“Has he given any kind of statement?”

“Jesus, are you even listening—” When she just stared at him, he muttered. “Junior has had nothing to say. And given that he was being groomed by his father, it’s likely he’ll let his gun do the talking.”

“Will he take over here in Caldwell?”

“There’ll be a power struggle first. Then we’ll have to see.” McCordle glanced toward the scene again. “I gotta get back. Promise me you’ll call if you—”

“Yes, of course. I’m not going to be stupid about this.”

There was a pause. “Jo.”

When he didn’t go any further, she said, “What.”

“I get that you want to do your job. And you’re a really good reporter. But you need to leave town until the dust settles. Nothing is worth your life.”

“You’ll let me know if you hear anything for sure about me.”

“I will. I promise.”

“Looks like we’ll be in touch again, then.”

Tucking the envelope under her arm, Jo gave McCordle a nod and then she went back around the hairdresser’s and across the street to her car. Before she got in, she looked over the crowd. The sense that this was not the end of the story, and she had the inside track on the situation, made her flirt with self-satisfaction. And it was that ego-driven nonsense that hounded her as she went back to the newsroom.

It was dangerous to think you were above things.

When she pulled into the parking lot of the CCJ, she went for the first available open spot. Putting her car in park, she opened the envelope and slid out the glossies.

Grimacing, she recoiled at the sight of a man squeezed into the back of the SUV. His face happened to be turned toward the camera and his eyes were open, as if he were alive, even though she knew that wasn’t the case: There was a black circle in the center of his forehead, about the size of a pencil eraser, and a tendril of blood leaked out of it, traveling down at a slant until it joined his eyebrow. The trail didn’t go any further than that.

She was surprised there wasn’t more gore.

She got that with the Gigante picture. God . . . it looked like a font of blood had come out of the front of his throat and waterfall’d down his fat-belly shirt.

The sense that she was being watched brought her head up and she burrowed her hand into her bag, finding her gun. Heart pounding, she looked around the lot. The buildings. The lanes. No one was moving, but would she see someone who had taken cover—

All at once, her headache came back, the sharp, piercing pain cutting some kind of mental connection. Some kind of—

It was a memory of feeling like this in her car before. Yes, she had felt exactly this kind of fear-based adrenaline sitting behind this wheel—and it hadn’t been a distant-in-time thing. It had been recent. It had been . . .

Groaning, she had to stop following the thought pattern, but the amnesia was frustrating, the conviction that what she was reaching for, in a cognitive sense, was close at hand and yet out of reach, taunting her.

Fumbling to slide the pictures back into the envelope, she grabbed her bag and got out. The rain was still falling in a gentle way, and she felt an urgency to take cover that had nothing to do with the weather. She flat out ran for the rear door of the newsroom’s building.

With a shaking hand, she swiped her card and all but jumped inside.

Pulling the solid steel panel closed behind herself, she leaned back against the wall and tried to catch her breath.

Maybe McCordle was right, she thought. Maybe she needed to get out of all this—

A memory that had no obstructions in front of it came to her mind. She saw Syn jumping out of her bathroom, prepared to shoot the pizza delivery guy. Contrasting that image with McCordle in his uniform, putting his version of brawn between her and that shout at the scene?

No offense to the officer, but she’d pick Syn every time in that race.

And P.S., she didn’t need a man to watch out for her, anyway.

Putting her hand on the side of her bag, she felt the hard contours of her gun, and decided Syn was right. She needed to keep this weapon close, 24/7.

She didn’t want to end up a crime scene photograph.

Day transitioned into night, and still Mr. F read on, turning pages one by one, his eyes skipping nothing of the book’s incredibly uninspiring prose. From time to time, he took a break, although not to get up and stretch or go to the bathroom or find food. And it remained an eerie revelation that none of that was necessary.

No, he stopped just because he felt like it was something he would have done before: When he’d been studying in high school. When he’d been on the grind in college during the year prior to him dropping out. It seemed important to connect to who he’d been, even if the old him had no more substance than a reflection in a mirror.

Fanning the remaining pages, he remembered that scene at the end of Beetlejuice where the father is sitting in his study, trying to get through a copy of The Living and the Dead.

This thing reads like stereo instructions.

Mr. F should be so fortunate. What he had in his palms read more like the Dead Sea Scrolls trying to explain how to hook up a seventiesera record player.

But he had learned a lot. Some twelve hours after he’d started, he now had the basics about what happened during induction, and what was in the jars that had to be guarded against pilfering by the Brotherhood. He knew how slayers were killed with a stab through the empty heart cavity with anything made of steel. He understood the process by which, thereafter, the essence was returned to the Omega, as the master was called. He also had a history of the war with the vampires, including the original conflict between the Scribe Virgin, who’d exercised her one act of creation to bring those with fangs into being, and the Omega, who was her brother and suffered from what sounded like standard sibling jealousy. Further, Mr. F now knew about the Black Dagger Brotherhood, and the great Blind King, and the different social strata of vampires.

And then there was the shit about his own role. There were chapters on the previous incarnations of organization within the Lessening Society, and a section devoted to what the Fore-lesser was supposed to be and how he was supposed to act, including a primer on troop mobilization, training, and provisions.

Not that that last one seemed relevant anymore. Assuming there were a couple more of these outpost houses scattered around the suburbs of Caldwell—hello, those keys that did not fit the lock here—the pathetic, ill-matched bunch of war knickknacks he’d found during his search of this place were no doubt no better than he was going to get at any of the other properties.

As he glanced around the empty living room he’d camped out in, he had the sense of a power structure left to rot, and, like a body that through a combination of age and disease no longer properly functioned, he wasn’t sure a revival was coming—or even possible.

He’d been hoping for light at the end of the tunnel with all the packed prose he’d been wading through. Now that he was coming to the final chapter, he was worried he wasn’t going to get one. For all the knowledge he’d gained, he still didn’t know what to do.

That changed in the last four pages.

Like the finish line of a marathon, the solution arrived only after he had expended assiduous effort through the twists and turns of an uphill slog. And at first, when his eyes traced the words, he almost kept going.

Something drew him back, and as he reread them, he realized it was only because they were set in the middle of the page, the lines indented, each one of them.

Stanzas. Like it was a poem.

There shall be one to bring the end before the master,

a fighter of modern time found in the seventh of the twenty-first,

and he shall be known in the numbers he bears:

One more than the compass he apperceives,

Though a mere four points to make at his right,

Three lives has he,

Two scores on his fore,

and with a single black eye, in one well will he be birthed and die.

An end before the master? Or an end of the master?

Mr. F thought back to the night before, to the Brother who put his mouth over that slayer’s and started to inhale, the Brother who the Omega took on as an enemy of special importance. Mr. F wasn’t sure what to make of all the passage’s threes and fours, two scores and the single black eye, but he knew what he’d witnessed. The Omega and that particular vampire were tied together, and the strings that linked them were in these stanzas.

If lessers that were stabbed with steel sent their evil back to its source . . . maybe that male vampire with the prodigious set of lungs circumvented that process. Maybe he was the reason the Omega that was described in this book was so diminished in person.

Mr. F thumbed through the pages he’d read. The master as depicted here was an all-powerful scourge, capable of great and terrible things. What had shown up in that alley? Mystical, sure. Magical, yup. But all-powerful? Not in that dirty robe. Not with whatever the master had thrown at that vampire.

That shit had only knocked the Brother back.

If you were really the root of all evil, if you were truly the powerful demigod in this book? You would have blown your enemy apart, little bits of flesh and tiny slivers of bone all that were left to drift down onto the pavement, mortal snow to fall from the sky.

Not what had happened.

Mr. F closed the book. He was not a strategist by nature. But he knew what he had read. He knew who he was in this game, and he knew who controlled him. He also knew how he and the Omega were connected.

So he knew what he had to do.

He had to pull all of the slayers together here in Caldwell. And they had to find that Brother from the night before.

It was the only way he was going to come through this. Besides, according to the book, it was all but preordained.

St. Patrick’s Cathedral was some real Catholic majesty, Butch thought as he sat in a pew in the back-back, as he’d called it when he was a kid. The church was the seat for Caldwell and many surrounding towns, and the stone building could handle the responsibility. With Notre Damelike stained windows and arches, and the seating capacity of an NFL dome’d arena, it was exactly where he liked to go to services, take confession, and enjoy moments like this where he just sat with his hands folded in his lap and his eyes on the great marble altar and the statue of Jesus upon the cross.