head-blow, skull rebounding against a heavily painted brick wall glistening with the condensation of mortal breath and outside humidity.
That was merely a love-tap. Maximus’s claws pierced a sanguinant throat on both sides, every substance save bonecollapsing. When his palm met reinforced cervical spine it was a simple matter to close his hand and yank. Usually the move was simply one more moment in combat, though tricky and technically difficult.
However, a burst of muffled satisfaction at victory slid through him. Emotion was a luxurious gift, even with its distraction-drawback riding tandem.
The male had fed more recently; wet rot sloughed through his tissues before being eaten by glisterdust. None of the mortals noticed, only a few rubbing at their eyes as the building’s HVAC systems blew grit across the floor, struggling to push fresh oxygen over packed, gasping dancers. Nemesis passed between mortals crowding the stairways to the second level, and the dance-space here was packed with stomping, stamping, thrashing celebrants, nearly all dressed in black, a different music vying with the din from below.
More sanguinant upon this level as well, and the light was dimmer though steady strobe-flashes gave the appearance of stuttering movement, some bulbs emitting the spectrum which granted certain substances—cloth or paint—a certain glow to mortal eyes. Another half-dozen of his own kind died nearly unaware, showers of grit timed to burst between stammering fluorescence.
A clot of dogsbodies and elders lingered at the foot of a second stairwell, its open maw crossed by a line of a red velvet rope. Nemesis realized he was grinning, true teeth bared and the battle-roar beginning in his chest, for he recognized both of Esmond’s senior advisors in conference among the clearly worried soldiers. Jumal the Red, with his bare-shaved head glinting under stinging light, and Raleigh the Golden in what was her accustomed garment of leather strips clinging to poreless, stone-hard skin still bearing the color of a mortal life spent under the kiss of desert sun.
