“Elise! Do not tell me you have been to university!”

As her father came charging out of his study, he looked as much like a raging bull as a whip-thin, utterly distinguished aristocrat could—which was, actually, not like a bull at all, but more like a European prince trying to flag his butler down. Felixe the Younger did have, however, a highly uncharacteristic flush to his face, and he had failed to button his evening jacket as he had rushed from his desk at her.

If he’d been a commoner, he would have been picking up pieces of furniture and throwing them around as he carpet-bombed the air with variations on an f-word theme.

And as she faced off at him, from out of nowhere, she heard that line from M*A*S*H: Winchesters do not sweat, we perspire. And Winchesters do not perspire.

Or something to that effect. You had to love Charles Emerson Winchester III.

“Explain yourself!”

There were a couple of ways to handle this, she supposed. Deny, deny, deny, but with a backpack hanging off her shoulder, those pesky snowflakes all over her, and the fact that she’d previously told him she was going to stay in and read? Hard sell, for one thing; for another, she detested lies. Another option was walking away, but that was a total no-go—she had been raised properly, and that meant that she couldn’t be rude to her elders.

Annnnnd that left her with door number three.

The truth.

“I’vebeengoingbacktoschool.” As her father frowned and leaned in toward her, she put some volume into her voice and slowed things down. “Yes, I have been going to school again.”

Her father fell silent in shock and she studied him as if he were a stranger. He had a patrician face, the even features distilled by good breeding to the point that you were aware he was of masculine derivation, but the sexual affiliation was at a whisper, not a shout. His hair was dark, whereas hers was streaked with blond, and his eyes were pale gray, not blue. But their diction was identical and so were their good posture, their moderated affect … and their sense of values.

So, yes, she did feel as though she had done something wrong. Even though she was past her transition, arguably of age especially if you applied a human standard, and had done nothing more reckless than sit in a quiet library for three hours grading papers.

“Are you … have you … how can you …” It was a while before her father could get through an entire sentence. “I forbade you to go there! After the raids, I explicitly told you that it was unsafe and that you were not to be permitted to go! And that was before …”

Elise closed her eyes. That last sentence wasn’t finished because it was That Which Was Not Discussed.

Allishon’s name hadn’t been uttered since the night word had come unto the household that she had passed. They hadn’t even had a Fade ceremony for her.

“Well!” he demanded. “What have you to say for yourself!”

“I’m sorry, Father, but I—”

“How can you possibly be so delinquent! If your mahmen were still alive, she would be apoplectic! How long has this been going on?”

“A year.”

“A year!”

At that moment, the butler came scurrying in from the back of the house, as if he had heard the disturbance and was concerned some crazy person had broken in to the mansion for which he was responsible. When the doggen got a gander at her father? He backed off fast as a mouse before a cat.

“You have been going for a year?” her father hissed, his voice shaking. “How have you—you have been lying to me? For that long?”

Elise shucked her backpack and put it between her feet. “Father, what was I to do?”

“Stay here! It is dangerous in Caldwell!”

“But the raids are over. And even when they occurred, the slayers were hitting vampire targets, not human ones. It’s a human school—”

“Humans are savages! You know exactly how much damage they do to each other! You see the news—the guns, the violence! Even if they were not targeting you as another species, you could get caught in the crossfire!”

As Elise’s eyes drifted to the high ceiling, she searched for some correct combination of words to make this all go away.

“We’re not doing this here.” Her father’s voice dropped. “In my study. Now.”

When he jabbed a finger to his open door, she picked up her backpack and headed in that direction. Behind her, tight on her heels, her father fell into a full march, and she was not surprised when the carved door clapped shut, closing them in together.

The room was lovely, a fire crackling in the hearth, cheery light flickering over the leather chairs, the first editions on the mahogany shelves, the oil paintings of hunting dogs that her father had owned in the Old Country.

“Sit down,” he snapped, though not loudly.

She knew exactly where he wanted her and she went to the chair across from his desk, lowering herself into its antique contours and being sure to keep her pack with her. The last thing she wanted was for him to take it away from her.

In the midst of this confrontation, the thing represented her freedom.

Felixe sat down and linked his fingers together as if he were attempting to control himself. “You know exactly what happens when a female goes out of the home unattended.”

Elise looked up at the ceiling again and was careful to keep her voice low. “I’m not like Allishon.”

“You’re out in the human world. Just like her.”

“I know where she went. It was not to university, Father.”

“I’m not going to discuss the particulars and neither are you. What you are going to do is swear to me, right here and now, that you will not violate my trust again. That you will stay here and—”

Elise bolted up out of the seat before she was aware of moving. “I can’t waste my life sitting here, night by night, going nowhere and doing nothing but needlepoint. I want my advanced degree, I want to finish what I started! I want a life!”

As he recoiled, he seemed as surprised by the outburst as she was. And to defuse the insubordination, Elise sank back down into the chair. “I’m sorry, Father. I don’t mean to speak rashly, it’s just … why can’t you understand that I want to be free to live?”

“That is not your station and you know it. I have been more than lenient with you, but that time has passed. I will be entertaining suitable males for mating—”

Elise let her head fall back. “I want more than that, Father.”

“Your first cousin is dead. After they already lost their son in the raids! You see the suffering of her parents nightly in this house! Do you want that for me? Do you care so little for me that you want me to mourn my only daughter after I’ve already lost my shellan?”

Swallowing a groan, she stared across the desktop. The objects upon it—the sterling-silver-framed pictures of her and her mother, the pens in their holders, the ashtray in which one of his pipes sat—were as familiar as the backs of her own hands, things that she had never not known. They were also part of the comfort of home, symbols of the security that she at once valued, but also wanted to escape.

“Well?” her father said. “Do you want that for me?”

“What I want is to talk about her.” Elise sat forward. “No one ever speaks about Allishon. I don’t even know how she died. Peyton came here and talked to the three of you behind closed doors—next thing I know, her room is shut up tight, Auntie has taken to her bed, and Uncle looks like a zombie. Nobody has told me anything. There’s no Fade ceremony, no mourning, just this shut-off void in the midst of everyone suffering. Why can’t we just come forward and be honest—”

“This is not about your cousin—”

“Her name is Allishon. Why can’t you say her name?”

Her father’s thin lips got even thinner. “Do not attempt to distract me from the real problem. Which is you lying to me whilst you put yourself in danger. What happened to your cousin is in the past. There is no cause for conversation.”

Elise shook her head. “You’re so wrong about that. And if you’re going to try to use whatever tragedy happened to her to persuade me, then you better tell me what really happened.”

“I don’t have to explain anything to you.” Her father banged a fist into his desk, making one of the framed photographs jump. “You are my daughter. That is a sufficiency unto itself.”

“Why are you so afraid of talking about her?”

“This conversation is over—”

“Is it because you think she got what she deserved?” Elise was aware of her body starting to shake as she finally spoke what had been on her mind for weeks. “Is nobody in this house saying anything because you all disapproved of the way she was behaving, and the fact that she died because of it doesn’t make you sad, but rather angry? Angry because you don’t want the potential social complications for our bloodline?”

“Elise! You were not raised to—”

“Allishon went out at night. She dated males who were not of our class and consorted with humans—”

“Stop it!”

“—and now she’s dead. Tell me, honestly, are you really worried about me getting hurt—or is it more about the potential embarrassment for you and the bloodline? One unconventional female with a tragic event may eventually be forgiven, but two? Never. Is that your truth, Father? Because if it is, that strikes me as far more ugly than my seeking an education.”

Axe left The Keys with the scent of the human woman on his skin. As he stepped out of the sprawling, interlocking series of buildings, he breathed in the cold, fresh air and felt his overheated body steam under his cloak. Flurries were falling from a heavy cloud cover, and all around him the city was alive, sirens sounding in the distance, music from the club thumping in a hush, traffic on the Northway rumbling along.

He wanted to go home and take a shower, wash himself clean of the filthy, nasty sex he’d had all over her body, but there was no time.

Finding a thick of shadows, he whipped off that new skull mask he’d had made for himself and disappeared it into the cloak. Then he removed the great hanging weight from his shoulder, taking a black shirt out of another inner pocket, and putting the wifebeater on over his head. His weapons were hidden in still more compartments, and he retrieved them and their holsters from their Velcro strapping system. Arming himself, he gathered the voluminous fall of the cloak and folded it into itself until the outerwear appeared to be nothing more than a three-quarter-length coat.

A moment later, he dematerialized and re-formed in an alley eleven blocks farther into the worst part of Caldie.

He was not the first of his fellow trainees to arrive. Peyton and Boone were already there, the pair of them standing together under a fire escape. They were in black and as heavily armed as Axe was, but unlike him, they didn’t smell like sex.

And Peyton didn’t smell like weed or booze, either. Fucking miracle.

The male smiled. “Been busy?”

“Not at all.” Axe clapped palms with him and did the same to Boone. “Where’s everyone?”

Peyton smiled, flashing his fangs. The guy was right out of the Perfectly Bred Handbook—and so exactly the kind of bastard Axe hated on principle. Rich, blond-haired, with polished nails and an off-duty wardrobe that looked like something Zoolander would wear, Pey-pey was a pey-pain in the ass. The only thing that saved him? He was a helluva shot, and either too arrogant or too stupid to understand his own limits: In training, he fought just as hard as everyone else did, took way too many chances with himself and his safety, and was so out of control, all Axe could think of was a Lamborghini that had lost half of its wheels, most of its undercarriage, and all of its brakes.

As it headed for a brick wall.

So yeah, Peyton, first blooded son of Peythone, was the exception that proved the aristocrats-should-never-be-in-the-field rule.

But Axe still wasn’t all buddy-buddy with the SOB.

Not that he went there with anybody.

Boone, on the other hand, was the anti-Pey-pey. Quiet, huge, and unusually physically adept, he was the crouching tiger of the group, the prowler who kept to himself and the shadows, the one who was most likely to pounce on your back and slit your throat with a knife you weren’t even aware of him having in his hand. Axe was pretty sure the guy had been seriously fucked up by somebody or something earlier in his life. For all his outward calm, Boone was never, ever truly relaxed or at ease. Whether he was reading on his iPhone, listening to his music on the bus, or waiting for commands from the Brothers, you always had the sense he knew where everybody in a given space was.

As if he were waiting for an attack—and goddamned if he was going to let anyone get the best of him.

Watch the sleeper, Axe always thought. Before the cocksucker went Grim Reaper all over your ass.

Craeg and Paradise arrived next, the pair of them dressed in black and covered in weapons. The couple was as committed as a mated twosome, but they were not lovey-dovey in class or outside of it. And thank God for that.

After all, Axe hated vomiting—and if there was one thing guaranteed to make his stomach go evac? It was the sight of two people going baby-talk and gooey-eye’d all over each other. Back three years ago, when he’d been doing heroin all the time, his nightmare had been when he’d been too nodded out to change the channel on a Sandra-fucking-Bullock marathon.

Although he’d liked The Blind Side.

Axe acknowledged them and stepped back as the rest of the greetings rolled out. And then there was a lull, during which he amused himself by watching Peyton try not to stare at Paradise. It was the same thing every night, that weak pining after a female the guy couldn’t get, and it was good to see the pretty boy who undoubtedly had everything he ever wanted get shanked by fate.

So fucking pathetic.

Man, that was one lesson Axe’s moms had taught him. Never give a female power over you. That shit will castrate you faster than a pair of surgical scissors.

Hell, look at what had happened to his old man after Axe’s mom had left them. Decades and decades of mourning. A life wasted at the altar of “love.” An otherwise good male brought to his knees and kept there by an abandonment that was based on what someone else could fucking buy her.

As an old, familiar pain lit off behind his sternum, Axe bolted away from the sensation even as his body didn’t move. Refocusing on the Paradise-Peyton-Craeg triangle, which wasn’t a triangle at all for Craeg-adise, he found himself smiling. Yeah, the fact that the poor kid had won the girl made him happy. Craeg was the alpha of all alphas, the de facto leader of the trainees, but he came from nothing, just like Axe. Paradise, on the other hand, was the daughter of the King’s First Advisor. You didn’t get more pedigreed than that.

But she had picked the scrub over the Great Gatsby.

Attagirl. One more reason to like her. Aside from her hunting skills.

The last trainee to arrive was the kind of female that would have gotten Axe’s attention under any circumstances. And yup, with nothing but black leather covering her from head to foot, he took the opportunity to admire the view—at a respectful distance. She was the cobra in the group, a sinewy, powerfully dangerous thing of beauty, with teal eyes, reflexes quicker than C4 exploding, and a subversive nature that Axe totally got.

But he’d never hit that.

Even though she was hot as fuck, he had a couple of reasons for his uncharacteristic restraint, the main one being that you didn’t shit where you ate. Although Craeg and Paradise had somehow won the destiny lottery by hooking up without losing their edge or hating each other in the end, that was not a set of dice Axe was interested in rolling. Oh, and P.S., he was about as into relationships as he was aristocrats.

As Novo eased back against the brick tenement next to him, he nodded to her.

“Cold tonight,” Peyton said to no one in particular.

“It’s December,” Novo muttered. “You want it to be eighty?”

“Yup, I do.”

Novo had some choice words under her breath for the guy, including “arrogant” and “fucker,” but nobody paid any attention to it. The pair of them had turned into conversational snipers, but only at each other, and hey, popcorn-and-Coke’ing the show passed the time.

A blast of wind shot down the alley like it was being pursued by an enemy, and Axe flared his nostrils, testing the rush for scents of Brothers or humans … or their enemy, the Lessening Society.

Nada. And that frustrated him.

After seven weeks of intensive training, that had covered everything from hand-to-hand combat skills and firearms to poisons, bombs, and stalking techniques, Axe wasn’t alone in thinking they were ready for something other than fighting in the gym with themselves and studying hypotheticals. Each of them had their own reasons for wanting to get in the war, but the common denominator was they were all chomping at the bit to light some shit up.

And come on. They had been going in to the Black Dagger Brotherhood’s hidden training center six nights a week, for six to eight, sometimes ten, hours at a time. And it hadn’t been a case of a couple of seminars in classrooms and a paper typed up on your laptop. It had been hard, grueling work, and none of them had failed—which proved the brutal tryouts, that had weeded the applicant pool from like sixty to the six of them, had picked the right half dozen to go through the program.

Axe tested the air again. Still nothing. He’d been stoked when, for the first time, they’d been instructed to meet not at wherever the bus was going to pick them up to drive them in, but rather here in the field.

Maybe they were finally getting a chance to fight for real.

Ten minutes later, the checking of the watches started, the wrists popping up at first on the down-low, and later with increasing annoyance.

Axe didn’t bother checking his. They were in the right place. They’d gotten here at the right time. The Brothers would show when they were good and goddamn ready.

Fucking hell, this shit was making him twitchy, though.

He looked down the alley. Snow was starting to fall on the serious from all that cloud cover, but the currents of wind that topped these tightly packed four-and five-story deserted cages for humans meant that nothing penetrated the maze of alleys between the abandoned buildings. Off in the distance, sirens continued to echo back and forth across the city like the ambulance drivers and the cops were playing hide-and-seek blindfolded. No humans were walking anywhere in this area, as there was nothing to come here for, not even a crack house.

Those were a little to the west. About three blocks.

He knew because he’d used them—

The gunshots came from all directions.

Up above. Down in front. From behind.

Axe dived away from the bullets that whizzed by his ears and his ass, and instantly regretted that he hadn’t thought to have guns in his hands already. They’d been taught that. Goddamn it.

As he rolled across the pitted pavement, he fumbled to get his forties against his palms, but it was like trying to catch tennis balls while you were falling down a crevasse: His coat was flapping around, getting tangled in his arms and slapping him in the face, and his limbs were sloppy and uncoordinated as he tried to find a way to save himself from getting killed.

Somehow he made it to a shallow doorway in the wall, got his guns up, and then he was assessing whether the fire was a test or the actual enemy. He couldn’t tell. He couldn’t see anything, couldn’t scent much. People were running everywhere. Bullets were still flying. He had no idea who to make a target out of, or what he should do, or what the fuck was going on.

The chaos was unexpected. So was the grind-to-a-halt-while-faster-than-the-speed-of-light dichotomy: His brain couldn’t seem to decide whether things were in slow motion or going at a dead run—

And then a bullet came so close to his face that the tip of his nose felt the burn.

Fuck this, he thought as he pivoted.

With a violent thrust, Axe smashed his shoulder into the door, splintering the rotten wood. Just as he was falling inward, Novo streaked by, and he caught her arm, yanking her in with him. Together, the pair of them landed on concrete that had all the give of a morgue slab, arms and legs tangling, a split second of oh-fuck freezing them both.

Right away, they were back up on the vertical, and just as they had been taught, they went spine-to-spine with guns raised, forming the best defensive unit they could. Axe’s eyes burned as they strained to see something, anything, but the darkness was too thick to penetrate. His ears stepped into the sensory void, however, isolating and droning out the sounds of bullets and bodies moving in the alley, focusing on …

There was something dripping over to the left. Novo was breathing as hard as he was. And he could hear the beat of his own heart.

Wherever they were smelled like old air and twelve kinds of mold, suggesting that the place hadn’t been opened up in a—

“Click, you’re dead.”

As the soft words were spoken, a gun muzzle made contact with his temple. And given the way Novo gasped, he was pretty sure that she had a forty pressed up tight to her chrome dome, too.

“Motherfucker,” Axe muttered.

“Yup,” the Brother Rhage said without censure. “Neither of you are coming down for First Meal tomorrow morning. You failed your first field test.”