What he did with his murder kit on his own time was personal, a return to the death he had wrought on the sire who had tortured him and his mahmen.

Syn was getting lax about the screening process though, wasn’t he. When Gigante had told him to kill Jo, he hadn’t looked into whether the target was an innocent or not. He’d been reeling and kill-starved, overdue and therefore prepared to murder a reporter, regardless of their virtue or lack thereof.

Which was very different from a mobster who sold drugs to kids and did fuck-all else.

“I don’t want you around her,” Manny said abruptly.

“So you’ve decided to believe her. About your kinship with her.”

“Doesn’t matter.” The surgeon’s dark eyes went to the rearview. “Sister or not, she doesn’t need you in her life.”

Syn looked down at the gauze banding around his thigh. Manny had insisted on packing that wound as well as his others.

“So you’re just going to let me bleed out, huh,” Syn said.

“No, I’m still going to treat you. I have professional ethics.”

Syn lowered his head and closed his eyes. As images of Jo came to him, a relentless onslaught of memories, his instinct to protect her surged under his skin and raced along his veins. Under different circumstances, he might have suggested he and her brother fight it out.

What stopped him was . . . he couldn’t disagree with the man’s conclusion.

Jo was much better off without him.

You stole from me again.”

As Jo spoke, she stared out of the window of the truck she’d gotten into at the abandoned mall. The last thing she remembered, they were leaving the site of the fighting. Now, they were in a parking garage somewhere . . . God only knew where.

“It’s for your safety.”

She looked across the seat. The man—male—beside her was Syn’s size, but with a long, flowing, multi-colored hair and the calm demeanor of someone who had done so many super-dangerous things that chauffeuring a woman to . . . well, wherever the hell they were . . . was waaaaaaaay down on his list of stressors.

“My safety?” She glanced at the bulk of his leather jacket. “Really. Like I’m not already at risk around you.”

He killed the engine and stared over at her with yellow eyes that were beautiful—and so not human. “You will not be hurt here.”

“I’m supposed to trust you? When I’ve lost—” She tapped the digital clock on the dash. “—seventeen minutes. Oh? You mean you didn’t think I’d check the time? I knew you were going to do something with my memory, so I’ve been keeping track of these numbers as they change.”

The male narrowed his eyes. “What you don’t understand is that there are people who would torture you for the information about where to find us. And they can read your mind and know what you know in the blink of an eye. So yes, it’s for your safety.”

Jo looked back out the window. There wasn’t much to see. Just concrete, asphalt, parking spaces, and no open-air anything.

As he got out of the truck, she followed suit. “Are we underground?”

“Yes.” He indicated an unmarked metal door. “And we’re heading over there.”

Following him—because really, what was her other option?— she ended up in some kind of corridor, going by . . . what seemed to be classrooms. Meeting rooms. And then some medical facilities that looked every bit as state-of-the-art as any hospital she’d ever seen.

He stopped in front of an open door. “I think Doc Jane wants you in this exam room.”

Jo crossed her arms over her chest. “I’m not consenting to any kind of medical procedures, FYI.”

“Not even a blood test to prove that the man you think is your brother is actually related to you?” When she didn’t reply to the rhetorical, the male nodded. “That’s what I thought. Manny—Doctor Manello—is right behind us. I know you two didn’t get a lot of time to talk at the scene. And then you can meet Jane and find out if you’re his kin.”

Before she could ask him anything further, he gave her what looked like a little bow and backed out of the room. After he closed the door, she expected to hear some kind of lock get turned. That didn’t happen. And a few minutes later, when she tried the knob, she was able to open things just fine.

Leaning out, she looked left and right. The corridor continued beyond the room she was in, and she was surprised at the extent of the facilities. This was not anything cobbled together, and it sure as hell couldn’t have been cheap to build or maintain—

Down to the left, the reinforced door she had come through opened and she stiffened. Syn limped in first, and right behind him was Manuel Manello. Both men—males, whatever—stopped dead as they saw her, the heavy panel they’d used shutting with a solid thunch behind them.

Jo stepped out, figuring she had every right to take up some space. Then she noticed the huge red spot that had grown on the white bandage around Syn’s thigh.

“Are you okay?” she asked as they approached. Which was a stupid question.

“He’ll be fine.” Dr. Manello stepped between them. “It’s nothing for you to worry about. I’m just going to stitch him up and then we’ll talk, okay?”

“Yes. Please.”

Standing next to the doctor, Syn was a silent, looming presence that kept his eyes lowered and his head down. But just before he went into the treatment room next door, he glanced sideways at her. And then he was out of view.

As she retreated back into her own exam room, she realized she expected him to say something. Maybe break away and come talk to her. Explain . . .

Well, what did she expect him to say, anyway?

Pacing, she made a circle around the examination table. Then she went over to the stainless steel sink and cabinet setup. Opening the cupboards, she checked out the orderly sterile supplies and equipment—

The voices in the room beside her were low at first. But then they got louder. And louder still, as an argument intensified.

Jo went over to the wall and put her ear to the Sheetrock. The doctor and Syn were going at it hard-core—and there were so many reasons to just stay out of whatever the fight was about.

Even though, come on, she could guess.

And because she had an idea what they were bumping heads over, she walked out, hung a left, and ripped open the door to the other treatment room.

“—she’s damn well going to go through the transition!” Syn yelled.

“You don’t know that!”

“You’re human, you wouldn’t know—”

“Fuck you—”

The two of them were on opposite sides of the examination table, leaning in, forehead to forehead, arms planted—at least until they noticed her at the same time. That shut them up quick, and the two bags of testosterone straightened, pulled their clothes back into place, and played at total composure.

Like they were choirboys who would never, ever raise their voices.

But she wasn’t worried about audio decorum.

Swallowing through a tight throat, Jo had to clear her voice before she could speak. Twice.

“What am I going to go through?” she asked hoarsely.

In addition to righteous styling, a fine sound system, and plenty of fucking torque, one of the benefits of the Audi R8 performance coupe was its all-wheel drive. There was also plenty of rubber available for grip on its racing tires, and good braking if you got a little overexcited with the pedal on the right.

Unfortunately, when it came to four-wheeling it through a forest, the car had one great rate limiter.

The thing had the ground clearance of wall-to-wall carpeting.

As a result, as Butch drove the supercar behind the box van, he was fifty-fifty on whether or not he was going to have to give up the ghost and hoof it the rest of the way.

The Tomb was located quite a distance from the Brotherhood mansion, its hidden location born courtesy of a thin fissure in the mountain’s granite and quartz superstructure, one that happened to widen into a huge subterranean cave. From what Butch had been told, the site had been in use way before Darius had built the big house, the underground space serving as the sanctum sanctorum of the Brotherhood. Not only were all the lesser jars that had ever been collected stored in its ante-hall, but deep in its stony belly, inductions and sacred rituals had been hosted for a couple of centuries, all with the Tomb’s special brand of torch-lit, yup-this-some-vampire-shit-right-here.

The R8 gave up the effort about a quarter mile from the site. Or rather, Butch decided that he could run faster than he was going, and given V’s little sojourn in Lassiter’s bubble of happiness, it was better to stop rolling the dice on that front spoiler: He didn’t want to have to explain how he’d peeled the thing like a grape. And besides, he’d made it a good mile farther than he’d thought he would.

Putting the engine in park, he killed the growl and got out, leaving the fob in the slot by the gearshift.

No reason to think the car was going to be five-fingered out here. Not only was the mountain a hard climb, that hard-core, permanent mhis obscured everything in the landscape, making it impossible for anyone or anything who was not supposed to be here . . . to be, well, here.

Which was why Wrath had voted yes for proposition privacy. The great Blind King hadn’t liked the idea of bringing the enemy to the Tomb any better than Butch or anybody else did. But he’d seen the logic, and made the right choice.

Falling into a jog, Butch scanned the pine trees as he weaved around boulders that reminded him of adult teeth breaking through in a child’s mouth. There wasn’t much underbrush. The mountain, like all of the Adirondack range, was more rock than soil, the topography carved by the advance and retreat of glaciers that had briefly considered a zip code relocation during the Pleistocene epoch.

This, by the way, was all according to V. Who liked to use big fancy words like “Pleistocene epoch” for “Ice Age” (not the movie.)

And so, yes, now, some eleven thousand years later, Butch was here, running over a spongy mattress of fallen pine needles, hell-bent on welcoming the enemy into the most sacred place the Brotherhood had.