And on a night like tonight, he wasn’t sure what was worse. The idea that he was responsible for ending the war.

Or the possibility that he wasn’t.

Putting his hand on V’s shoulder, Butch moved down the heavily muscled arm until he clasped the thick wrist above the glowing curse. Then he stepped in beside his brother and lifted that deadly palm, the leather of V’s jacket sleeve creaking.

“Time for cleanup,” Butch said hoarsely.

“Yes,” V agreed. “It is.”

As Butch held up the arm, energy unleashed from the palm in a great burst of light, the illumination blinding him, his eyes stinging, though he refused to look away from the power, the terrible grace, the universe’s mystery of origin that was inexplicably housed within the otherwise unremarkable flesh of his best friend.

Under the onslaught, all traces of the Omega’s evil work disappeared, the structure of the maintenance building, its comparably fragile walls and floor and rafters of the roof, remaining untouched by the fearsome glory that reclaimed the humble space that been horribly used for as evil a purpose as ever there was.

What if the Prophecy itself is not enough, Butch thought to himself.

After all, mortals weren’t the only things that had a shelf life. History likewise decayed and was lost, over time. Lessons forgotten… rules mislaid… heroes dead and gone…

Prophecies dismissed when another future comes along to claim the present as its victim, proving that that which had been taken as an absolute was in fact only a partial truth.

Everyone was talking about the end of the war, but was there ever really an end to evil? Even if he succeeded, even if he was, in fact, the Dhestroyer, what then. Sweetness and light forever?

No, he thought with a conviction that made his spine tingle with warning. There would be another.

And it would be the same as what had been defeated.

Only worse.

CHAPTER FOUR

The woman—she liked to call herself that, needed to, really, her true identity aside—stood in the crowd of bodies, the scents of those around her a once-tantalizing blend of humanity’s sweat and blood and mortality. Music united them all through their ears, the beat stringing them one by one onto an audio-gasm garland that draped around the dance floor, the links swinging as hips rolled, backs arched, and arms swung in slow, sensual motion.

She was unmoving and unmoved as she sipped her fruit and alcohol alchemy through a metal straw, tasting none of the sweetness, feeling none of the buzz.

Closing her eyes, she yearned to find the metronome of the music, the penetration of the bass, the tickle of the treble. She wanted a body against her own, hands that palm’d down her waist to her hips, fingers that gripped her ass, a cock pressing against her skintight skirt. She wanted a mouth at the hollow of her throat. A tongue to lick into her between her legs. She wanted the beast with two backs, the down-and-dirty, the hard pound.

She wanted…

The woman was unaware of giving up again. But as she bent down and set her half-finished drink on the floor, she realized she was leaving. Again. With grace, she walked forth, turning to one side and another and then back again as she navigated between the men and the women who breathed and schemed, lived and died, chose and denied. She envied them the chaos of their free will, all those repercussions that would find them, good and bad, all the illusive goals never to be scored, all the distant horizons that would e’er be out in front, precious for the never-captured nature of their sunsets.

As much as she knew about damnation—and that was a lot—it turned out that a land of unwanted plenty was a fresh kind of hell, and she had a feeling the dogged, low-level malaise she suffered from was all about accessibility. If everything was within reach, nothing mattered, for the obtainable was a meal already gorged upon, the appetite ever-slaked creating a bloated, sickly feeling that disinclined one to ever dine again.

While the woman passed through all the shoulders and torsos, many eyes stared at her, double-taking, or never looking away in the first place. Lids popped wide, and jaws lowered ever so slightly, the impact of her presence jumping the wait line of so many chemically altered senses, barging its way into those brains ahead of other kinds of feedback.

When she had first returned here, to Caldwell, she had looked back at them, all of them, not just the ones in this club, but those striding on the sidewalks of the city, and stuck in traffic jams in their cars, and filing in and out of shops and offices and homes. With fervent expectation, she had searched for a response within herself to any of the unspoken invitations, a yes, a harmonizing drive to complete the chord, a brick to add to a collective wall, a penny of her own to make the dollar whole.

It had not come.

Lately, she stayed out a shorter time each night. And now, she did not venture out in the day at all.

The club’s rear exit was tattooed with a warning in red letters that it was to be used In Case of Emergency Only. The woman pushed the bar and stepped out. As the alarm started going off, she walked away down the alley, lifting her face to the spring rain that fell from storm clouds above.

Is it cold? she wondered. It had to be cold after she had been in that oven of body heat.

Her stilettos clipped over the dirty pavement, and kicked up puddles, and, on occasion, failed to find suitable purchase on the uneven ground. And when she lowered her head, wind swept her hair back, as if the night wanted to see her properly, as if it wanted to regard her sadness as a kind friend would, with pity, with concern.

The shouting bass of the club faded in her wake, replaced by softer conversations created by rain dripping off fire escapes, and windowsills, and the fenders of abandoned cars. A stray cat howled and received no reply for its throaty efforts. A cop car sped by, in pursuit of a felon or perhaps, in a rush to save somebody from one.

The woman walked with no destination, although an empty berth of sorts found her when she sensed someone following her. Looking over her shoulder, she thought she might have been mistaken. But then… yes. There it was. A figure with long legs and broad shoulders, the man emerging from the shadows into the disinterested peach glow of the city’s illumination halo.

The woman didn’t vary her pace, but not because she wanted to be caught.

The capture soon occurred, however, the man closing the distance to come beside her, the erection in his pants and the testosterone surging in his veins making some kind of intersection between their bodies a foregone conclusion in his mind.

She stopped and looked up to the storm again. The rain tiptoed on her cheeks and forehead, a thoughtful guest that did not want to overly disturb its host.

“Where you at, girl,” the man said.

Righting her head, she cranked a stare in his direction.

He had an almost-attractive face, something about the slightly-too-short distance between those dark eyes and the pinch of his too-thin lips robbing him of true handsomeness. And maybe the latter was why he’d gotten that tattoo on his neck, and why he greased his black hair back. He wanted to refute the priggish tint to his features. Probably also explained the way he stuck that blunt straight-out from between his uneven teeth, like it was an extension of his arousal.

“Now why you gotta be like that.” He took the blunt away. Spit on the wet ground. Put the thing back. “What’s your problem.”