His kin was not going to get in the way of him getting gone.

As the alley turned into a brother-convention, Butch went back over to the carcass of the lesser. He hadn’t gotten far into the inhale before Syn decided to play bowling ball with the Omega and there was a job to be finished.

And fuck no, he wasn’t going to honor that promise to the evil of stabbing the damn thing back to its master.

“You don’t have to, cop. You can take a break tonight.”

He looked over at V. The brother’s clear, cold eyes were like fresh air when you were sick to your stomach. And inside Butch’s head, thoughts started to spin, careening into each other, making hash of any logic.

“Cop, you just went through some shit.”

“Yeah, and the only way out of this whole thing is to do my fucking job.”

Butch dropped to his knees, and angled his face over what was left of the slayer’s mashed-in features. As he braced himself to take one of those long, strange inhales that he’d been pulling ever since the Omega had gotten into him, he thought—not for the first time—that he didn’t know how it worked. He didn’t understand the metaphysics of how he could drain the essence out of its vessel.

Then again, an explanation wouldn’t change reality and he wasn’t sure he really wanted to know the particulars. Besides, he had other issues to worry about . . .

“The Omega should have been able to kill me,” he said as he glanced up at V. “It was throwing shit at me . . . the magic should have blown me apart. And then there was its presence. I mean, I’ve been right up close with that thing before. I know how powerful it used to be. Not anymore . . . it’s dying.”

And you’d think he would have gotten a second wind—natch—from the bald evidence of his success. Instead? He only felt more exhausted.

V knelt down and exhaled over his shoulder. “That means it’s working. The prophecy is coming true.”

“Yeah.” Butch stared at the glistening mess of the slayer’s face, the cheekbones white under the inky stain of the black viscera. “I feel like a competitive eater in the last thirty seconds of Nathan’s Famous.”

V put his gloved hand on Butch’s shoulder. “We have time. It doesn’t have to end tonight. Send him back and let’s go home.”

Butch shook his head at the lesser. “The Omega should have been able to kill me.”

When another pair of shitkickers entered his field of vision, he glanced up. Qhuinn had come over, and the brother was white as a sheet, his hands trembling at the ends of the sleeves of his leather jacket. The male lowered himself down. His blue-and-green eyes were red-lined and watery, and he was blinking them like he had a fan right in front of his face.

“Butch, you saved my life,” the brother said. “And you’re spent. Let me stab it, and we’ll all go home.”

Butch wanted to do that. He was tired in a way unrelated to physical exertion. He wanted to call Marissa and hear her voice, ask her to cut work early, and just lie beside his shellan. He wanted to know that his brothers and the other fighters were on the mountain and behind the mhis, behind the thick stone walls of the mansion, behind the fortress Darius had built over a hundred years ago. He wanted to be certain that, if only until nightfall the following evening, everybody was safe.

But that was the thing, wasn’t it.

Safety was an illusion if it only lasted twenty-four hours. And those precious kids in that house, not just Lyric and Rhamp, but all of them, deserved to have their parents beside them. Hell, all of the mahmens and sires of all of the species should have that guarantee.

As long as the Omega was on the planet, normalcy was a fragile privilege for vampires, not a basic right.

Butch refocused on the slayer. It was still moving, the fingers flexing and curling on the asphalt, the legs churning in slow, faint motion.

Opening his mouth, Butch had to force himself to start inhaling.

So he could take the evil into his body once again.

Jo stood outside McGrider’s on the sidewalk, watching a car pass by. Stepping aside as two guys in what had to be plainclothes went into the bar. Checking her phone, even though who cared about the hour.

The next time Syn asked for her number, she was going to damn well give it to him.

Assuming she ever saw him again.

The night seemed especially cold as she walked back toward the CCJ offices—positively Baltic, in fact—and it was funny, she hadn’t noticed the temperature on the way over with Syn. And as she went along, she became aware that Caldwell had suddenly emptied out of life-forms. In spite of the people behind the wheels of the cars that went along the city streets, and the patrons she’d left behind at McGrider’s, and even her misogynistic boss, and dear, sweet Bill and Lydia, she felt post-apocalyptic alone, the sole survivor of a nuclear catastrophe.

Then again, someone significant could take everyone else with them when they left—

Okaaaaaaaaaay, time to put away the melodrama. This was not a grown-up episode of My So-Called Life, with her as Angela and Syn as Jordan Catalano.

“Hormones,” she muttered as she came up to the front of the CCJ building.

Instead of walking all the way round to the back, she took out her pass card and went in a side door. The sense that she wasn’t going to be working at the paper for much longer was both part of her weird emotional state, and not that big an extrapolation. And it sucked. The last forty-eight hours had been full of the crazy, but she was starting to love reporting. Blackmailing her boss to let her work was not her gig, though, and she wasn’t going to kid herself about Dick. She’d forced his hand for now, but that was sandbags against a storm surge. Sooner or later, the hold was going to break and he was going to find a way to fire her.

She hit the bathroom because she was in no hurry to go sit home alone—although the idea of binge-watching Angela Chase’s love life wasn’t a bad B plan to the prospect of sitting at her desk until dawn. After she came out drying her hands, she checked her email to see if the other photographs McCordle was going to send from his phone had come in. They hadn’t.

Before she started cleaning her desk out, and not because she was firing herself, she decided this was ridiculous. She couldn’t stay here all night. Putting the back exit to use, she ducked her head and hustled quickly to her car, aware of a ringing paranoia in her blood. Glancing around furtively, she didn’t unlock the Golf until she was four feet away from the driver’s side. But come on, like someone was going to sneak into her back seat otherwise? Throwing herself behind the wheel, she shut the door on her coat and left it there as she locked things back up.

Cranking the sewing machine engine over, she pulled her seat belt across her chest, put the gearshift in reverse, and hit the gas—

Jo slammed on the brakes.

In her rearview mirror, bathed in the red illumination of her taillights, a huge figure with a Mohawk was standing right behind her rear bumper.

Jo shoved the engine into park and jumped out.

A quip about long time/no see died in her throat.

“Are you okay?” she asked as she got a load of him.

When he nodded, she didn’t believe him. He was pale and shaken, and at the base of both sleeves of his leather jacket, his hands were trembling.

“I need a shower,” he said.

“What?”

“I don’t smell good.”

“Your cologne is all I can smell.”

“I need . . .”

She had the feeling he had no idea what he was saying, and she wanted to know what the hell had happened during the twenty minutes between when he’d run out of the bar and now. It couldn’t be second thoughts about leaving her. That wouldn’t leave a hard-ass like him in this dazed, disordered state.

Before she was aware of making a conscious decision, she went to him and took his hand. She meant to say, “Come with me.” But his skin was so icy, she worried about hypothermia.

“We need to get you warm.”

“Am I cold?”

She led him around to the passenger side and opened the door for him. “Sit.”

You know, in case he didn’t know what to do—although how in the hell was he going to fit his big body into that seat—

“Guess you’re retractable,” she muttered as she shut him in.

Going around the front bumper, she put herself back behind the wheel, aware that her heart was pumping hard and her blood was rushing. As she put the car in reverse for a second time, she glanced at the man she’d picked up off the street like a stray dog.

He barely fit into her car: “Retractable” was an overstatement. Cantilevered was more like it. His knees were practically up to his earlobes, his arms wedged in between his legs, his far shoulder squeezed against his door. He didn’t seem to care. Then again, he didn’t seem to know where he was.

“My apartment’s not far from here,” she said. Well, not compared to someone who lived in Vermont. “I mean . . .”

Syn stared straight ahead. As if he were in a different world.

“Seat belt?” she prompted.

When he didn’t move, she hit the brakes and reached across him to—

In the cramped space, he moved so fast, she couldn’t track him. One second he was like a full-length coat crammed into a shoulder bag. Then next, he had grabbed her around the throat and was looking at her with blank, unseeing eyes.

True fear shot through Jo’s chest. “Please . . .” she croaked out. “No—”

He blinked and focused on her properly.

“Oh, shit . . .” He immediately dropped his hold. “I’m sorry. You took me unaware.”

Sitting back against her seat, she put her hands up to her neck. “I’m not going to do that again.”

“It’s just because . . . I’m somewhere else. I’m not going to hurt you, I swear.”

As he shuddered, he seemed to have trouble breathing right. And even though he was physically strong and clearly a tough guy, she felt an overwhelming need to take care of him. He looked broken.