Cracking the lid on the Grey Goose, he took a good pull and ground his molars as the burn fired down his throat and lit up his gut like Fenway Park.
As V would have said.
How in the hell had the night ended up like this.
iAm was not about to waste time with shAdoWs, The Iron Mask or Sal’s. Screw that. There was more than enough competent staff at all three to take care of business. He’d just told his brother the lie because he didn’t want Trez even more freaked out.
Materializing on the terrace of their condo, he glanced at his watch and then went inside. Pacing around, he turned on some lights, checked the refrigerator even though he knew there was nothing much in it, and poked around the cabinets.
He hadn’t eaten since … Sal’s the night before, actually. And he hadn’t fed in … shit, he didn’t know how long.
Probably needed to handle that, but as always, he had little interest in the vein. Not that he didn’t appreciate and respect the Chosen who served him and his brother. He just didn’t like the whole business of sucking at someone’s wrists when she was a stranger. Yeah, yeah, duty, whatever.
Guess he was far more Shadow-ish than his brother.
In their culture, anything physical like that was sacred. Which sucked, because biological necessity forced him to feed probably six times a year, and every time he did, it was an exercise in self-discipline—and not because he wanted to bang whoever it was.
He was, at his ripe old age, still a virgin.
He blamed the celibacy on the shit with Trez, and the teachings and traditions of his kind, which he sometimes felt like he took waaaaay too seriously—
Wow. He was so wound that he was talking to himself.
About shit he already knew.
Which wasn’t even that interesting to begin with.
He paced around. Checked his watch again and then looked to the terrace. Where the fuck was—
“That you?”
iAm wheeled around at the male voice that came from the bedrooms. Striding forward to the hall, he palmed his forty, but given the inflection? Not much was going to be a problem.
And sure enough, as he rounded the corner into what had been his crib, he found s’Ex stretched out on the bed, the sheets wadded up around his naked body, a double-size bottle of Ciroc nestled in his arms like a baby.
“I thought you were in mourning,” iAm said as he tucked his gun away.
“Am.” s’Ex held up the half-empty bottle. “This is my Kleenex.”
“Doesn’t the Queen want you in the Territory”
“Not really.” The male slashed his hand through the air. “Too embarrassing. I’m okay to fuck behind closed doors, but out in the open? No good. Course, all woulda been forgiven if the chart’d been right. But no.”
iAm leaned against the doorjamb and crossed his arms. “How long have you been here?”
“Since you left—was it last night? You need more liquor up in here. When can you bring it? And I want some females.”
iAm’s first instinct was to tell the guy to go screw. Natch. But he needed something from the bastard.
“I can make that happen,” he said.
s’Ex closed his eyes and rolled his hips under the sheets. “When.”
“You gotta do something for me first.”
Those lids lifted slowly, and the black eyes glittered. “It doesn’t work like that.”
“Actually, it does.”
“Fuck you.”
“Fuck you.” iAm held that gaze steadily. “I need to get into the palace.”
s’Ex shut his piehole. Then he shoved his tremendous torso upright, the covers falling down, pooling at his waist. In the light from the bathroom, the tattoos that covered every inch of his flesh glowed like they were fluorescent against his dark skin.
“Not what I thought you’d say,” he murmured. “Without a gun to your head.”
“What I need from you is a guaranteed out.”
“So you’re going to steal something.”
“I just want access to the library.”
“Lot of recreational reading out here in the human world.”
“And I need to go now.”
s’Ex stared at him for a while. And then he yawned like a lion, great fangs flashing as his jaw cracked from the strain.
“Now,” iAm said.
“The palace is closed for mourning.”
“You got out.”
s’Ex made a noncommittal noise. “What kind of information are you looking for?”
“Not relevant for your purposes.”
“The hell it isn’t.”
“Look, I need to go now, and I have to be back before dawn. This is an emergency. I’m not asking to stroke you.”
s’Ex frowned. “Like I said, the palace is closed.”
“So you’re going to have to sneak me in.”
“Why the fuck do you think I’m going to help you.”
iAm smiled coldly. “Get me in and out, and you’re fucking that Queen of yours.”
“Ours. And if I want to screw her, all I have to do is slide into her bed.”
“You think you can still stand to do that now?”
“Don’t romanticize me,” s’Ex said grimly.
iAm shrugged. “Whatever. Bottom line is, you’re never going to get Trez at this point. I’ve got to try to help him.”
If Selena died? Everybody was going to lose him. Shit, all iAm had to do was think of his brother bolting from that exam room, racing out into the corridor with a gun up to his temple, ready to pull the trig.
s’Ex stared up at him for the longest time. “What the hell is going on?”
“I’m giving it to you straight. Your interests and mine are aligned. I don’t want my brother dead and neither do you. We’ll fight over what happens to him at the end of this, but right now? You need me to get him through a certain crisis.”
“Put a definition on ‘crisis.’”
iAm looked away. “Someone who’s close to him is sick.”
“Not him, though?”
“No.”
“You?”
“Do I look sick.” iAm met the executioner’s eyes again. “Look, you and I both have a management problem with him. You think I like trusting you? If there were any other option, I’d be getting it in. But like you know firsthand, you got to deal with what life gives you. And I need that goddamn library.”
The s’Hisbe had a long and distinguished history as healers. And as Shadows were, like symphaths, an evolutionary offshoot of vampires, it would seem logical that this Arrest disease might have shown up at some point in his race’s past—and if it did, it would be in that library.
If they were lucky, the healers might have some kind of treatment—at which point, stop number two was going to be the s’Hisbe’s extensive pharmacology vault. The Shadows had been synthesizing drugs from plant and animal material for centuries, titrating all kinds of compounds to deal with diseases and disorders—and as with record keeping, the healers were meticulous about their trials and studies.
His people had brought rationalism into medicine long before humans ushered out mysticism and embraced scientific thinking.
Maybe there was hope. He had to find out.
“I do not want to rely on you,” iAm said roughly. “But I have to. Just like you are going to have to do this for me if you want any chance of getting Trez in line. He will be dead within the hour if that female dies.”
“Female?” When iAm said nothing more, s’Ex cursed. “The two of you are a huge pain in my ass, you know that.”
“I feel the same way about you and your Queen.”
“Ours. You’re a member of the s’Hisbe no matter where you choose to live.”
It was, of course, total bullshit about Trez going back to the Territory and falling in line with that astrological chart of his. That was never going to happen. But iAm had to use whatever leverage there was, and s’Ex was probably drunk enough not to look too closely at the motivation involved here.
And what do you know, it worked.
With a curse, the huge male threw off the covers and got to his feet—and for a moment, iAm checked out those tattoos. Christ. The executioner’s flesh was covered from throat to ankle, shoulder to wrist, with white markings, the only absent places his face and his cock and balls. Even iAm had to be impressed. The “ink” was actually a poison that discolored the skin. Most males prided themselves on withstanding the pain and sickness of a small symbol of their families on the shoulder or the name of a mate over the heart.
The fact that s’Ex had lived through all that was visible confirmation that he was a badass. Or a masochistic psycho.
Leaving the guy to get dressed, iAm went into the living area. As he approached the glass sliders, he looked out over the nightscape of Caldwell: the speckled illumination randomly spaced in the skyscrapers, the twin lanes of red taillights and white headlights wrapping around the curves of the Hudson River, a plane or two blinking high over the horizon.
In and out, he told himself. That was how this had to be.
And if there was a God, he’d be able to find something that would help Selena.
EIGHTEEN
“Turn here?” Layla asked as she leaned into her sedan’s steering wheel.