"The bridge. We arrived" - Ehric motioned to his twin, who stood silent and watchful beside him - "on time with the product. About five minutes later, the three of them showed up."
"As lessers."
"They had the money. They were ready to make the transaction."
Assail whipped his head around. "They didn't come to attack you?"
"No, but we didn't figure that out until it was too late." Ehric shrugged. "They were slayers who came out of nowhere. We didn't know how many of them there were, and we were not taking any chances. It wasn't until we searched the bodies, and found the correct amount of money, that we realized they'd just come to do the deal."
Lessers in the trade? This was a new one. "Did you stab the bodies?"
"We took the heads and hid what was left. The money was in a backpack on that one on the left, and naturally, we brought the cash home."
"Phones?"
"Got them."
Assail started to slide a cigar out, but then didn't want to waste the taste. Reclosing the bags, he rose up from the carnage. "You are certain they were not aggressive?"
"They were ill-equipped to defend themselves."
"Being badly armed does not mean they weren't there to kill you."
"Why bring the money?"
"They could have been dealing elsewhere."
"As I said, it was in the correct amount and not one penny more."
Abruptly, Assail motioned for them all to proceed into the house, and oh, the relief that came with clean air. With the screens slowly descending over all the glass, and the coming dawn getting shut out, he went to the wine bar, retrieved a double magnum of Bouchard Pere et Fils, Montrachet, 2006 and popped the cork.
"Care to join me?"
"But of course."
At the circular table in the kitchen, he sat down with three glasses and the bottle. Pouring the trio, he shared the chardonnay with his two associates.
He didn't offer the cousins any of his Cubans. Too valuable.
Fortunately, cigarettes made an appearance and then they all sat together, smoking and taking hits of bliss off the knife edge of his Baccarat.
"No aggression from those slayers," he murmured, leaning his head back and puffing upward, the blue smoke rising above his head.
"And the exact amount."
After a long moment, he returned his eyes to level. "Is it possible the Lessening Society is looking to get into my business?"
Xcor sat in candlelight, alone.
The warehouse was quiet, his soldiers yet to come home, no humans or Shadows or anything walking above him. The air was cold; same with the concrete beneath him. Darkness was all around, except for the shallow pool of golden illumination he sat at the outer rim of.
Some thought in the back of his mind pointed out that it was getting dangerously close to dawn. There was something else, too, something he should have remembered.
But there was no chance of anything getting through his haze.
With his eyes focused on the single flame before him, he replayed the night over and over again.
To say that he had found the Brotherhood's location was mayhap a stretch of the truth - but not a total fallacy. He'd been following that Mercedes out into the countryside incremental mile by incremental mile, with no real plan of what he could or should do when it stopped...when from out of nowhere, the signal of his blood in his Chosen's body had not just been lost, but wildly redirected - sure as a ball thrown against a wall sharply changed its trajectory.
Confused, he had scrambled about, dematerializing this way, that way, up and back - as all the while, a strange feeling of dread came over him, like his skin was an antenna for danger and it was warning of imminent harm. Backing off, he had found himself at the base of a mountain, the contours of which registered, even in the bright, clear moonlight, as fuzzy, indistinct, unclear.
This had to be where they stayed.
Mayhap up at the top. Mayhap down the far side.
There was no other explanation - after all, the Brotherhood lived with the king to protect him...so undoubtedly, they would take precautions the likes of which no one else would, and perhaps have at their disposal technologies as well as mystical provisions that were otherwise unavailable.
Frantic, he had circled the vicinity, going around the base of that mountain a number of times, sensing nothing but the refraction of her signal and that strange dread. His ultimate conclusion was that she had to be somewhere in that vast, thick acreage: He would have sensed her traveling beyond it, in any direction, if she had come out on another side, and it seemed reasonable to assume that if she had gone to her sacred temple, upon some alternate plane of existence, or - Fates forbid - died, the resonant echoing of himself would have disappeared.
His Chosen was there somewhere.
Returning to the warehouse, to the present, to where he was now, Xcor rubbed his palms back and forth slowly, the rasping of the calluses rising up into the quiet. Over on the left, on the edge of the candlelight, his weapons were laid out one by one, the daggers, the guns, and his beloved scythe carefully arranged next to the messy pile of outer clothing he'd removed as soon as he'd chosen this particular spot on the floor.
He focused upon his scythe and waited for her to talk to him: She often did that, her blood-thirsty ways in lockstep with the aggression that flowed in his veins and defined his thoughts and motivated his actions.
He waited for her to tell him to attack the Brotherhood where they lay. Where their females were. Where their young slept.
The silence was worrisome.
Indeed, his arrival in the New World had been predicated upon a desire to gain power, and the biggest, boldest expression of that drive was overthrowing the throne - so, naturally, that was the course he had chosen. And he was making headway. The assassination attempt in the fall, which had without a doubt put death sentences upon his and his soldiers' heads, had been a tactical move that had very nearly finished the whole war before it had gotten started. And his ongoing efforts with Elan and the glymera were promoting his agenda and shoring up his support in and among the aristocracy.
But what he had learned this night...
Fates, nearly a year's worth of work and sacrifice and planning and fighting paled in comparison to what he had discovered this night.
If his hunch was correct - and how could it not be? - all he had to do was marshal his soldiers and begin a siege as soon as night fell. The battle would be epic, and the Brotherhood and First Family's home permanently compromised no matter the outcome.
It would be a conflict for the history books - after all, the last time the royal homestead had been hit had been when Wrath's sire and mahmen had been slaughtered before his transition.