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?”

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

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.

When Butch had joined the war, he had done it himself.

“Who the fuck got in here?” another brother said. “And why did they break all of this shit?”

Butch eyed the mound of shards and shrapnel that swelled to a point in the center of the corridor. As the torches on the walls threw strobing illumination on the jagged pile, he couldn’t imagine who could have found—

“Oh, shit!” he barked.

As everyone else fell silent behind him, he wasn’t thinking straight as he plunged into the pottery and porcelain debris, shifting through the pieces with hands that were cut by sharp edges, digging… clawing… praying.

“No, no, no…” He heard someone saying that word over and over again, and became dimly aware that it was him. “No… no…”

As people started to talk behind him, he ignored them.

Butch went all the way down to the stone floor. All the way down.

Then he gave up in utter defeat, twisting around to his brothers as he let himself fall back on his ass in the clearing he had made with hands that now bled red.

For a moment, all he could do was stare up at the group of males who had been enemies to him first, and then friends… only to culminate in blooded brothers. He knew their faces as well as he knew his own, and he loved each and every one of them as much as he could love another male.

And it was because of that love that he was suddenly completely and utterly terrified.

Tohr looked over and held his hands up in confusion, all WTF. “Cop, what’s going on here?”

“The hearts are gone,” he choked out. “The Omega… somehow, he got in here and he took the hearts from the jars.”

The response was immediate, voices exploding and echoing around as the brothers—and Wrath—went on an immediate offense with their guns and daggers, like they were about to go hunt down the enemy deeper into the subterranean lair.

“He’s not here!” Butch yelled over the din. When they quieted down, he likewise lowered his voice. “The Omega’s gone. He took what he needed… and he’s gone.”