Where was the little bastard.
Ah . . . perfect timing. A fourth car pulled up and it was not like the other three. The street racer's flashy-ass paint job was probably just as expensive as the souped-up sewing machine under the hood, and the undercarriage's neon glow made it look like it was coming in for a landing. The kid got out from behind the wheel and gee whiz, he was all spanked, too: He'd gotten himself some brand- new jeans and a sweet-ass Affliction leather jacket, and he'd taken up lighting his cigarettes with something gold.
Well, wasn't this going to be the test.
If the kid went in and just partied, Lash had been wrong about the fucker's smarts . . . and the Omega had gotten himself nothing other than a good lay. But if Lash was right, and the SOB had more to him than that, the party was going to get interesting.
Lash drew his lapels closer to the raw meat that was now his neck and tried to ignore how jel he was. He'd been in the sweet spot where that kid was. Reveled in the I'm-so-specials and assumed that glow would last forever. But whatever. If the Omega was willing to kick his own flesh and blood to the curb, this previously human piece of shit wasn't going to last long.
When one of the lushes inside stared out the window in Lash's direction, he supposed he was taking a chance getting this close to the hub, but he didn't give a crap. He had nothing to lose, and wasn't really looking forward to spending the rest of his days as nothing more than animated beef jerky.
Ugly and weak and leaky was not hot.
As the cold wind made his teeth rattle, he thought of Xhex and warmed himself with the memories. On some level, he couldn't believe that his time with her had been mere days ago. Felt more like ages since he'd had her under him. For fuck's sake, finding that first lesion on his wrist had been the beginning of the end . . . he just hadn't known it at the time.
Just a scratch.
Yeah, right.
Lifting his hand to push at his hair, he hit the bill of the baseball cap and was reminded that he had nothing to fuss with anymore. All he had left up there was a bone dome.
If he'd had more energy, he would have started ranting and raving at the unfairness and the cruelty of his decaying destiny. Life wasn't supposed to be like this. He wasn't supposed to be looking in from the outside. He had always been the focus, the driver, the special one.
For some stupid reason, he thought of John Matthew. When the motherfucker had come into the training program for soldiers, he'd been a particularly small pretrans with nothing but a Brotherhood name and a star scar on his chest. He'd been the perfect target to ostracize and Lash had gotten off on riding the kid hard.
Man, back then, he'd had no idea what it was like to be the odd man out. How it made you feel like worthless crap. How you looked at the other people who had it going on and would trade anything to be in with them.
Good thing he hadn't had a clue how it was. Or he might have thought twice about fucking with the cocksucker.
And here and now, leaning against the shaggy, cold bark of an oak tree and watching through the windows of the farmhouse as some other golden boy lived his life, he felt his plans shifting.
If it was the last thing he did, he was going to take that little shit down.
It was even more important than Xhex.
That the guy had dared to mark Lash for death wasn't the driver. It was the need to send a message to his father. He was, after all, a rotting apple that didn't fall far from the tree, and payback was a bitch.
THIRTY-NINE
"That's Bella's old house," Xhex said after she took form in a meadow beside John Matthew.
As he nodded, she looked around at the pastoral spread. Bella's white farmhouse with its wraparound porch and its red chimneys was picture-perfect in the moonlight, and it seemed a shame that the place was left empty with nothing but exterior security lights on.
The fact that its outbuilding had a Ford F- 150 parked in its gravel drive and windows that were glowing seemed to make the sense of desertion even more acute.
"Bella was the one who first found you?"
John made an equivocal motion with his hand and pointed over to another little house on the lane. As he started to sign and then stopped himself, his frustration over the communication barrier was obvious.
"Someone in that house . . . you knew them and they put you in touch with Bella?"
He nodded as he reached into his jacket and brought out what appeared to be a handmade bracelet. Taking it from him, she saw that symbols in the Old Language had been carved into the hide.
"Tehrror." When he touched his chest, she said, "Your name? But how did you know?"
He touched his head, then shrugged.
"It came to you." She focused on the smaller house. There was a pool in the back and she sensed that his memories were sharpest there, because every time his eyes passed over that terrace, his emotional grid fired up, a switchboard with a lot of circuits flaring.