Jesus Christ . . . to be three hundred years old and find out you had a sibling.
Nice move, moms. Real fucking nice.
To think he’d assumed he’d worked through all of his issues with his parents. Then again, only one of them was dead. If the Scribe Virgin would just go the way of the Bloodletter and kick it, maybe he’d manage to get on an even keel.
As things stood now, however, this latest Page Six exclusive, coupled with his Jane’s wild-goose chase out into the human world alone, was making him . . .
Yeah, no words on that one.
He took out his cell phone. Checked it. Put it back into the pocket of his leathers.
Goddamn it, this was so typical. Jane got her focus on something and that was that. Nothing else mattered.
Not that he wasn’t exactly the same way, but at times like this, he’d appreciate some updates.
Fricking sun. Trapping him indoors. At least if he were with his shellan, there’d be no possibility of “the great” Manuel Manello oh-I-don’t-think-so-ing things. V would simply knock the bastard out, throw the body in the Escalade, and drive those talented hands back here to operate on Payne.
In his mind, free will was a privilege, not a right.
When he got down to the tail end of the hand-rolled, he stabbed it out on the sole of his shitkicker and flicked the butt into the bin. He wanted a drink, badly—except not soda or water. Half a case of Grey Goose would just barely take the edge off, but with any luck he’d be assisting in the OR in short order and he needed to be sober.
Pushing his way into the exam room, his shoulders went tight, his molars locked, and for a split second, he didn’t know how much more he could take. If there was one thing guaranteed to peel him raw, it was his mother pulling another fast one, and it was hard to get worse than this lie of all lies.
Trouble was, life didn’t come with a “tilt” default to stop the fun and games when your pinball machine got too tippy.
“Vishous?”
He closed his eyes briefly at the sound of that soft, low voice. “Yeah, Payne.” Switching to the Old Language, he finished, “ ’Tis I.”
Crossing to the center of the room, he resumed his perch on the rolling stool next to the gurney. Stretched out under a number of blankets, Payne was immobilized with her head in blocks and a neck brace running from her chin to her collarbone. An IV linked her arm to a bag that hung on a stainless-steel pole and there was tubing down below that plugged into the catheter Ehlena had given her.
Even though the tiled room was bright and clean and shiny, and the medical equipment and supplies were about as threatening as cups and saucers in a kitchen, he felt like the pair of them were in a grungy cave surrounded by grizzlies.
Much better if he could go out and kill the motherfucker who’d put his sister in this condition. Trouble was . . . that would mean he’d have to pop Wrath, and what a buzz kill there. That big bastard was not only the king, he was a brother . . . and there was the little detail that what had landed her here had been consensual. The sparring sessions that the two had been rocking for the last couple months had kept them both in shape—and, of course, Wrath had had no idea who he’d been fighting because the male was blind. That she was a female? Well, duh. It had been on the Other Side and there were no males over there. But the king’s lack of vision had meant he’d missed what V and everyone else had been staring at anytime they’d walked into this room:
Payne’s long black braid was the precise color of V’s hair, and her skin was the same tone as his, and she was built just as he was, long, lean, and strong. But the eyes . . . shit, the eyes.
V rubbed his face. Their father, the Bloodletter, had had countless bastards before he’d been killed in a lesser skirmish back in the Old Country. But V didn’t consider any of those random females relations.
Payne was different. The two had the same mother, and it wasn’t just any mahmen dearest. It was the Scribe Virgin. The ultimate mother of the race.
Bitch that she was.
Payne’s stare shifted over and V’s breath got tight. The irises that met his were ice white, just like his own, and the navy blue rim around them was something he saw every night in the mirror. And the intelligence . . . the smarts in those arctic depths were exactly what was cooking under his bone dome, too.
“I cannot feel anything,” Payne said.
“I know.” Shaking his head, he repeated, “I know.”
Her mouth twitched like she might have smiled under other circumstances. “You may speak any language you wish,” she said in accented English. “I am fluent in . . . many.”
So was he. Which meant he was unable to form a response in sixteen different tongues. Go, him.
“Have you heard . . . from your shellan?” she said haltingly.
“No. Would you like more pain meds?” She sounded weaker than when he’d left.
“No, thank you. They make me . . . feel strange.”