"You don't need to read him to know that. Just think about what he did to your king. "
"Yes. Yes, indeed. "
From Qhuinn to Xcor. Fabulous track record for picking males -
"He's moving fast," Layla said urgently. "He's dematerialized. "
"This is it. This is where you come in. "
Layla closed her eyes and shut out all of her senses except the instinct to find her own blood. "He's moving north. "
As previously agreed, the two of them traveled a mile and reconvened; traveled another five miles and reconvened; traveled another ten, and another ten. . . with Layla's instincts acting as a compass, steering their course.
And all the while time was of the essence, dawn racing in, a dangerous glow lodging in the seat of the sky and getting stronger.
The final leg of their race found them in a wooded forest, a good mile to a mile and a half away from where he had stopped - and at last gone no farther.
"I can get you closer," Layla murmured.
"He's not going anywhere?"
"No, he's not. "
"Then you go. Now - go!"
Layla took one last look in the direction he was in. She knew she had to depart - for if she could sense him, he could perhaps sense her as well. The expectation, of course, was that if he did, he would not be able to react fast enough, that her disappearance to the mhis-protected environment up north would stop her trail and stymie him completely, not just giving him no inkling of her destination, but scrambling his blood sense so totally, he would be sent in a different direction like light bouncing off the surface of a mirror.
Fear made her heart skip, and she held on to the sensation, recognizing it as more real than her assessment of the time they'd been together when he had fed from her.
"Layla? Go!"
Dearest Virgin Scribe, she had condemned him to death this night -
No, she corrected. He had done that to himself. Assuming that rifle was found in and among the Band of Bastards' living arrangements, and that it proved what the Brothers thought it would, Xcor had set the wheels of his doom in motion months ago.
She might be the conduit, but his actions were the electrical charge that was going to stop his heart.
"Thank you for giving me this opportunity to do the right thing," she told Xhex. "I'll go home right now. "
With that, she dematerialized away from the wooded glen, zeroing in on the mansion, making it into the vestibule just as the light was beginning to sting her eyes.
It was not tears doing that. No, those were not tears - it was the coming dawn.
Tears shed for that male would be. . . wrong of her on too many levels to count.
* * *
"We need to go, buddy. "
John nodded as Qhuinn spoke to him, but he didn't move. Standing in the middle of Wellsie's kitchen, he was suffering from a kind of culture shock.
The cupboards were bare. The pantry was empty. So were all the drawers and the two closets. The bookcases over the built-in desk. The desk itself.
Walking around, he circled the table that was in the alcove, remembering the dinners Wellsie had served on it. Then he ambled down the long stretch of granite countertop, imagining her bowls of bread dough draped with dish towels, her cutting boards with piles of diced onions or sliced mushrooms on them, her canister of flour, her crock of rice. At the stove, he almost bent down to breathe in the aroma of the stew and the spaghetti sauce and the mulled apple cider.
"John?"
Turning away, he walked over to his best friend. . . and then kept going, heading out into the living room. Shit, it was like the place had been bombed in a way. The paintings had all been stripped from the walls, nothing but their claw-shaped brass hangers left where they had been hung: Everything in a frame had been moved over to the far corner, the works of art leaning up against each other, separated by thick terry-cloth towels.