The Brotherhood’s training center was a state-of-the-art, hundred-thousand-square-foot bunker of holy-shit-how-is-this-not-the-government–level facilities and equipment. Located underground, and preceded by a gating system of gradually more secure and intimidating G.T.F.O.s, the place was off-limits to vampires, humans, and lessers.

As well as the trainees who were technically allowed to be in it.

When the “school bus” slowed again at yet another checkpoint, Axe could tell by the angle of the descent that they were getting close to the entrance to the facility. The blackout windows next to him didn’t offer much visual, but he imagined the last couple of stop-heres to be like something out of Jurassic Park, all concrete walls that were as tall as the Hoover Dam and topped with miles’ worth of barbed wire.

For the last month, the trainees had been meeting at designated locations in and around Caldwell and getting on this nothing-yellow-or-schoolish-at-all tank with its bulletproof body plating, thick-as-your-arm windows, and deep bucket seats.

Yeah, sure, Fritz, the old doggen at the wheel, could have worked for Caldwell Central Schools. But that was about it for comps.

And what do you know. Tonight’s ride in from a deserted factory in the old industrial part of town had been about twenty-five minutes of Peyton glaring a hole in Axe’s skull.

Good times, good times.

Everyone else was minding their own damn business. Novo had her Beats on up in front. Boone was reading—Kierkegaard’s Enten-Eller, whatever the fuck that was. Paradise and Craeg were trading an iPhone back and forth like they were searching for PokéStops on the way and getting bad reception.

Peyton, on the other hand? He apparently had nothing better to do than steam like dog shit laid fresh on a snowbank.

Axe had done a damn good job of ignoring the glares, however, and he intended to keep up the brick wall for the rest of the night—

“I mean it,” Peyton snapped.

As Axe let his head fall against the rest, he knew he should have moved farther back when Mr. Boundaries had sat across the aisle from him. Course that would mean he’d be riding in on the rear bumper.

“You made your point last night,” Axe muttered. “And I agreed with you, if you remember.”

“You didn’t say shit.”

“Fuck you, and I’ll repeat myself now.” He turned his head lackadaisically to the male. “I’m not going to touch her.”

“Then why did you follow Elise out like that?”

“Fresh air, man. I needed—”

“I’m fucking serious—”

“Hey, I have an idea. Let’s not play Emilio Estevez and Judd Nelson circa Maine North High School.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

Boone spoke up but didn’t look up from the row ahead. “The Breakfast Club. Widely considered the best high school film ever made. Filmed at Maine North High School in Des Plaines, Illinois, in 1984. Judd Nelson played the role of the stereotypical degenerate—”

“FYI,” Axe cut in, “that’s my role. You’re the wrestler, Pey-pey. The judgmental fuck with the please-daddy complex.”

Peyton cocked an eyebrow. “Him”—he motioned to Boone—“I’d expect to know that. You?”

“I haven’t been a sex addict my whole life, you know. I used to be a druggie who specialized in nodding out in front of the TV. And will you do us both a favor and drop this shit. I’m not going to bang your pure-as-the-driven-snow cousin. She’s not my type.”

Okay, fine. He might have spent all day staring at the ceiling, reliving the way she had turned to him on that sidewalk. Looked at him. Spoken to him.

And yeah, there might have been some palm action. But it had been a case of either he took care of the perma-rection he’d developed or he came to class with a baseball bat in his leathers.

But that wasn’t about her. Nah. That was just a sign he needed to spend more time at The Keys.

The bus came to a stop, and the ancient butler retracted the partition while opening the door across from his driver’s seat. “We’ve arrived! Have a lovely evening!”

The doggen said the same thing in the same cheerful voice every night, and as Axe got to his feet and walked down and off before anyone else could, he realized it was kind of a ritual. The verbal equivalent of rubbing a rabbit’s foot for good luck.

The parking area had a number of vehicles in it, including an RV that was actually a mobile surgical center, a new Hummer that was being bulletproofed, two pickups that sparkled like they were just off the Ford lot, and an earthmover of some CAT variety. There were other levels of graduated asphalt rising upward, but Axe had never bothered with them.

Even if he’d been allowed to drive in, it wasn’t like he had a car or any prospects of getting one.

Nope, no whip for him. In his world, there was no money for anything other than the clothes on his back and the human property taxes on the little house his father had built for a female who had never given a shit about him. Oh, and those ramen noodles. Axe’s electricity had been turned off again and this time, he wasn’t going to bother to pay the bill. He could live in the dark—it was better than crashing at the training center like a homeless human. Besides, gas and sewer were municipal, so he had hot running water, and the fireplaces worked well enough to keep him warm.

He’d survive.

As he approached a steel-reinforced door, he didn’t have to wait. It was opened from the inside, the Dhestroyer shoving the heavy weight wide like the thing weighed as much as a sheet of paper.

“Evenin’,” the Brother Butch said. “We’re in the first classroom.”

Axe nodded and walked down the long hall, passing by interrogation rooms and other teaching areas, and then the new lab where they were, literally, blowing shit up.

The classroom they used was your typical set-up—or at least what he’d seen on the TV during his heroin days. There were two rows of long tables with pairs of seats facing an old-fashioned chalkboard. Overhead lights were banks of fluorescents; the flooring was speckled linoleum.

No readin’, writin’, and ’rithmetic taught here, though.

Try hand-to-hand-combat theory, military maneuvers, basic first aid, group dynamics.

Axe sat in the back and—thank you, God—Peyton parked it down in front. The others settled in, ready for the night.

The Brother Butch closed the door and sat on the desk that was off to the side. He had a Red Sox hat on, a shirt that had a stencil of Big Papi’s face on the front, and set of Adidas track pants in black. Running shoes were Brooks and in a pink and red neon.

“Tonight,” the Brother said, “we’re going to review how badly you each performed in that mock attack. Which should take us eight to twelve hours. Then, if there’s time left, we’ll keep going with poisons, focusing on aerosols and contact poisons. But first, I have a job opportunity for someone.”

Axe frowned.

Money, he thought, would be good.

“The position is one that will require the utmost discretion and tact.” The Brother leveled a deadly stare at the group. “As well as an intimate knowledge of personal defense.”

Rhage absolutely fucking hated Havers’s clinic. Yeah, sure, the underground facility was secure, and even though he didn’t like the guy, no one could argue with the healer’s treatment of his patients. But as Rhage sat in the corridor outside the exam room that Bitty and Mary had been in for, like, a hundred and fifty years, pretty much everything was getting on his nerves.

First of all, he hated the synthetic “clean” smell, that fake lemon disinfecta-stench burrowing into his sinuses. Hell, it was so bad, he kept imagining all kinds of tiny yellow minions with pickaxes and spray bottles of the shit paying personal attention to his nostril regions.

Second, the productive hush of everything bugged the fuck out of him, even though it was arguably a good thing. All the soft-soled shoes shuffling along, the quiet voices, the carts of medical supplies and equipment whispering along the hall.

But the worst thing? He really couldn’t stand the attention he got.

It wasn’t that the nurses were popping their bodices and going grind-on-it all over his junk, but damn, he didn’t need all the lingering glances and the unnecessary multi-walk-bys and the twittering and giggling.

He’d dealt with versions of this all his life—at least since the split second he’d made it through his transition. And pre-Mary, he’d taken advantage of the sexual attention to the point where he didn’t leave a reputation so much as a religion of fucking in his wake. Post-Mary, though, he had no interest in other females. In fact, he’d begun to think of his face and body like a sweet-ass whip that his brain drove. His core, his soul, his heart, didn’t have anything to do with how he looked.

And there was the issue.

When your daughter was on the other side of a thin door, dressed in a frail little hospital gown, her eyes big and wide from current fear and past trauma as her personal space and her body were invaded by third parties, the last thing you wanted was a bunch of people falling all over you because they thought you were Channing Tatum and Chris Hemsworth’s frickin’ love child.

Maybe he should put a paper bag over his head—

As a hand came down on his shoulder, he jumped—and was equally shocked to find Zsadist sitting down next to him on the hard floor of the corridor.

Across the way, V and Lassiter were still on their feet and arguing, the pair of them face to hockey mask, the brother putting a hand-rolled between his lips—and then whipping it out as if he remembered he couldn’t light up—the angel more than holding his own, talking a mile a minute.

Rhage didn’t have the energy or the focus to spare on them.

All he could think about was …

“She’s just suffered enough,” he heard himself say. “God … how long have they been in there?”

Looking into the eyes of his brother, he saw that instead of that stare being yellow, Z’s peepers were jet black.

But yeah, Rhage was being pretty annoying. He’d been bitching about the same thing for how long now? No wonder his brother was getting frustrated with him.

“Sorry.” Rhage rubbed his face. “I’ve got to shut up over here. Don’t mean to piss you off.”

Z looked at him like he’d sprouted a horn in the middle of his forehead. “Not you. I just want to dig up that sire of hers and kill him all over again. If Nalla had been abused like that? And had bones full of past breaks?”

The brother stopped talking at that point. Just as well. Rhage felt like vomiting again.

“When it’s your kids, it’s just a whole different level.” Rhage started to bang his head against the wall, and then worried that it might disturb Bitty and the doctors. “You know, I wasn’t prepared for this. I mean, I thought the hard part about being a dad was going to be the arguments—like her bringing some knuckle-dragging mouth breather home and expecting me not to slice off his smooth criminals and plant them in the yard. But this? I want to be the one going through it for her. It’s just not fair.”

Z held his stare, solid as a rock, about as far from psychotic as the brother had once been knee-deep in the crazy. “You are a tremendous father, you know that. You’re the real deal.”

Rhage looked away fast. Cleared his throat. “I feel like I’m failing her.”

“You’re right with her when she needs you most.”

“No, to do that, I’d have to be on that exam table. I’d have to have my body there instead of hers.”

“Not possible and you know it.” Z cursed softly. “The hardest thing about being a father is not being able to make everything all right for them. Sometimes the best you can do is just show up.”

“There has to be more to it.”

“If there is and you figure it out, let me know.”

“Ha! You’re the best father I’ve ever seen.”

“Tell you what, I’ll call your ass the next time I lie awake wondering how I could have screwed things up worse.”

“But it’s different for you.”

“Why.” When Rhage didn’t fill in the blank, Z didn’t let the unspoken remain silent. “Why, because Nalla is biologically mine? G’head, say it. ’Cuz when you hear that shit come out of your mouth, you’ll realize how stupid it is.”

“I just … I wonder if I’d be doing something better if … you know, I were really her sire.”

“Oh, like her biological father, you mean? Like the motherfucker who put her on that table? You want to be like him? Yeah, that’s a real improvement over a guy who’s been here in this corridor, looking like he’s going through open-heart surgery without anesthesia ’cuz his little girl’s having a hard time.”

Rhage rubbed his hair so hard his fingers were fuzzy when he stopped. “You wouldn’t understand. You’re never going to be in my shoes.”

“That’s my point, though. Whether you had a hand in birthing them or you volunteer to take them in, we’re all in the same shoes.”

Rhage stared at the closed door in front of him. “I’m scared, Z. I’m just … fucking scared. What if there’s something permanently wrong? That’s what Doc Jane is worried about, you know. She’s worried Bitty’s transition will ruin her arms and legs so badly … that they’re going to end up having to amputate them.”

The image of Bitty dancing through the foyer made his eyes sting. She was so active now … he couldn’t imagine her in a wheelchair that was operated by her blowing into a tube. It just killed him.

“What the … what the fuck are you talking about?” Z demanded.

“Something to do with growth plates. There were breaks that occurred right along”—He motioned to his thighs, his forearms, his calves—“you know, Bitty’s growth plates, and they healed wrong? So when the change hits her, they’re liable to bust open and be unrepairable.”

“Shit.”

“Mary doesn’t know.” Rhage went back to trying to pull his hair out. “Yeah, I should have told her before now, but I just didn’t know how. I told Doc Jane I would. But I’m a fucking coward for both of them. I was hoping … for good news, I guess, but the longer they’re in there, the more I think—”

Across the way, the exam room door swung open, and Doc Jane emerged.

One look at her face and he knew that the worst case had rolled out in there.

“How bad is it?” Rhage gritted as he jumped to his shitkickers. “And is there anything we can do?”