Robert Kraiten fought his mind for as long as he could.

His thoughts, long the sound and logical road to follow, had taken him into a forest of threatening chaos that he could not find his way out of. And now he was stumbling through his actual glass house, tripping and falling on his face, dragging himself across polished marble … circling the second-story rooms before funneling, like dishwater, down the front staircase.

On the first floor, he caught his breath and tried to resist the impulse that controlled him, but his body refused to stop its forward progression.

He was naked, and his bald elbows and knees, his sweating palms, squeaked over the glossy tiling that he had a vague memory of installing two years ago: Alabastri di Rex by Florim. In Madreperla.

His recollections of spending months choosing the stone were like a distant echo, a pin dropping in the middle of a cheering stadium. Everything was like that. His business. His money. His secrets.

He had secrets. Terrible secrets. Secrets that …

The firestorm in his head whirled around faster, words forming and disintegrating, torn apart by the raging fury that surely his skull could not contain any longer.

He did not want to go to the kitchen. He did not want to go in search for what his brain was telling him he needed. He did not want to use the object for what his mind was telling him he wanted it for.

Instead, he wanted to go …

Robert Kraiten, long the master of his destiny and that of others, could not hold an independent thought.

After a lifetime of self-determination, something had come unhinged deep inside of him. He had only the vaguest sense of when it had started: Leaving the labs the night before. In a car that was not his own … in one of the security vehicles that he’d made a guard give him the keys to.

And he had come home.

The security vehicle was still in his garage. He did not know where the keys to his actual SUV were, nor did he have his wallet or his cell phone. But he had gained access to his house by fingerprint.

He had come home.

He had come home to—

Something had happened at the lab last night. He had met with someone he needed to control in his office, and he had a vague idea that the meeting had gone satisfactorily—the deflection of their interest had been effective. But then, before he could leave, an interruption. A dangerous, Level I infiltration that had—

His body froze. His head reared back.

With a vicious strike, his forehead slammed forward of its own volition, his frontal lobe hitting the alabaster so hard, a crack like lightning striking a tree echoed into the high ceilings above him.

Blood dripped, red and glossy, off his nose, onto the floor.

He smeared it as he crawled onward, creating handprints and smudges in his own blood. Red blood. Drop, drop—now flowing. A river down his face, getting into his nostrils, into his mouth, copper-tasting drool now.

The going became harder, his purchase on the glossy stone compromised by the slick mess he was making.

With relentless fixation, his mind drove his body forward even as his conscious self, his actual will, the true north on the compass of his sentient being, said, No! Go back! Do not do this!

The disintegration and degeneration of his mind had started as soon as he’d gotten home. Standing in his back hall, by the alarm center and computer systems that ran the entire house, he had inexplicably become bombarded with childhood memories, the images and sounds and smells hitting him as cannon shots, rocking him internally until he had collapsed onto his knees.

It was every bad thing he had ever done: All the joy he had taken at the expense of others, the shame and humiliation he had puppet mastered on his younger brothers. On his classmates. On teammates. On opponents.

Lost in the morass of memory, he had watched his younger self ride the ugly, but ultimately triumphant, tide of his own creation, his prominence sustained by the power structures he created and leveraged on his behalf. He had cheated on tests. Gotten his papers written by smarter students who had secrets they needed to keep. He had falsified his SATs and gotten into Columbia on an application written by a fellow senior who had been sucking off their English teacher. In college, he had sold drugs, and he had used women, and he had sparked a campus riot just for the fun of it. He had gotten a physics professor fired for sexual harassment she did not commit just to see if he could. He had blackmailed a dean for swinging because he was bored.

Kraiten had graduated having learned nothing of substance academically, and everything that mattered in terms of exploiting weakness.

Five years later, he had founded BioMed. And seven years after that, he had been driving home from his summer house on Lake George late at night, and come upon a car accident on the rural road halfway between Whitehall and Fort Ann.

He had never understood why he had stopped. It was not in his nature.

But something had compelled him.

Behind the wheel of the wreck, he had found a woman who was not just a woman. She had been a female of a different species: The deer she had hit was still struggling on the ground, and as it expired, her open mouth had shown him the kind of anatomy that he was unfamiliar with.

Fangs.

She had coded in his car on the way to the lab. Twice. He had pulled over and revived her both times.

As soon as he had her in secure custody, so to speak, he had talked to his partner, who had instantly seen the possibility. And as they had worked on her, he had discovered where to find others. Make deals.

Seven of them. Over the course of thirty years. Males and females. Then one who had been born in captivity, the result of a breeding.

He had learned so much. He had …

Robert Kraiten abruptly realized that he was up off the floor, on his feet, in the kitchen. Blood was all down his chest and his belly. And as he looked down at himself, he noted that he hid his old man body under well-tailored suits.

Pudgy, flabby, gray hair on his chest.

He had been fit once—

His hands were moving, pulling open a drawer that revealed things that flashed, mirror bright, under the overhead lights.

Knives. Chef knives. Freshly sharpened, state-of-the-art, knives.

Tears formed in his eyes, flowing down, mixing with the blood that drip, drip … dripped from his forehead into the drawer, onto the blades.

His right hand, the hand he wrote with, reached in and gripped one of the fourteen-inch Masamotos. The blade at the tip was tiny. At the base, it was two inches. This was the knife that was used to cleave slices off turkeys and roast beefs.

He had always been in control of everything. His whole life, he had ruled everyone around him.

Now, at the end of his mortal coil, he could control nothing.

“No …” he said through the blood in his mouth.

Robert Kraiten watched as his hand turned the knife around and the other one joined its mate in steadfast grip, all ten of his knuckles standing out in stark relief under the skin that covered them.

His lips peeled off his teeth as he gritted and fought and tried to stop the stabbing. Fruitless. It was like fighting a foe, a third party, an attacker who had snuck up on him.

Veins popped down his thin forearms as they shook.

There was sound all around him now, a loud sound that was echoing around the closed, smooth cabinets and empty counters and chrome appliances.

His scream was that of bloody murder … as he drove the knife into his abdomen and jerked it side to side, over and over again, turning his digestive tract to soup held within the tureen of his pelvic cradle.

He died in a crumbled mess three minutes later.

Some two hours after the killing party started, Murhder stabbed a third lesser back to the Omega. With that tire iron. And then he tossed the tool to John Matthew, who dispatched number four.

They were blocks and blocks away from where they had engaged the first pair, at least a mile and a half, maybe two, to the west, and as they’d gone along, he’d been shocked at how few of the slayers were out and about. Kind of frustrating when you were looking for quantity—and P.S., the quality of these fighters sucked. Every one of them was newly turned, unequipped, and ragged as the first had been.

But beggars/choosers and all that.

As John’s pop and flash lit up the vacant street, Murhder laughed.

Just threw his head back and laughed as loud as he wanted to.

Across the street, lights came on in a walk-up, humans stirring, not that he cared.

John straightened and flipped the tire iron end over end, catching it in a snap and smiling. Murhder nodded without the guy having to ask anything: More. They needed more.

The freedom was intoxicating, the city spread before them, a field to hunt and find the enemy in, a playground in which to eliminate those who sought to kill innocent males and females—for no other reason than the Omega wanted to destroy that which the Scribe Virgin had created.

Murhder double-checked the sky. The position of the stars suggested a number of hours had passed, but there was time still left before the dawn came and robbed them of their pursuits. Not enough though. He wanted night after night after night of this buzz, this deadly hunt and peck, this sense that he was doing meaningful work.

“Where have they all gone?” He motioned around the street. “There should be dozens of lessers out tonight, but we’ve seen only four?”

John made a slicing motion across the front of his throat.

“They’re dying off?” When the male nodded, Murhder frowned. “The Omega can’t die. It’s as immortal as the Scribe Virgin.”

John shook his head again.

“Wait, what?” He was vaguely aware of humans moving around in those lighted windows, and he sank back into the shadows at the head of an alley. “I don’t understand. The Omega is gone?”

More of that shaking.

“The Scribe Virgin is gone? What the hell’s been going on here—”

“You two have gone rogue. That’s what the fuck’s been going on.”

Murhder looked over his shoulder and grinned. “Tohr! What’s up! How’re you?”

The Brother with the levelheaded reputation was not looking particularly even-keeled at the moment. He was hair-across-the-ass mad, his lips thin, his stance tilted forward as if he were on the verge of punching someone.