And it shouldn’t have exploded. Mr. F had seen the MythBusters episode when he’d been in one of his rehabs. But clearly there was something special in what the Brotherhood was shooting.

BOOM!

The force of the combustion had recalibrated the verticality on all kinds of vampires and slayers alike, blowing men and males off their boots, bodies flying backward. Then came the shrapnel, falling to the ground from the sky, metal chunks and pieces of bike skipping across the asphalt in a clatter of applause as if the show of light and force had been approved of.

Mr. F had meant to stay. He’d intended to stay. He’d told himself he was going to stay.

But it turned out the mortal survival instinct was one thing that even the Omega’s induction couldn’t disappear. With things still dropping from the explosion, he had slithered into the sedan, cranked the key, and thrown it in reverse.

And so he was here. Out on the four-laner that carved a trail through all manner of retail stores and touristy holes-in-the-wall. Every car he passed he wondered whether it was one of his. And every time he looked at the road behind himself, he worried that something with a vampire at the wheel was closing in on him.

As far as his brain had informed him, there had been thirteen lessers left in the Society. But he had no idea how many had survived, and it would be a while before he could concentrate and do a recount.

The Omega was going to be pissed at this.

And Mr. F knew what the punishment was going to be.

“Damn it,” he moaned.

* * *

The white landscape—the barren, blinding wasteland of white—drifted away like fog dispersed by a cold wind. In its place… awareness. Sounds, smells, tastes… and then sight.

The first thing Syn saw when he was able to focus was the one thing he never wanted to see. As the black-ink blood of lessers dripped off his fangs and his fingers, off his chin and his clothes, as the still-alive, half-destroyed bodies of his victims moved slowly on the blood-covered concrete, as the smoke cleared and the skirmish quieted… he discovered that he had turned to Jo and was staring at her.

Revealing the realest part of him.

To her.

The horror on her face. The hands up to her cheeks. The slack mouth and pale skin.

Yes, she saw him. She saw all of him, including his talhman, and she saw everything he did.

Wiping his mouth on the back of the sleeve of his leather jacket, he whispered something. It didn’t carry. He didn’t want it to.

And then the Brotherhood came rushing in: familiar, heavy boots pounding over the concrete and stopping behind him, breathing that was heavy, scents that were intermingling with the stench, shadows that were long from those headlights shining in through the blast hole.

“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.”

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

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.