“Syn,” someone said. “How you doin’?”

When somebody tried to walk by him, his arm snapped out and stopped them by grabbing a hard hold.

“Do not touch her,” he growled. “She is mine.”

Another voice. Different than the first. “Okay, my guy. We won’t go near her. But listen, you’re leaking, and this is not a secured site. We’ve got shit we have to deal with and you need some stitches.”

Please, he thought at Jo. Even though he didn’t know what he was begging for.

Bullshit, he knew exactly what he needed from her. He wanted her to forgive him for being his father. For revealing to her the fact that he was a terrifying killer. For showing her why he didn’t care that everyone else knew, but what he wished she had never discovered.

Jo shook her head. Then she focused over his shoulder and her face changed.

“Oh, shit,” one of the Brothers said.

“I’ve seen you before,” Jo said hoarsely. “Coffee shop.”

Syn looked over his shoulder. Rhage was standing a couple of feet away, and the Brother ran his palm down his face.

“Does she know what’s going on?” Hollywood asked.

“No,” Syn muttered. “She does not.”

“Motherfucker.”

“That about covers it.”

Syn stepped off and tried to walk around, hands on his hips, head lowered, heart pounding. He didn’t get far. His boot knocked into something . . . a torso that was bent backward, its limbs moving in slow motion, like the thing was a remote control robot whose batteries were running out.

Out of the corner of his eye, he was aware that everybody was staring at him, and he knew what the questions were. Too fucking bad. The only ones that mattered were from Jo, and he had no good answers for her.

The arm of the slayer at his feet flopped over on its own accord, and he watched as the black-stained hands clawed uselessly at his boots.

With nothing to lose, and Jo having already seen the worst, he unsheathed one of his steel daggers, tossed it in the air, and caught the hilt with a smack of his palm. Vicious point down, he lifted the weapon over his shoulder as he dropped onto one knee to stab—

Rhage caught his wrist. “No. We wait for Butch.”

Right about the time Syn was trying to shoot his way out of that groundskeeping building, before the explosion, Butch was attempting to get out of the office building downtown. He punched the bar on an interior fire door, breaking the thing open on its hinges. As it swung wide, he burst out into yet another corridor—even though he didn’t know what the fuck he was rushing for. He was still going to end up in that mail receiving area with no IT MacGyver flashy shit to get him out smoothly.

Then again, he didn’t need to be smooth, right? Did he really care if the whole goddamn building lit up with alarms and the cops came with sirens blaring? He was going to be long gone, running back to the garage, getting the R8 and going 0–60 in 3.2 seconds to the conflict location.

Thank God V got the engine upgrade to the performance—

The smell of fresh air was not good news. As he rounded the final corner before the receiving bay, the scent of the night was a shocker and meant someone had already come in. Cops? Maybe the alarms were silent.

Skidding to a halt in front of the last door, he unholstered one of his guns and back-flatted it against the wall. There were no sounds of anyone moving around on the other side. Nobody talking. But he didn’t want to be someone’s target practice just because he was distracted and not reading the situation right.

He was quiet about his penetration this time, slipping through the last panel.

“What . . . the fuck?”

One of the bays was wide open, and parked right in front of it, ass in to the building, ready to go with the powerful engine already running . . . was V’s R8.

Like Butch was Tony Stark and had summoned the fucking thing with a remote.

“Lassiter?” he said as he looked around the dreary mail room.

Whatever. No time, no time.

Butch covered the distance in three big strides, leaped out of the bay like a parachuter, and would have Dukes of Hazzard’d it into the driver’s seat of the R8 except for: (1) the window wasn’t down; (2) there was no way in hell he could fit himself through the aperture of the top half of the door; and (3) if he left so much as a smudge on the paint, the leather, the trim, the seat, the center console, whatever V did to Lassiter after the containment spell was going to look like a Sandals vacation in Cancún.

Five minutes later, he was out of the congested streets and tall buildings of downtown. Five minutes after that, he was in the sprawling retail-urbs, blowing through red lights and dusting the few cars on the road with him in the passing lane. If he’d met a cop, it would have gotten nasty, but he didn’t.

When he made the turn to go up to the Adirondack Outlets Mall, even the Quattro couldn’t keep the supercar on the pavement, the heavy back end of the car fishtailing. At the top of the rise, he shot forward to the stores—and nearly bought the farm in a front-end collision with a gray Ford Taurus.

The inside of the older sedan was dark so he couldn’t see the driver, but there was no time to follow up on that shit, either.

He went around to the back, as instructed, and got a load of a scene out of a Schwarzenegger movie circa 1987. You want to talk about chaos? There were cars and trucks full of holes, slayers on the ground still moving, gunpowder—and in this case, gasoline, too—thick in the air. Oh, and a whole corner of the building was gone. Slamming on the brakes, he got out, and the stench of lesser was so intense, he fell back against V’s precious car.

Qhuinn came jogging over. “We got some enemy down on the ground, all ready for you.”

“How many?”

“Nine. Maybe ten.”

Butch kept his groan to himself. “Any of us hurt?”

“We’ve got one with a leak—even if he refuses to admit to the shit. Manny’s on the way.”

“Who’s injured?” Butch looked around. “And what the fuck happened to the building?”

“Bike blew up. Oopsie.” Qhuinn calmly unholstered one of his guns and put three shots into the head of a slayer who’d reached for his pant leg. “I believe it’s being classified as a Honda-plosion.”

“I’m going to need Vishous to come in.” Butch shook his head. “But I hate to have him so exposed.”

“We’ll move the bodies, then.”

Rhage jogged over, called by the shooting. “Everything okay out here?”

“One of them was getting touchy-feely, but my body, my choice.” Qhuinn tucked his gun back under his arm. “And now he doesn’t have a frontal lobe or eyeballs so it’s not going to be a problem.”

“We need transport,” Butch said. “You’re exactly right. We’ll move the slayers to a neutral location where I can do what I have to and V can be right on hand. This place is way too exposed.”

Sure, V could throw up some mhis, but after that explosion, the scene was bound to be on 911’s radar. The last thing anyone needed was a bunch of humans wondering why they couldn’t see something that they knew damn well was there.

“And we’ve got one other problem,” Rhage said.

As Butch’s phone went off, he glanced at the screen. Then focused on the brother. “Manny’s ETA is just six minutes from now. So if it’s bleeding, we’ve got it covered.”

“It’s not bleeding. And I wish it was the kind of thing the docs could fix.”

It was as all the men came to stand in front of Jo that she realized the truth she had been after, the trailhead she had been determined to find, the answers she had sought . . . was going to be worse than the not knowing.

Seven of them. All Syn’s size. All wearing some version of leather on the top and the bottom. None of them spoke. They just stared at her, and their expressions were the same, no matter the features.

Sadness. As if they pitied her.

Because they were going to kill her? Or was it because of something even deeper than that. Death, after all, was a simple, if traumatic, concept. There was a truth in this lineup of huge bodies, however, one that she recognized as very complicated, even though she had yet to learn its dimensions.

Its repercussions.

She looked at Syn, who was standing with his back to her. Who was standing between her and the others.

“Who are you really,” she said to his broad shoulders.

When he didn’t answer, and none of the others did either, she stared at one of the bodies on the floor. The torso was bent at a right angle— in the wrong direction. The man’s head was nearly touching his hips. And even though his back was clearly broken, and the spinal cord must have been severed, and no part of him should have been moving outside of autonomic twitches in the toes or the hands? The legs were churning and the arms were scratching over the cement.

His head turned to her, and his unblinking eyes stared up.

With pure hatred.

As Jo gasped, more of the sickly sweet stench speared into her nostrils. And as her headache pounded, she put a hand to her temple.

The blood all over the should-have-been-dead man wasn’t right. It wasn’t red.

None of this was right.

“What are you!” she yelled.

When Syn didn’t turn around, and none of the others replied, she jumped forward and punched his shoulders. But even though she put all her strength into it, the impact seemed to barely register on him.

“Tell me! Tell me what this is all about—”

Sharp footfalls came at her. “Easy there,” a male voice said in a Boston accent.

Jo wheeled around and recognized who it was in the hazy, disjointed way of a dream. “You . . .” She groaned and weaved on her feet. “I know you . . .”

“Yeah. You do,” he said with a strange kind of defeat.

“The blog . . .” Her headache was getting so much worse. “The school for girls. The restaurant that was abandoned downtown. The stories and the photographs, that video feed from the souvenir shop parking lot . . .”