But he wasn’t numb. Oh, no, he was definitely not numb. He had a constant, weighted pain on his heart, to the point where he struggled to take a deep breath. It was the loss of Jo, of course—and he had a feeling the mourning was going to stick with him for the rest of his life. True love, after all, could be expressed in many different ways, but the one commonality to it was that it lasted. It was a permanence, in whatever form it took.
Especially when it was lost.
“You told Xcor, then?” V asked.
“Yes.”
“What did he say?”
“Not much.”
“How’d you feel when you were telling him?”
Syn stared at the perfectly smooth surface of the cue ball. “It is what it is.”
“You’re not bothered at all that he and your cousins are out there without you?”
“You’re trying to lead me to a conclusion.”
“No, I’m trying to make you see past yourself.” V came around from the bar, glass of OJ in hand. “But yeah, I was going to come and find you. I have the answer to the question you asked me yesterday. About that female you knew from the Old Country.”
Syn looked up with a jerk. “You found her? Is she here? In the New World?”
His words came out fast, like a tommy gun.
V’s diamond eyes narrowed, his expression becoming remote. “She came over in the nineteen fifties. With her hellren and her young. A boy and a girl.”
Syn closed his eyes and pictured the female running in that meadow around her parents’ cottage with her pretrans brother. “So she mated. Who is her mate?”
“An aristocrat.”
Popping his lids open, he frowned. “Tell me it is a love match.”
“Yes.”
Syn exhaled in relief. “This is good news. I’ve always wondered what happened to her. If I had believed in a benevolent creator, I would have prayed for just what she got. Where did she settle?”
“Here in Caldwell.”
“Really. Well, that’s good. She’s safe here—”
“Sunnise was killed in the Raids.” As Syn looked over in horror, V continued, “Along with her hellren and both her young. Murdered. By the lessers.”
“You’re lying. You’re telling me this to—”
V looked bored. “You think I would waste a split second on making this shit up? They were slaughtered in their home about seven miles from here. In the death photograph I saw, which was taken by a blooded relation of hers, she was holding her daughter. She had tried to shield the young with her own body. The hellren and the son were decapitated.”
When Syn heard something crack, he looked down. The cue ball in his hand had split in half, powdering under the pressure he had exerted upon it.
“You asked me to find her.” V finished his OJ. “And I did. What you do with the information, like everything else in your life, is up to you.”
With that, the Brother left the billiards room, the sound of his shitkickers drifting away until all Syn knew was the dense silence around him.
And the agony in his chest.
At the base of the alley downtown, Mr. F grabbed the back of the slayer’s parka and yanked the other lesser around. Putting his face into his subordinate’s, he spoke in a voice he had never heard come out of his mouth before.
“We stay together.” He looked the other two dead in the eye. “The four of us stay the fuck together or I will kill you myself.”
That was not an empty threat. Even though they were all technically immortal, he was done with the whole fucking thing. The Omega had meted out such a punishment with dawn’s arrival that Mr. F could barely walk. He could also barely hear, the ringing in his ears the kind of background noise through which he couldn’t decipher anything softer than a scream.
He had been tasked with finding recruits.
He had been told that it was his last chance.
And he had been aware that the Omega had changed. No more stains on the white robe. No more weakness. Nothing but a horrible power that seemed to gather further strength as the hours had passed.
Mr. F had been used as a piece of exercise equipment, and his misery had fueled the abuse further. When he had finally been cast out of Dhunhd and sent back to this world, he had known that he was being toyed with and lied to. As soon as he got the recruits in order, he was going to be demoted.