Tragedy had struck.

About fifteen feet away, a civilian male was flat on his back and clutching his chest with one hand. The other was clawing at the dirty snow as he moved his legs like he was still running from what had mortally wounded him.

“I’ll cover,” Blay said.

John ran over and dropped down. The first thing he did was assess the clothing. Nothing torn, not the fine cashmere coat or the fine cashmere sweater underneath. But there were bloodstains on the chest.

“Help me …” There was a gurgle to the words, as if the civilian’s airway were blocked. “Help …”

Those eyes struggled to focus, and the hand that was digging into the snow grabbed onto John’s leather jacket, bringing him closer.

“I don’t … feel right …”

Alerted by a scent, John looked up sharply, his senses firing. A split second later, another civilian male, in nice clothes as well, came racing around the back of the club—with Xhex and a bouncer right behind him.

As the trio came up to John, his shellan was clearly surprised to see him, and signed, You need help?

The other civilian started talking fast. “We were supposed to meet friends out here, and we were waiting—all of a sudden this black shadow comes from out of nowhere—”

Take him out of the way, John signed. We don’t want him seeing what happens next.

“Hey,” she said to the male, “let’s you and I go back into the club—”

“He’s my cousin! I can’t leave him—”

Xhex stared at the civilian, her dark gray eyes steady, fixated. Hypnotizing. A moment later, the civilian nodded and followed behind her, a train that had changed tracks. The bouncer, who was also of the species, covered them both.

Just before they went around the corner, Xhex looked back at John. Her face was drawn and pale. But death did that to people, even the strong ones.

John signed, I’ve got this. Don’t worry.

She nodded. And continued out of sight.

Meanwhile, the wounded civilian was getting more frantic with his movements, as if he knew his end was coming closer, and he was racing against his demise in the only way his broken body could. To offer compassion, John moved his own lips, speaking in silence things that he hoped would have been comforting if he’d been able to speak and the victim able to hear.

But the male was beyond that now. His eyes rolled back, the whites flashing, and his breathing became even more labored.

John quickly screwed a suppressor onto the muzzle of his gun, and he was aware that his own lungs stopped working as he took the weapon and put it directly to the temple of the dying male—

“What are you doing—what the fuck are you doing!”

John looked up. Two human men had come around the back of the club, and even though they were weaving in the still night like they were in a stiff wind, they were sober enough to recognize where the business end of a gun had been pointed. Too bad they didn’t understand that this was none of their fucking business.

The men rushed forward, all Good Samaritans in savior mode, but Blay was on them—or would have been, if the sickly sweet stink of the enemy didn’t waft over from the opposite direction, the worst kind of party crasher ever.

John cursed to himself as Blay dematerialized, clearly to get on the slayer who was somewhere close by.

“What the fuck you doin’!”

The human man was in his mid-twenties, tall and lanky as if he either did a lot of coke or was an organic, non-processed foodie with a vegan slant. His buddy was along the same lines, man-bun’d and hipster-clothed, but unlike the guy in front, he was a true New Yorker who didn’t want to get involved in shit that wasn’t his problem: He was staring at the ground, shaking his head, slowing down.

When he finally did glance over, he recoiled and changed flight paths completely.

“I’m out of here,” he muttered as he turned away.

His friend grabbed him. “Get your phone—I lost mine. Call nine-one-one—make a video! This needs to be on video! We need to go—”

As John Matthew straightened to his full height, the human with the big plans quieted down a little, proof positive that the survival mechanism hadn’t been completely eradicated by all those chemicals he’d taken in at the club.

“I’m not afraid of you!” he shouted.

Considering the guy knew there was a gun with a suppressor involved here, that seemed like bluster over brains, but John was done dealing with the interruption. With a force of will, he entered the human’s mind, burrowing into that gray matter, shutting down memory function and rewiring—

“Fuuuuuuck …”

Something about the tone of that curse got John’s attention and he paused in the middle of his erase job. The other human, who’d been on the way out, was staring over John’s shoulder, his face showing the kind of horror a person would feel if they came up on a dead body.

Or, as it turned out, if a dead body came up on them.

The mortally injured civilian was back on his feet, but not because he had magically rebounded from his injuries. His eyes had stayed rolled back, nothing but white showing between those lashes, and his mouth was open and snapping, fangs fully descended.

Clap. Clap. Clap.

The lock of that scissor bite as the jaw reflexively opened and closed was piranha and then some, and even though the reanimated corpse shouldn’t have been able to see, he somehow focused on John.

The damn thing lunged without warning, and there was none of that Walking Dead uncoordinated shit. The corpse’s hands went for John’s throat like it had been trained in the art of strangulation, and when John ducked the hold, there was no break in the assault. Those snapping jaws rerouted to his shoulder, his upper arm, the just-dead-a-second-ago like a banshee unleashed with hellfire in its veins and the strength of ten thousand linebackers in its muscles.

John punched his palm forward, catching the thing in the center of the chest and holding it out of bite range. Then he plowed his gun into the gut on an upward angle and squeezed off four rounds. The corpse jerked in time to the shots, onetwothreefour—

And kept right on coming at him.

Not a pain receptor in sight, evidently.

As he wasn’t sure whether a bite from the thing would welcome him to the reanimation club, John lunged to the side, grabbed the corpse by the waist, and went discus on the sitch, slinging his undead attacker into bricks and mortar.

It didn’t even register the impact.

But John had time to point-blank a shot to its head.

There was a screeching sound that made his ears sing, and then the corpse went deadweight, falling through the cold air and landing like a tabletop in the snow.

John stepped over, put two more bullets into its brain, and then waited, his breath leaving in locomotive-puffs of condensation—

Abruptly, he remembered the peanut gallery of those two humans. Glancing over his shoulder, he erased their memories, wiping things clean and sending them away.

As they wandered off and nothing moved at his feet, he commenced a frantic self-assessment, checking for breaks in his skin under his leather jacket.

The jacket had been nailed a number of times, those twin punctures of fangs giving him a case of the cold sweats—

“John!”

Blay came stomping around the corner, the black blood of slayers spattered on his face and his jacket, his dagger traded for a pair of guns.

I’m okay, John signed. But we need to get this moved.

“I’ll take one end,” his old friend said.

The two of them hand-and-foot’d the now-immobile-and-please-God-stay-that-way body and carried the civilian further into the alley, a trail of bright red blood staining their boot prints in the dirty city snow. Laying the male facedown again, John took out a set of handcuffs and clicked the corpse’s wrists together.

The sound of Blay texting was a series of tip-tip-tips that made John’s nerves shimmy. Not that they needed the help. Standing over the remains with his gun out and pointed at the leaking head, he felt sick, especially as he looked at the stain that marked the path of the carry.

As of now, there was no additional scent of lesser.

Please, God, let things stay that way. Because the slayers used to work in squads, back when there had been more of them.

“I just texted Tohr,” Blay said as he put his cell away. “They’re going to send the surgical unit, ETA from the garage bunker is three and a half minutes.”

John could only nod. Even if one of his hands wasn’t busy holding his Smith & Wesson, he didn’t have anything to add.

He focused on the handcuffs that were biting into the flesh of those wrists and then on the back of the head. Ordinarily, if you were detaining someone and they were lying facedown, you wanted to make sure they had an air source. Not a problem here. The civilian’s nose and mouth were right in the snowpack, but it didn’t matter.

A great wave of sadness hit him as he thought about the mahmen and father who had brought this male into the world however long ago. In the vampire species, to have a successful live birth was a blessing given the incredibly high numbers of maternal and fetal deaths. The parents must have been so thrilled, assuming mom lived as well.

And yet all that ended here, in a shitty alley, in a rough part of town, facedown in the snow with fucking restraints on the corpse because no one was sure whether the term “dead” as applied in this case counted as a permanent thing.

I’m sorry, he mouthed to the body.

It struck John how random fate was with both its blessings and its curses. How he’d won a nick-in-time jackpot back as a pretrans whereas this poor male had gotten short-straw’d in the most terrifying of ways.

Who made those decisions, he wondered. Who doled out such cosmic wins and losses?

People said it had been the Scribe Virgin, but V’s mom was long gone now. So who was there to pray to when an innocent male died in such a gruesome way?

Maybe, like the arrangement of stars in the night sky, it was all just random, with only the minds of the afflicted and the affluent alike trying to make sense of the great swings of pain and grace … while the disinterested universe churned on through relentless, infinite time, on a journey to nowhere.