Syn moved over to the hidden door. As he willed the panel to slide back, the old man recoiled, but he recovered fast, no doubt assuming it hadn’t shut right.

“You don’t want the money?” he said. “Who the hell does a job without getting paid?”

Syn lowered his chin and stared out from under his lids. As his eyes flashed with all the menace of his talhman, the old man abruptly sat back in his chair as if he didn’t like being in an enclosed space with the very weapon he had sought to purchase and was putting to use.

“Someone who likes to kill,” Syn said in an evil growl.

As Butch O’Neal stood inside an abandoned mall’s grounds-keeping building, he stared at a woman’s vacant, frozen fear and had a wicked odd thought. For some reason, he recalled that his given name was Brian. Why this was relevant in any way was unknown, and he chalked up the cognitive drive-by to the fact that she kind of reminded him of his first cousin on his mother’s side. That connection wasn’t particularly significant, either, however, because in Southie, where he had been born and raised in Boston, there were only about a thousand red-haired women.

Well, and then there was the fact that he hadn’t seen any member of his family, extended or otherwise, for what, over three years now? He’d lost count, although not because he didn’t care.

Actually, that was a lie. He did not care.

And besides, the fact that this woman seemed to be a half-breed on the verge of going through the change was probably more to the point. Not exactly his experience, but close enough.

He’d been where she currently was.

“Am I scenting this right?” He looked over at his roommate. His best friend. His true brother, in comparison to the biological ones he’d left in the human world. “Or am I nuts.”

“Nah.” Vishous, son of the Bloodletter, son of the Blessed Virgin Scribe, exhaled a cloud of Turkish smoke, his hard features and goatee briefly obscured by the haze. “You ain’t nuts, cop. And I am getting really sick and tired of scrubbing this woman, true? Her hormones need to shit or get off the pot.”

“To be fair, you get sick and tired if you have to do most things once.”

“Don’t be a hater.” V waved at the woman. “Buh-bye—”

“Hold on, she dropped her phone.”

Butch went farther into the induction area and gagged. Fucking lessers. He’d rather have sweat socks shoved up his nose. Fortunately, the phone had landed faceup in the oily mess, and he took a handkerchief out and wiped it off as best he could. Placing the unit in the woman’s pocket, he stepped back.

“I’m sure I’ll see her again,” V said dryly.

As she walked out into the rain, Butch watched her cross the asphalt and disappear up the cement stairs. “So she’s the one you’ve been monitoring?”

“She just won’t leave us the fuck alone.”

“The one with the website about vampires.”

“Damn Stoker. Real original. Remind me to ask her when I need help with puns.”

Butch looked back at his roommate. “She’s searching for herself. You can’t turn that kind of thing off.”

“Well, I got better shit to do than check on her hormones like I’m waiting for a goddamn egg to hard-boil.”

“You have such a way with languages.”

“Seventeen, now that I’ve added ‘vampire conspiracist.’” V dropped the butt of his hand-rolled and ground it with his shitkicker. “You should read some of the crap they post. There’s a whole community of the crackpots.”

Butch held up his forefinger. “’Scuse me, Professor Xavier, given that we do actually exist, how can you call them crazy? And if she’s a crackpot, how did she find this induction site at the same time we did?”

“You mind if I clean this mess of the Omega’s up, or do you just want to stand here arguing the obvious while our sinuses melt and the rain sinks into all that cashmere you’re wearing.”

Muttering under his breath, Butch brushed at the shoulders of his Tom Ford. “It is so unfair that you know my triggers.”

“You could have just worn leathers.”

“Style is important.”

“And I could have handled this by myself. You know I come with my own special brand of backup.”

V lifted his lead-lined glove to his mouth and snagged the tip of the middle finger with his sharp, white teeth. Tugging the protective shield off what was underneath, he revealed a glowing hand that was marked on both sides with tattooed warnings in the Old Language.

Holding his curse out, the interior of the storage building was lit bright as noontime, the blood on the floor black, the blood in the six buckets red. As Butch walked around, his footsteps left patterns in the oily stink that were eaten up quick, that which covered the concrete consuming the prints, reclaiming dominance.

Lowering down onto his haunches, Butch dragged his fingers through the shit and then rubbed the viscous substance. “Nope.”

V’s icy eyes shifted over. “What?”

“This is wrong.” Butch hit his handkerchief for cleanup. “It’s too thin. It’s not like it was.”

“Do you think . . .” V, who never lost track of a thought, lost track of his thought. “Is it happening? Do you think?”

Butch straightened and went over to one of the buckets. Drywall bucket. Still had the brand name on it. Inside, the blood that had been drained from the veins of a human was a congealed soup. And for once, it had some meat in it.

“I think the heart’s in here,” he said.

“Not possible.”

For centuries, inductees of the Lessening Society had always taken that particular organ home with them in a jar. Oddly, if they lost their heart after it was removed by their new master, they got into trouble with the Omega—which was why, after a kill, the Brotherhood had a tradition of claiming those jars whenever they could.

Slayers could lose their humanity. Their soul. Their free agency. But not that cardiac muscle they didn’t need any more to exist.

“No, it is the heart,” Butch said as he headed to the next bucket. “This one has it, too.”

“Guess the Omega’s getting sloppy. Or wearing out.”

As Butch turned back to his roommate, he did not like the expression on the brother’s face. “Don’t look at me like that.”

“Like what.”

“Like I’m the solution to it all.”

There was a long moment. “But you are, cop. And you know it.”

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

“The Prophecy is not ours. 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. And after that, with recording, it shall be the sacred past, the saving of the species, the end of the war.”

Butch thought of his dreams, the ones that had been waking him up during the day. The ones that he refused to talk 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 permission to exist.”

Unease scurried through his veins like rats in a sewer, finding all kinds of familiar paths. And meanwhile, as freely as the anxiety 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.”

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 require 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.”

The brother shook his head, as if he were remembering parts and parcels 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 Vishous spoke of.

Maybe the intellectual construct of fate, of destiny, was just a way to frame all the shitty fucking things that happened to people. Maybe all the proverbial bad luck that rained down on the heads of essentially good folks, all that Murphy’s Law, was actually not luck at all, just the impersonal nature of chaos at work. Maybe all 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, were not preordained or personal in the slightest.

Maybe there was no meaning to the universe, and nothing after death, and no one driving the metaphorical bus from up above.

Butch fished through damp cashmere to grip the heavy gold cross hanging from his neck. His Catholic faith told him otherwise, but what the fuck did he know.

And on a night like tonight, he wasn’t sure what was worse. The idea that he was responsible for ending the war.

Or the possibility that he wasn’t.

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

“Time for cleanup,” Butch said hoarsely.

“Yes,” V agreed. “It is.”

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