Oh, shit, he really didn’t want that coming out of his mouth right now.
“What,” she demanded. “You might as well tell me because somehow, I don’t think tonight could get any worse.”
His eyes traced her face and he shook his head ruefully. What the hell was he going to do with her?
What the hell was he going to do without her?
“Don’t bet on it,” he muttered. “Worse is always a possibility.”
“Well, all I know is, where you go, I’m going.” She crossed her arms over her chest. “And if you have a problem with that, I’m not really interested in hearing about it.”
He cursed. Then he thought of her upstairs, guarding his six.
With another round of swearing, he went to the living room and came back with the duffle bag full of weapons. “Fine. I want to go clear your basement.”
Erika nodded once. “The door’s right behind you. And I’ll go first.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
How had the Omega changed its mind?
As the male walked down the city street, he was naked and impervious to the cold. He was also invisible to the few humans who were passing in cars. But he was alive.
With the wind blowing through his blond hair and across his bare skin, the sensations were distant and also foreign—and he wondered how long he had been in the miasma, the torturous void, the black oily Hell where he had known pain to the point where he had become pain.
No form, no function, just an agony that was somehow self-aware…
In spite of who he’d been sired by, he’d never thought much about Dhunhd. Now that he’d died, he knew firsthand that it existed—and not in terms of his father’s private quarters, but rather the eternal damnation that humans waxed poetic about and that vampires, too, sought to avoid.
He wasn’t sure why he was back here.
Striding by a parked car, he backtracked to check out the license plate. The sticker in the corner had a date that made sense to him. It was just over two years past when he had “died.”
No, not died. Not in the conventional sense. Rotted out, was more like it, on that mattress, unable to fight the tide of putrefaction that had seeped through and out of his body: Forsaken by his sire. Stabbed and left to degrade and decay in Hell. Abandoned like an experiment gone wrong—or worse, forgotten like a toy that had been explored, mastered, and discarded.
He’d wanted to think his sire had played a long game with his “birth” and the embedding of him in his infant state into the rarefied bosom of that aristocratic family. It had been a very strategic move on the Omega’s part, allowing him to infiltrate the enemy from the very moment of his first awareness, setting his son on a course not only to be trained by the Black Dagger Brotherhood, but to fight with them.
He had been the chosen one, not a lesser initiated into the Lessening Society, but the blooded son, the heir to power, the special gift to the earth.
When the son had been ready, he had assumed control of the coordinated vengeance against all vampires, and the first thing he had done was kill the family who had raised him. And then, because he had been in the mansions of all the aristocracy, he had taken the army of slayers out to do what they did best. He himself had led the slaughter, and nearly all of the glymera had been wiped out. The resulting societal chaos had been almost enough to topple the Blind King, and that auspicious beginning had been as he’d intended to go on. He’d been determined to eradicate all of that species he’d been reared among.
But somewhere along the line…
His father had become the enemy. The son just hadn’t known it until far too late.
When he had arrived down in Dhunhd, he’d been shocked, and he’d suffered, and he was now a hundred thousand years older than he had been before. Forged in the fire of the agony, he was harder. Stronger. And he couldn’t begin to guess about the motivation for him being renewed.
From a tactical point of view, it was stupid. The Omega was powerful and terrifying, and all of that was in the son—who was now disaffected and pissed off at having had to perpetually stew in the kind of pain that came when you were hit by a car and every bone in your body was broken. Why would anyone volunteer for an enemy that knew so much about—
The male stopped. Looked up to the sky. Looked down to his feet.
Then he turned in a circle. All the way around.
“Father?” he said quietly.
Closing his eyes, he reached out with his instincts, searching for…
His lids raised. And then he frowned when what was in front of him came into focus. It was the exit to a multi-level parking garage, the “Do Not Enter” sign glowing red above an arch in the concrete walling.