Torqueing in midair, he twisted his body and swung his legs out in front of him so they were the bow of his shit-canned ship. The maneuver didn’t slow him down, but it made it possible for him to land in a crouch.

Or he would have.

If he hadn’t run into the hood of a car that had been abandoned and stripped for parts.

The front grille split him like a wishbone, one leg going north and peeling off the Chrysler emblem mounted over the radiator, the other going south and getting jammed under the front spoiler. His nut sac took the impact and turned him into a soprano, the C note he hit seven thousand octaves higher than any male should ever get near outside of an opera cape.

It was as his ’O Sole M’otherfucker echoed around that the lesser jumped to his feet. There was a split second where he and the slayer looked at each other. Hard to say who was more surprised, but who got back on the boogie train was answered pretty damn quick. Twinkle Toes with the perfectly timed face-plant didn’t hang around. He took off, racing past Butch’s new avocation as a hood ornament.

Groaning, Butch surgically removed his nads from the car and started after the slayer again. The pain was enough to make his stomach roll and his eyes water, and he had to swing his legs out from ground zero, his gait like a cowboy who’d gotten off his horse after three years in the saddle. Things evened out pretty quick, though, the idea that this could be the one, this could be the final lesser, making him go faster than his crotch would have liked.

Then again, going by how shit was feeling down there? He should be lying on a couch with a bag of frozen peas wrapped around his courting tackle.

Another corner, and by force of will alone, he started to close again. This time, he wasn’t going to run the risk of another crotch-on collision. With his prey in sight, enough with the Matrix shit. He just chugged it out until the stench wafting off the slayer was punching him in the nose, and the huffing and puffing of the undead was as loud as the roar of his own blood in his ears.

Throwing out an arm, he crowbarred his enemy, his elbow locking around the throat, his free hand grabbing onto his own wrist, his body yanking off to one side so that the lesser popped off the pavement and maypole’d around. With a practiced move, Butch dominated the ground game that followed, mounting the slayer, palming the back of the head, slamming the face into the pavement.

And that was when he discovered that he’d lost his dagger.

Yanking out his other one, he grabbed onto the lesser’s short hair, pulled back, and slit the throat from ear to ear.

The undead went slack, and Butch let go and rolled off, disgusted with himself and the sloppy takedown. As the slayer’s face flopped onto the asphalt, and all kinds of sputtering and choking rose up, he hung his own head and tried to catch his breath. With the chase over, his adrenaline was ebbing, and oh, God, the pain from his poor, abused testicles took the place of his aggression.

Leaning over, he retched and went between his thighs to delicately rearrange things—not that it helped. Blue balls had nothing on bashed balls.

When he could, he refocused on the slayer. Its arms and legs were still moving, and he thought of a dog in repose, chasing after imaginary squirrels and bunnies, paws twitching as the body went nowhere. Same diff here. Except unless he took care of business, this nonsense was going to go on in perpetuity. Or until some human rode up and went 911 on the situation.

After which, total calamity would ensue as the secret about the vampires and the Lessening Society got out.

Yup, the need for discretion was the only thing that the two sides agreed on.

On that note, he forced himself to get back to work. Reaching out, he grabbed the undead’s shoulder and rolled it over. The gurgling sounds got louder, and he stared down at the busted-up face with its wide, secondary smile. That new mouth, below the chin, was drooling black, stinky oil all over the place, but even if the body was drained dry, its motion would continue.

There were only two ways to get a lesser gone. One was the stab of a steel knife through the front of the chest, the blade going into the hollow space where the heart had been. Pop-pop, fizz-fizz, back to the Omega it is—at which point, the essence of evil that had been imparted into this once-human body would be returned to the Evil, recycled and put into another vessel.

The second way to “kill” the enemy was the one that was bringing the end of the war, and Butch was the only person who could do it.

Re-sheathing his dagger, he looked up as a police helicopter paddled overhead, its brilliant beam skating past him and the slayer, missing them entirely. Time to move fast. He wasn’t taking for granted he’d luck out like that again when it came back around. With a grunt, he planted one hand on either side of the slayer’s head. Then he leaned over, his arms bowing out, his eyes meeting the undead’s. It was hard to know how much the lesser was taking in. Those peepers were wide as car tires, the whites glowing in the darkness. There was no vengeance or hatred in them, however.

It was rank fear. In spite of the fact that the humanity was gone, a very human terror was coming through loud and clear.

“You’re not going home,” Butch muttered. “I’m going to save you. Even though you don’t deserve it.”

Although he wasn’t so sure about that.

The slayer had run when it had the chance. It hadn’t attacked. It hadn’t fought back with any weapons. It clearly wasn’t trained, and it was alone.

Butch knew this because he could sense the Omega’s boys and there weren’t any others around. He knew this because, briefly, he had been one of them.

“Do you regret what you agreed to?” Butch whispered.

The head slowly nodded, and a single tear escaped the far corner of one of those bloodshot, swollen eyes.

The mouth, the real one, not the one Butch created with his dagger, moved in a coordinated way: Too late.

Six blocks over, Jo threw her anchor out and ripped her arm free of the man’s hold. In response, there was an immediate holler from her rotator cuff, and he wheeled around just as quick.

“You’re not safe here,” he said.

In the back of her mind, she noted that he was barely breathing. On her side of things, her lungs were in crisis mode, her rib cage doing push-ups like she was about to be thrown overboard.

“You have to trust me.”

“No, I don’t,” she got out between pants.

He looked in the direction they’d come from, as if they were being chased. Or were about to be.

“I cannot leave you here.”

There was an accent to his words. Not quite French, not really German. Not really Italian.

He lowered his head and his nostrils flared. Then he cursed. “You need me—”

Jo stepped back sharply. “Leave me alone—”

“I can’t. You’re going to die.”

Fear curled inside Jo’s chest, and it wasn’t because she was scared of him. “You don’t know me—”

The man cursed again. “You’ve got to listen to—”

That helicopter crested over the building next to them, the light swinging in a wide circle and heading in their direction.

“The police aren’t going to help you,” he said. “They’re going to arrest you. And I know where to go. You can trust me.”

“I’m not going to run from the—”

“They saw you holding a gun to my chest. They know what you look like. Do you want to end up in jail tonight? Or do you want to get out of here.”

As Jo looked up, the blast from the blades peeled her hair back against her head. To keep things together, and because she didn’t want to be recognized, she yanked the hood of her windbreaker up and tied it in place.

“I don’t trust you,” she yelled through the wind currents.

“Good. You shouldn’t. But I’m all you got right now.”

“Sonofabitch,” she muttered.

When he took her hand again, she expected to be pulled behind him once more. Instead, he stayed where he was, his huge body tense, his eyes fierce, his aura that of such urgency, you’d have sworn he was rescuing her from a serial killer.

She thought of what she’d look like in her mug shot. Then she pictured how thrilled Dick would be that she’d gotten herself arrested. Finally, she considered her bank account. She might have been the adopted daughter of the grand and glorious Philadelphia Earlys, but the estrangement she had effected with her parents years ago had hit her bank account hard.

“Well,” she snapped, “where are we going.”

And still he did not move. “I’m not going to let anything happen to you.”

“Great, now stop talking and start moving, or I will.”

He nodded, as if they’d struck some kind of deal, and then they were off, pounding down the alley, going further into the maze of downtown as the helicopter swung around again overhead. The corners they took were made with decisive turns on his part, as if he knew exactly where he was taking her, and she kept up with him now, the desire to evade the police making her go track star with the running.

Skidding into a right turn, he shot them down a narrow artery between two apartment buildings, and then he—

Took them right into the path of a Caldwell Police Department patrol car.

As the headlights hit them both, he stopped. And so did she.

Maybe it was McCordle, she thought—

“Drop your weapon!” the female officer barked as she opened her door and stuck her gun out around the jamb of the windshield. “Drop your weapon—now!”

Jo put both her hands up.

And that was when she realized that the cop wasn’t talking to the man next to her. Jo was the one who was armed; she still had her gun in her palm.

“Guess you don’t know which way to go as well as you thought,” she muttered as she ordered her grip to release the nine millimeter.

Devina, the immortal who wanted to be a woman, put her palms together, stuck out her forefingers, and extended both her thumbs up, making like she had a gun. Aiming her red painted nails at the night sky, she pretended she was leading the helicopter that was circling like a fly trying to land in someone’s soup. It was hard to judge whether her extrapolations of speed and direction were correct, however, without actually sending a bullet into that annoying tin can with its loud, thumping rotors.