Total pages in book: 163
Estimated words: 154735 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 774(@200wpm)___ 619(@250wpm)___ 516(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 154735 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 774(@200wpm)___ 619(@250wpm)___ 516(@300wpm)
These were the pair of males the Book had shown her, the ones she had not known.
And they were not vampires, she thought. They were something else…
They had halos, just as Lassiter had once had. They were of his kind, and yet he did not reveal himself unto them.
He recognized them, however. From his perch, he stared at them as if their appearance was a shock, and not in a good way. But would not he greet them? Especially if they were with the Brothers?
Double-checking on him once again, she took a deep breath and heard his voice in her head.
Take care of yourself, and by extension, my heart.
She needed to leave. She had no business being even on the periphery of what was clearly a military exercise of infiltration. Instead, she closed her eyes and concentrated on the texture, color, and arrangement of the stones that formed the six-foot-high decorative frieze around the base of the building that sheltered her presence. When nothing altered of her body, she worried her pounding heart was going to prevent the shifting—but then she felt the orientation of her molecules ripple themselves into a new alignment, what was her physical form now assuming the appearance of the creamy stone and pale gray mortar.
When she was certain the transmutation was complete, she reopened her lids and moved her position, progressing down the building so she could close in on the clutch of males.
“We go in this way,” the Brother Vishous announced. “Through the mailroom.”
The Brother turned to a series of broad doors that were lined up at waist height off the ground. They were the kind of thing she had seen located off to the side of houses, and she remembered Nate working on the ones out at Luchas House. He had explained the ancillary structure was a “garage,” but how would they get a car inside these? There was no ramp?
This was the least of her concerns.
Evil.
The building the warriors were going to enter was steeped in darkness, stained with it, though there was nothing showing upon its exterior. Surely the Brothers sensed the threat, too? And Lassiter? It could not only be her.
With a lithe shift, Vishous jumped up to the lip of one of the garage doors, and after manipulating something down at the base, he hoisted the metal panels up on tracks, rolling them into the ceiling above. Dim lights glowed in some kind of barren interior, and she glanced back at Lassiter’s position. He was still up there on the roof next door, watching everything.
But he was not going to stay where he was: In the ambient glow of the city, his face was drawn in tight, grim lines, as if he were in a kind of intense inner debate, and she was certain he was going to follow at a careful distance.
Knowing this, Rahvyn ghosted into the building herself, flying over the heads of the other Brothers and the angels as they propelled themselves off the pavement with powerful lunges and landed in the open area in near silence. Unsure what they were going to do next, she chose a temporary perch hovering in the far corner by a reinforced panel she assumed opened into the structure at large—and indeed, after Vishous shut them all in, he focused on that door, which opened on its own, as if he had willed it so. Rahvyn wafted herself in front of the group, weaving her essence over the polished concrete floor, continuing along with them as they proceeded down the corridor. At another steel door, which Vishous also opened, she was the first to descend a set of stairs.
As she emerged upon the lowest level, the foreboding she felt was so intense, she nearly lost the concentration necessary to keep herself camouflaged against the environment—
“Does anybody else smell that?” one of the angels hissed.
She could sense nothing olfactorily in her current incarnation, but as the Brothers traded glances and promptly unsheathed their daggers, she knew exactly what they were going to say. And she hated being right.
“Yup, that’s a lesser,” one of them replied grimly. “Fucking hell… the war is back on.”
* * *
Of course Eddie and Adrian were back.
As Lassiter watched the fallen angels disappear into the loading dock of the older skyscraper, the confluences of the night were wearing him the fuck out. First, all those humans cosplaying the people he lived with. Then Rahvyn showing up. Now the Creator’s Frick & Frack henchmen. And what the hell were they doing here with the brothers—
Devina.
Oh, shit. Maybe they’d come for the demon and not him? Because this was the seat of her lair—assuming they could penetrate her metaphysical camouflage.
As the implications of it all fell on his head, he had a momentary paralysis.
Off in the distance, he heard the thumping bass of a club’s sound system. Some tires screeching. A cop car’s siren. All around, the downtown was doing its night thing, festering addictions and law violations, humans racking up stupid score points and winning stupid prizes.