“Yeah, and I’m here with the Goose,” he muttered as he took another drink. “Not half bad …”

Unfortunately, his mind remained stubbornly, unacceptably, clear. And that meant he was being triggered by too much, his emotions getting a disproportionate amount of airtime.

Which was to say they were on his radar screen at all.

He hated feeling anything, true?

Trying to engage his gray matter in something, anything else, he fired up the Internet and decided to monitor some of the human news outlets. That was always worth a laugh. The shit those motherfuckers could get themselves worked up over was just incredible—and then inevitably they ended up yelling at each other through their computers.

Truth was nuanced. Hysteria anything but.

After idling through CNN.com, Fox News, and TMZ.com, he ended up on YouTube watching McKamey Manor videos, which was one of his absolutely favorite things to do, and which did, as usual, cheer him up a little. And it was after about a half hour of that when a notification flared on the bottom of the screen, indicating an email had come through to him.

With a frown, he went over to Outlook and opened the thing up.

Well, well, well, good ol’ Damn Stoker had posted something new.

V smiled and swallowed another healthy load of Goose as he hopped on the blog that he’d been following for the last month. It was new on the paranormal scene, written by a guy who seemed to be a cross between an investigative reporter and a fang fucker.

I.e., a human who was determined to prove the existence of vampires.

They were so amusing to watch as they twisted and turned at the end of their lexicon of falsities, repeating all kinds of lies and bullshit that humans had been using to mythologize that which actually existed in their midst.

Good times, good times.

Talk about YouTube vids. There were only about a hundred thousand snippets, sound bites, and soliloquies on that Internet platform purporting to show actual vampires vampiring in their vampware. Driving Vamps-wagons—

Okay, it was possible the alcohol was kicking in.

But Damn Stoker was different, and that was why V had tagged the motherfucker’s not-so-rambling ramblings.

He actually had the goods.

Somehow, the guy had gotten video of the showdown out at the Brownswick School for Girls, the one where the Lessening Society and the Brotherhood had met and danced in the moonlight, so to speak. It was your typical, jumpy-jerky iCrap-shot footage, but there was enough to suggest that something big and otherworldly might have happened on the abandoned campus.

Fortunately, the Omega had done a stellar clean-up job after the fighting, and what the recording showed was nothing that couldn’t arguably have been generated on someone’s computer. Lesser blood on the ground, after all, looked like shadows thrown on grass or black paint or old motor oil.

Good thing it wasn’t Smell-O-Vision or bitch would have been making people sick.

And of course, the fact that there was nothing presently on the grounds was a big invalidator, that little storage house Rhage’s beast had eaten having been ready to collapse anyway, just like a lot of the facilities there.

Still, this guy who was hiding behind a not-so-clever alias was on V’s radar. He’d posted a lot of links to other content on YouTube, mostly blah-blah-blahs of other humans who swore up and down that they had had contact with “real” vampires or, again, more of those bumpy, night footage clips of fights or figures moving in and out of doorways wearing capes. But again, it was the shit from that abandoned school campus that was a marker—and also the fact that the guy’s grammar was good, he didn’t overuse caps or do this!!!!!!!!!!!!!! at the end of his sentences, and there was a general professionalism to it all.

None of which was the kind of thing the race needed.

Ridic humans with artificial incisors and walking sticks with skulls on them? Fine. Give V a hundred million of those. A canny, more-Scully-than-Mulder type who seemed to be systematically scouring the Internet and debunking the bunk while isolating those few instances when something had actually happened?

Not good news for a species that wanted to keep hiding in plain sight.

“Another video …” V murmured as he scanned the new post. “What do we have tonight, Damn? Wrong season for Halloween.”

V bypassed the write-up that gave context to whatever was on the link, and just fired the thing up.

At first, he wasn’t sure what he was looking at—oh, okay, black-and-white security cam footage of a parking lot at night. Car entering and turning around … parking, but not turning its engine off going by the subtle puffs of condensation out the back.

V took another draw off his glass and patted around his desk for a hand-rolled. No luck. He needed to—

“Oh … hello there, Mr. Latimer.”

As both doors opened, he recognized the male who emerged from the passenger side. It was Trez. And well, well, well … a female got out from behind the wheel, one with dark hair and civilian clothes. Impossible to see the face as she was looking down like she was trying not to slip on the ice, but the body was good.

Maybe the poor SOB was drowning his sorrows the old-fashioned way.

Trez walked around the car, and met her in front. The two of them talked for a minute—

“Shit.”

V shook his head and then squeezed the bridge of his nose. Then he hit pause, went back a little, and replayed things.

The female just up and disappeared, dematerializing into thin air. And then Trez got behind the wheel and drove off like nothing had happened.

V scrolled up and read the bumph that Damn had posted: local souvenir shop across from the Storytown—which was, if memory served, a mere half mile down from Sal’s Restaurant. The footage was the property of the shop, of course, but the owner had forwarded it to Damn with permission to post. No authorities had been contacted, and there was a statement from the owner, in full quotes like this was a newspaper article, that “Nothing has been altered on the recording.”

Vishous watched the clip two or three more times, and told himself to chill. What the hell was someone going to do with this? Go to the local CBS station and get them to air it as an exposé? It didn’t really prove anything—other than the fact that sex was an effective, short-term painkiller when it came to the grieving process.

No one was going to believe the vid hadn’t been spliced.

It was fine.

But Damn was starting to be a pain in the ass: Twice in one month, some human managed to post videos that actually showed shit going down?

Sometimes, yes, conspiracy theorists got it right.

And when they did that too many times in a row, they had to be contained, true?

THIRTY-EIGHT

The next location Xcor dematerialized to was not inhabited. Indeed, the little cottage and larger farmhouse beyond was a property that was well outside of Caldwell, and as he reformed in the blowing snow, he was not surprised that there were no lights on, no fires burning, no figures in any windows in either abode.

As he plodded forth, he passed by the cottage and entered the tree line, which, blessedly, offered him some relief from the driving wind. He had purchased both structures and the plot of land upon which they had been built for Layla and him. Indeed, he had had some fantasy—one that he had ne’er vocalized nor even much acknowledged unto himself—that the pair of them could shelter in the little cottage with its charm and its coziness whilst his males bunked down in the farmhouse across the way.

Indeed, she had visited him here a couple of times, back when she had been heavy with her young and so resplendently beautiful, and he had found it nearly impossible not to express things that he had had no business feeling much less speaking of. And then she had called him on exactly where his emotions had evolved to, providing him with a crushingly accurate picture of the weakness he possessed in her favor.

He had sent her away at that point. Said cruel things he had not meant because it had been the only manner by which to get her to leave him alone. Some warrior he had been. A coward for her was more like it. But he had not been able to see any future for them, and he had begun to worry about her safety being so pregnant … and more than both of those, he had been terrified that she read him so well.

Terrified at the power she held over him.