J.R. Ward the Black Dagger Brotherhood Novels 5-8 - J. R. Ward [344]
“Thank you,” Cormia said again, without looking over.
Bella just reached out and gave Cormia’s hand a squeeze, and they both focused on the screen.
Chapter Twenty-nine
Lash stumbled out of his parents’ home with blood on both his hands. His knees were unhinged, his stride jerky. As he tripped over his own feet, he looked down. Oh, God, the stuff was on his shirt and his boots, too.
Mr. D popped up out of the Focus. “You hurt?”
Lash couldn’t find any words to answer. Limp and shaky, he could barely stand. “It took . . . so much longer than I thought.”
“Here, now, suh, let’s get you in the car.”
Lash allowed the little guy to take him around to the passenger side and settle him in the seat.
“Whatchu got in your hand there, suh—”
Lash shoved the lesser to the side, bent over, and dry-heaved a couple of times over the ground. Something black and oily came out of his mouth and dribbled down his chin. He wiped it off and looked at it.
Not blood. At least, not the kind . . . “I killed them,” he said hoarsely.
The lesser knelt down in front of him. “ ’Course you did, and you made your daddy proud. Them bastards ain’t your future. We are.”
Lash tried to stop the scenes from replaying in his head. “My mother screamed the loudest. When she saw me kill my father.”
“Not your father. Not your mother. Animals. Those things were animals in there. Like taking down a deer . . . or, yeah, like a rat, you know? A vermin.” The slayer shook his head. “They wasn’t you. You just thought they was.”
Lash looked down at his hands. The knife was in one. A chain in the other. “So much blood.”
“Yeah, they done bleed a ton, those vampires.”
There was a long silence. Like, one that lasted for a year.
“Say, there, suh, you got like a pool thing ’round this place?” When Lash nodded, the lesser said, “ ’Round back?” Lash nodded again. “Okay, we gonna take you there and let you wash up. We got you some fresh clothes in the back of this here car and you gonna put ’em on.”
Before Lash knew it, he was in the estate’s pool house under a shower, washing the remnants of his parents away from his skin and watching the red funnel down the drain at his feet. He rinsed off the knife and the chain as well, and when he stepped out to towel off, he put the stainless-steel link around his neck first.
There were two dog tags hanging off the thing. One was his rottweiler’s last license, and the other the record of King’s final rabies shot.
Lash’s change of clothes went on quick enough, and he transferred his father’s wallet from the soiled pants he’d had on to the clean ones Mr. D had gotten for him. He was going to have to keep using the boots, but the stains were browning up, looking less red, which made it more bearable.
He came out of the pool house and found the little slayer sitting on one of the glass-topped tables by the lawn chairs.
The lesser hopped down off it. “You want me to call for the backup now?”
Lash looked at the Tudor. Driving over here, he’d intended to ransack the place. Take anything that was worth a dime. Use a fleet of what the Omega had told him were his troops to strip the place down to its wallpaper and floorboards.
It seemed like the Conan thing to do. The perfect declaration of his new status. You don’t just crush your enemies, you take their horses and burn their huts and hear the lamentations of their women. . . .
Trouble was, he knew what was inside that house. With the bodies of his parents and the doggen in it, he was staring at a mausoleum, and the idea of desecrating the place, of sending in a swarm of lessers to defile it, was too wrong.
“I want to get out of here.”
“We’ll come back then?”
“Just get me the fuck out of here.”
“Whatever you like.”
“Right answer.”
Moving like an old man, Lash walked back around to the front of the house and kept his eyes straight ahead, avoiding the windows