“So you weren’t going to try and resurrect Sahvage? I thought bringing him back was the point of all this.”

“No.” Lassiter shook his head. “Sahvage was never the thing. He was supposedly buried with the Gift of Light, and that’s what I want you to have.”

“What is that exactly? A sword? Another book—”

“Yeah, like we need a second hardcover in all this,” V muttered.

There’s something wrong here, Lassiter thought. This is not the way it’s supposed to be.

Turning away from Sahvage’s inscription, he cleared his throat. “The Gift of Light is a prism, a sacred relic of an ancient time that goes all the way back to when the Scribe Virgin was creating the vampire race. It reflects whatever goes into it. So if you leverage it against great evil—”

“Then that’s what you get back out of it,” V finished.

“So you could turn evil on itself?” Phury said.

“Only certain kinds of evil.” Lassiter pushed a hand through his hair. “It wouldn’t have worked against the Omega. He was the other half of the Scribe Virgin, so it was too close to him—I have to go now.”

“You’re kidding me, right.” V glared across the empty coffin. “If you’re leaving us because Golden Girls is on—”

“No, it’s not that.”

“Then what the hell’s wrong with you?”

Shaking his head again, Lassiter repeated some combination of the I’m-out-of-here album blaring through his skull—and dematerialized directly out from the Tomb.

Good job the Other Side was never far away for him. All he had to do was pierce the veil that separated the earthbound from all that was eternal and poof! he was in a glorious field of grass that did not require mowing, turning his face to a milky white sky that never stormed, taking a deep breath of temperate air that was perfumed with the delicate scent of tulips.

But there was no peace for him right now.

As he strode off toward his destination, he went past the bathing temple, with its beautiful, shimmering basin of water, and then continued on by the columned villas where the Chosen had stayed when they’d lived here. There was also the Treasury, with its baskets of loose gems and special artifacts, and even more important . . . the Scribing Temple.

He stopped outside of the sacred confines where, for millennia, the most cloistered of all the Chosen had spent the forever-hours of their existence staring into crystal seeing bowls and recording the lives and events unfolding down below on earth.

Opening one of the solid doors, he viewed the scribing stations set in rows, the desks still sporting the ink pots and feathers as well as the bowls and the folios of fresh, unused parchment. Everything was as it should be, the chairs aligned perfectly, the plumes of the quills all gracefully extending up at the same angle, no dust on anything, no cobwebs, the space as it had been at the moment it was established for its purpose.

Even though it had been abandoned.

Stepping inside, his boots echoed around the high ceiling, and he had a thought that with the Scribe Virgin retiring and him taking over, all these functions that had once been so vital were gone.

Talk about relics.

On that note, he went past the scribing stations and proceeded to the library—and even for an angel like him, who was pretty damned impervious to being impressed, it was daunting to take a gander at all the stacks and stacks of the recorded history of the vampire race.

Inside the countless volumes, which were arranged chronologically, every major and minor incident of every soul housed inside every body with vampire blood had been faithfully recorded. By hand. In ink.

It was all the knowledge that existed of all the lives that had gone before—and he was going to go through the pages and find every mention of the Gift of Light and Sahvage and that goddamn Book.

The brothers and the other fighters in the mansion often gave him a hard time for not taking his job seriously enough.

And for the first time, he worried that maybe they were right.

Because something wasn’t adding up here; he just didn’t know what.

• • •

Devina walked through the club, high heels clickin’—not that anyone could hear her Louboutins cross the grimy floor. Overhead, SoundCloud rap was thumping, the auto-tuned, distorted voice of a guy mumbling about drugs and sex punctuated with a lot of high-fiving synthesized beats. In her opinion, the track had as much in common with actual music as a Twinkie did with a homemade Victoria sponge, but what the fuck did she care.

It was chum into the sea, pulling out of houses and apartments all manner of humans, creating a buffet for her base instincts.

As she visually interviewed the various couples and throuples—assessing all manner of body type and wardrobe choice, but mostly the eye contact between and among the connected—she had a thought that she was feeling just a liiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiittle aggressive.

And didn’t that self-awareness show personal growth?

Sure as fuck did, she thought as she focused on a pair of men who were nose to nose, eye to eye, their bodies moving in sync. Behind them was a man and a woman. Next to them, all around them, were more of the same, combinations of sexes and heights and hair colors coming together.

So they could come together.

The fact that she was surrounded by so much one-night-standing was the only thing that kept her from exploding the place, just running the people through with her wrath so they blew apart in chunks. Which would be so fucking satisfying . . .

Okay, fine, it would be so satisfying for maybe as long as it took for the pieces of arms, legs, and torsos to stop bouncing up from their landings on the floor.

But that was something, right?

Yeah, and then where was she going to be.

Right back where she was.

Stopping in the center of all the groping, directly under the light fixture that shot laser beams into the writhing masses, she turned and turned and turned . . . until she was like the after-school-special transition into flashback that wound faster and faster until everything blurred up and funneled away . . .

To Something That Brought Meaning or Revelation to Present Events.

Of course that was not what was actually happening at the moment. In spite of the Instagram revolution of narcissism, which she fully supported, people’s lives, even if you were immortal, were not actually film productions with jump cuts, off-camera narration, and soundtracks. There were no scripts, no stage markers for where you were supposed to stand, no let’s-try-that-take-again-with-a-little-more-emotion.

Which fucking sucked.

She wanted a do-over. And some better lighting. And a leading fucking man, thank you very much.

As her frustration sharpened even further, she surveyed the landscape of lovers and knew two things were true: One, not all of these one-night stands were going to stay that way. Some of these couples were going to develop their connection, and forge relationships, and someday in the future, laugh between themselves, or maybe with friends, at how they’d found true love at a club.

Can you believe it? We were so fucked up on Molly when we met, but now here we’re picking out china patterns and a sofa. We’re just so lucky, Todd.

You’re right, Elaine, so lucky!

Yeah, fuck off, Todd and Elaine. Oh, and the other thing she knew for sure? She was no part of this and not because she wasn’t human. While all of these useless tools were coupling up, she was locked out of a happily ever after, sure as she’d been blocked from entering that stupid fucking ugly-ass, fucking piece of shit, motherfucking ranch.