Lover Avenged(50)

The barbed strips would not be on when she went out to do the job.

Xhex paused and looked up at the sky. The dry, slicing wind promised snow, and soon. Winter’s deep freeze was coming to Caldwell.

But had been in her heart for ages.

Down beneath her, under her feet, she sensed the people again, reading their emotions, feeling them. She would kill them all if she was asked to. Slaughter them without thought or hesitation as they lay in their beds or went about their staff duties or copped a midday snack or rose for a quick piss before going back to sleep.

The messy, sloppy residue of demise, all that blood, didn’t bother her, either, any more than an H amp;K or a Glock would give a shit about carpet stains or smudges on tile or leaking arteries. The color red was the only thing she saw when she went about her work, and besides, after a while all bulging, horrified eyes and mouths that choked on last breaths looked the same anyway.

That was the great irony. In life, everyone was a snowflake of separate and beautiful proportion, but when death came in and grabbed hold, you were left with anonymous skin and muscle and bone, all of which cooled and decayed at predictable rates.

She was the gun attached to her boss’s forefinger. He pulled her trigger, she shot, the body dropped, and in spite of the fact that some lives were forever changed, the sun still came up and went down the next day for everyone else on the planet, including her.

Such was the course of her jobligation, as she thought of it: half employment, half obligation for what Rehv did to protect them both.

When she returned to this place at nightfall, she would do what she was there to do and leave with a conscience as intact and secure as a bank vault.

In and out and never to be thought of again.

Such was the way and the life of an assassin.





FIFTEEN




Allies were the third prong in the wheel of war.

Resources and recruits gave you the tactical engine that allowed you to meet, engage, and reduce the size and strength of your enemies’ forces. Allies were your strategic advantage, people whose interests were aligned with your own, even if your philosophies and ultimate goals might not intersect. They were just as important as the first two if you wanted to win, but they were a little less controllable.

Unless you knew how to negotiate.

“We been drivin’ for a while,” Mr. D said from behind the wheel of Lash’s adoptive dead father’s Mercedes.

“And we’re going to drive a little longer.” Lash glanced at his watch.

“You ain’t told me where we’re going.”

“Nope. I haven’t, have I.”

Lash stared out the sedan’s window. The trees at the side of the Northway looked like pencil drawings before the leafy bits had been sketched in, nothing but barren oaks and spindly maples and twiggy birches. The only thing with any green were the stumpy coniferous stalwarts, the numbers of which had been increasing as they went farther into the Adirondack Park.

Gray sky. Gray highway. Gray trees. It was like New York State’s landscape had come down with the flu or some shit, looking about as healthy as someone who hadn’t had his pneumonia shot in time.

There were two reasons Lash hadn’t been up-front about where he and his second in command were headed. The first was straight-up pussy, and he could barely admit it to himself: He wasn’t sure whether he was going to go through with the meeting he’d set up.

The issue was that this ally was complicated, and Lash knew he was poking a hornets’ nest with a stick by even approaching them. Yes, there was potential for a great alliance, but if loyalty was a good attribute in a soldier, it was mission critical in an ally, and where they were headed, loyalty was as unknown a concept as fear. So he was kind of fucked on both ends and that was why he wasn’t talking. If the meeting didn’t go well, or his sniff test didn’t work, he wasn’t going to proceed, and in that case, Mr. D didn’t have to know the ins and outs of who they were dealing with.

The other reason Lash was tight-lipped was because he wasn’t certain whether the other party was going to show. In which case, he again didn’t want a record of what he’d been contemplating.

At the side of the road, a small green sign with white reflective print read: U.S. BORDER 38.

Yup, thirty-eight miles and you were out of the country…and that was why the symphath colony had been located all the way up here. The goal had been to get those psychotic motherfuckers as far away from the civilian vampire population as you could, and goal accomplished. Any closer to Canada and you’d have to say fuck off and die to them in French.

Lash had made contact thanks to his adoptive father’s old Rolodex, which, like the male’s car, had proven very useful. As a former leahdyre of the council, Ibix had had a way of contacting the symphaths in the event that one was found hiding in the general population and needed to be deported. Of course, diplomacy between the species had never been in the cards. That would have been like offering a serial killer not only your own exposed throat, but the Henckels to cut it with.