"I'm right here." Butch stepped into her line of sight, but didn't come near her.
In the stark silence that followed, Marissa walked in slowly, feeling as though the air had turned into a slush she had to fight her way through. Numbly, she heard Wrath shut the door, and from the corner of her eye she saw Vishous rise to his feet from behind his computers. As V walked around the desk, the three males traded looks.
Butch held out his hand. "Come here, Marissa."
When she took his palm, he led her to the computers and pointed to one of the monitors. Up on the screen was... text. A whole lot of dense text. Actually, there were two sections of documents, the field split down the middle.
"What is this?" she asked.
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Butch gently sat her in the chair and stood behind her, resting his hands on her shoulders. "Read the passage in italics."
"Which side?"
"Either. They're identical."
She frowned and ran her eyes over something that seemed almost 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 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.
Confused, she scanned what was around it, only to have horrible phrases jump out at her: "Lessening Society,"
"Induction," "Master." She looked up to the title on the page and shuddered.
"Dear God... this is about... lessers."
As Butch heard the icy panic in her voice, he sank down on his knees beside her. "Marissa-"
"What the hell am I reading about here?"
Yeah, how to answer that one. He was still having a hard time coming to terms with it all himself. "It seems as though... I am this." He tapped the smooth screen and then looked at his deformed pinkie, the one that was shriveled up tight to his palm... the one he couldn't straighten... or point with.
Marissa shifted away from him warily. "And this is... what?"
Thank God V spoke up. "What you're looking at is two different translations of the Lessening Society's Scrolls. One we had from before. One is from a laptop that I confiscated from the slayers about ten days ago.
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Prophecy. We've known about it for generations, ever since the first copy of the Scrolls fell into our possession."
As Marissa's hand went to her throat, she was obviously getting the gist of where they were headed. She started shaking her head. "But it's all riddles. Surely-"
"Butch has all the markers." V lit up a hand-rolled and exhaled. "He can sense lessers, so that's one more than north, south, east, or west he apperceives. His pinkie is misshapen from the transition, so he has only four fingers he can point with. He's had three lives, childhood, adulthood, and now as a vampire, and you could argue he was birthed here in Caldwell when we turned him. But the real telltale is that scar on his belly. It's the black eye and one of two scores on his forefront. Assuming you count his belly button as the first."
She looked at Wrath. "So what does this mean?"
The king took a deep breath. "It means Butch is our very best weapon in the war."
"How..." Marissa's voice drifted.
"He can shortcut a lesser's return to the Omega. See, during the induction, the Omega shares a part of himself with each slayer and that piece comes back to the master when the lesser is killed. As the Omega is a finite being, this return is critical. He needs to get back what he puts in them if he's to continue to populate his fighters." Wrath nodded toward Butch. "The cop breaks that part of the cycle. So the more lessers Butch consumes, the weaker the Omega will become until there is, literally, nothing left of him. It's like chipping away at a boulder."
Marissa's eyes slid back to Butch. "Consume exactly how?"
Oh, man, she wasn't going to like this part. "I just... inhale them. Take them into me."
The terror in her eyes killed him, it really did. "Won't you become one, then? What stops you from being