Lover Avenged (Black Dagger Brotherhood #7)(50)

In the beginning, he’d had to cram his finger down his throat, but no more. He just clenched his diaphragm and up it all came, like rats fleeing an overflowing sewer.

“You gotta cut that shit out.”

Lassiter’s voice harmonized with the sound of the toilet flushing. Which so made sense.

“Christ, don’t you ever knock?”

“It’s Lassiter. L-A-S-S-I-T-E-R. How is it possible you’re still getting me confused with someone else? Do I need a nametag?”

“Yes, and let’s put it over your mouth.” Tohr sagged onto the marble and dropped his head into his hands. “You know, you can go home. You can leave anytime.”

“Get your flat ass in gear, then. ’Cuz that’s what’ll do it.”

“Now, there’s a reason to live.”

There was a soft chiming sound, which meant, tragedy of tragedies, the angel had just popped himself up onto the countertop. “So, what are we doing tonight? Wait, let me guess, sitting in morose silence. Or, no…you’re mixing it up. Brooding with soulful intensity, right? What a f*cking wild child you are. Whoo. Hoo. Next thing you know, you’ll be opening for Slipknot.”

With a curse, Tohr stood up and went over to turn on the shower, hoping that if he refused to look at the loudmouth, Lassiter would get bored more quickly and move on to ruin someone else’s afternoon.

“Question,” the angel said. “When are we going to cut that rug that’s growing out of your head? Shit gets any longer, we’re going to have to mow it down like hay.”

As Tohr stripped out of his T-shirt and boxers, he enjoyed the only consolation to be had in suffering Lassiter’s company: He flashed the motherf*cker.

“Man, flat ass is right,” Lassiter muttered. “You’re sporting a pair of deflated basketballs back there. Makes me wonder…Hey, I’ll bet Fritz has a bicycle pump. I’m just saying.”

“You don’t like the view? You know the door. It’s the one you never knock on.”

Tohr didn’t give the water time to warm up; he just got under the spray, and he cleaned himself for no good reason he knew of—he had no pride, so he didn’t give a shit what anyone thought of his hygiene.

The throwing up had a purpose. The showering…maybe it was simply habit.

Closing his eyes, he parted his lips and stood facing the nozzle. Water licked into his mouth, whisking away the bile, and as the sting left his tongue, a thought walked into his brain.

Wrath was out fighting. Alone.

“Hey, Tohr.”

Tohr frowned. The angel never used his proper name. “What.”

“Tonight is different.”

“Yeah, only if you leave me alone. Or hang yourself in this bathroom. Got six showerheads to choose from in here.”

Tohr picked up the bar of soap and went over his body, feeling the hard, jabbing thrusts of his bones and joints coming through his thin skin.

Wrath out alone.

Shampoo. Rinse. Turn back to the spray. Open mouth.

Out. Alone.

He ended the shower, and the angel was front and center with a towel, all manservant and shit.

“Tonight is different,” Lassiter said softly.

Tohr looked at the guy truly, seeing him for the first time, even though they had been together for four months. The angel had black-and-blond hair that was as long as Wrath’s, but he was no cross-dresser in spite of all the Cher dripping down his back. His wardrobe was straight-up army/navy, black shirts and camo pants and combat boots, but he wasn’t all soldier. Fucker was pierced like a pincushion and accessorized like a jewelry box, with gold hoops and chains hanging from holes in his ears and wrists and eyebrows. And you could bet the mountings were on his chest and below the waist—which was something Tohr refused to think about. He didn’t need help throwing up, thank you very much.

As the towel changed hands, the angel said with gravity, “Time to wake up, Cinderella.”

Tohr was about to point out that it was Sleeping Beauty when a memory came to him as if it had been injected into his frontal lobe. It was the night he’d saved Wrath’s life back in 1958, and the images came to him with the clarity of the actual experience.

The king had been out. Alone. Downtown.

Half-dead and bleeding into the sewer.

An Edsel had nailed him. A piece-of-shit Edsel convertible the color of a diner waitress’s blue eye shadow.

As near as Tohr could figure out later, Wrath had been on foot in pursuit of a lesser and barrel-assing around a corner when the boat of a car had plowed into him. Tohr had been two blocks away and heard the screeching brakes and the impact of some sort, and he’d been prepared to do absolutely nothing.

Human traffic accidents? Not his problem.

But then a pair of lessers had run past the alley he’d been standing in. The slayers had been hauling nut through the fall drizzle like they were being pursued, except there was no one riding their bumpers. He’d waited, expecting to see one of his brothers. None had come pounding along.

Didn’t make any sense. If a slayer had been hit by a car in the company of his cronies, they wouldn’t have left the scene. The others would have killed the human driver and any passengers, then packed their dead up in the trunk and driven off from the scene: The last thing the Lessening Society wanted was an incapacitated lesser leaking black blood on the street.