Darius did not look back at the camp as he walked toward the four who had come for him. The Bloodletter knew that he was going out into the field and didn't care whether or not he returned herein. And the other trainees were likewise.
On the approach, he wished he had more time to ready himself for this test of will and strength and courage. But it was now and here.
Verily, time moved forward even if you wanted it to slow to a crawl.
Stopping afore the Brothers, he yearned for a bracing word or a well wish or a pledge of faith from someone. As there was none coming, he offered up a brief prayer to the sacred mother of the race:
Dearest Virgin Scribe, please let me not fail in this.
Chapter One
Another f**king butterfly.
As R.I.P. looked at what was coming through the door of his tat shop, he knew he was going to end up doing another f**king butterfly. Or two.
Yup. Given the pair of long, blond, and bubbly that was jiggling their giggly way up to his receptionist, he was so not going to be rocking any skull-and-bones shit into their skin.
These Paris Hiltons and their we're-so-bad excitement had him looking at the clock... and wishing he closed now, instead of one a.m.
Man... the shit he did for money. Most of the time he could be all yeah, whatever about the lightweights who came in to get marked up, but tonight the bright ideas of cutie-pies annoyed him. Hard to get enthused about the Hello Kitty set when he'd just spent three hours doing a memorial portrait for a biker who'd lost his best friend on the road. One was real life, the other a cartoon.
Mar, his receptionist, came over to him. "You got time to do a quickie?" Her pierced eyebrows went up as her eyes rolled. "Shouldn't take long."
"Yeah." He nodded to his padded chair. "Get the first one over here."
"They want to be done together."
Of course they did. "Fine. Grab the stool from the back."
As Mar disappeared behind a curtain and he got set up, the two by the cash register held each other's hands and twittered over the consent forms they had to sign. From time to time, both of them shot him wide looks, like with all his tats and his metal, he was an exotic tiger they'd come to admire at a zoo... and totally approved of.
Uh-huh. Right. He would cut his own balls off before he threw them as much as a pity f**k.
After Mar took their money, she brought them over and introduced them as Keri and Sarah. Which was more than he'd expected. He'd been bracing himself for Tiffany and Brittney.
"I want a rainbow carp," Keri said as she got into his chair with what she clearly intended to be an enticing arch. "Right here."
She pulled up her tight little shirt, undid the zipper on her jeans, and pushed down the top of her pink thong. Her belly button had a hoop with a pink rhinestone heart dangling off of it and it was clear she was into electrolysis.
"Fine," R.I.P. said. "How big."
Keri the Seductress seemed to deflate a little--as if her no doubt one hundred percent success rate with college football players had led her to assume he would pant all over the real estate she was showing him.
"Um... not too big. My parents would kill me if they knew I was doing this... so it can't show over a bikini bottom."
Of course not. "Two inches?" He held up his tatted hand and gave her a sense of dimension.
"Maybe... a little smaller."
With a black pen, he made a sketch on her, and after she asked him to stay on the inside of the lines, he snapped on his black gloves, got out a fresh needle, and tuned up his gun.
It took Keri about a second and a half to sport tears and hang onto Sarah's hand as if she were giving birth without an epidural. And that was the difference, wasn't it. There was a huge divide between the hard-core and the wannabe. Butterflies and carps and pretty little hearts were not--
The shop's door opened wide... and R.I.P. sat up a little straighter on his rolling stool.
The three men who walked in were not in military uniforms, but they were definitely not civilians. Dressed in black leather from their jackets to their pants to their shitkickers, they were huge men who sucked the walls of the shop in closer and shrank the ceiling down tight. Lot of bulges hidden underneath those coats. The kinds made by guns and maybe knives.
With a subtle shift, R.I.P. moved in the direction of his counter, where the emergency alarm button was.
The one on the left had mismatched eyes and gunmetal piercings and a killer's cool stare. The one on the right seemed a little closer to mainstream, with his pretty-boy puss and the red hair--except for the fact that he carried himself like someone who'd been to war and back.
The one in the middle, however, was trouble. Slightly larger than his buddies, he had dark brown hair that was cut short and a classically handsome face--but his blue eyes were lifeless, with about as much reflection as old asphalt.
A dead man walking. With nothing to lose.
"Hey," R.I.P. called out to greet them. "You guys need some ink?"
"He does." The one with the piercings nodded at his blue-eyed buddy.
"And he's got the design. It's a shoulder piece."
R.I.P. gave his instincts a chance to weigh in on the project. The men didn't eye Mar inappropriately. There was no casing of the cash register and no one went for their metal. They waited politely--but with expectation. Like either he did what they wanted, or they'd find someone else who would.
He eased back into position, thinking they were his peeps. "Cool. I'll be finished in no time here."
Mar spoke up from behind the counter. "We were supposed to be closing in less than an hour--"
"But I'll do you," R.I.P. told the one in the center. "You don't worry about the time."
"And I think I'll stay," Mar said, eyeing the one with the piercings.
The blue-eyed guy's hands came up and moved with distinct gestures. After he was finished, the pierced one translated, "He says thanks. And he's brought his own ink, if that's okay."
Not exactly the norm, and against the health code, but R.I.P. had no trouble being flexible for the right customer. "No prob, my man."
He got back to work with the carp and Keri resumed her bitten lip and little-girl moaning routine. When he was finished, he was not at all surprised that Sarah, after having watched her friend go through "agony," decided that she wanted a refund instead of some pretty, rainbow-colored ink of her own.
Which was good news. It meant that he could get to work on the guy with the dead eyes right away.
As he snapped off his black gloves and cleaned up, he wondered what in the hell the design was going to look like. And exactly how long it was going to take Mar to get inside the pierced guy's pants.
Former was likely to be fairly good.
And the latter... he'd give that about ten minutes, because she'd caught his mismatched stare and Mar was a fast worker--not just behind the counter.
Across town, away from the bars and tat shops on Trade Street, in an enclave of brownstones and cobbled lanes, Xhex stood in a bay window and stared out of wavy antique glass.
She was naked and cold and bruised.
But she was not weak.
Down below, on the sidewalk, a human female strolled along with a little yappy dog on a string and a cell phone up to her ear. Across the way, people in other elegant walk-ups were drinking and eating and reading. Cars went by slowly out of both respect for the neighbors and fear for their suspension systems on the uneven street.
The Homo sapiens peanut gallery couldn't see or hear her. And not just because the capacities of that other race were so diminished in comparison to those of vampires.
Or in her case, half-symphath vampires.
Even if she turned the ceiling light on and screamed until her voice box gave out, even if she waved her arms until they fell out of their sockets, the men and women who were all around would just keep up whatever they were doing, unaware that she was trapped in this bedroom, thick in their midst. And it wasn't as if she could pick up the bureau or the bedside table and break the glass. Same with kicking down the door or crawling through the bathroom vent.
She'd tried all that.
The assassin in her had to be impressed by the pervasive nature of her invisible cell: There was, quite literally, no way to get around, through, or out of it.
Turning away from the window, she paced around the king-size bed with its silk sheets and horrible memories... and went by the marble bathroom... and kept going by the door that led out into the hall. Given the way things went with her captor, it wasn't as if she needed more exercise, but she couldn't keep still, her body twitchy and humming.