He paused and looked around. It was utterly surreal to be doing something as normal as copping a movie, and it felt vaguely inappropriate. But right now was all about waiting. He and everyone else involved were in neutral.

As he went over to the DVD player and put the disk on the machine’s black tongue, all he could see was Lash down on that tile, fear in his eyes, blood running out of his neck.

He started to pray that Lash would make it.

Even if it meant he had to live in fear of his secret being exposed, better that than having Qhuinn condemned as a murderer, and a death on John’s conscience.

Please, God, let Lash live.

Chapter Sixteen

Downtown at zerosum, Rehv was having a bad fucking night, and his chief of security was making it worse. Xhex was standing in front of his desk with her arms crossed, looking down her nose at him like he was dog shit on a hot night.

He rubbed his eyes, then glared back at her. “And why are you telling me to stay in here?”

“Because you’re toxic and the staff are scared of you.”

Which proved they had half a brain, he thought.

“What happened last night?” she asked softly.

“Did I tell you I bought that lot four blocks down?”

“Yes. Yesterday. What happened with the Princess.”

“This town needs a Goth club. I think I’ll call it the Iron Mask.” He leaned in toward the glowing screen of his laptop. “Cash flow here is more than strong enough for me to cover a construction loan. Or I could just cut a check, although that would get us audited again. Dirty money is so fucking complicated, and if you ask me about last night one more time, I’m going to kick you the fuck out of here.”

“Well, aren’t we feeling precious.”

His upper lip twitched as his fangs shot out into his mouth. “Don’t push me, Xhex. I’m so not in the mood.”

“Look, you can keep your yap shut, that’s fine, but don’t take your head fuck out on the staff. I’m not interested in cleaning up the interpersonal debris- Why are you rubbing your eyes again?”

Wincing, he gave his watch a look-see. In the midst of his vision’s flat plane of red, he realized that it had been only three hours since his last hit of dopamine.

“Do you need another dose already?” Xhex asked.

He didn’t bother nodding, just opened his drawer and took out a glass vial and a syringe. Peeling his suit jacket off, he rolled up his sleeve, tourniqueted his upper arm, and then tried to push the needle’s fine head through the red seal on the drug’s container.

He couldn’t quite manage to hit the bull’s-eye. With no depth perception, he was fishing through empty space, trying to match the point of the needle with the top of the little bottle and getting a whole lot of skipping misses.

Symphaths saw only shades of red, and in two dimensions. When his drug didn’t work, either because he was stressed or had missed a dosage, his vision change was the first sign of trouble.

“Here, let me.”

As a wave of ill swept through him, he found he couldn’t speak, so he just shook his head at her and kept at it with the syringe. In the meantime, his body started to wake up from its deep freeze, sensation flooding into his arms and his legs on a fleet of tingles.

“Okay, enough with your ego.” Xhex came around the desk in all-purpose mode. “Just let me-”

He tried to get his shirtsleeve down in time. Didn’t make it.

“Jesus Christ,” she hissed.

He shuffled his forearm away from her, but it was too late. Way too late.

“Let me do it,” Xhex said, putting her hand on his shoulder. “Just ease up, boss… and let me take care of you.”

With surprisingly gentle hands, she took the syringe and vial, then extended his wretched black-and-blue forearm straight out on the desk. He’d been shooting up so much lately that even with how fast he healed, his veins were decimated, all swollen and full of holes, pitted like roads too heavily traveled.

“We’re going to use your other arm.”

As he stretched out his right one, Xhex managed the whole needle-in-the-lid thing with no problem, drawing out what should have been his normal dose. He shook his head and held up two fingers so she’d double it.

“That’s way too much,” she said.

He lurched for the syringe, but she moved it out of reach.

He slammed his fist into the desk, and his eyes shot to hers, all stark demand.

With a couple of choice words, she drew more of the drug out of the vial, and he watched as she hunted around his drawer for an alcohol towelette, tore the thing open, and scrubbed a patch on the crook of his elbow. After she shot him up, she snapped free the tourney, and put his hit kit back in the desk.

Easing into his chair, he shut his eyes. The red persisted even with his lids down.

“How long’s this been going on?” she asked quietly. “The double dosing? The shooting up without disinfecting the injection site? How many times are you doing this every day?”

He just shook his head.

Moments later, he heard her open the door and tell Trez to bring the Bentley around. Right as he was getting ready to no-fucking-way her, she took one of his sable dusters out of the closet.

“We’re going to Havers’s,” she said. “And if you argue with me, I’m going to call the boys in here and they’re going to carry you out of this office like a rug roll.”

Rehv glared at her. “You are not… the boss around here.”

“True. But do you think if I tell your boys how infected your arm is, they would take even a breath before manhandling you? If you were nice, you might end up in the backseat instead of the trunk. If you were a prick, you’d be the hood ornament.”

“Fuck you.”

“We tried that, remember? And neither of us liked it.”

Shit, there was something he needed reminding of right now.

“Be smart, Rehv. You’re not winning this one, so why bother with the argue? Sooner you go, sooner you’ll be back.” They glowered at each other until she said, “Fine, leave out the double-dipping. Just let Havers look at your arm. One word: sepsis.”

As if the doc wouldn’t figure out what was doing when he saw the thing?

Rehv palmed his cane and slowly pushed up off his chair. “I’m too hot… for the coat.”

“And I’m bringing it so that when the dopamine kicks in and you cool off you won’t get a chill.”

Xhex offered him her arm without looking at him because she knew he was too much of a pride-filled dickhead to lean on her otherwise. And he needed to lean on her. He was weak as shit.

“I hate when you’re right,” he said.

“Which explains why you’re usually so short-tempered.”

Together they walked slowly out of the office and into the alley.

The Bentley was there waiting, with Trez behind the wheel. The Moor asked no questions and made no comments, as was his way.

And, of course, all the crushing quiet always made you feel worse when you were being an ass.

Rehv ignored the fact that Xhex settled him into the backseat and slid in next to him as if she were worried he would get carsick or some shit.

The Bentley took off with the smoothness of a magic carpet ride, and that was so fucking apropos, because he felt as if he were on one. With his symphath nature battling his vampire blood, he was doing the seesaw between his bad side and his halfway decent one, and the shifts in moral gravity were making him nauseous as fuck.

Maybe Xhex was right to be concerned about the throwing-up thing.

They hung a left on Trade, hooked up with Tenth Avenue, and shot down toward the river, where they got on the highway. Four exits up, they turned off and glided through a high-rent district, where big houses on parklike lots were set back from the road, kings waiting to be knelt before.

With his red, two-dimensional vision Rehv didn’t see much with his eyes. With his symphath side, he knew too much. He could sense the humans in the mansions, knew the inhabitants by the emotional footprint they emitted, thanks to the energy their feelings released. Whereas his sight was flat as a TV screen, his sense of the people was in three dimensions: They registered as psychic grid patterns, their interplay of joy and sadness, guilt and lust, anger and hurt creating structures that to him were as solid as their houses.