What a waste, he thought as the undead’s head moved so it could look up at him.
He could have interrogated it.
Under other circumstances.
Falling to his knees, he took a deep breath. And another. While he drew out his steel dagger.
“You’re… going… to… die…” it said.
The words were a hushed curse that wafted up at him along with the stench of that rancid oil in the slayer’s veins. And the laughter that came next was nasty and self-satisfied, like it had called for help.
“No shit, Sherlock,” L.W. muttered as he lifted his weapon over his shoulder. “I’m mortal—”
Three morelessersappeared at the end of the alley, about twenty yards from him, forty yards from the dumpster, and nearly fifty from the cops and the Toyota.
“And fuck you,” he snarled to everybody in the whole city.
As a vicious anger overtook him, something strange happened: A sudden tunnel vision shrank the world to just himself—which he supposed a lot of people would say was his S.O.P. And then he pictured his sire in that Audience Room, the two of them yelling at each other.
He took one last breath.
And stabbed the slayer.
The blast of illumination and thepop!drew the attention he knew they would. The cops instantly started clambering over the dumpster, ordering all kinds of weapons-down, hands-up, in their automated voices. The good news? Thelessersat the end of the alley took one look at those uniforms and melted into the shadows.
Which just left him, his puddle of blood, and some of the many guns that had been used to shoot at the fine, electric members of the Caldwell Police Department.
Except before they could get to him, he shut his lids, exhaled… and pictured the one thing that could give him any peace.
Just as the police came barreling down at him, he disappeared into thin air.
Thanks to the image of Bitty’s beautiful profile.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
About twenty miles north and east of where shit was going down with the CPD, Vishous was sitting at his glass desk in his glass office at Four Toys HQ. Drumming the gloved fingers of his cursed hand, he stared off into space as his most recent hand-rolled cigarette burned to a stub. In the background, ancient D12 bumped, but he didn’t hear anything except the bass stride.
Stabbing his coffin nail into a nub, he lit up another one and got to his feet. As soon as he stepped out of his office and looked down the modern barn’s spanned central space, heads popped up over the monitors along the rows of his team’s workstations.
All typing stopped.
When he put his palm up in a no-not-you way, the work immediately recommenced.
The males and females had been cherry-picked from hundreds of applications, and he had to say, they’d never let him down. The two dozen or so IT experts monitored about a hundred properties as well as countless databases of civilians. They also aided in the investigations of crimes, kept up with the human world, and were available for special projects at the drop of a hat.
This was a 24/7 operation, with people coming in at sundown andstaying for forty-eight-hour shifts. Down on the lower level, there were plenty of sleeping quarters, a kitchen that thedoggenkept stocked with prepared meals, and a gym. And in a move hearkening back to the good ol’ days of the human tech boom, you were allowed to bring your dog to work if it behaved itself, with the servant staff more than willing to take them out during the daylight hours as required.
It had taken a lot of thought, facility construction, and hiring to put this living organism of an IT department together, and he took great satisfaction in the service they provided the Brotherhood, the King, and the species at large.
Not that he was feeling good about tonight.
That shit didn’t have anything to do with his people, though.
Rounding the corner of his office, he stared over at the desk that had been set right against the barn’s back wall. There were even more monitors on its surface than the other workstations, and the dark-haired, underdeveloped male who was bent over one of three keyboards and comparing four different tables of data at the same time was probably smarter than Vishous himself.
Take out the “probably.”
When there was no response to his presence, he cleared his throat—something that should have been unnecessary given his exhale of Turkish smoke.
