SIXTY-FIVE
It was very easy to escape from his own house.
Assail simply cracked the window on the upper floor and departed his premises with all the fuss and circumstance of a draft escaping into the night.
He had been tracking the movements of the Brothers in his woods with his night-vision cameras, the huge shapes of the males moving like T. Rexes through his property, their presences sticking to the trees.
Following the sun’s disappearance, he had kept the illusion blinds in place, effectively preserving the daytime, vacant appearance of his interior. It would give the Brothers something to do as they contemplated the where and when of his and his cousins’ nocturnal reappearance aboveground.
Which would not be until he had completed a specific endeavor.
With alacrity, he traveled to the east, to a prearranged location at an abandoned strip mall approximately five miles outside of the downtown area.
The Hertz rental car was parked grille-out against the rear wall of a building that had a faded BLUEBELL’S BIRTHDAY BOUTIQUE, DELIVERIES ONLY sign hanging cockeyed from above a paint-chipped reinforced door.
Ehric put the driver’s-side window down as Assail reformed. “Are you driving?”
“Yes, I am.”
As his cousin got out and Assail assumed the male’s place behind the wheel, Evale spoke up from the backseat. “What do you want us to do?”
“Nothing.”
He put the engine in gear and headed off, moving swiftly, but obeying all traffic laws. He’d gone but a couple of miles when the cocaine that he’d taken about two hours earlier began to wear off in earnest.
But he was not going to reload. He needed to be focused enough to dematerialize if need be.
He took the three of them and the pedestrian Ford Taurus through the sprawling suburbs and out farther from the metro hub, into the farmland that formed a skirting around the Adirondack Mountains. As he went along, the roads became narrower, the yellow line in the middle and the white lines at the shoulders growing so faint, the headlights failed to pick them out. And still he continued onward, no one behind him, no cars or trucks coming toward him.
Some miles later, he arrived at the dairy farm he was looking for. Like Bluebell’s Birthday Boutique, it, too, was abandoned, and the sedan bumped along as he transitioned off the asphalt onto a dirt lane that went out into the overgrown fields. Crossing through the bramble and cornstalk tangle, he drove all the way to the forest’s edge and found shelter among the birch trees and maples that retained few of their leaves. With quick circles of the wheel, he turned the rental around so they were facing out and waited, leaving the car running. He hated that the headlights remained aglow, but there was naught to be done about that.
The Brothers’ presence had made taking his Range Rover impossible.
“He’s late,” Ehric said a little later.
“He’ll be here.” There was too much at stake for the Forelesser not to show. “He shall not fail us.”
And sure enough, moments later, a dark shape came forward through the field, following their path. No running lights. So he knew it was the one for whom they were waiting.
“You know where to go,” he said softly as he cracked one of the back windows an inch.
Just like that, the cousins dematerialized out of the backseat … and the Forelesser arrived, coming to a stop. As usual, Assail and his business associate both put their windows down at the same time.
“Where’s your Range Rover, vampire?”
“In the shop.”
“Be fucking real. Have you been trailed?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
The slayer frowned, his dark brows falling down over his dark eyes. For a moment, Assail mourned the Old Country, where you knew the bastards not just from their stench, but because they had been in the Lessening Society long enough for their coloring to pale out. Not in the New World. No, here, in the disposable culture of American humans, the undead did not last long enough to have their pigments fade.
“ATF?” the slayer demanded. “Or CPD.”
As if during his years as a human he had often found inconvenience from those two organizations.
“By the Black Dagger Brotherhood. And the Blind King, Wrath.”
The undead threw his head back and laughed. “Whatever, my man, that’s on you.”
“No, I’m afraid that shall be on you, mate.”
Without warning, Assail lunged out of his window and stabbed the slayer in the eye, using the dagger he had discreetly placed upon his thigh. As the Forelesser screamed, Assail wrenched the blade free and slashed across the front of the throat. Gurgling sounds and copious amounts of black blood filled the interior of the slayer’s SUV, and Assail was forced to awkwardly extract his upper body or be drenched in the mess.