“Is it? I’m not so sure . . . I never knew who my birth mother or father was, and I thought that was bad.” She laughed in a short, tense rush. “Turns out not knowing what species I am is so much worse. I almost can’t comprehend . . . anything.”

“You’re the same person you’ve always been.”

“No, I’m not.” She put out her hands and turned them over. “Because I didn’t know what I was in the first place.”

“Nothing has to change.”

“Then why is it called ‘the change.’”

Shit. He completely sucked at this.

Abruptly, Jo tucked her hands under her legs, as if she couldn’t bear looking at them. “Is this why the urgent care center called me and told me they couldn’t read my blood sample?”

“Did you see a doctor?”

“Yes. I already told you. And their office called and said there was a lab error and I needed to come for another try at it. But my blood wasn’t contaminated at the lab, was it.”

“No. The readings would be off compared to humans.”

“I wish I knew whether the change was actually coming.”

“I think it is.” Syn tapped his nose. “I can smell it. Others of my kind can as well.”

“And that’s how the other one, the Boston guy, recognized me?”

“Yes.”

Her eyes locked on his. “Do you think I’ve been hunting for vampires because I am one?”

“I think you’ve been looking for yourself.”

“How many memories have you taken from me?”

“None.”

Jo was quiet for a time, and Syn found himself getting to his feet and moving over to her side of the divide, her side of the coffee table . . . her side of the conflict. Even though, when it came to her transition, there really wasn’t a conflict to be had. Her body was her future, its internal mechanisms of oxygen exchange and heart rate, hormones and DNA, a mystery that was going to solve the mystery. And no one and no test and nothing was going to force the outcome.

But he was with her, no matter what.

“Before Manny left just now . . .” She cleared her throat. “He said I was going to have to take a . . .”

When she didn’t go any further, he finished things for her. “Take a vein. I’m sorry, I know it must repulse you. But if it happens, you need to have the blood of an opposite member of the species or you will die—”

“I want it to be yours.” As Jo’s eyes glowed with unshed tears, she wrapped her arms around herself. “No one else’s.”

Syn shook his head as he tried to get over his shock. How could she ever pick him? “Jo . . . there are so many better choices.”

“Then I’m not doing it. It’s you or no one.”

“I don’t think you understand what’s going to happen. Your body is going to make up your mind, not the other way around. Bloodlust is nothing to negotiate with.”

“You’re the only person in this world I know. I don’t want some stranger . . .” She squeezed her eyes shut. “This is like a nightmare. I literally can’t get my head around any part of this. And you think I’m going to choose a stranger?”

“It doesn’t have to be sexual.” Syn’s molars ground together as the bonded male in him started to scream. “The feeding, that is.”

“How will I know? When I have to . . .”

“You will know.”

“And you did this? I mean, it happened to you?”

Syn pictured the female from the Old Country. “Yes. And there was nothing sexual in that first feeding for me.”

“How long ago was it?”

“Three hundred years. Give or take.” As her eyes bulged, he nodded. “Our life expectancies are different.”

“Will mine change?” When he nodded, she chewed on her bottom lip. “Is the transition dangerous?”

“I’m not going to lie to you.”

“So that’s a yes.”

Syn slowly nodded, fear gripping his chest at the idea he might lose her. Even though she never really had been his.

“Isn’t there a blood test or . . . something . . . that can tell me precisely when it will hit?”

“No.” He wanted to reach out. Hold her. Ease her in any way he could. “You just have to wait. And again, because you’re part human, it could be a while.”

“Or it could never happen, right?” When he nodded again, Jo looked around the break room. “Tell me they don’t expect me to just sit around and wait here, like I’m some kind of prisoner? I have a job . . . a life . . . to get back to. Especially if this never happens.”

“They won’t keep you here against your will. They can’t.”

“You sure about that?”

“Yes.” Because he was damn well going to make it so. “I’m sure.”

Jo seemed to relax at that, her shoulders easing some.

Except then she pegged him with a level stare. “So are you saying you won’t do it? That you won’t . . . give me your vein if I need it?”

Fuck the shovel, Butch thought. What they really needed was a wheelbarrow.

As he dragged the first of the slayers into the cave by the ankles, he was aware that he had cherry-picked his payload. Unlike a lot of the other undead, this one was fully intact, with the arms and legs and the head still attached to the torso. Most of its sieve-like comrades did not pass this basic inventory test, and under different circumstances, he would have felt bad for leaving the lesser-than lessers for his brothers.

Except he knew he was going to go back for more. And then there was what was ahead of him.

The inside of the smaller cave behind the fissure was a black hole, but there was an orienting glow around the corner so he had enough to go on when it came to light. As he rounded the turn, his undead followed along with him, that head bumping over the rocky, uneven ground.

Like Butch gave a shit about the back of that skull.

When he came up to Tohr and Wrath, they had just opened the way into the Tomb, having slid back the rock wall and gone forward to the first set of thick gating with mesh that prevented access to anyone who wasn’t supposed to be there.

As the two turned to him, torches flared to life in the corridor beyond, willed to flame by Tohr. Or maybe it was Wrath, even though the King didn’t need illumination.

“I wish we didn’t have to do this,” Butch muttered as he dropped the ankles, the heels of the slayer banging into the packed dirt. “But the good news is, once these fuckers are consumed? I think we only have four left.”

“Four?” Wrath frowned. “Four slayers in the Lessening Society, and that’s it?”

“There were thirteen on-site or close to it when I arrived. I could sense them. One got away on the bike that was still operational. Another was in a car that I almost had a head-on collision with. And two turned back before they got there. That’s four left. All the others we’ve got in that van out there.” Butch looked down at the still-animated remains at his feet. “Plus this ball of fire right here.”

“But how do you know that’s all of them,” the King asked.

“Tonight was a meeting called by the Fore-lesser. It’s the only explanation for why so many of them were in a place outside of the field downtown. The only other congregations of that size have been inductions, but there was no evidence that anyone had been turned tonight— and more to the point, the Omega never uses the same site twice for that shit. He’d already used that groundskeeping building. No, it was a meeting, convened by the Fore-lesser. A gathering of the troops and resources which we found by luck thanks to Syn and that woman—so the count is the count. Thirteen.”

“But the Omega could make more. He could be holding an induction as we speak.”

As the other brothers came into the cave with more chum, Butch glanced down again at his little buddy with the bleeding problem. “I’m not sure he can anymore. He’s got to have enough energy inside of himself to propagate, and he was looking a pale shade of half-dead when I saw him the other night. I don’t think there’s any strength left for that.”

“Four slayers.” Wrath shook his head. “I can’t fucking fathom it. Did anyone get a bead on the Fore-lesser?”

“Not that I’m aware of, and he isn’t among the fallen.” Butch rotated his sore arm. “I’d recognize him from when I . . .”

As he trailed off, he leaned around the King. And promptly lost his voice to shock.

“What is it?” Tohr asked.

“Cat got your tongue, cop?” Wrath said.

On a sudden surge of panic, Butch pushed Tohr back and jumped in past the gating. Behind him, Tohr said to the group sharply, “Weapons out.”

The chorus of shifting metal on metal ushered Butch down the hall.

But he didn’t have to go far to be overcome by an unheard-of act of vandalism, the kind of thing that was so shocking, it made him doubt the information his eyes were feeding him.

All of the jars that had been set upon all of the floor-to-ceiling shelves in the ante-hall, well over a thousand, had been thrown to the stone floor of the Tomb’s entry corridor and shattered. Every single one.

Butch stopped as his shitkickers crunched over the first of the shards . . . that soon grew into a mountain.

“What is it—”

As Tohr abruptly stopped talking, Butch dropped down on his haunches and picked up a piece of enameled pottery. It looked old, but some of what had been broken was quite new, the sort of vases you could buy at Target.

“What the fuck?” someone else said as they got a look at the mess.

Butch stared up at the shelves. There was not one single jar left.

For generations of fighting, the Brotherhood had collected these vessels from the lessers they had slain, taking the hearts that were stained with evil as trophies of triumph. Whether it was a case of lifting the ID off the body before it was stabbed back to the Omega or actively torturing the enemy for information on where they stayed, claiming the jars had always been part of the victory ritual.