“Damn it, beat…”
Something brushed his face and he jumped back—only to find that Selena had actually reached up to him, her pale, slender hand extending in a series of jerks like the joint was rusty.
“Selena,” he said, dropping down so she didn’t have to strain. “Selena…”
He kissed her palm, her fingers, and then he let her brush his cheeks. Her eyes were incredibly blue, luminous, glowing. And for a moment, everything faded away so that it was just the two of them, the walls of the exam room, its equipment and personnel, even his beloved brother, disappearing from them.
Her lips started to move under the clear plastic mask.
“Okay, okay, okay.” He had no idea what she was saying. “Can you stay with me? Please stay here—don’t go.”
She was moving, and that was good, right?
“Selena!” Shit, her eyes were rolling back. “Selena…!”
“We’re losing her!”
There was no conscious thought involved for him. The instant Doc Jane barked those three horrible words again, he blew his form apart, and blanketed Selena’s body with his molecules, his energy, his soul, surrounding her above, around, below. He threw himself into her, pushing through her skin, getting in deep, sharing everything he had in hopes that he could somehow do what the crash cart couldn’t.
That he could somehow bring her back …
And then it happened.
Sure as if Selena reached out with her hands and grabbed what he had to give, a vital pull latched onto his essence, drawing him in, taking from him.
That’s right, he thought. Use me—
“I have a heartbeat!” someone said.
“She’s breathing!”
He heard the commentary not as sound, but as the thoughts of others—he didn’t stop, though. Too early. Not enough had been given.
And yet all too soon, his strength started to fade, his energy draining in a flush, not anything that was gradual. As much as he wanted to keep helping her, he knew he had to get back into physical form or he was going to get stuck in vapor, and that was a death sentence.
Not until she was gone, he told himself.
And he could help her again, after he—
Trez landed on the tile floor like he’d been pushed down, all hard knocks and bad smacks. From his vantage point, he got a close look at Doc Jane’s red Crocs, Ehlena’s blue ones, and his brother’s knees as the male immediately crouched down next to him.
iAm was all action, no delay, hooking a hold under Trez’s pits, and dragging him back to Selena’s head, lifting him up when he couldn’t stand, kneel, or even hold his torso to the vertical.
No clue what Doc Jane and Ehlena were doing, the pair of them making their rounds of Selena’s prostrated form with all kinds of medical equipment—
The door from the corridor burst open. Manny Manello, the human doctor who was Jane’s medical partner, was in civilian clothes and a full hassle, like he’d been in a rush to get back to the training center.
Wrong gender. Considering Selena was naked.
Trez’s lip curled up off his suddenly descended fangs, a growl percolating out of him.
“Traffic was a bitch!” Manny said. “I’m so sorry—”
“You need to leave,” Doc Jane hollered as she looked up from checking Selena’s eyes with a light. “Unless you want to get bitten.”
As Manny shot him a look that was full of eyebrow, Trez could feel the strength coming back to him. And he wasn’t the only one who noticed. iAm wrapped heavy arms around his chest.
“I’ll be out in a second for a consult?” Doc Jane said to her partner.
“Roger that.” Manny lifted a hand to Trez. “Sorry, man.”
You had to respect his turnaround time, Trez thought as the guy disappeared.
“She has limited mobility in her arms, fingertips to shoulders,” Ehlena announced as she went to the base of the table and took hold of Selena’s leg. “Hip socket. Knee. Ankle. Same.”
“Vitals are stable,” Doc Jane reported. “I want another set of X-rays as soon as I’m sure she’ll stay with us.”
Jane glanced over at Trez. “You brought her back. You saved her life.”
As if she heard the words and understood them, Selena looked over at him. Trez opened his mouth to respond, and didn’t make it. Like someone had unplugged him from the world, everything faded to black and he went floating into unconsciousness.
The only thing he was aware of? Even after he passed the fuck out?
The steady beep-beep-beep of the machine marking Selena’s heartbeat.
TWELVE
BROWNSWICK SCHOOL FOR GIRLS, CALDWELL, NEW YORK
Denzel got it right in American Gangster.
The best drug dealers were good businessmen. And it didn’t take nothing from Harvard to get there.
Mr. C, Forelesser of the Lessening Society, weren’t no fucking suit with a bullshit piece of paper framed on his wall. But he was born and bred on the streets and damn good at moving product.
As sundown happened outside his broken office windows, he kept bundling his cash, the stacks of ragged twenties kept together with rubber bands he’d stolen from the copier stations at FedEx Office. Didn’t look like much, but that was something the movies usually got wrong.
Mr. C leaned down and handful’d another fist of crumpled, stained Andrew Jacksons out of the Hefty bag on the floor. His men were required to empty their pockets every dawn here in the headmaster’s office, and even if it took him all day, nobody helped him count.
At this point, after nearly a year of being in business, he had roughly a hundred carriers working for him, the number floating up and down depending on how his recruiting efforts kept up with the Black Dagger Brotherhood’s killing efficiency. His idea for putting the Lessening Society all in one place, in this defunct prep school, had been smart. He could run the slayers like a military unit, housing them together, keeping them on a schedule, monitoring every breath and each sale personally.
There was a fuckload of rebuilding to be done.
Soon after the Omega had come to him and elevated him to Forelesser, he’d realized the promotion was for shit. The Society had had no money. No real guns or ammo. No crib. No organization and no plan. All that was different now: An unusual, uneasy alliance had solved the first problem, and that was taking care of the second and third. The fourth was on him.
At this point, all he had to do was keep shit gaining. Make sure his men were in line. Track the cash coming and going. Start collecting some war toys. Once he was probably armed?
He was going to slaughter the Black Dagger Brotherhood, and go down in history as the one who’d finally gotten the motherfucking job done.
Mr. C finished the count just as the last threads of light were draining out of the now-night sky. Getting up, he strapped on a pair of forties and put the bundles of cash into a duffel bag. The total was four hundred thousand dollars.
Not bad for forty-eight hours of work.
As he left, there was no reason to lock up anything, because access was everywhere. The headmaster’s office had windows like sieves and doors that hung off their hinges, and on a larger scale, the decrepit grounds of the rotting boarding school were lined by an iron fence with more broken sections than ones that were upright.
What kept people out?
The slayers that roamed the property constantly, sentries whose sole job was to jack anyone who came too close.
Good news? The place was rumored to be haunted, so when those punk-ass fifteen-year-olds tried to come walkin’, a couple of Omega tricks took care of that little problem. Bonus? His boys liked freakin’ the fools out, and it was better than killing the bitches. Dead bodies were a pain in the ass, and he didn’t want the human police involved.
After all, there was one and only one rule in the war against the vampires: No humans were welcome at the party.
Outside, Mr. C got into his black-on-black Lincoln Nav and turned around on the unmowed, dead grass. In the twilight, he could sense his boys moving over the grounds even though he couldn’t see them, the echo of the Omega’s blood in them better than GPS chips shoved up their asses.
So, yeah, he knew one of his crew had been lost last night. He’d felt the death as a shock under his pasty white skin. Fucking Brotherhood. And the dumb-ass who’d been slaughtered had had cash and drugs on him, so that was a net loss of at least five grand.
On any given night, he had twenty to twenty-five dealers out on the streets at a time, each working in shifts of four hours. Shifts were critical. Anything longer than two hundred and forty minutes and the slayers had too much asset on them, too much to lose if they got picked up by the police, rolled, or killed by the Brotherhood. Too much to get a bright idea over.
He’d learned how to handle his business from back in the day, when he’d still been human and a bit player on the street, looking to get large.
And the no bullshit truth? The Omega fucking needed him. Not the other way around.
The route he took to get to his supplier was different every time, and he was careful to track any cars behind him in case he was being followed by CPD or ATF. Likewise, there was no communication over the phone with his wholesaler—technological advances on the part of local and federal agents made that shit too risky. Plans were set or changed upon meeting, and if there was a no-show on either side, a contingency arrangement previously made meant they knew the when and where to reconnect.