The Sinner (Black Dagger Brotherhood 18)

Then again, maybe she was hiding a whole lot of metal under that skirt—and not of the chastity belt variety, but the point-and-shoot kind.

As they closed in on each other, Jo risked a second glance, and decided that the strut was less model-like and more like ready-to-cut-a-bitch pissed.

Jo dropped her stare as they passed, but she couldn’t stop herself from looking over her shoulder.

Yup, the back was as good as the front, that long, mahogany-colored hair so thick, so bouncy, so healthy, it had to be a raft of extensions. Surely no one could have all those physical attributes going for them.

Shaking her head, Jo checked the street sign as she crossed another intersection and then cut over toward where she’d left her VW Golf. The wind came at her now, and it was hard to say exactly when the scent registered. But even with the goal of getting safely to her junker, her feet slowed… and stopped.

Copper. She was tasting copper in the back of her throat.

There was only one thing that did that, and there had to be a lot of it for the smell to be concentrated in this kind of stiff breeze.

Narrowing her eyes, she tried to see what was up ahead while she went for her cell phone. Looking behind herself, she couldn’t see the woman anymore, and there was no one else around.

Maybe she was wrong. Maybe this was…

Even though her instincts were screaming at her to come back when the sun was up, she walked forward, the smell of blood getting thicker until she felt like she wasn’t so much breathing it in as drinking it. And then she caught sight of her car, about a hundred yards away—

The dripping stopped her.

Between each of her footfalls, she became aware of a soft plunk, plunk, plunk.

Don’t look, a small voice inside her said. Don’t… look—

Up on the first landing of a fire escape, there was a tangled knot the size of an armchair, and her first thought was Why the hell would someone put a piece of furniture up there?

And then she saw the origin of the dripping sound.

There was a steady stream of something dropping from the knot, and as she went over to the fire escape, light from an exterior fixture some distance away lined up with what was falling to the asphalt.

The stuff was red and translucent.

Stumbling back, Jo covered her mouth with her palm, but then she needed to throw out her arms for balance as her foot knocked into a soccer ball—

Not a soccer ball.

What rolled off to the side was a human head.

As it came to rest, the facial features were angled toward her. The eyes were open and staring sightlessly upward, the mouth lax as if the man had been screaming as he had been decapitated.

Jo’s vision went checkerboard and her legs went loose, but she had the presence of mind to dial 911. When the operator answered, the words did not come. She was breathing hard, yet there was no air in her lungs, nothing to send the syllables up her throat and out her mouth.

She focused on her car, and the proximity terrified her. In the back of her mind, she heard Gigante threaten her life.

Run! she thought. Except she was now a witness to some kind of a crime—because there was no way this was a suicide or an accident.

“My name is J-j-jo Early,” she said hoarsely. “I’m at the c-c-corner of Eighteenth and Kennedy and I need to report… a murder, a killing… he’s dead. Oh, God, his head… is not on his body anymore…”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

By eight the next morning, Syn was a caged animal as he paced around his empty bedroom. He was not animated by food that he had consumed nor blood that he had swallowed. He was not well rested, either.

The sense that he was needed by that female and could not respond, that he was powerless in the face of the sun’s dominance, that he was not strong, but weak, gave him an energy that shook his hands and rattled his teeth. And as a result of the physical quaking, things under his conscious surface, things he had refused to let air for so many years, were threatening to break through.

He fought them back as best he could, but he lost the battle thanks to the bathroom mirror. It was there, standing naked before the sinks, that he bared his fangs—as if to prove to himself he still had them—and it happened.

The present disappeared and the past took him over, a storm unleashed…

Old Country, 1687

When Syn lifted his head, blood spooled out of his mouth, falling to the dirt floor of the hut. There was a ringing sound in his ears, surging and retreating by turns, and he thought of the sea that did the same at the base of the cliffs nearby. How long had he been without consciousness this time?

The inside of his nose was stuffed up so he swallowed to be better able to breathe through his lips. As his tongue brushed against where his front teeth should have been, there was a ragged gap, the two—no, four—empty sockets tender and tickly.

He went to try to stand up to see if aught was broken of his arms and legs, but he knew better.

With caution, he looked across to the only bedding pallet. Beneath a carpet’s worth of blankets, the great beast slept, the mound of flesh and muscle rising and falling, a gurgle marking the inhales. Even in repose, it had its priorities. A meaty hand protruded out of the woolen layers, the dirt- and blood-caked fingers resting protectively upon the open throat of a bladder of mead.

The snoring was the signal Syn could move, and as he pushed his torso up, he was sore in his shoulders and his ribs. The hut was never clean, never tidy, but after he had been beaten with a copper pot and thrown about like a bolt of cloth, there was more disorder than ever. The only thing that had not been disturbed was the mummified remains of his mahmen, the body, wrapped in its rags, as yet where it had been for the last ten years.

Gingerly setting his seat upon the packed floor, he made sure that the aches and pains were not from serious injury. Verily, his father seemed to know how far he could push the battering. No matter how drunk he was, he did not take the beatings unto death’s door. He stopped a hairsbreadth before the point of ne’er return.

The empty belly cradled between Syn’s pelvis became something he could not ignore, and not because his hunger was of sufficient urgency. He had been so long starved that the hollow feeling was a natural extension of his body, nothing of note. But the growling sounds it made were dangerous.

He did not want to rouse his sire, although it was hard to know what was worse—when the male was disturbed from his addled state and still of drunken mind, or when he awoke furious at the recession of the mead’s soporific properties.

As Syn attempted to stand, his legs wobbled, thin and unreliable beneath his slight frame, and he balanced himself only when he threw out his arms. His father’s pallet was set directly afore the heavy skin flap that covered the doorway to the outside, and given that Syn was a pretrans, he could not close his eyes and carry himself off upon the air. He must needed to ambulate about in a corporeal fashion.

Placing his palms upon his stomach, he pressed in whilst he held his breath. On the balls of his feet, he chose his path with care, disturbing naught, and he orientated his safety upon the bladder of mead and the fingertips resting upon it. His sire suffered from an unrelenting unsteadiness of extremity. If he were to awaken, his fingers would tell the tale through movement—

As Syn focused on the back of that hand, he saw something odd in the blood-caked flesh. There was a flash of brilliant white, and he thought that perhaps the strikes of the night—or the day, he knew not which—had been so hard, his sire had broken through the flesh of his knuckles, down to the bone. again, maybe she was hiding a whole lot of metal under that skirt—and not of the chastity belt variety, but the point-and-shoot kind.