Lover Mine(114)

Layla would be good company right about now.

Right up his alley.

After all, she had been trained for sex, and all she wanted to do was use him as an erotic gymnasium. He didn't have to worry about hurting her or her getting attached to him. She was a professional, so to speak.

Or she would be when he was done with her.

As for Blay? He had no idea why the guy had come back instead of heading off into Saxton's bed, but one thing was clear. The pair of them were attracted to each other and Saxton wasn't the kind to wait when it came to somebody he wanted.

Qhuinn and his cousin were related, after all.

And that wasn't going to save the sonofabitch in the slightest if he broke Blay's heart.





FORTY-ONE





The party at the farmhouse went on and on and more people kept coming, their cars parking on the lawn, their bodies jamming into the downstairs rooms. Most who showed were ones that Lash had seen at the Xtreme Park, but not all of them. And they kept bringing more booze. Six-packs. Bottles. Kegs.

God only knew what kinds of illegal were in their pockets.

What the fuck, he started to think. Maybe he'd been wrong and the Omega had been snowed by his perversions--

As a rolling breeze developed out of the north, Lash went perfectly still, keeping his camo in place and locking his mind down.

Shadow . . . He projected a shadow in him and through him and around him.

The Omega's arrival was preceded by an eclipse of the moon and the idiots inside didn't have a clue what was doing . . . but that little shit did. The kid stepped out of the front door, the light from inside spilling out around him.

Lash's blooded father came into form on the scruffy lawn, his white robes swirling around his body, his arrival driving the ambient air temperature down even further. As soon as he'd taken form, the Shit walked up to him and the two embraced.

There was the temptation to go off on the pair of them, to tell his father he was nothing but a fickle cocksucker and warn that little rat bitch his days and nights were numbered--

The Omega's hooded face turned in Lash's direction.

Lash stayed perfectly motionless and projected in his mind an utterly blank slate such that he was invisible inside and out. Shadow . . . shadow . . . shadow . . .

The pause lasted a lifetime, because without a doubt if the Omega sensed Lash was around, it was game-over.

After a moment, the Omega refocused on his golden boy, and just as he did, some fuck-twit tripped out the front door, his flailing arms and loose legs going haywire as he tried to keep upright. Once on the grass, the guy got close to a cabbage patch but didn't quite make it, before landing on his knees and hurling all over the foundation of the house. As people inside laughed at him and the sounds of the party rolled out into the night, the Omega swept up to the doorway.

The party just kept raging as he went into the house, no doubt because the shwasted bastards were too far gone to realize that under that white drape, evil had just come into their mix.

They weren't clueless for long, though.

A massive light bomb went off, the blast of illumination sweeping through the house and streaming out of the windows to the tree line. As the roaring illumination dimmed to a soft glow, there were no upright survivors: All those lushes had dropped to the floor on a oner, the good times over and then some.

Holy shit. If this was headed where it seemed to be going . . .

Lash sidled up to the house, being careful to leave no footprint literally or figuratively, and as he got closer, he heard an odd scraping sound.

Coming to one of the living room's windows, he looked inside.

The Shit was dragging bodies around, lining them up side by side on the floor so that their heads were all facing north and there was a foot or so between them. Jesus . . . there were so many of the stiffs that the good-little-dead-soldier routine stretched all the way out into the hall and into the dining room.

The Omega hung back as if he liked the view of his boy toy muscling the men around.

How. Precious.

It took almost a half hour to get everyone in the row, the guys from the second floor getting dragged down the stairs so that their heads bounced on each step and left a bright red trail of blood.

Made sense. Easier to pull a deadweight by the feet.

When everybody was together, the Shit got to work with a knife and it became an assembly line of inductions. Starting in the dining room, he sliced throats and wrists and ankles and chests and the Omega followed behind, bleeding black into the open ribs then hitting them with electricity before performing cardio-ectomies.

No jars for this batch. When the hearts were extracted, they were pitched into a corner.

Slaughterhouse much?

By the time it was done, there was a pond of blood in the center of the living room where the floorboards had sagged, and another at the base of the stairs in the hall. Lash couldn't get a look-see all the way to the dining room, but he was damn sure there was one there as well.