boots.
With nothing to lose, and Jo having already seen the worst, he unsheathed one of his steel daggers, tossed it in the air, and caught the hilt with a smack of his palm. Vicious point down, he lifted the weapon over his shoulder as he dropped onto one knee to stab—
Rhage caught his wrist. “No. We wait for Butch.”
Right about the time Syn was trying to shoot his way out of that groundskeeping building, before the explosion, Butch was attempting to get out of the office building downtown. He punched the bar on an interior fire door, breaking the thing open on its hinges. As it swung wide, he burst out into yet another corridor—even though he didn’t know what the fuck he was rushing for. He was still going to end up in that mail receiving area with no IT MacGyver flashy shit to get him out smoothly.
Then again, he didn’t need to be smooth, right? Did he really care if the whole goddamn building lit up with alarms and the cops came with sirens blaring? He was going to be long gone, running back to the garage, getting the R8 and going 0–60 in 3.2 seconds to the conflict location.
Thank God V got the engine upgrade to the performance—
The smell of fresh air was not good news. As he rounded the final corner before the receiving bay, the scent of the night was a shocker and meant someone had already come in. Cops? Maybe the alarms were silent.
Skidding to a halt in front of the last door, he unholstered one of his guns and back-flatted it against the wall. There were no sounds of anyone moving around on the other side. Nobody talking. But he didn’t want to be someone’s target practice just because he was distracted and not reading the situation right.
He was quiet about his penetration this time, slipping through the last panel.
“What . . . the fuck?”
One of the bays was wide open, and parked right in front of it, ass in to the building, ready to go with the powerful engine already running . . . was V’s R8.
Like Butch was Tony Stark and had summoned the fucking thing with a remote.
“Lassiter?” he said as he looked around the dreary mail room.
Whatever. No time, no time.
Butch covered the distance in three big strides, leaped out of the bay like a parachuter, and would have Dukes of Hazzard’d it into the driver’s seat of the R8 except for: (1) the window wasn’t down; (2) there was no way in hell he could fit himself through the aperture of the top half of the door; and (3) if he left so much as a smudge on the paint, the leather, the trim, the seat, the center console, whatever V did to Lassiter after the containment spell was going to look like a Sandals vacation in Cancún.
Five minutes later, he was out of the congested streets and tall buildings of downtown. Five minutes after that, he was in the sprawling retail-urbs, blowing through red lights and dusting the few cars on the road with him in the passing lane. If he’d met a cop, it would have gotten nasty, but he didn’t.
When he made the turn to go up to the Adirondack Outlets Mall, even the Quattro couldn’t keep the supercar on the pavement, the heavy back end of the car fishtailing. At the top of the rise, he shot forward to the stores—and nearly bought the farm in a front-end collision with a gray Ford Taurus.
The inside of the older sedan was dark so he couldn’t see the driver, but there was no time to follow up on that shit, either.
He went around to the back, as instructed, and got a load of a scene out of a Schwarzenegger movie circa 1987. You want to talk about chaos? There were cars and trucks full of holes, slayers on the ground still moving, gunpowder—and in this case, gasoline, too—thick in the air. Oh, and a whole corner of the building was gone. Slamming on the brakes, he got out, and the stench of lesser was so intense, he fell back against V’s precious car.
Qhuinn came jogging over. “We got some enemy down on the ground, all ready for you.”
“How many?”
“Nine. Maybe ten.”
Butch kept his groan to himself. “Any of us hurt?”
“We’ve got one with a leak—even if he refuses to admit to the shit. Manny’s on the way.”
“Who’s injured?” Butch looked around. “And what the fuck happened