To buttress the point, Xcor sat down at the foot of the door, putting his back in place against the panels. He trusted his soldiers with his life in the field, but that was a beautiful, powerful female down there, and they were rutting, horny sonsabitches, the lot of them.
They would have to get through him to get to her.
After all, he was a bastard, but he was not completely codeless, and she deserved protection she likely did not need for the good deed she had done him.
Killing the Bloodletter?
Now, that had been a favor to Xcor, as it turned out.
Because it meant he did not have to render the liar’s demise upon the fucker’s ugly head himself.
FIFTY-THREE
Manny was behind the wheel of his car, hands cranked down hard, eyes sharp on the road in front of him, when he took a tight turn . . . and drove right into exactly the kind of scene Vishous had described.
About. Fucking. Time. It had taken him only a good three hours of making boxes and boxes around block after block after cocksucking block to run across the damn thing.
But yeah, this was what he was looking for: In the ten a.m. sunlight that bled in between the buildings, a slick, oily mess gleamed all over the pavement and the brick walls and the Dumpster and those chicken-wired windows.
Popping the clutch, he flipped the gearshift into neutral and hit the brakes.
The instant he opened the door, he recoiled. “Fucking hell . . .”
The stench was indescribable. Likely because it shot directly into his nose and shut down his brain, it was so frickin’ awful.
But he did recognize it. The guy with the Sox hat had reeked of it that night Manny had operated on the vampires.
Cocking his phone, he called up Vishous’s supersecret number and hit send. The line barely rang once before Payne’s twin answered.
“I got it,” Manny said. “It’s everything you told me about—man, the smell. Right. Yeah. Got it. Talk to you in two.”
As he hung up, part of him was losing it, thinking of Payne’s possibly have been involved in what was clearly a bloodbath. But he kept it together as he searched around for something, anything, that could tell them what had happened—
“Manny?”
“Motherfucker!” As he spun on his heel, he grabbed his cross—or maybe it was his heart, so the damn thing didn’t break out from behind his sternum. “Jane?”
The ghostly form of his former head of trauma solidified before his eyes. “Hi.”
His first thought was, Oh, God, the sun—which showed just how much his life had changed. “Wait! Are you okay with daylight—”
“I’m fine.” She reached out and calmed him. “I’ve come to help—V told me where you were.”
He gripped her shoulder briefly. “I am . . . really fucking glad to see you.”
Jane gave him a quick, hard hug. “We’re going to find her. I promise.”
Yeah, but what kind of condition was she going to be in?
Working together, the pair of them scoured the alleyway, weaving in and out of both the shadows and the lit parts. Thank God it was still early and this was a deserted part of the city, because he was not in a mind-set where he could deal with the complication of people—especially the police—showing up.
Over the next half hour, he and Jane went through every square inch of the alley, but all they found were the remnants of drug use, some litter and a number of condoms he had no intention of looking very closely at.
“Nothing,” he muttered. “Goddamn nothing.”
Fine. Whatever. He was just going to keep moving, keep combing, keep hoping—
A rattling sound snapped his head around and then took him over to the Dumpster.