Lover Avenged (Black Dagger Brotherhood #7)(11)

Twenty minutes later, Rehv pulled up to an iron gate that was downright industrial in its function over form. The thing was without any grace whatsoever, nothing but solid shafts bolted together and topped with a curly wig of barbed-wire coil. To the left there was an intercom, and as he put down his window to hit the call button, security cameras focused on the grille of his car and the front windshield and the driver’s-side door.

So he was not surprised at the tense tone of the female voice that answered. “Sire…I was not aware that you had an appointment?”

“I don’t.”

Pause. “As a nonemergency walk-in, the wait time could be rather long. Perhaps you would like to schedule—”

He glared into the closest camera eye. “Let me in. Now. I have to see Havers. And this is an emergency.”

He had to get back to the club and check in. The four hours he’d blown already this evening were a lifetime when it came to managing the likes of ZeroSum and the Iron Mask. Shit didn’t just happen in places like those, it was SOP, and his fist was the one with Buck Stops Here tatted on the knuckles.

After a moment, those ugly-ass, rock-solid gates slid free, and he didn’t waste time on the mile-long driveway.

As he came around the last turn, the farmhouse up ahead didn’t warrant the kind of security it had, at least not if you took it at face value. The two-story clapboard was barely a colonial, and it was totally pared-down. No porches. No shutters. No chimneys. No plantings.

Compared to Havers’s old crib and clinic setup it was the poor relation to a garden shed.

He parked opposite the detached bank of garages where the ambulances were kept and got out. The fact that the cold December night made him shiver was another good sign, and he reached into the Bentley’s backseat to take out his cane and one of his many sable dusters. Along with numbness, the downside of his chemical mask was a drop in core temperature that turned his veins into air-conditioning coils. Living out his nights and days in a body he couldn’t feel or warm was not a party, but it wasn’t as if he had a choice.

Maybe if his mother and his sister hadn’t been normals, he might have Darth Vadered himself and embraced the dark side, living out his days f*cking with the minds of his comrades-in-harm. But he’d put himself in the position of being head of his household, and that kept him in this stretch of neither here nor there.

Rehv walked around the side of the colonial, pulling the sable in close to his throat. When he came up to a nothing-looking door, he rang the button that was tacked onto the aluminum siding and stared into an electronic eye. A moment later, an air lock popped with a hiss, and he pushed his way into a white room the size of a walk-in closet. After he stared into a camera’s face, another seal popped free, a hidden panel shifted back, and he descended a set of stairs. Another checkin. Another door. And then he was in.

The reception area was every clinic’s patient-and-family parking lot, with rows of chairs and magazines on little tables and a TV and some plants. It was smaller than the one at the old clinic, but it was clean and well-ordered. The two females sitting in it both stiffened as they saw him.

“Right this way, sire.”

Rehv smiled at the nurse who came around the reception desk. For him, a “long wait” was always one in an exam room. The nurses didn’t like him spooking the folks in those rows of chairs, and they didn’t like him around themselves, either.

Worked for him. He wasn’t the socializing kind.

The exam room he was led down to was located on the nonemergency side of the clinic, and it was one he’d been in before. He’d been in all of them before.

“The doctor is in surgery and the rest of the staff are with other patients, but I’ll have a colleague come take your vitals as soon as I can.” The nurse left him like somebody had just coded down the hall and she was the only one with paddles.

Rehv got up on the table, keeping his coat on and his cane in his palm. To pass the time, he closed his eyes and let the emotions in the place seep into him like a panoramic vista: The walls of the basement dissolved away and the emotional grids of each individual emerged from out of the darkness, a host of different vulnerabilities and anxieties and weaknesses exposed to his symphath side.

He held the remote to all of them, instinctually knowing what buttons to push on the female nurse next door who was worried that her hellren wasn’t attracted to her anymore…but who had still had too much to eat at First Meal. And the male she was treating who had fallen down the stairs and cut his arm…because he’d been into the booze. And the pharmacist across the hall who up until recently had been lifting Xanax for his personal use…until he’d found the hidden cameras put in place to catch him.

Self-destruction in others was a symphath’s favorite reality show to watch, and it was especially good when you were the producer. And even though his vision was now back to “normal” and his body was numb and cold, what he was at his core was just banked, not spent.

For the kind of shows he could put on, there was an endless source of inspiration and funding.





“Shit.”

As Butch parked the Escalade in front of the clinic’s garages, Wrath’s mouth did some more pull-ups on the curse bar. In the headlights of the SUV, Vishous was spotlit like some frickin’ calendar girl, all sprawled out on the hood of a very familiar Bentley.