As Aidan lay there, choking on the blood pouring down his throat from loose teeth and his broken nose, his assailant’s face swam into view.
Shock seized him.
“Who the fuck are you?” he wheezed.
Zach stared down at the traitor, wanting so badly to kill him, needing so badly to kill him.
This bastard was responsible for Lisette’s nearly dying.
Rage burned his stomach like acid as Zach leaned in close and gripped Aidan by the throat. “I’m the dog Seth sicced on you.”
The room around him fell away as Aidan teleported them to a darkened mountain range.
Zach’s hold didn’t loosen. “Anywhere you teleport, you take me with you, dumb ass.”
Aidan fought harder, using telekinesis to hurl large stones and other objects at Zach, as he pried at the fingers closing off his air.
Zach merely tightened his grip.
Aidan teleported them again, this time to a sunny vale.
Warmth washed over Zach’s back . . . which remained unblemished. Minutes passed while Zach continued to choke Aidan, fending off his blows and repaying them with many of his own. Eventually Aidan began to sunburn.
Zach didn’t and saw the surprise in the younger immortal’s eyes. “That’s right, asshole. Like Seth, I’m impervious to daylight.”
Aidan returned them to his home.
A dagger leapt from a stand on the wall and slid into Aidan’s grip. Aidan slashed at Zach and managed to draw blood before Zach closed his hand around Aidan’s on the dagger and made Aidan stab himself in the arm.
Furniture shattered as the struggle continued, Aidan taking nearly all of the damage.
Zach had a lot of anger to burn.
“Where’s Seth?” Aidan gritted.
“Seth was furious enough that he feared he might kill you, so he sent me in his stead.” Tired of playing, Zach pinned Aidan in place with a powerful telekinetic push.
Aidan’s eyes widened.
Zach sneered down at him. “How I wish I could kill you myself.” He drew an auto-injector from his back pocket. “Or maim you in ways the virus can’t heal. Let you suffer as others have suffered because of your perfidy. Alas, it isn’t my fucking place to do so.”
Zach jabbed the auto-injector into Aidan’s neck with more force than necessary.
Just as Lisette had, the immortal instantly went limp.
Wrapping a towel around herself sarong-style, Lisette looked up from tucking the end between her breasts as the bedroom door swung open.
Zach strode in, clad in his usual leather pants and boots.
She smiled. “Damn, you look good.”
He grinned. “I feel good now that I’m with you.” Halting, he swore and closed the door behind him.
“What?”
“I missed it.”
“Missed what?”
“You. Naked in the shower. Water cascading down over your soft-as-silk skin and skimming off the tips of your bewitching breasts.” His eyes began to glow as a noticeable bulge rose behind his zipper.
Lisette started toward him, then noticed his bruised and bloodied hands, the red smears on his arms and chest. “Zach! What have you done now?” she asked, propping her hands on her hips.
“Moi?” he asked, his expression as innocent as a choirboy’s. Until he followed her gaze to the blood. “Oh.” He winced. “Right. That.”
She rolled her eyes. (Was this how Melanie felt, constantly having to deal with Bastien’s crazy antics?) “Explain.”
“We found him.”
“Found whom?”
“The immortal who has betrayed us.”
Lisette didn’t let him see how thrilled she was to hear him include himself in the Immortal Guardian family. “Was it Aidan?”
“Yes.”
“You read his mind?”
“We didn’t have to. Reordon has surveillance tape of Aidan breeching network headquarters, using mind control on the guards, wiping memories—”
“Merde!”
“—and helping himself to confidential files in both the records room and Reordon’s private office.”
They had known an immortal had betrayed them, had even suspected Aidan, but . . . it still confounded.
“What happened? What did you do?”
“Seth asked me to capture him and incarcerate him at the network.”
She looked pointedly at his hands, which finished healing even as she spoke. “And you—what?—scraped your knuckles on the doorframe on your way in?”
“I might have kicked his ass a little first.”
“Zach—”
His face darkened. One second he stood by the door; the next he loomed over her, his eyes glowing with rage. “He hurt you.”
“He wasn’t even there the night—”
“He has probably been culling information from the network for weeks. Perhaps months. And he used that information to up the dosage of the sedative so it would bring you to the brink of death.”