Although the rules had changed, apparently.

“Cop?”

Butch pivoted back around to his roommate and did not like the expression on the brother’s face. “Don’t look at me like that.”

“Like what.”

“Like I got answers. Like I’m the solution to it all.”

There was a long moment of silence between them, nothing but the pitter-pat of rain on the metal roof marking the stillness, the quiet.

“But you are, Butch. And you know it.”

Butch walked over and stood chest-to-chest with the male. “What if we’re wrong?”

In the Old Language, V said, “The Prophecy is not ours to claim. It is the property of history. As it was foretold, so it shall be. First as the future, then as the present when the time is nigh. After which, with recording, it shall be the sacred past, the saving of the species, the end of the war with the Lessening Society.”

Butch thought of his dreams, the ones that had been waking him up during the day. The ones that he refused to speak to his Marissa about. “What if I don’t believe any of that.”

What if I can’t believe it, he amended.

“You assume destiny requires your belief.”

Unease scurried through his veins like rats in a sewer, finding all kinds of familiar paths. And meanwhile, as freely as it roamed, he became trapped. “What if I’m not enough?”

“You are. You have to be.”

“I can’t do any of it without you.”

V’s familiar eyes, diamond with navy-blue rims, softened, proving that even the hardest substance on earth could yield if it chose to. “You have me, forever. And if you need it, you can take my faith in you for as long as you need it.”

“I didn’t ask for this.”

“We never do,” V said roughly. “And it doesn’t matter even if we did.”

Vishous shook his head sadly, as if he were remembering parts of his own life, routes taken by force or coercion, dubious gifts pressed into his unwilling hands, mantles tossed over his shoulders, heavy with the manipulations and desires of others. Given that Butch knew his roommate’s past as well as he knew his own, he wondered about the nature of the so-called destiny theory V spoke of.

Maybe the intellectual construct of fate, of destiny, was just a way to distance a person from all the shitty fucking things other people did to them, all the proverbial bad luck that rained down on the head of an essentially good guy, all that Murphy’s Law, which was actually not luck at all, just the impersonal nature of chaos at work. And then there was the disappointment and injury, the loss and alienation, the chips off the soul and the heart that were inevitable during any mortal’s tenure upon the ashes and the dust to which they were doomed to return.

Butch pushed damp cashmere aside to grip his heavy gold cross through the thin silk of his shirt. There was a balance, though, he reminded himself. Love, in all its forms, was the balance.

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

“Time for cleanup,” Butch said hoarsely.

“Yes,” V agreed. “It is.”

As Butch held up the arm, energy unleashed from that deadly palm in a great burst of light, the illumination blinding Butch, his eyes stinging, though he refused to look away from the power, the terrible grace, the universe’s mystery of origin that was 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 shed, those comparably fragile walls and rafters of the roof, remaining untouched by the fearsome glory that reclaimed the humble space that had been horribly used for as evil a purpose as ever there was.

What if the prophecy itself is not enough, he 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 came along to claim the present as its victim, proving that that which had been taken as an absolute was in fact only partially true.

Everyone is talking about the end of the war, but is there ever really an end to evil? Butch wondered. 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.