The trouble was, the film reel kept with its final edit, none of the scenes altering, the soundtrack of conversations and inner thoughts remaining the same, the script evidently not subject to alteration.

“What the fuck is your problem, glow stick,” came a dry voice.

Great.

Vishous.

Exactly the brother he didn’t want anywhere near him at the moment. ’Cuz really, why bring a matchstick to a gas party.

“You look like someone broke all the remotes in the house.” There was a shcht of a lighter firing up. And then the scent of Turkish tobacco. “Come on, angel, this isn’t like you—and I can’t believe I’m jumping into your pool of weirdness, here.”

“I didn’t see her,” Lassiter murmured as he stared at the female with the long silver hair and strange, glowing silver eyes.

“Huh?”

“In all the visions about this . . . I never saw her.” Lassiter focused on the brother. “I don’t get it. I saw everything . . . the demon, the Book, Sahvage, Balthazar, Rehvenge . . . all of it. Even down to this scene here, although I couldn’t figure why it would be here and not the mansion. But I never saw her.”

He went back to staring through the crowd of familiar bodies, people blocking his view and then revealing her when they stepped aside. One young male in particular seemed to dote on her, bringing her a glass of milk from inside the house, but she seemed suspended and unconnected in the midst of them all.

Ethereal.

Beautiful—

Her eyes shifted around as if they were looking for something to light on, as if she were starting to feel overwhelmed and maybe wanted to escape—

See me, he thought at her. I want you to see me.

Her stare continued on past him. And then promptly doubled back.

As their eyes met, a shimmer of awareness, of heat . . . of purpose . . . went through Lassiter’s entire body.

“Well,” V said, “all I can tell you is that I never saw anything that was meant for me, true?”

Lassiter looked back at the brother. “Huh, what?”

“My visions. They’ve only ever been about the destinies of others, never my own.” The brother shrugged and started to walk away. “So good luck with that, angel. Or should I say, good luck with her.”

With a knowing look, the brother wandered off.

Leaving Lassiter with the strangest sense that the Gift of Light wasn’t an object at all . . . and that he and this silver-haired female were just getting started with each other.

With so many thanks to the readers of the Black Dagger Brotherhood books! This has been a long, marvelous, exciting journey, and I can’t wait to see what happens next in this world we all love. I’d also like to thank Meg Ruley, Rebecca Scherer and everyone at JRA, and Hannah Braaten, Andrew Nguyen, Jennifer Bergstrom, and the entire family at Gallery Books and Simon & Schuster.

To Team Waud, I love you all. Truly. And as always, everything I do is with love to and adoration for both my family of origin and of adoption.

Oh, and thank you to Naamah, my Writer Dog II, who works as hard as I do on my books! And to the Archiball!

See where it all began in the first novel in the No. 1 New York Times bestselling Black Dagger Brotherhood series . . .