Blood Vow (Black Dagger Legacy #2)(26)

Shit, Axe wasn’t crazy about competing with Novo—he would have much rather gone up against another male, and yeah, guess that made him sexist. Then again, the joke was probably on him. She was just as good at the fighting and the shooting as he was, her strength nearly that of his own, her brains a little ahead of his. She also didn’t look like a serial killer.

But hey, he would take his piercings out. Bam. Nearly normal.

He also had zero personal skills. So she could very well beat him in the interview.

“You want to have a friendly wager?” Novo drawled.

“On what?”

“Who gets it? Loser has to pay for dinner.”

He wasn’t in a position to buy her a Kit Kat. “How about winner buys dinner?”

“Deal.”

Twenty minutes later, the bus came to a stop and everyone filed off. The night was bitterly cold, and no one lingered to talk. As Axe dematerialized to his father’s cottage, he thought it was weird that he’d never called the little place his “parents’ ”—but then again, there had been no “parents” involved with the damn thing. It had been built for his mother, and hadn’t done its job to keep her in the family.

So the roof and four walls were nothing but a monument to his father’s weakness for a female.

Going inside, he was glad there was no electricity, no lights to turn on. He couldn’t stand the kitchen, hated looking at it, and he steamed right through the shallow space. The stairs to the second floor were short and steep and he took them two at a time, proceeding to the only open door.

He kept his father’s room closed off.

His room was a mattress on the floor, clothes in piles, and not much else. Hell, he didn’t even sleep up here, because the fireplace was downstairs and he had to stay warm. In the spring and summer, though, he’d move back to the second floor—or maybe he wouldn’t. Who cared.

Axe went through his own “wardrobe” of muscle shirts, black jeans, and the occasional leather jacket or cloak, although not because he expected a turtleneck to have miraculously appeared courtesy of the Look-More-Normal Fairy Godmother dropping by. It was more because he had to brace himself to go through his father’s stuff.

Ten minutes and no turtle-for-his-neck later, he was down the hall and opening the door. With no lights on anywhere in the house, the shallow space was nothing but shadows and shades of gray … kind of like his self-hatred had sucked the color out of everything.

He couldn’t even look at the bed, which was still messy from the last time his father had slept it in two years ago, and he certainly didn’t spare all the pictures of his fucking mother a glance, and no, he didn’t dwell on the layer of dust that covered everything or the fact that one of the windows had sprung from its sash and let in fallen leaves and even some of the snow.

It seemed colder in the room, his breath condensing in puffs of white.

Maybe his father was haunting the place.

As a shiver went down his spine, Axe marched his ass over to the bureau and went through the things in it with rough, agitated hands. He found what he was looking for in the bottom drawer.

It seemed so fucking weird to think the thing had been worn and used by the male. And as he shoved the drawer shut, and beat feet out of the room like he was being stalked, he vowed never to go in there again.

Back in his own space, he stripped off his muscle shirt and pulled on his father’s turtleneck. Heading over to the mirror above his cheap dresser, he leaned in and made sure everything on his throat was covered up.

Just before he turned away, he reached up and removed, one by one, the black piercings that ran from his lobe up to his cartilage on the same side as his tattoos. Also took out the one on his brow.

Next move was to arm himself. Slipping on a shoulder holster, he tucked the pair of forties he’d been given the week before into both sides. The way the Brothers saw it, they were investing time and money into the trainees and the last thing they needed was for anyone in the program to wake up dead because they had shit equipment: Once the class had all been vetted properly at the gun range, the Glocks had been handed out—and although you were not permitted to bring the weapons into the training center, you sure as shit were expected to have ’em with you outside of it.

And use them properly if necessary. Unlike what they’d done the night before.

Out of the house, didn’t bother to lock the door—after all, there was no electricity to power the alarm, and besides, he didn’t really care about anything under the roof.

Hell, it’d be a relief if somebody broke in and lit the place on fire. Not that that was likely. He lived in the sticks; his nearest neighbor was a quarter of a mile away and probably took a donkey in to work.

Axe knew before he even dematerialized to the interview location that the house—or mansion or castle or whatever—was going to be huge. Even poor kids raised outside of the human world knew where the big estates were, and the zip code the place was in?

Yeah … okay, he thought as he re-formed.

Wow.

Axe shook his head at the stone structure in front of him. The thing had to be at least three stories high, and the front face of the slate roof alone seemed big as a football field. With about seven hundred black shutters and a front door that was more like the entrance to a parliament or a maybe a municipal library, he couldn’t actually believe a family lived there.