viscera. “I feel like a competitive eater in the last thirty seconds of Nathan’s Famous.”
V put his gloved hand on Butch’s shoulder. “We have time. It doesn’t have to end tonight. Send him back and let’s go home.”
Butch shook his head at the lesser. “The Omega should have been able to kill me.”
When another pair of shitkickers entered his field of vision, he glanced up. Qhuinn had come over, and the brother was white as a sheet, his hands trembling at the ends of the sleeves of his leather jacket. The male lowered himself down. His blue-and-green eyes were red-lined and watery, and he was blinking them like he had a fan right in front of his face.
“Butch, you saved my life,” the brother said. “And you’re spent. Let me stab it, and we’ll all go home.”
Butch wanted to do that. He was tired in a way unrelated to physical exertion. He wanted to call Marissa and hear her voice, ask her to cut work early, and just lie beside his shellan. He wanted to know that his brothers and the other fighters were on the mountain and behind the mhis, behind the thick stone walls of the mansion, behind the fortress Darius had built over a hundred years ago. He wanted to be certain that, if only until nightfall the following evening, everybody was safe.
But that was the thing, wasn’t it.
Safety was an illusion if it only lasted twenty-four hours. And those precious kids in that house, not just Lyric and Rhamp, but all of them, deserved to have their parents beside them. Hell, all of the mahmens and sires of all of the species should have that guarantee.
As long as the Omega was on the planet, normalcy was a fragile privilege for vampires, not a basic right.
Butch refocused on the slayer. It was still moving, the fingers flexing and curling on the asphalt, the legs churning in slow, faint motion.
Opening his mouth, Butch had to force himself to start inhaling.
So he could take the evil into his body once again.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Jo stood outside McGrider’s on the sidewalk, watching a car pass by. Stepping aside as two guys in what had to be plainclothes went into the bar. Checking her phone, even though who cared about the hour.
The next time Syn asked for her number, she was going to damn well give it to him.
Assuming she ever saw him again.
The night seemed especially cold as she walked back toward the CCJ offices—positively Baltic, in fact—and it was funny, she hadn’t noticed the temperature on the way over with Syn. And as she went along, she became aware that Caldwell had suddenly emptied out of life-forms. In spite of the people behind the wheels of the cars that went along the city streets, and the patrons she’d left behind at McGrider’s, and even her misogynistic boss, and dear, sweet Bill and Lydia, she felt post-apocalyptic alone, the sole survivor of a nuclear catastrophe.
Then again, someone significant could take everyone else with them when they left—
Okaaaaaaaaaay, time to put away the melodrama. This was not a grown-up episode of My So-Called Life, with her as Angela and Syn as Jordan Catalano.
“Hormones,” she muttered as she came up to the front of the CCJ building.
Instead of walking all the way round to the back, she took out her pass card and went in a side door. The sense that she wasn’t going to be working at the paper for much longer was both part of her weird emotional state, and not that big an extrapolation. And it sucked. The last forty-eight hours had been full of the crazy, but she was starting to love reporting. Blackmailing her boss to let her work was not her gig, though, and she wasn’t going to kid herself about Dick. She’d forced his hand for now, but that was sandbags against a storm surge. Sooner or later, the hold was going to break and he was going to find a way to fire her.
She hit the bathroom because she was in no hurry to go sit home alone—although the idea of binge-watching Angela Chase’s love life wasn’t a bad B plan to the prospect of sitting at her desk until dawn. After she came out drying her hands, she checked her email to see if the other photographs McCordle was going to send from his phone had come in. They hadn’t.
Before she started cleaning her desk out, and not because she was firing herself, she decided