Текст книги "Blood Kiss"

Автор книги: J. R. Ward

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Текущая страница: 14 (всего у книги 26 страниц)

Chapter Twenty-four

Sitting at the desk in Tohr’s office, Butch stood the long, thin metal key up on the end that had the red tassel … and let the thing fall to the blotter. As gravity made it tap out, the sound was a solid thunk. With a curse, he picked it up, stood it on its other end … and let it fall. And again. And again—

“Are you ready?”

He looked up at Tohr, who’d leaned in through the glass door. “Hey, yeah, sure. Who’re you sending in first?”

“Axwelle. Figured you might as well start the eval with the one most likely to be considered a sociopath.”

“Perfect.” He swiveled to the computer, tapped in a few commands and got the hidden video camera rolling. “Pull him out of the workout.”

“Roger that.”

As the glass door eased shut, Butch watched his fingers work the tasseled key some more. He hadn’t wanted to say it to his Marissa, but to him and V, it was pretty clear what the thing was. The problem? When nada had come up on the Internet search, V had hit his connections in the vampire underground … but nothing had surfaced with any of the sex clubs or groups.

A key to get you in so you could get it on. So to speak.

Ordinarily, Butch would have wondered if people weren’t hiding something or lying, but V was a legit member of the wonderful world of kink—plus the brother wasn’t above using a little muscle to get information if he had to.

Yet another reason the two of them were tight.

So what else was it. Where else could he—

At the sound of a knock on the glass, he glanced up and motioned with his hand. “Hey, man. C’mon in, sit down.”

As Axwelle entered, the guy made a move with his hands like he was used to cramming them in the pockets of his jeans, but then had nowhere to go with the impulse in his training uni. “Can I stand?”

“Nope.” Butch nodded to the chair on the opposite side of the desk. “There. And that is not a suggestion, that’s a requirement.”

They had to make sure the trainee’s face was in full view of the lens up in the corner behind him.

Axwelle—or Axe, as he called himself—crossed his arms over his chest and planted it in the seat. “What’s this about?”

“Just want to talk to you for a little bit. Get to know you better.” Butch frowned and sat forward. Then he dangled the key by its red tassel. “You recognize this?”

“No.”

“Then why did your eyes just go to it?”

“Because it’s in your hand and you’re not holding anything else. There’s nothing on the desk, either.”

Butch held the tassel between his thumb and forefinger and let the thing swing from side to side. “That’s the only reason, huh.”

“Do I look like I worry about keys?”

“How do you know it’s a key?”

Eyes that were nearly as yellow as Phury’s locked on him and stayed put. “What else could it be?”

“You tell me.”

“I thought this was supposed to be a get-to-know-ya. What the fuck does some whatever-it-is have to do with my ass?”

Butch studied the kid’s face, looking for tells. Huh. You know, without the half-job tattoos and piercings, the guy might have been handsome. And he might well be a good poker player, considering all the mask-in-place he was rolling.

Axe put his puss just inches from the key. “I’m still staring at it. Is this working for you?”

Butch took his own sweet time before changing subjects. The thing with liars? Silence and stillness were often the best challenge to their fronts, and he looked for tics, blinks, and twitches.

Eventually, he smiled. “You ever see someone die?”

Not on the list of questions Mary had given him to help her ascertain a trainee’s psychological state. But he was good with winging shit.

“What are you suggesting?”

The thought of his Marissa crying over that dead female made him more aggressive than a bull, but he drew back on that throttle.

“Just asking.” He looked at the key to give the male some “personal space.” “It is one way to get to know you better, isn’t it? An icebreaker, they call them, when two people go on a blind date and have to make conversation.”

“You want to know if I’ve ever killed anybody.”

“Not the question, was it. I asked, have you ever seen death happen?”

When there was no answer for a period of time, Butch glanced up. Axe wasn’t looking at the key anymore. The guy was focused on the middle distance in front of his nose.

Gotcha, Butch thought.

Gentling his voice deliberately, he murmured, “Who was it, Axwelle.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“Why, it’s your name.”

“I don’t answer to it.”

“Why.”

An angry glare went point-blank on Butch like a gun muzzle. “Because I fucking don’t, okay?”

“Fine, back to the Grim Reaper. Tell me the story.”

“Fuck you.”

Under any other circumstances, Butch would have lunged across the desk and grabbed the cocksucker’s neck for that kind of attitude, but there was too much purpose behind this.

“Hmmmmm,” was all he said.

Axe slammed himself back in the chair and did the re-cross thing with his arms. As his shoulders bunched up, it was hard not to approve of the heft of all that muscle. Strength without brains and a copious lack of psychotic, however, were going to do none of them any good.

“Can I go now?” Axe demanded.

“No, son, I don’t think you can. And before you get all huffy on my ass, I’m going to point out to you that this wonderful little bonding time we’re sharing is the first of at least three sessions.”

“Are you a shrink?”

“Fuck, no, are you kidding me?” He laughed. “I take pride in my own little stretch of madness, as a matter of fact.”

After all, he was seriously religious, putting his faith and the course of his life willingly in the hands of a belief system that was not concretely verifiable. And that was nuts, right?

Then again, the fact that his religion enriched his mortal coil and centered him and brought him meaning even after he had been “turned” into another species was enough proof for him.

With a shrug, he said, “The only way to get out of this office is to tell me what happened. As soon as you do, you’re free to go back to the weight room and power-lift until either your knees give out on you or you begin to vomit. So much to look forward to, right?”

If Craeg had thought that sitting behind Paradise in class was bad? That was nothing compared to watching her do pull-ups.

Across the mats, and to the accompaniment of the clanking of free weights, Paradise was lifting her body in perfect form up to the chin bar and then releasing … and up … and releasing. Her knees were cocked parallel to the floor, her ass was … painfully tight (for him, not for her, clearly), and her torso was in control from pelvis to shoulder.

Every time she hit the low point, her breasts punched up against the loose shirt they all wore—

“Fuck,” he groused as he lay back down on the bench and gripped the bar above his head.

Popping the four hundred and fifty pounds off its support, he took the weight down to his pecs and shoved it back up like the thing had insulted his dead mother.

“You want a spotter?” Novo asked.

When all he could do was grunt, she assumed the position behind his head, keeping her hands just under the now-bent bar.

“Three…” she counted. “Two more. One … good. You got it.”

As she helped guide the load back into its holding position, he flopped his forearms onto his chest and caught his breath.

Novo put her face in his line of vision. “I think you need to take a break.”

“Fuck that.”

“No, I mean it.”

“I got at least four more sets in me.”

“Your endurance ain’t what I’m worried about.” At that, her eyes went down to his hips. “Not that I don’t appreciate the view. Just not sure what the virginal object of your affections is gonna think.”

Craeg lifted his head. And then sat up quick.

Novo laughed. “Yeah, why don’t you take care of that and come back?”

“Damn it,” he hissed, jumping to his feet.

Marching across for the door, he glanced at the Brother Vishous. “I gotta go to the bathroom.”

Vishous smiled darkly. “Yeah, you do.”

Punching his way out into the corridor, he wondered if everyone had noticed he had a hard-on. The only good news? Paradise seemed oblivious—which meant she was either incredibly good at hiding her reactions, which he doubted, or she was as clueless about his little problem as he hoped.

In which case he felt like an extra-huge douche bag.

He hit the door to the men’s locker room so hard it flew open, striking the wall and forcing him to catch the thing before it smacked him in the face on the rebound.

“Not it, this is not it.”

Pacing around with his hands on his hips, he realized he should never have taken her vein. That blood exchange had created some kind of connection between them such that he was aware of every move she made anywhere at any moment—and the way that shit registered?

Mr. Happy got all excited about the possibility of shaking hands with her.

Which was never. Fucking. Going. To. Happen.

More pacing. More cursing.

Still hard.

“Fuck me!” he belted out.

Yes, please, his cock replied with a kick.

For a moment, all sorts of fantasies played through his head: Slamming the thing in a heavy book. Dropping a cement block on it. Car doors, hammers, logs.

This couldn’t be happening to him. The hardest part of training to become a soldier under the Brotherhood so he could avenge his family … could not possibly be some blond female. He just refused to believe this.

Not possible—

With another kick under his uniform, his erection seemed to be laughing at him.

Glaring down at his hips, he barked, “Shut up, idiot.”

Chapter Twenty-five

Butch watched every move the kid made. From the series of fine muscle contractions under Axe’s left eye to the chin itch he was rocking to the crack-of-the-neck finale.

“Tell me, and I’ll let you go,” he repeated.

Man, this was so much easier to do than when he’d been working for the CPD. Miranda rights? Yeah, whatever. Involuntary restraint? Blah, blah, blah. Coercion?

Well, actually he’d done some coercion even back then.

In fact, he thought back to that kid Billy Riddle who had attacked Beth before she had fallen into the vampire world and taken Butch with her. Man, he’d really enjoyed grinding that little bitch’s nose into the linoleum in the emergency room. Hmm … that hadn’t been coercion, technically—because he hadn’t been after information. It had been flat-out payback for the bastard having jumped a perfectly innocent woman in an alley so he could try to rape her with his friend.

Yeah, because you could really get through to an animal like that with arm’s-length handling.

Fucker.

Refocusing on Axe, Butch murmured, “I’m waiting.”

Axe shrugged. “Kick me out if you want, do other shit to me if you want … but I don’t owe you that. You don’t get a piece of my soul—you haven’t earned it.”

Sound logic, Butch thought—and exactly what he himself would have said if he’d been sitting in that chair.

Butch leaned in. “Sooner or later, before your final acceptance, you’re going to have to tell me.”

“Why the fuck do you care?”

“I don’t.”

Well, didn’t that get him a pair of bug eyes. “Then what the fuck are you asking me for?”

Butch planted his elbows on the desk and fanned out his hands, all Duh. “I need to know how you’re going to handle it when you see it again. That’s why. And one assessment of future behavior is past behavior. What you guys experience here in training is nothing compared to what the outside world is like. You gotta be prepared for situations when there is no time to think, when all you’ve got to go on to save your life or the lives of the people who are fighting with you are your instincts and your will to survive—and I guarantee you that when you get to those moments, the last thing you want is to have a lockup. The more you’re exposed to trauma, the more hardened you become to it and the safer you are. And that is a really suck-ass fucking equation, but it is the goddamn truth.”

Axe’s eyes drifted down to his own hands.

“Go back to the gym,” Butch ordered. “Think about shit. Just know you don’t have forever. We’re not wasting—”

“I lied.”

“Excuse me.”

The hard-ass, Gothed-out, degenerate-looking male inhaled slowly. “I haven’t seen any. I don’t know … what it looks like. I don’t know what it feels like.”

The change in affect, from hostile mask to profound sadness, was startling, but that was the way it always happened. When someone broke, when they decided to give up the goods, they became a different version of themselves, proving that self-protection and revelation were two mutually exclusive propositions.

“So why are you here?” Butch whispered. “Tell me … why did you come to us?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yeah, you do.”

Butch surreptitiously reached over and made sure his phone was on silent and that the ringer on the office line was off. And when Tohr reappeared on the far side of the glass door, Butch put his palm out—and the Brother backed off.

“Why are you here, Axe?”

The minutes slowed to a crawl and the quiet noises of the office seemed to dim even further out of respect for the space they were in.

“My dad was a nobody,” came the hoarse voice. “He didn’t do anything with his life. He was a carpenter for the species, you know … worked with his hands. Ma didn’t want anything to do with him or me—she left before my transition. She didn’t give a fuck about us. My dad, though, he stayed, and without him, I woulda been out on the streets as a pretrans, and we both know how long I would have lasted.” That dark-haired, half-and-half head shook slowly from left to right. “I wasn’t … good, you know? I never have been. He didn’t leave because there was no one else, I guess.”

Butch made no move, no sound. If he interrupted, he was liable to remind the male that he was talking, instead of reliving his previous life internally.

It was pretty clear where this story was going.

“I like X. I like coke. I like … some other hard-core shit. Two years ago, I went on a bender. Gone for like a week. One night, my dad tried to reach me by phone. Left me these messages—I was so fucking high that I got annoyed with him.” That low voice trailed off. “I got … annoyed.”

When Axe stalled out, the haunted cast to his face was a heartbreaker.

“What did you do, son?” Butch said softly, because he couldn’t help himself.

Axe cleared his throat a couple of times. Rubbed underneath his nose like the tears he was holding back were irritating the thing.

“I erased the messages.” There were a couple of coughs. “I erased … all the messages without listening to them.”

“And then what.”

“They’d killed him. The lessers. He was working in one of the aristocrats’ houses that got hit in the raids. He was … dying at the time he left me the voice mails.” Axe shook his head. “I went back and looked at the call log when I found what had happened and did the math.”

Butch closed his eyes for a second. “I’m sorry, son.”

“I didn’t know about it all right away … I guess a son of one of the workers went there and discovered everyone? That guy, whoever he was, he took care … of everything. When I finally got back home—you know, three days later—there was this note that had been put on the door. Someone had called the house phone and left messages, and when there was no one returning them, they put it all … in a note.”

“Brutal. Fucking brutal.”

“I kept the note.” Axe sniffed hard and shook his head. “I have the note they left. The remains are still on the estate—I think the house is in human hands now?”

“Do you want to get them back?”

“I don’t know. No. No, I don’t think so. Just one more way to be a bad son, huh.”

“Where’s your mom?”

“Heard she moved up in the world, married some rich guy, living the life. I don’t know—I don’t care.” As the male looked up abruptly, Axe’s face resumed its earlier composure, shutting the emotion down in the same way you might lock out an intruder. “So, no, I haven’t seen death up close. That’s one cherry I haven’t popped. Can I go now?”

Butch felt like he should say something profound. But what Axe really wanted, more than some pep talk, was the exit. “Yeah. You can.”

That chair made a squeaking noise against the concrete as it was shoved back hard, and then Axe steamed for the door. Before he opened it, he stopped. Looked back over his shoulder.

“What is it like?”

“Death?” When he got a nod, Butch did an inhale of his own. “You sure you want to know that kind of shit?”

“You said we needed exposure.”

Touché, he wanted to say. Instead, Butch pictured the male going back to the modest house he lived alone in and getting really fucking drunk and slitting his wrists. Or OD’ing. Or jumping out a window.

Not a foregone conclusion, given the amount of pain lurking under the half-tats and the metal.

“I want you to move in here.” Butch rubbed his large gold cross through his shirt. “Craeg’s going to stay with us, you need to as well.”

“What, worried I’ma go hang myself in the bathroom?”

“Yeah, precisely.” When Butch just stared across the desk, those dark brows of the guy rose once again. “You’ll stay here, Axe. It’s safer, you’re protected, and you can concentrate on what you need to do.”

There was going to be a fight about this, of course. Asshats like this guy always had a—

“Okay, but I’m going to need a night or two every once in a while to … you know.”

Interesting, Butch thought. So the poor SOB was aware, on some level, of the shit going on in his brain—and was spooked.

“You need to get laid, huh?” Butch drawled.

“Yeah.”

“Don’t blame you—and you can make arrangements with the doggen to drive you in and out. That won’t be a problem.”

“So … what is it like?”

Butch fell quiet and found himself pulling a little middle-vision-field of his own as images—gruesome, horrible images—played across his mind. For a moment, he wondered whether he should go there with the kid, but then he recognized that the truth was something that needed to be spoken even if it was terrible. Maybe especially if it was terrible.

And it had to be told to anyone who wanted to fight in this war.

If Axe couldn’t handle his demons, then the last thing that was good for anybody was to give him a dagger and a gun and send him out into Caldwell’s alleys.

Butch shrugged. “I used to be a homicide detective with the human police—don’t ask—so I saw a lot of it. To answer the question, it depends on how old it is and how it happened. The new stuff … especially if it was violent … can be messy. Body parts really don’t like to be cut, stabbed or hacked into sections, and they express their anger by leaking all over the fuck. Jesus, we’re, like, seventy percent water or something? And you learn that’s so fucking true when you go to a fresh scene. Pools of it. Drips of it. Speckles of it. Then you got the stained clothes, rugs, bedsheets, walls, flooring—or if it’s outside, the ground cover, the concrete, the asphalt. And then there’s the smell. Blood, sweat, urine, other shit. That juicy bouquet will get in your sinuses and stay there for hours afterward.” He shook his head again. “The older cases … the smell is worse than the mess. Water deaths, with the bloating, are just ugly—and if that gas that’s built up gets out? The stench will knock you on your ass. And I don’t know, I wasn’t too crazy for the burn deaths either. I mean, you’d think we’d realize we’re not different than any other mammal—cooked meat is cooked meat, period. But I’ve never seen a grown man puke up his coffee and donuts over a medium rare T-bone.” Butch refocused on the male. “You want to know what I always hated the most?”

“Yeah.”

He motioned over his head. “The hair. The hair … God, the fucking hair, especially if it was a woman. Matted with blood, dirt, little rocks … tangled and twisted … lying on gray skin. When I can’t sleep at night, that’s what I see. I see the hair.” His hands automatically began to rub themselves. “You always wore these gloves, you know … so you didn’t get fingerprints on anything, didn’t leave any of yourself behind. Early days they used to be latex—later, they were nitrile. And sometimes, when I’d handle a body, the hair would get on the gloves … and it was like it wanted to get into me? Like … you could catch death by murder somehow.” He shook his head. “Those gloves were so fucking thin. And they didn’t work.”

Axe frowned. “Why did you have to wear them then?”

“No, no, they worked with fingerprints, you know. But I left something of myself behind in all those dead bodies. Every one of them … has a piece of me.”

Starting with my sister, he thought. And to be accurate, she had taken the largest hunk out of him.

There was a long stretch of silence.

“You were in the human world?” Axe asked. “I mean … it sounds like you were—”

“Yeah, a while ago. Now … I’m something else.” Butch cleared his throat. “G’head, get outta here. You need your workout. You, me, and Craeg will go get all your shit—and maybe it’ll help me if you’re in the car with that hardheaded sonofabitch. I think I’m going to have to fight to keep him from jumping out and pulling a runner.”

“Yeah. Okay. Sure.”

“I’m sorry about your dad. And he wasn’t a nobody. Taking care of you made him count.”

Axe turned away and paused again, like he was bracing himself. Then he pushed his way out into the corridor and was gone.

As the glass door quietly eased shut, Butch stared straight ahead. He hadn’t intended to reveal that much to the male—he never spoke about that shit to anyone.

Putting his head in his hands, he took some deep breaths … and prayed to God that none of the other interviews went like that one.