from him, leaving a bloody trail behind her as she ran.
Boone just stood there and panted, great puffs of white leaving his open mouth. Oh, for fuck’s sake. The last thing he wanted was to get roped into a shit ton of human drama. But it was kind of like being in a car, heading for Starbucks for a venti latte—and having a dog run out in front of your bumper.
Sure, you could keep going and get your fucking coffee.
But you were going to waste the rest of the night wondering what the hell happened to that goddamn dog.
And no amount of milk foam was going to make you feel any better.
“Oh, come on,” he muttered as visions of slaughtering a slayer got replaced with the hassle of stripping memories and calling 9-1-1.
Except as she continued to run, he realized she was naked from the waist down . . . and there was blood on the inside of her thighs—
A door was thrown open about fifteen feet in front of him, the shitty panel smacking into the flank of its building with the crisp, clear exclamation point of an axe going into hardwood.
The human male who came out was pulling his pants up and had a knife between his teeth. Unlike the woman, he didn’t even notice Boone. He was too busy tracking the bloody footprints in the snow with his eyes—and when he saw the human female, the laugh that left his lips was pure evil.
He didn’t pursue her at a run. He walked, in boots, after her, his naked torso marked with tattoos in black, his muscles covered with a healthy layer of fat.
“It’s a dead end, bitch,” he called out. “And ain’t no one gonna save you.”
* * *
Syn got the message about the trainee going AWOL at the beginning of his shift. He didn’t say anything about it to Balthazar because there was no need to. For one, the other male had gotten the text alert, too. But more to the point, although the Bastards helped out with the training program from time to time if the Brotherhood was short-staffed, for the most part, Syn and his boys did not truck with the young soldiers.
So really, the fact that one of those kids was out in the streets, heavily armed and without a partner, wasn’t the kind of problem that anyone would expect him to solve.
So Syn blew the shit off as he and Balthazar covered the western quadrant of the city. The collection of abandoned walk-ups and filled-up crack dens happened to be his favorite assignment because the humans who were in these neighborhoods stuck to themselves. No matter how many gunshots or screams or strange smells percolated up into the night air? You could be guaranteed some privacy to work in.
Naturally, the Lessening Society knew this, too, and as a result, this stretch of ten or fifteen blocks was the best hunting in the city. And what do you know, two slayers appeared about an hour and a half into their sweeps. Syn killed his quickly—a disappointment, but that was what happened when you got sloppy with your knife and hit the jugular too soon: He’d been aiming for a shoulder stab so he could draw out the death, but the fucker had zigged when it should have zagged.
And then it was a case of Old Faithful, a goddamn geyser of foul-scented black oil.
The fucking asshat bled out so quick, Syn decided the Omega must be putting his new recruits on Coumadin.
Meanwhile, Balthazar, the lucky shit, had gotten a live one with good fighting skills. The two of them were going hand-to-hand in the alley even though there were plenty of guns available, at least on the Bastard’s side. But hunting had been slow of late, and that meant, if you got the chance to hone your skills, you took advantage of it.
Who knew that the end of the war would be so boring?
After Syn stabbed his pathetic leaker back to its boss, he got out of the way, even though he was dying to “help” Balthazar out. And by “help,” he meant jump in and stab the enemy. A couple hundred times.
Give or take.
The trouble was, it was early in the night, and a move like that would get his partner for the shift cranky as shit and thus guarantee a long grind of no fun—
As the wind changed direction, the scent of red blood that reached his nose was faint and kind