And it wasn’t just word service. Something was fundamentally different for him. Ever since his transition, his talhman had always been inside of him, a monster prowling the fence line of its enclosure, looking for signs of weakness, opportunities for escape, lapses in oversight.

No more. There was . . . a strange silence in the center of him.

But he wasn’t numb. Oh, no, he was definitely not numb. He had a constant, weighted pain on his heart, to the point where he struggled to take a deep breath. It was the loss of Jo, of course—and he had a feeling the mourning was going to stick with him for the rest of his life. True love, after all, could be expressed in many different ways, but the one commonality to it was that it lasted. It was a permanence, in whatever form it took.

Especially when it was lost.

“You told Xcor, then?” V asked.

“Yes.”

“What did he say?”

“Not much.”

“How’d you feel when you were telling him?”

Syn stared at the perfectly smooth surface of the cue ball. “It is what it is.”

“You’re not bothered at all that he and your cousins are out there without you?”

“You’re trying to lead me to a conclusion.”

“No, I’m trying to make you see past yourself.” V came around from the bar, glass of OJ in hand. “But yeah, I was going to come and find you. I have the answer to the question you asked me yesterday. About that female you knew from the Old Country.”

Syn looked up with a jerk. “You found her? Is she here? In the New World?”

His words came out fast, like a tommy gun.

V’s diamond eyes narrowed, his expression becoming remote. “She came over in the nineteen fifties. With her hellren and her young. A boy and a girl.”

Syn closed his eyes and pictured the female running in that meadow around her parents’ cottage with her pretrans brother. “So she mated. Who is her mate?”

“An aristocrat.”

Popping his lids open, he frowned. “Tell me it is a love match.”

“Yes.”

Syn exhaled in relief. “This is good news. I’ve always wondered what happened to her. If I had believed in a benevolent creator, I would have prayed for just what she got. Where did she settle?”

“Here in Caldwell.”

“Really. Well, that’s good. She’s safe here—”

“Sunnise was killed in the Raids.” As Syn looked over in horror, V continued, “Along with her hellren and both her young. Murdered. By the lessers.”

“You’re lying. You’re telling me this to—”

V looked bored. “You think I would waste a split second on making this shit up? They were slaughtered in their home about seven miles from here. In the death photograph I saw, which was taken by a blooded relation of hers, she was holding her daughter. She had tried to shield the young with her own body. The hellren and the son were decapitated.”

When Syn heard something crack, he looked down. The cue ball in his hand had split in half, powdering under the pressure he had exerted upon it.

“You asked me to find her.” V finished his OJ. “And I did. What you do with the information, like everything else in your life, is up to you.”

With that, the Brother left the billiards room, the sound of his shitkickers drifting away until all Syn knew was the dense silence around him.

And the agony in his chest.

At the base of the alley downtown, Mr. F grabbed the back of the slayer’s parka and yanked the other lesser around. Putting his face into his subordinate’s, he spoke in a voice he had never heard come out of his mouth before.

“We stay together.” He looked the other two dead in the eye. “The four of us stay the fuck together or I will kill you myself.”

That was not an empty threat. Even though they were all technically immortal, he was done with the whole fucking thing. The Omega had meted out such a punishment with dawn’s arrival that Mr. F could barely walk. He could also barely hear, the ringing in his ears the kind of background noise through which he couldn’t decipher anything softer than a scream.

He had been tasked with finding recruits.

He had been told that it was his last chance.

And he had been aware that the Omega had changed. No more stains on the white robe. No more weakness. Nothing but a horrible power that seemed to gather further strength as the hours had passed.

Mr. F had been used as a piece of exercise equipment, and his misery had fueled the abuse further. When he had finally been cast out of Dhunhd and sent back to this world, he had known that he was being toyed with and lied to. As soon as he got the recruits in order, he was going to be demoted.

Or whatever was worse than demotion.

Tonight was his one shot at survival—on his own terms. If he didn’t execute faultlessly?

“We stay the fuck together,” he snapped.

The other two seemed too overwhelmed to argue about anything, and that was good for them. And as for this one with the AWOL ideas? Mr. F was going to break him like a horse if he had to.

“Now, we are going this way.” He pointed in the direction the internal signal was coming from. “And you are going to go together.”

When nobody moved, he yelled, “March!”

Mr. F took out one of the three guns he had. He’d given the knives and the ropes to the others.

“If you don’t start moving, I will shoot you myself,” he growled.

As he and his troops started off, he felt nothing like himself. He was another person, and not because of the initiation into the Lessening Society. The pressure he was under, the limited choices he had, the torture he had endured, had all hardened him into something else. Gone was the pacifist, druggie, fuckup. In its place . . . a military man.

And he meant exactly what he’d said.

He would stab them if he had to. Drag them if he must. Kick them and coerce them—anything to get them funneled down this fucking alley and into those goddamn motherfucking Brothers who he could sense, clear as day, just blocks away.

Mr. F knew he was right about where their enemy was. And he didn’t have long to get the validation he didn’t require.

One hundred yards later, two figures rounded the far corner and stopped.

Mr. F’s troops stopped as well. And so help him God, he was prepared to jump-start them in the ass with his boot.

“You get in there, and you fucking fight,” he snarled with menace. “Or what waits for you if you run will be so much worse than anything those vampires will do to you, I promise.”

As Butch and Tohr squared off with a quartet of slayers, Butch breathed in deep, though his sinuses were not what he used to measure the threat. He relied on his instincts. As he always did.

But he didn’t believe the information that came to him.

“These can’t be it,” he whispered.

Tohr tilted his head to his communicator and gave their location in the too-well-lit alley. Immediately, one by one, fighters began appearing. Some on the roof. Some behind them. Some off to the side.

Those three lessers didn’t stand a fucking chance.

But Butch was not allowed to fight. When he went to run forward and engage, Tohr held him back.

“No. You and I stay here.”

As the brother pulled him back into a doorway for cover, it took everything in Butch to stay put. Everything. But the battle didn’t last long. Qhuinn and Blay attacked from up above, jumping off the roof-lines of the buildings they’d materialized onto, and re-forming right on top of the enemy. And the two males used the low-tech weapons the slayers had been armed with to incapacitate them.

One. Strangled by his own rope by Blay, then hog-tied facedown on the pavement.

Two. Stabbed in the gut by Qhuinn, then dropped when both its hamstrings were sliced with its own knife.

. . . and three. All but decapitated by the mated pair as the two hellrens went after it at once, a pair of daggers going deep into the throat. As the head went loose and hung backward on the spine, the chain-links in its hand were used to immobilize its arms.

All told, it took less than four minutes, and no one else had to get involved. Done and dusted. Okay, not dusted, not yet. That was Butch’s job.

And yet he didn’t walk forward. Looking around, he tried to define what he began to sense.

“You okay?” Tohr asked.

Butch reached into his jacket and gripped his cross. Then he shook his head and looked around the alley again. “No, this isn’t . . . right. Something is . . .”

Somebody came up to them. Someone else. Then all kinds of brothers and fighters. They were all talking and looking at him, excited. Bubbling with aggression and triumph.

That was very premature.

All at once, Butch began to pant, his chest pumping up and down as an urgency, a warning, an alarm, vibrated through his body.

“Go . . .” he croaked.

“What?” Tohr said.

“You need to all go . . .” He threw out his hand and grabbed onto somebody’s arm. “Go . . . you need to go . . . goooooooooooooooooo!”

None of them listened. Not one. The males he loved most in the world, his brothers, his friends, his family, clustered around him, trying to argue. Looking worried. Attempting to calm him by offering placation.

And that was when the hum started. Low, at first. Then growing in intensity. Why couldn’t they hear the warning, Butch thought as he panicked. Why couldn’t they feel the impending doom—

The first of the security lights exploded down at the far end of the alley, the fixture blowing up and showering sparks down the sweaty side of its building. And then another across the way. And another.

The flaring bursts of sparks were inexorable, closing in on the three fallen slayers who were writhing on the pavement as well as on those who Butch could not bear to lose.

“You have to leave or you’re going to die!” he screamed as all the buildings on the whole block went dark, inside and out.

Ducking both hands into his jacket, he outted his forties—and began shooting at the asphalt in a circle. As the brothers and fighters jumped back and then scrambled for cover, he didn’t look at where his bullets were ricocheting. He was only focused on what was coming through the darkness.