in all of them, especially the one involving my son.”
Between one heartbeat and the next, the Scribe Virgin disappeared, but she left the glow of her goodness behind, the beneficent illumination of her presence remaining for a moment before it faded.
Left alone once again, there was the temptation to replay the interaction, mine it for more clues, bask in the fact that he had been sitting right next to the creator of the vampire race.
That of everyone, she had come to see him.
No time, though.
Shuffling out of the pew, Butch went for his phone as he hauled ass out of the sanctuary and through the narthex. The number he dialed was in his favorites. He prayed that it was answered.
One ring…
Two rings…
Three rings…
For fuck’s sake, Butch thought as he burst out of the cathedral’s heavy main door. V was downtown right now. Looking for lessers. And the Omega wasn’t stupid.
The evil had to know how the prophecy worked because no mortal entity, vampire or human or combination of the two, could survive taking a part of the Omega inside of itself. There had to be a way to get the evil out of a mortal, and there was.
The Omega’s nephew, Vishous, was the key. And surely this was going to dawn on V’s uncle. Any tactician would put the two and two together at some point, and the fact the Omega hadn’t done so already meant the dawn-on-Marblehead, switch of strategy, was long overdue.
“Pick up, V,” Butch muttered as he broke out into a run down the stone steps. “Pick the fuck up.”
Butch wasn’t the one who needed to be kept off the streets in safety.
His roommate was.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
As Syn re-formed in the damp, cold night, he was frustrated. Twice a year, all fighters had to have physical exams down in the Brotherhood’s training center. It was a colossal waste of time. If you were upright and nothing was in a sling or a cast, or had been stitched back together within the last twenty-four hours, you needed to be out in the field. For fuck’s sake, back in the Old Country, you fought as long as your dagger hand was steady. Here? In the New World? People worried about things like biomechanics, nutrition, performance.
Such snowflake bullshit.
Especially when he had things he had to do before he could go downtown into the field.
The back end of Jo’s apartment building was quiet. Just like the front had been when he’d looked for her car, and been reassured to find it was parallel parked three spots down from the sidewalk that led to the front door. She was safe. She was indoors. She would be as such until dawn.
He had no more business here.
He’d had none as soon as he’d arrived.
Why had he come back here then—
Syn frowned as his palm found the butt of his gun and he crouched down. He was behind a commercial-grade dumpster off to the side of a small, common area terrace—so he had cover, both optically and olfactorily. And he was going to need it.
He was not alone.
Flaring his nostrils, he scented the wind that had abruptly changed directions.
About fifteen feet away, a tall, powerfully built figure in black was standing outside Jo’s bedroom window, its back to the building, its eyes trained on the glass if it were trying to see between her venetian blinds without giving its presence away. Light slicing through the slats created enough of a glow so that its goatee and temple tattoos were obvious to someone who had seen them plenty of times before.
What the fuck was Vishous doing here?
As Syn’s fangs descended and his upper lip peeled off his teeth, he had to force himself not to trade his gun for his dagger. Guns were for when there was an emergency. Daggers were for when you wanted to stare your kill in the face as you took their life from them.
And he wanted to murder the Brother. Straight up.
Hell yeah, he respected the male in the field. How could anyone in the fighting business not value Vishous’s kind of backup? The Brother was no joke with that glowing palm of his, and even better, he kept to himself except for the occasional, spot-on, sarcastic kick in the mouth he was always ready to give anyone who deserved it.
But all of that shit didn’t mean a goddamn thing when the male was lurking next to the private sanctuary of Syn’s female.
Not a goddamn thing at all—
V shoved a hand inside