Clap. Clap. Clap.

The lock of that scissor bite as the jaw reflexively opened and closed was piranha and then some, and even though the reanimated corpse shouldn’t have been able to see, he somehow focused on John.

The damn thing lunged without warning, and there was none of that Walking Dead uncoordinated shit. The corpse’s hands went for John’s throat like it had been trained in the art of strangulation, and when John ducked the hold, there was no break in the assault. Those snapping jaws rerouted to his shoulder, his upper arm, the just-dead-a-second-ago like a banshee unleashed with hellfire in its veins and the strength of ten thousand linebackers in its muscles.

John punched his palm forward, catching the thing in the center of the chest and holding it out of bite range. Then he plowed his gun into the gut on an upward angle and squeezed off four rounds. The corpse jerked in time to the shots, onetwothreefour—

And kept right on coming at him.

Not a pain receptor in sight, evidently.

As he wasn’t sure whether a bite from the thing would welcome him to the reanimation club, John lunged to the side, grabbed the corpse by the waist, and went discus on the sitch, slinging his undead attacker into bricks and mortar.

It didn’t even register the impact.

But John had time to point-blank a shot to its head.

There was a screeching sound that made his ears sing, and then the corpse went deadweight, falling through the cold air and landing like a tabletop in the snow.

John stepped over, put two more bullets into its brain, and then waited, his breath leaving in locomotive-puffs of condensation—

Abruptly, he remembered the peanut gallery of those two humans. Glancing over his shoulder, he erased their memories, wiping things clean and sending them away.

As they wandered off and nothing moved at his feet, he commenced a frantic self-assessment, checking for breaks in his skin under his leather jacket.

The jacket had been nailed a number of times, those twin punctures of fangs giving him a case of the cold sweats—

“John!”

Blay came stomping around the corner, the black blood of slayers spattered on his face and his jacket, his dagger traded for a pair of guns.

I’m okay, John signed. But we need to get this moved.

“I’ll take one end,” his old friend said.

The two of them hand-and-foot’d the now-immobile-and-please-God-stay-that-way body and carried the civilian further into the alley, a trail of bright red blood staining their boot prints in the dirty city snow. Laying the male facedown again, John took out a set of handcuffs and clicked the corpse’s wrists together.

The sound of Blay texting was a series of tip-tip-tips that made John’s nerves shimmy. Not that they needed the help. Standing over the remains with his gun out and pointed at the leaking head, he felt sick, especially as he looked at the stain that marked the path of the carry.

As of now, there was no additional scent of lesser.

Please, God, let things stay that way. Because the slayers used to work in squads, back when there had been more of them.

“I just texted Tohr,” Blay said as he put his cell away. “They’re going to send the surgical unit, ETA from the garage bunker is three and a half minutes.”

John could only nod. Even if one of his hands wasn’t busy holding his Smith & Wesson, he didn’t have anything to add.

He focused on the handcuffs that were biting into the flesh of those wrists and then on the back of the head. Ordinarily, if you were detaining someone and they were lying facedown, you wanted to make sure they had an air source. Not a problem here. The civilian’s nose and mouth were right in the snowpack, but it didn’t matter.

A great wave of sadness hit him as he thought about the mahmen and father who had brought this male into the world however long ago. In the vampire species, to have a successful live birth was a blessing given the incredibly high numbers of maternal and fetal deaths. The parents must have been so thrilled, assuming mom lived as well.

And yet all that ended here, in a shitty alley, in a rough part of town, facedown in the snow with fucking restraints on the corpse because no one was sure whether the term “dead” as applied in this case counted as a permanent thing.

I’m sorry, he mouthed to the body.

It struck John how random fate was with both its blessings and its curses. How he’d won a nick-in-time jackpot back as a pretrans whereas this poor male had gotten short-straw’d in the most terrifying of ways.

Who made those decisions, he wondered. Who doled out such cosmic wins and losses?

People said it had been the Scribe Virgin, but V’s mom was long gone now. So who was there to pray to when an innocent male died in such a gruesome way?

Maybe, like the arrangement of stars in the night sky, it was all just random, with only the minds of the afflicted and the affluent alike trying to make sense of the great swings of pain and grace … while the disinterested universe churned on through relentless, infinite time, on a journey to nowhere.

Who the fuck knew.

Murhder waited for Wrath to walk out of the dining room, but the King stayed where he was, under the chandelier. The Brotherhood were the ones who moved. They closed ranks and formed a wall facing their “guest.”

Impressive. Like being in a forest. Where the trees were made of tigers. And you had sirloin steaks as clothes.

“I signed the papers you wanted,” Murhder called out to his King through the breathing barricade. “And now you have to help me.”

Wrath didn’t reply to that, not that it had been a question. And in the crushing silence of the foyer, Murhder got impatient with the game—

“I don’t have to do shit for you,” Wrath said.

Ah, yes, that deep voice. Still autocratic in tone. Still aristocratic in the drawl.

Still with the vocabulary of a trucker.

The King was staring straight ahead, his black wraparounds positioned toward no one in particular—and the disconnect between focal point and head direction suggested that Wrath’s poor eyesight had faded into a true blindness.

To confirm this, Murhder tilted his body to the left. And indeed, that cruelly handsome face did not follow the movement.

Those nostrils flared, however, the King clearly testing his scent. “I want to see him alone.”

Big surprise, the Brotherhood voted no on that idea, a chorus of grunts and creative curses bubbling up those thick throats.

Not his problem. “Where do you want me.”

“Let him through, boys.” When none of Wrath’s guards complied, the growl that came out of the dining room sounded like someone had started a Ferrari. “Let him in, right fucking now!”

“You’re not seeing him alone—”

Murhder wasn’t sure who said that, but PDQ, the opinion didn’t matter. All of a sudden, a cold blast came from out of nowhere, as if a door to the outside had been opened—no, wait. The arctic chill was emanating from Wrath’s body, and even Murhder felt his butt pucker in warning.

The Fence of Ferocity broke in the center and parted, the disapproving guards moving away, letting him pass. And as he limped for the open doors, he could feel the stares on his back and decided it was a wonder he wasn’t knocked on his face again just from the death rays.

The second he was through the archway, the dining room’s great wooden panels slammed shut, and that was when he noticed the dog. A golden retriever was cowering behind Wrath, its head lowered, its big body tense as it sought protection from the vampire it was using as a shield.