Lover At Last(43)

He cut off the fantasy monologue as the breeze shifted and his nose got a whiff of sweet and nasty.

Everyone got their weapons out and focused on the airplane hangar.

“We’re upwind,” Rhage said quietly. “So there’s got to be a big-ass mess in there.”

The five of them approached the facility cautiously, fanning out, searching the ambient blue glow of reflected moonlight for anything that moved.

The hangar had two entryways, one that was bifurcated and big enough to fit a wingspan through, and the other that was supposed to be for people, and looked Barbie size in comparison. And Rhage was right: In spite of the fact that the icy winter gusts were hitting them in the back, the smell was enough to tingle the insides of the nose, and not in good way.

Man, cold usually dimmed the stink, too.

Communicating via hand signals, they split into two groups, with him and John taking one side of the mammoth double doors, and Rhage, Blay, and Z zeroing in on the smaller entrance.

Rhage went for the requisite handle while everyone braced for engagement. If there was a football team’s worth of lessers in there, it made sense to send the Brother in first, because he had the kind of backup nobody else did: His beast loved slayers, and not in a relationship sense.

Talk about your thin mints.

Hollywood put his hand over his head. Three…two…one…

The Brother penetrated in total silence, pushing the door open and slipping inside. Z was next—and Blay went in with them.

Qhuinn felt a heartbeat of pure terror as the male jumped into the unknown with nothing but a pair of forties to protect him. God, the idea that Blay could die tonight, right in front of him, on this run-of-the-mill assignment, made him want to stop all this defending the race bullshit and turn the fighter into a librarian. A hand model. Hairdresser—

The shrill whistle that came no more than sixty seconds later was a godsend. And Z’s all-clear was the signal for him and John to change positions, shuffling laterally to the now open door, and going through the—

Okay. Wow.

Talk about your oil slick. And holy fuckin’ A from the stench.

The three who’d gone in first had busted out their flashlights, and the beams light-sabered around the cavernous space, cutting through the darkness, illuminating what at first looked like nothing but a sheet of black ice. Except it wasn’t black and the shit wasn’t frozen. It was congealed human blood—about three hundred gallons’ worth. Mixed with a whole lot of Omega.

The hangar was the site of a massive induction, the scale of which made that thing out at that farmhouse a while back look like nothing more than a play date.

“Guess those boys who took your whip were heading to one hell of a party,” Rhage said.

“Word,” Z muttered.

As the beams of the flashlights highlighted an old, decrepit airplane in the back—and absolutely nothing else—Z shook his head.

“Let’s search the outer area. There’s nada in here.”



Given that the cabin was nothing much from the exterior, just your typical hunting/fishing shack out in the woods, Mr. C was tempted to bypass the damn thing. Thoroughness had its virtues, however, and the cabin’s location, about a mile or two into the tract of land, suggested it might have been used as a headquarters at some point.

All things considered, it would have been smarter to check out the property before he’d used that airplane hangar for the largest induction in the Lessening Society’s history. But priorities were what they were: First, he had to put himself in control; second, he had to justify the promotion; and third, he had to deal with all those new lessers.

And that meant he needed resources. Fast.

Following the Omega’s messy, grand ceremony, and the nauseous period that had lasted a number of hours thereafter, Mr. C had ordered the new recruits onto a school bus that he’d stolen from a used-truck dealership a week ago. Between exhaustion and the physical discomfort they were in, they had been such good little boys, filing on and sitting two by two like they were on some kind of fucked-up Noah’s Ark.

From there, he’d driven them himself—because you didn’t trust assets like that to anybody else—to the Brownswick School for Girls. The defunct prep school was in the suburbs on thirty-five acres of ignored, overgrown, dilapidated grounds, rumors of its being haunted keeping the normal folks out.

For now, the Lessening Society were squatters, but the For Sale sign on the corner near the road meant he could fix that. As soon as he pulled some cash together.

With his boys finishing up their recovery back at the school, and the current slayers downtown trolling for the Brotherhood, he was out on his own, cataloging the few assets left in the Society—including this stretch of mostly empty forest north of the city.