Shit. This was all wrong. This shouldn't be hap -
He blinked and rubbed his eyes. When he opened them again, his depth perception was gone.
Yeah, the hell this isn't happening. And he wasn't going to make it downtown.
He wrenched the wheel to the right and pulled over into a strip mall, the one where the Caldwell Martial Arts Academy had been before it burned down. He killed the Bentley's lights and drove behind the long, narrow buildings, parking flush with the bricks so that if he had to drive off fast, all he had to do was hit the gas.
Leaving the engine running, he shrugged out of the sable coat, stripped off his suit jacket, then rolled up his left sleeve. Through the red haze, he reached into his glove compartment and took out a hypodermic syringe and a length of rubber tubing. His hands were shaking so badly he dropped the needle and had to stretch down and pick it up off the floor.
He patted his jacket pockets until he found the glass vial of the neuromodulator dopamine. He put the thing on the dash.
It took two tries to open the hypodermic's sterile packet, and then he nearly broke the needle off getting it through the rubber top on the dopamine lid. When the syringe was loaded, he wrapped the rubber tubing around his biceps using one hand and his teeth; then he tried to find a vein. Because he was working in a flat visual field, everything was complicated.
He just couldn't see well enough. All he had in front of him was... red.
Red...red...red... The word shot around his mind, banging on the inside of his skull. Red was the color of panic. Red was the color of desperation. Red was the color of his self-hatred.
Red was not the color of his blood. Not right now, at any rate.
Snapping himself to attention, he fingered his forearm and looked for an internal launching pad for the drug, a superhighway that would bring the shit up to the receptors in his brain. Except his veins were collapsing.
He felt nothing as he pushed the needle in, which was reassuring. But then it came... a little sting at the injection site. The numbness he preserved himself in was about to end.
As he hunted around under his skin for a usable vein, he started to feel things in his body: The sensation of his weight in the car's leather seat. The heat blowing on his ankles. The fast air moving in and out of his mouth, drying his tongue.
Terror had him shoving the plunger down and releasing the rubber tourniquet. God only knew if he'd had the right place.
Heart pounding, he stared at the clock.
"Come on," he muttered, starting to rock in the driver's seat. "Come on... kick in."
Red was the color of his lies. He was trapped in a world of red. And one of these days the dopamine wasn't going to work. He'd be lost in the red forever.
The clock changed numbers. One minute passed.
"Oh, shit..." He rubbed his eyes as if that might bring back the depth in his vision and the normal spectrum of color.
His cell phone rang and he ignored it.
"Please..." He hated the pleading in his voice, but he couldn't pretend to be strong. "I don't want to lose me..."
All at once his vision returned, the red draining from his visual field, the three-dimensional perspective returning. It was like the evil had been sucked out of him and his body numbed up, its sensations evaporating until all he knew were the thoughts in his head. With the drug, he became a moving, breathing, talking bag that blessedly had only four senses to worry about now that touch had been medicated to the back burner.
He collapsed against the seat. The stress around Bella's abduction and rescue had gotten to him. That was why the attack had hit him so hard and fast. And maybe he needed to adjust the dosage again. He'd go to Havers and check about that.
It was a while before he was able to put the car in drive. As he eased out from behind the strip mall and slipped into traffic, he told himself he was just one more sedan in a long line of cars. Anonymous. Just like everyone else.
The lie eased him somewhat... and increased his loneliness.
At a stoplight, he checked the message that had been left for him.
Bella's security alarm had been turned off for an hour or so and had just come back on. Someone had been in her house again.
Zsadist found the black Ford Explorer parked in the woods about three hundred yards away from the entrance to Bella's mile-long driveway. The only reason he'd run across the thing was because he'd been scouring the area, too restless to go home, too dangerous to be in the company of anyone else.
A set of footprints in the snow headed in the direction of the farmhouse.
He cupped his hands and looked in the car's windows. The security alarm was engaged.
Had to be those lessers' ride. He could smell the sweet scent of them all over it. But with only one set of tracks, maybe the driver had dropped his buddies off, then hidden it? Or maybe the SUV had had to be moved from somewhere else?
Whatever. The Society would be back for its property. And wouldn't it be sweet to know where the hell it ended up? But how could he trail the damn thing?
He put his hands on his hips... and happened to look down at his gun belt.
As he undipped his cell phone, he thought fondly of Vishous, mat tech-savvy son of a bitch.
Necessity, mother, invention.
He dematerialized under the SUV so he left a minimal amount of tracks in the snow. As his weight was absorbed by his back, he winced. Man, he was going to pay for that little trip through the French door. And for the knock on the head. But he'd survived worse.
He took out a penlight and looked around the undercarriage, trying to pick the right spot. He needed somewhere fairly large, and it couldn't be near the exhaust system, because even in this cold, that kind of heat could be a problem. Of course, he'd have much preferred to get into the Explorer and tuck the phone under a seat, but the SUV's alarm system was a complication. If it were tripped he might not be able to reengage it, so the lessers would know someone had been in the car.
As if the punched-out window wouldn't be a clue.
Goddamn it... He should have gone through those lessers' pockets before stabbing them into oblivion. One of those bastards had had the keys. Except he'd been so pissed off, he'd moved too fast.
Z cursed, thinking of the way Bella had looked at him after he'd chewed up that slayer in front of her. Her eyes had been wide in her pale face, her mouth loose with shock at what he'd done.
The thing was, the Brotherhood's business of protecting the race was a nasty one. It was messy and ugly and sometimes deranged. Always bloody. And on top of all that, she had seen the killing lust in him. Somehow, he was willing to bet that was what disturbed her the most.
Focus, dumb ass. Come on, get out of your head.
Z poked around some more, shifting under the Explorer. Finally he found what he was looking for: a little cave in the undercarriage. He shrugged out of his windbreaker, wrapped the phone up, and shoved the wad in the hole. He tested the jury-rig to make sure it was in there good and tight, then dematerialized out from under the SUV.
He knew the setup wasn't going to last long under there, but it was so much better than nothing. And now Vishous would be able to track the Explorer from home, because that little silver-bullet Nokia had a GPS chip in it.
Z flashed over to the edge of the meadow so he could see the back of the farmhouse. He'd done an okay patch job on the busted kitchen door. Fortunately the frame of the thing had still been intact, so he'd been able to close it and reengage the alarm sensors. Then he'd found a plastic tarp in the garage and covered up the monster hole.
Fixed, but not really.
Funny... he didn't think he'd be any more successful if he tried to rehab Bella's opinion of him. But - goddamn it?e didn't want to be a savage to her.
In the distance, two headlights turned off Route 22 and shined down the long private lane. The car slowed as it came up to Bella's house, then pulled into her driveway.
Was that a Bentley? Z thought. Sure looked like it.
Man, an expensive car like that? Had to be a member of Bella's family. No doubt they'd been notified that the security alarm had been off for a while and then been turned back on about ten minutes ago.
Shit. Now was not a good time for someone to do a look-see walk-through. Given Z's luck, the lessers would pick right this moment to come back for their SUV - and decide to do a drive-by of the farmhouse for kicks and giggles.
Cursing under his breath, he waited for one of the Bentley's doors to open... except no one got out of the car and the engine stayed idling. This was good. As long as the alarm was activated, maybe they wouldn't think to go inside. Because the kitchen was a mess.