Chapter 6
I bolt to the windows of the projector room and peer down into the theater below.
At least ten Brood deviants have filtered in.
Demons, of course, but werewolves in their creature forms and vamps with fangs bared too.
Two Brood thugs at the helm are wandering the dusty aisles, dragging a gagged and trembling man behind them.
The tension among us in the projector room warps into something different. Those claws I never saw slink back into Deacon’s flesh with a grim slicing sound like knives being sharpened. Ward is at the window beside me a heartbeat later. Sophia and Elliot too. Penny exhales enough for the lot of us.
“Is Reid there?” she asks, hopeful.
“No,” I say, though it stings. I can’t quite articulate it, but this new syrabraxa ability means that because I can sense who each deviant is, I know Reid isn’t one of them.
Sophia peers down next to me. “What are they doing?”
Below, one thug rips off the quaking man’s gag and asks a question I can’t hear.
“Looks like they came here to interrogate someone. Penny,” I whisper. “Hide somewhere and don’t leave until we come back for you.”
I don’t turn, but I hear Penny move underneath some of the boxes behind us. My limbs loosen, if only slightly.
“You can’t go down there,” Sophia breathes. “If they capture you—”
“Finn could be down there. He could lead us to Reid.”
“He’s not here,” Deacon assures us, hands in his dark jean pockets as he comes to stand beside me, rich with the scent of tobacco and black cherry.
I swallow hard even as I keep my eyes on the scene unfolding below. “How do you know?”
“He’s lazy. Bores easily. He doesn’t have the patience required for productive interrogation. He only likes the bloody bits.”
Torture. That’s what he means.
Likely what he’s been doing to Reid—
Anger pounds in my veins until, below us, a thug spits at the man in frustration and stalks out of the theater, gesturing for his Brood to follow. Deacon turns to me, one brow arched. “It’s now or never. Shall we, nemesis?”
I nod, blood thrumming, and turn to Ward, Elliot, and Sophia. “We go on three, okay? One—”
But Deacon ignores me and sails clean through the glass window, landing in a crouch in the aisle below. Ward follows, and Sophia and I exchange an aggravated eye roll. With no other options, we jump down after them and take off running.
The decrepit theater hums with chaos. Shocked Brood demons release their claws and scramble for their weapons.
Sophia shoots arrows into limbs. Elliot carves through flesh with his sword.
But I have a one-track mind. I don’t care what Deacon said—I’m like Hound with a scent. I want to track down Finn.
I slice and dice my way through the fray, ducking stray punches and claws.
A roaring werewolf barrels into my path and I launch myself at him, ready to slide my daggers into the soft fur of his neck, when Deacon tackles the beast out of my grasp.
The two of them go careening through the worn theater seats, and I fall face-first onto the aisle floor.
“I had him,” I call, my chin burned from the dusty carpet.
“You were in my way,” Deacon grunts back, now pinned beneath the were’s massive paws. Good boy, I think. Eat up.
But I should know better. Ward, in his werewolf form, is on the Brood’s were in seconds flat, tearing off an ear and sending uncanny canine whines throughout the theater.
Deacon’s up a second later, ripping limbs and roaring bloody murder.
When I finally make it out to the hallway, I scan for Finn but he’s nowhere to be found.
My nifty new trick doesn’t sense him, either.
God damn it.
My back begins to ache and writhe with my fury.
A coarse, grinding pain. I fight my way back inside, ignoring the sensation.
When one vampire almost rips into Elliot’s neck, I stab him through with a broken-off wooden armrest. At some point in the brawl I find myself back-to-back with Deacon.
His fists whale on a thick-necked demon, my silver meeting the curve of another’s claws. “Finn…” I grunt out between blows.
“Not here. Told you,” Deacon replies while delivering a solid punch. I can feel his massive lats moving against the aching scar down my back. “When will you learn to listen to those older and wiser than you?”
“I’m going after him,” I grunt, dodging a Brood’s spindly claw. “Maybe he’s out front.”
“Vivienne…” he growls.
Before I whirl to face him, I level one last blow, driving my dagger into the Brood demon’s sternum. He gurgles out a gory grunt and bursts into ash, and I’m shocked to find the rising pain in my scar withers away right along with him. Something to figure out later.
“Finn is our only chance to find your brother. If there’s a shot he was here, I have to take it. I have backup tonight that I might not have—”
Deacon spins to look at me, one enormous hand clasped around the entire head of the demon he was fighting. No body attached.
Blood is splattered on the side of Deacon’s face, painting his granite jaw in dripping red.
But his eyes—they are alight. Sheer elation.
It’s clear he doesn’t fight like this for his brother or for justice or even to win.
He fights because he loves it. I’m sickened by both the realization and, far worse, what I might see of myself in him.
“You know,” he growls, stepping toward me, “the more you ignore every god damn thing I say, the more comfortable I get with debilitating madness.”
I snarl at him and he seethes right back, glacial eyes glued to mine.
When I raise my daggers, his gaze flicks behind me, lightning quick.
With ease, he drops his gory trophy and grabs my hips roughly, dragging me an inch to the right.
Before I can ask what that was for, searing pain rips through my shoulder.
I stare down in horror at the silver arrowhead lodged in my skin. Deacon…Deacon just used me as a human shield.
Blood pours from the wound, bleeding into the fabric of my coat.
“Sorry, sweetheart,” Deacon says with a shrug, wiping blood from his brow. “This is my favorite shirt.”
I can’t even think past the blaring pain and the nearly equal fury. He’s wearing a fucking plain white T-shirt. I’m going to have this scaffolding-sized nuisance castrated.
But Deacon’s already back to the mayhem around us, bludgeoning a werewolf to death with his hands, no claws in sight.
A fury I can hardly comprehend consumes me.
My fist, dagger still clenched within, plows into his cheekbone with enough force to shatter wood.
Deacon staggers back, tripping over the beast who’s bleeding out at his feet. He gapes at me.
“Oops,” I breathe. “Missed.”
He stands with a snarl, but a second later Sophia is at my side, yanking her arrow out of my shoulder. “Fuck, Viv, I’m so sorry.”
“It’s fine,” I grunt, woozy with pain, eyes still on a scowling Deacon.
“I had to take the shot. The way he was looking at you…I thought he was going to rip your face off.”
“I know. It’s fi—”
Three more Brood descend on us and we’re forced to beat them back, daggers and arrowheads and sailing punches and swift kicks.
Despite the way the pain crests and peaks every time I swing my arm, I clamber over dust-ridden theater seats and cobweb-coated railing, Sophia at my side.
Across the aisle, Ward sinks fangs and claws into demonic flesh, Deacon grins as he gouges eyeballs, and Elliot lands blow after blow with his sword.
In discordant harmony, we finally put down the rest of the Brood.
When no further threats come barreling toward me, I sheathe my daggers, breaths wheezing out of me like an accordion.
The derelict little theater—once a place for mouths full of popcorn and time spent with loved ones—is now a battlefield the morning after a great war.
Broken chairs. Slashed movie screen. Mountains of ash. Pools of sticky blood.
Elliot limps over a severed vampire arm, leaning down to light it on fire. Sophia wraps a gruesome gash on her thigh with a strip of peeling upholstery. Two werewolves lie in broken heaps, the one Deacon pulverized just a mound of gore and fur. I hate the way my chest expands with satisfaction.
And Deacon…half smile glowing as he takes it all in. Blood still dripping from his perfectly sharp jaw.
“Wipe that look off your face,” I spit.
Deacon lowers a brow at me, as if he doesn’t buy my irritation. “A good fight never leaves you all tingly and satisfied? In need of a good cigarette?”
My face turns in disgust. I’ll take those post-battle feelings with me to the grave.
Whimpers pull my attention back to the top of the aisle, where Ward holds the sniveling man the Brood was interrogating by his shirt collar. “Look who I found hiding behind the curtains.”
Ward forces the crying man down to his knees, and the vibration in my skin tells me what I missed earlier. He’s a deviant…a vampire, I think. Not a mortal man.
“Time for that productive interrogation I was telling you about,” Deacon murmurs behind me.
My eyes can’t roll farther back without risk of blindness. But if I had a chance to look for Finn, it’s long gone. This vampire’s the only lead we have left, and Deacon’s already stalking toward him. “I’m looking for a Brood demon. He’s got blue eyes, is about half a foot shorter than me—”
“Just a few inches, really,” I snip.
“Curly brown hair, morose woe-is-me expression on about ninety-five percent of the time. Self-sacrificial, victim complex, self-loathing, whiny—”
“Reid Graveheart,” I interrupt, fuming. “His name is Reid Graveheart.”
The vampire shakes beneath Ward’s grip. “I—I—”
“Come on, now.” Deacon flicks some viscera off his pants. “Use your big-boy words.”
“I…have no idea who you’re talking about.” The vampire winces. “I’m sorry.”
“Why’d the Brood bring you here for questioning?”
The vampire swallows thickly. “Before I was turned, I worked in research at a tech firm in NTC, North of the Chasm. The Brood found me. Offered me and my family safety in a forthcoming war between demons and mortals. A place among them if I would just look into a school that’s housed somewhere in the city.
A hunter school, hidden in another building.
But I haven’t had much luck tracking it down, and they think I’m keeping things from them but I’m not and I told them as much tonight… ”
I breathe out as slowly as I can, fighting the urge to glance at Elliot and Soph. Harker’s location is the best-kept secret in all hunter circles. Even I didn’t know about it until I was recruited.
“Surely one of the men keeping tabs on you has mentioned the demon we described?” Deacon presses. “Brought him along once or twice? As a cautionary tale?”
The thought fills my stomach with acid. Reid, being paraded around by Finn, as proof of what happens if you go against the Brood.
“I have no information on him,” the vampire utters. “I swear.”
But Deacon only offers him a crooked grin. “I was actually hoping you’d say that.”
“I barely know these guys,” the vampire pleads. “I was only turned a month ago. They don’t tell me anything, I swear!”
A turned vampire with a run-of-the-mill-job uptown. For all I know, we’ve gotten coffee at the same NTC café on our lunch hour. And now, a fresh brand on his neck. A man—my age at the most—who foolishly looked to the Brood for safety. “Deacon—”
But he doesn’t acknowledge me. Deacon just lowers to a knee before the quivering vamp. “When I was under the tutelage of my old friend Genghis Khan, he taught me my very favorite method of torture. Can you guess what that was?”
“Please.” The vampire squirms in Ward’s grasp, tears cresting in his eyes. “Before tonight I’d only met the High Thane’s son twice. I’ve never seen your friend.”
“It was called ling chi. More commonly known as death by a thousand cuts. I know, I know, the title sounds repetitive. Boring. Time-consuming. But I assure you, the practice leaves a lot of room for creative license.”
“Are you hearing me?” the vampire begs. His tears drip down his face to the blood-soaked movie theater floor. “I don’t know anything!”
Sophia cuts her wide eyes to me. My jaw grinds shut.
“Now, I’m not claiming my way is the right way,” Deacon muses, “but personally? I like to start with each toe.” Deacon flicks out his index finger, a black claw curling out of a hand covered in bone-white scales.
Glinting under the broken overhead lights like freshly polished opals.
“Then I work my way up to the Achilles tendon—that one is a doozy—then a deep gouge along the shinbone…”
“Please,” the vampire moans. “I’m begging you. I’ll do whatever you ask—”
“Tell me where my brother is.”
“I have no idea who your brother is.”
“Tell me something valuable about Finn.”
The vampire makes an exasperated noise. “All I know about the guy is that he wants to find this school and where he likes to party!”
Deacon’s eyes flit to Ward’s. Ward shrugs.
“Fine,” Deacon muses. “Where’s that?”
“Both times I met the High Thane’s son it was at some town house South of the Chasm on a Friday night. A really weird party the Brood took me to as part of my initiation. He was high on poppy and would disappear into the back rooms. But there was no mention of some Reid guy. Never. I swear.”
Deacon nods to himself, satisfied. Sophia and I exchange twin breaths of relief as he stands up and turns around in thought.
But a moment later, he swings back to face the vamp.
“Sorry, bud. Can’t have the Brood knowing I’m on the hunt.
” Then he slashes his claw through the vampire’s neck in one swift blow.