Even as his blood flowed down those make-me-tough neck tattoos, leaking out of his mouth that, courtesy of her remodeling, was now plenty big enough for his face, he was too shocked to scream. But he got over that when she put her palm out and sent the energy into him.

Sure as shit he made a noise then, the high-pitched call that of an animal impaled.

But she wasn’t stabbing him. That sound was annoying, however.

With her opposite palm, she threw a spell at him, a transparent bubble forming around his head and containing the scream, sparing her ears the inevitable ringing that would persist long after he no longer did.

Devina split his skin down the center of him and tore it away, everything peeling off the muscle and bone underneath, his flesh falling from him as his now-useless clothes did, in two piles on either side of his feet.

Splayed wide, glistening in the rain, the man was still breathing and now there was very little blood, only lymph fluid oozing off the tendons of the toes. Things were twitching, though, hands and feet, mostly, but also the pec muscles. And then he lost control of his bowels.

Incontinence was so unseemly.

Disgusted, she called the bubble back to her palm and let him drop into a disjointed pile of joints. As she walked away, she went LeBron on the silencing spell, dribbling it at her side, the smacking on the alley’s pavement echoing around, a beat of her own creation in which she had no more interest than those created by others piped in through speakers at the club.

When she got to the alley’s dead end, some blocks to the north, she heard a commotion back where she had been and imagined the human had been found by someone. Sure enough, sirens began to sing in concert.

Although Caldwell at night spawned them like a replicator spell gone haywire, so perhaps it was another kind of emergency.

The woman stopped dribbling, capturing the bubble and standing it up on her fingertips.

The rain was falling even more tentatively, as if it couldn’t decide whether to recline into a state of fog or not—or perhaps she had scared it? Nevertheless, as the infinitesimally small drops hit the bubble and slid off, they weaved a rainbow of color in their wake and made her think of the inside covers of old books with their swirls of watermarks. She further considered how long she had been on the earth and then of her relatively recent captivity, a problem she had solved with no small amount of ingenuity. However, she worried. When she had first escaped the Well of Souls through a resourceful seduction, she had expected the father of everything, the Creator, to chastise her and remand her back to the below, re-punishing her with an even greater sentence of isolation.

But the longer she was permitted to roam the streets of the city, the more that winter transitioned into spring, she was coming to realize her freedom was to be trusted. Yet the longer she was here, and the more she trusted her freedom, the more she realized that she was, autonomous ambulation aside, still in captivity. Still imprisoned. Still weighted by chains, though she could see them no better than she could visualize the bars that penned her in.

Surrounded by potential lovers and endless possibilities for consumption on all levels, she mourned the loss of her one true love and grieved the unprecedented separation that marked the end of their relationship. Jim Heron, the fallen angel, was in Heaven now, forever apart from her—and forever not alone. He was with that little, irrelevant girl, Sissy, who he stupidly gave a shit about, and his eternity with that mealy-mouthed pathetic made Devina want to destroy the earth itself. And then start on the rest of the galaxy.

So she was getting why the Creator did not care that she was out and about once again.

It was because her Father knew that she had no real free will, for her unrequited love was a dungeon within which she would e’er be set.

A surge of familiar pain made it hard to breathe and what blurred her vision presently was no longer the rain.

As she grew desperate for a release from her suffering, she pitched the bubble at the head of the alley. Upon impact with the slick bricks, the translucent containment broke apart, shattering as glass, releasing the very anguished sound her black soul had been making since the angel she loved had forsaken her for another . . .

Without love, even evil was unhappy.

It was strange to require the very thing that she existed to destroy, and to mourn its loss as if she were mortal and the cold, thieving hand of death had plucked a prized, irreplaceable apple from one’s family tree.

This fucking sucked.

To a vampire, the sunlight was what you feared, never the night. Darkness was freedom, shadows were safety, clouds over the loud, bright face of the moon a stroke of luck. The approach of the sunrise, in contrast, made flesh creep with warning, and the greater the peach glow to the east, the deeper the terror in the chest. No matter how strong the back, how powerful the dagger hand, how stout the will, those rays of gold were a scythe that was ever sharp, a flame that never extinguished, a pool in which there was only drowning, never rescue.

Syn stood upon great stone steps with his back to the Black Dagger Brotherhood’s mansion, the humidity of the storm that had moved on lingering in the still air, like the scent of a female who’d departed a room. Before him, below him, there was a valley of pine and maple, the former fluffy with evergreen boughs, the latter studded with tentative buds that would become, in time and warmer weather, leaves that would unfurl, worthy blooms even though they sported no petals or perfume.

Disaster impended, however.

There. Behind the mountains. A faint blush, as if the cold, dark sky was embarrassed at the joy with which it greeted the coming sun.

If he stayed out here, if he cast his vampire eyes upon the deadly beauty, it would all be over. He would suffer briefly in an inferno of his own flesh, but after that, the long, chronic agony that had e’er been his life would be over.

“Cousin?”

Syn pivoted around. Silhouetted in the grand entrance, with the light from the vestibule framing his body as if he were holy, Balthazar, son of Hanst, was both a ghost and a living, breathing vampire. But that was the nature of thieves, wasn’t it. They never made a sound and they were able to steal things without being caught—because no one knew that their hand had been in an unguarded pocket until it was too late.

“I’m coming,” Syn muttered as he turned back to the horizon.

His eyes were starting to burn, and the skin across his shoulders was tightening, sure as if he were already being exposed to the heat that was to come.

As the grand door’s heavy weight shut, he was grateful that his cousin knew and understood. Tonight, his talhman was close to the surface, that bad side prowling around, demanding to—

“You know, you’re not going to look good with a tan that bleeds.”

Syn jumped. “I thought you went back inside.”

“No, you just want me to do that.” Balthazar lit up a cigarette and exhaled as he clipped an old-fashioned lighter shut. “And before you tell me you’re coming in again, I just want you to know I don’t believe you.”

“Don’t you have someone to rob?”

“Nah.” Balthazar made a pshaw with his hand. “I’ve given all that up.”

Syn cracked a laugh. “Yeah. Right.”

“You don’t believe I can turn over a new leaf?”

“You were born without a conscience.”

“That’s a little harsh, don’t you think.”

“You don’t even know when you’re lying.”

Balthazar held up his cigarette. “Oh, but you are so wrong on that. And it’s because I’m a master liar that I know when other people are fibbing.”

As the male stared at Syn, Syn was of a mind to pick him up and throw him off the fucking mountain. “Isn’t it getting hot out here for you?”

“If you’re good, I’m good.”

“Have you never wanted to have a moment alone?”

“At least I won’t need to light my next cigarette.” The bastard flexed his thumb. “You know, tendonitis is no joke.”

Syn turned and faced his cousin. “You are insane. You realize that?”

“I’m not the one volunteering to be barbecued.”

“What exactly do you call somebody who stands out here just because I am?”

“Ah, but that is not volunteering.” Balthazar narrowed his eyes. “You’re forcing me to kill myself.”

Syn clapped slowly. “Good performance. Now get the fuck back inside before you get hurt for no good reason.”

When Balthazar just stood there, smoking and blinking fast even though he was facing away from the sunrise, Syn crossed his arms over his chest.

“I’m not going inside—”

“Fine, we’ll be torches together—”

Someone opened up the door, and cursed. “What the fuck are you two doing out here?”

Both of them whipped their heads around. Zypher, the outrageously beautiful bastard, was pulling a schoolmarm, his one working eye frowning with disapproval. The other one, which had been lost about two months ago in a stabbing with a lesser, was currently replaced by a falsie with a Captain America shield for an iris.

“This is none of your business,” Syn snapped.

Balthazar motioned. “Come on out. I told him I wasn’t going inside until he did.”

Zypher jacked up his leathers and paraded out onto the steps, even though his face immediately flushed and he had to hold up an arm like someone was about to take out his good peeper with a poker.

“You know, I haven’t seen the sun since before my transition—”

Syn resisted the urge to stamp his shitkicker. “That’s the way it’s supposed to work!”

“Then why are you out here?” Zypher put his palm out. “Balz, k’I have one of those?”

Balthazar offered his pack. “You don’t smoke.”

“But this is what they do in front of a firing squad.” Zypher elbowed Syn. “Get it. Fire squad. Har, har, har.”

Syn looked back and forth between the two of them as Balthazar lit the cigarette and Zypher—