There had been only three regulars.

Back then, it had been all about burning off his edge, tempering his dark side, turning the dimmer switch down on his drives.

He signed into the account today.

Around noon.

Right after he’d gotten a text from Jane telling him that Blay’s mom had come through the operation just fine, but wanted to go home—so Jane had to stay at the clinic and try to talk the female out of leaving. The quick missive had come through about two hours after she’d told him she was done in the OR and on her way to the Pit—all she had to do was make sure the older Lyric came out of anesthesia. Which had been preceded two hours prior to that with a text talking about Assail.

There had been almost two hundred emails in the account.

And he had read through every single one of them. Some were short, nothing but vital stats with maybe a picture as an attachment. Others were long and rambling, streams of consciousness about what they wanted to have done to them. There were also two-paragraphers that begged for him to reconsider, reconnect, resume. And introductory sentences with phone numbers. And angry tirades that he couldn’t just forget them, no, no he could not, they weren’t going to have it, they were going to find him and make him realize how they were the right one for him …

It was like an archaeological dig in the relics of a city he had once constructed, assumed residence in, and lorded over.

Down below, on the cramped, snow-choked street, a Honda pulled up to the apartment building. Whoever was in it talked for a minute, and then the passenger-side door opened and a slender, red-haired human female got out.

“We’ll talk tomorrow, then?” she said into the car. “Okay. Yup, I’m on it—yeah, I’ll get it posted on the CCJ website tomorrow first thing. Dick can go pound sand.”

With a final wave, she shut the door and scooted around the blunt hood of the car. Putting her arms out to balance, she stepped through a snowbank in the predetermined footprints many people had used, then she skated up the walkway and checked the mailbox beside the right of the two doors.

A few moments later, he saw her walk through the second story’s front room and talk to the guys who were passing a bong back and forth as they sat on the sofa in front of the TV.

She looked pissed, V thought, as she put one hand on her hip and shook a stack of what looked like bills in their direction.

Then she marched off into the front bedroom and closed the door.

He looked away when she started to undress, but he didn’t need to bother. As it turned out, she just took off her outer coat and finished the rest in a bathroom that had a frosted window.

She ended up at her desk, in front of her POS Apple product, hitting the Internet.

As V lit another hand-rolled, he debated just putting a bullet in her head, but then decided he was only being cranky. Apart from the videos and shit that she posted, a cursory check of her background hadn’t yielded any red flags. She was the adopted kid of some rich folks. Meh job working at the CCJ on Internet content. Previously had been a receptionist at a real estate company. Pretty fancy school résumé, but like a lot of young kids, hadn’t done shit with that.

Unless you counted using proper grammar while talking about vampires.

So yeah, all he needed to do was erase her and he could go back to the Pit.

Taking a drag, he released the smoke and watched it float away on the mostly still air.

Off in the distance, he heard a siren.

Ambulance, he thought. That was an ambulance.

Overhead, in the crystal clear, velvet blue sky, only the brightest stars twinkled because of downtown’s sweating of illumination, but the planes showed up well enough, their flight patterns around the Caldwell International Airport concentric, invisible rings.

Like maybe God was using a highlighter to circle the city for some kind of follow-up.

After a while of staring at the human female, he wondered again why he wasn’t getting on with what he’d come out here to do. Hacking into her site and taking control of it, and then erasing content off YouTube, he could do back home.

Had to do, that was.

The Internet, after all, was kind of like a petri dish in a lab. If you wanted to a grow a certain culture, you just created the right conditions and let time do its thing: Enough chatter and talk about vampires, backed up by enough footage, and sooner or later it was going to catch on, because humans loved spooky shit, particularly if they thought it was sexy.

Yawn.

Conversely, if you had to kill an idea? You just made it disappear, and soon enough, the white noise of human drama replaced it with something else.

Humans’ ability to be distracted was, aside from their relatively easily extinguished mortality, their best feature.

’Cuz, really, when it came to vampires, who the fuck needed Ellen interviewing the Omega about his favorite holiday traditions or a posthumous book on Lash hitting the New York Times bestseller list, true?

Or worse, and all jests aside, the motherfuckers going on a hunt for the race.

Those rats without tails couldn’t get along with each other. They suddenly find themselves coexisting with another species on the level that vampires were shoulder-to-shoulder’ing them?

You could wipe the co- and -exist thing right outta your vocab.

So yeah, he was going to have to tidy up this little mess out on the Net, as well as have a “talk” with Ms. Jo Early, too: Assuming she’d been a vampire lover all her life, that kind of cognition was not going to be reversible, but he could certainly tinker around in her gray matter and redirect her from her blog.

Yup, he thought. It was time to ghost into her bedroom, find out what was doing in that skull of hers, and then head back to get his virtual Swiffer rocking on the Internet.

Uh-huh.

Yeaaaaah.

And yet V stayed where he was, ashing on the snow-covered roof, shifting his weight back and forth whenever his legs got tired, stretching his back from time to time.

The reason he didn’t leave had nothing to do with that woman.

No, he stayed for the same reason he had gone out.

When you were contemplating cheating on your mate, it was not easy on the conscience. And not something you wanted to do in the home you shared with her.

FIFTY

As Xcor waited for Layla to tell him that she wanted him to leave, his blood was raging in his veins and his head was frothing with memories. He had never talked to anyone about what had been done to him or what he had done in the war camp. For one, nobody had ever asked. His fighters had all either done that themselves or had it done to them, and it was hardly a topic of conversation among the group, something one reminisced about because it elicited warm and happy feelings. And outside of his fighters, Xcor had never run into anyone who had wanted to get to know him.

“Well,” he demanded. “What say you, female.”

It was not a question. For he knew what she was going to—

Layla looked him straight in the eye, and as she spoke, her voice was utterly level. “I say that survival is a gruesome, sometimes tragic, endeavor. And if you expect me to feel anything but sadness and regret on your behalf, you’ve got a long wait coming.”

Xcor was the one who broke eye contact. And as silence stretched out between them, he had no idea what he was feeling.

It seemed, however, as he regarded his hands from a great distance, that he was shaking.

“Have you never wondered what became of your parents?” she asked. “Wanted to find a brother or a sister, perhaps?”

At least, that was what he thought she said. His mind wasn’t processing things all that well.

“I’m sorry,” he muffled, “what?”

The bed moved as she shuffled over and sat beside him, her feet dangling, whereas his reached the floor because his legs were longer than hers. After a moment, he felt something drape over his bare shoulders. A blanket. She had covered him with the blanket that had been folded at the base of the duvet.

It smelled like her.

It was warm, like her.

“Xcor?”

When he didn’t respond, she turned his face to hers. As he looked at her, he wanted to shut his eyes. She was too lovely for him and his past. She was all that was good, and he had already cost her so much: her home, her peace with her young, her—

“Love is a matter between souls,” she said as she put her hand on the center of his chest. “Our love is between my soul and yours. Nothing is going to change that, not your past, our present … or whatever futures we may find apart. At least not on my side.”