Total pages in book: 149
Estimated words: 142050 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 710(@200wpm)___ 568(@250wpm)___ 474(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 142050 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 710(@200wpm)___ 568(@250wpm)___ 474(@300wpm)
The sixth floor was waiting for him, and yet he stayed where he was, hands on his hips, head down…
… as the specter of his past stalked around him in the drafts, having no mercy while he screamed in his head.
He’d been so good at leaving himself behind and getting lost in the present.
And a chance meeting with that blonde wasn’t going to change that track record. He was still a ghost for all intents and purposes, and he was going to damn well stay that way—
The main door opened behind him, and as the roar of the weather blasted into the lobby, all kinds of particles hit the air and spun up into tiny gray twisters.
Dev pivoted around grimly.
It was Bob, not the blonde. And that wasn’t much better news, was it.
CHAPTER SIX
Some fifteen blocks due east and a little south, Shuli was deep down an abandoned avenue and having a great fucking night. The cold had eaten under his clothes, his bad hip was acting up—and he was really fucking tired of playing babysitter for a heavily armed, cranky toddler. Oh, and he also had black lesser blood all over his face—which meant the oily shit was in his mouth.
Nothing like a little spoiled sushi whipped up with some old school Johnson & Johnson baby powder.
He wasn’t turning his head away, though, even to spit. And he certainly wasn’t moving either of his hands to wipe at anything.
The slayer he had pinned against a filthy brick wall was bleeding out. The lower part of its leg looked like the thing’d been in a mangler, and of course, the fact that L.W.—a.k.a. Wrath, son of Wrath, the great Blind King—had his fingers shoved into that open wound like he was looking for his car keys was having the opposite effect of plugging the leak. But that wasn’t even the worst of the undead’s injuries.
Still, the lesser remained dangerous, its shrewd, nasty eyes alert and looking for its best chance for retaliation.
“Where.”
As L.W. spat out the word, he was kneeling at the feet of the enemy as if he were about to propose. The position was not the norm for the hulking male, who was no more likely to bow down than settle down, but needs must and all that jazz.
On that note, the heir to the throne leaned in closer, his bicep thickening under his leather jacket, his upper lip peeling all the way off his fangs. In response, the lesser moaned in pain, the dead head lolling on its shoulders, the torso jerking and not getting far.
Thanks to Shuli.
He resecured the hand he had locked on the base of the slayer’s throat, but the other was doing just fine as it was: It was cranked around the hilt of the steel blade he’d impaled that abdominal cavity with—which was how he’d gotten his facial. Lot of sputtering involved when you disrupted the GI tract like that.
“Where, you fucker,” L.W. growled as he relented a little.
And then went right back into the meat of that leg.
As the second verse of suffering bubbled out of the lesser’s mouth, Shuli glanced around. The alley they were in was on the fringes of downtown. With abandoned apartment buildings on both sides, no CPD civilian monitoring systems in play, and empty streets all around, this was where the war between the Lessening Society and the vampires had played out for the last century.
Privacy mattered. It was the only thing both sides agreed on.
So they were not likely to get interrupted by anything other than backup for the piece of shit—and this was what Shuli was worried about.
“Not… telling…” The lesser drew in a ragged breath. “… shit.”
The former human still had the dark hair and hazel eyes he’d been born with, which meant his induction was fairly recent, i.e., within the last couple years. The longer the inductees were in the Lessening Society, the more they lost their natural pigmentation until they were pasty white and had OxiClean locks growing out of their heads. The discoloration thing was a good barometer for how advanced their training and technique was going to be, so yes, the bitch had been pretty easy to overtake. But it also meant the lesser wouldn’t have been let out alone.
Sooner rather than later, whatever it’d been partnered with was going to show up.
“Let’s move on.” Shuli glanced over to the left as his instincts prickled. “This is going nowhere—”
“Where’s your master.” L.W. outed a steel dagger. “You’re gonna fucking tell me—”
“Hold up,” Shuli hissed as he narrowed his eyes on the far corner of the decayed apartment building. “We’ve got fucking company.”
Overhead, cloud cover was choking out the moonlight, and it wasn’t like there were any outside lights to go by—or inside ones, either. But at least there was enough ambient bleed from the rest of the city that he could see well enough… to know that there was a shadow lurking at the end of the block.