Page 74 of Bonded By Blood
Kendall! Brianna’s back crashed against the hard, old brick surface of the building, with enough force to kill a mortal man. She cried out as something snapped inside and another flare of pain shot through her. Her body crumpled to the ground, face down, and she thought she heard a voice shout her name, but for a disorienting moment all she knew was pain. Were it not for the terrible, and recent, memory of being poisoned with werewolf blood, she might have been paralyzed in shock at feeling something so horrendous. Decades of being overly sheltered hadn’t been as good for her as her mother insisted.
She snapped to focus with a new rush of blood on the air. A simultaneous surge of relief and fear gripped her heart at the realization that, again, the blood assailing her nose was that of a vampire. Had Joe stepped in to shield Kendall again? Brianna had no doubt he would. And no words for the guilt she would feel—prepared herself to feel—as she pushed her body to her knees. Enough, at least, to look over and see what had happened.
If it killed her, she decided as her head turned, she would avenge him.
But Joe was fine. Kendall was fine. Even Adrian Colt was fine, for the most part.
Jasen had arrived, and made his entrance by taking one of their enemies off the board. He stood over what remained of Tobias Wilson’s corpse, one booted foot on its chest, with Tobias’s head dangling by the hair from one hand. In the other he held a machete—and a quick glance informed Brianna that Adrian had lost his, so she assumed the machete belonged to the Slayer.
Thank you, Jasen.
“T-T-Toby…?” Troy whispered, stumbling back from Jasen and away from Joe and Kendall. His stump had since stopped bleeding, but the tattered remains of his sleeve were stained dark with soaked blood.
Jasen ignored the vampire he clearly deemed to be subservient and tossed the graying head at Boris, throwing off any charge Boris may have been preparing. “I’m guessing that belongs to you.”
Brianna watched, able to see just enough of Boris’s face to see it contort in distaste. The sight made her feel a little better.
Boris curled a lip and, after a delayed second, dropped the head with enough of a flick of his wrists to keep it from landing on his loafers. “Disgusting. You must be the Enforcer I’ve heard so much about. I would say it’s a pleasure, but, I’m afraid I do have to kill you.”
No. A fight between the Original, and someone as lethal as Jasen, could destroy half of Sacramento. Brianna already could scarcely fathom what the Family associates in the police force and other branches of local government were doing to keep the block from being swarmed by first responders and nosy media. A fight like that would be uncontainable. But she was in no condition to stop it.
“You must be the reason the Princess is on the ground,” Jasen said.
“D-don’t!” Troy exclaimed.
Brianna looked over again and realized Jasen must have literally walked across Tobias’s mostly-decayed remains. In fact, there was even a boot-print. She cringed.
“Penalty for that,” Jasen said, his voice dropping lower than Brianna had heard it in a very long time, “is death.”
“Does that rule apply,” Boris began, “when an Original was the one who inflicted the wound?”
“You’re already dead, aren’t you?”
“W-wait,” Brianna said, pushing the word out of her mouth to keep Jasen from engaging. She reached behind her and grabbed onto a broken chunk of the wall to support herself as she pushed to her feet. Her stomach rolled, as her body wasn’t fully healed, but she ignored the sensation. She’d endured worse. Recently, thanks to her uncle’s scheming minions. “Uncle, tell me why…”
She didn’t really care. But she needed to stall him. To give Joe time to escape with Kendall—something he should be able to do now that only one Wilson remained. Jasen and Adrian were better equipped, in every way, for combat, but not against Boris. If Boris decided to get serious Brianna doubted any of them would survive. To say nothing of the human casualties that would get mixed in. So she needed to stall him, and the only thing she could think of to do that was to ask him the obvious question.
Boris looked over at her, without turning his entire body. “Why?” he repeated. “Do you mean ‘why am I still alive?’ or ‘why am I attacking now, after all this time?’ or something different, perhaps?”
Brianna pursed her lips and stood up straight. “All of it,” she said. “You said something about the lies I’ve been told. Do you mean Mother knew, or at least had reason to suspect, you’ve been alive?” She would have mixed feelings about that, honestly, but it would be hard to just take even an affirmative answer at face value in this situation, too. Still, in the back of her mind, she had to allow for the fact that her mother was … manipulative.
The anger that had remained in Boris’s expression faded away, smoothing back to the neutral that had stared at her as he’d held her trapped by the arm. “To my knowledge,” he said, “she never had reason to believe me dead.”
Well, that was more or less what Brianna had expected him to say. She frowned anyway. “Why wait all this time? Why not come find us?” Why turn on them? But she held that question back, for the moment.
“Princess,” Jasen interrupted, impatience in his tone. “You shouldn’t even be out here.”
“Silence from the audience, please,” Boris said, narrowing his eyes in Jasen’s direction. “I dislike speaking to brutes.”
Jasen arched a pointed brow.
“That’s rich,” Adrian Colt muttered. Of course, the Slayer would know they could hear him, but his stare was focused on Troy Wilson. Purposefully.
“Hmm.” Boris turned bodily toward Brianna and folded his hands behind his back. “Your pets have fled. That was clever. But surely you know there is nowhere they can run I cannot find.”
He was right, sort of. Joe and Kendall were gone. They’d finally made their escape in the minutes after Tobias’s decapitation. She wasn’t sure, actually, how much of her conversation with Boris they might have heard before taking the chance. Perhaps Troy had even taken notice and looked interested in pursuing them, and that was why Adrian was watching him? But that was conjecture. Irrelevant conjecture.
Brianna took a step forward on her own strength. “They’re not my pets. They’re my family. As you once were, uncle.” She still needed to keep him talking, because she still had no idea how they would get out of this situation alive.