"I think this hard drive has bitten it." Butch glanced up. "Jesus Christ… you look like Hugh Hefner."

"So not funny."

Butch winced. "I'm sorry. Shit… V, I'm's-"

"Shut up and let me look at the PC." V picked the thing up off Butch's lap and did a quick a maintenance scan. "Dead."

"Should have known. Safe Place is in a cluster fuck of IT shit. Their server's down. Now this. Meanwhile Marissa's up at the mansion with Mary trying to figure out how to hire more staff. Man, she doesn't need this."

"I put four new Dells in the supply cabinet outside Wrath's study. Tell her to go get one, true? I'd set it up for her now, but I gotta go."

"Thanks, man. And yeah, I'll get ready to come with you-"

"You don't have to be there."

Butch frowned. "Fuck that. You need me."

"Someone else can stand in."

"I'm not abandoning you-"

"Wouldn't be abandonment." Vishous wandered over to the foosball table and spun one of the rods. As the row of little men did backflips, he exhaled. "It's kind of like… I don't know, if you're there, it's all too fucking real."

"So you want somebody else to back you?"

V spun the rod again, a whirring noise rising up from the table. He'd chosen Butch on a knee-jerk, but the truth was, the male was a complication. V was so damned close to the guy it was going to be harder to front his way through the presentation and the ritual.

V looked across the living room. "Yeah. Yeah, I think I want someone else."

In the short silence that followed, Butch assumed the look of someone holding a plate of food that was too hot: uneasy and insecure. "Well… as long as you know I would be there for you, no matter what was doing."

"I know you're solid." V went to the phone, thinking over his choices.

"Are you su-"

"Yes," he said, dialing. When Phury answered his call, V said, "You mind standing in with me today? Butch is going to hang back. Yeah. Uh-huh. Thanks, man." He hung up. It might be an odd choice, because the two of them had never been particularly close. But then, that was the point. "Phury's going to do it, no problem. I'm going to bounce to his room now."

"V-"

"Shut it, cop. I'll be back in a couple hours."

"I wish like hell you didn't have to-"

"Whatever. This isn't going to change things." After all, Jane would still be gone; he would still be a bonded male without his mate. So yup, yup, nothing different, nothing mattered.

"You're absolutely positive you don't want me to go?"

"Just be here with the Goose when I get back. I'm going to need a drink."

V left the Pit through the underground tunnel, and as he walked over to the mansion, he tried to give himself some perspective.

This Chosen he was mating was just a body. Same as he was. The two of them were going to do what needed to be done, when it was necessary. It was just male parts meeting female parts, then thrust and repeat until the male ejaculated. And as for his complete and utter lack of arousal? Not a problem. The Chosen had salves to ensure an erection and incense that made you come. So even though he had absolutely no interest in sex, his body would do what it was born and bred to do: ensure that the best lines in the species survived.

Shit, he wished it could be clinical, all cup-and-baster. But vampires had tried IVF in the past, to no success. Young had to be conceived the good old-fashioned way.

Man, he did not want to think of how many females he was going to have to be with. He just couldn't go there. If he did, he was going to-

Vishous stopped in the middle of the tunnel.

Opened his mouth.

And screamed until his voice gave out.

Chapter Thirty-four

When Vishous and Phury crossed over to the other side together, they took form in a white courtyard surrounded by a white arcade of Corinthian columns. In the center was a white marble fountain that splashed crystal clear water into a deep white cistern. In the far corner, on a white tree with white blossoms, a flock of rainbow-colored songbirds was gathered as if they'd been sprinkled on top of a cupcake. The sweet calls of the finches and the chickadees harmonized with the chiming sound of the fountain, as if both cadences were in the same key of joy.

"Warriors." The Scribe Virgin's voice came from behind V and made his skin pull like plastic over his bones. "Kneel and I shall greet you."

V ordered his knees to bend, and after a moment they hinged like rusty legs on a card table. Phury, on the other hand, didn't seem to be suffering from a case of the stiffs and went down smoothly.

Then again, he wasn't hitting the floor in front of a mother he despised.

"Phury, son of Ahgony, how fare thee?"

In a perfectly eloquent voice, the brother replied in the Old Language, "I fare well, for I am before thee with purity of devotion and depth of heart."

The Scribe Virgin chuckled. "A proper greeting in the proper way. Lovely of you. And surely more than I will get from my son."

V felt rather than saw Phury's head whip toward him. Oh, sorry, V thought. Guess I forgot to mention that happy little fact, my brother.

The Scribe Virgin drifted closer. "Ah, so my son has not told you his maternal lineage? Out of decorum, I wonder? Concern for upsetting the generally held principle of my so-called virginal existence? Yes, that is why, is it not, Vishous, son of the Bloodletter."

V lifted his eyes, though he hadn't been invited to. "Or maybe I just refuse to acknowledge you."

It was exactly what she expected him to say, and he could sense this not from reading her thoughts, but because on some level the two of them were one and the same, indivisible in spite of the air and space between them.

Yay.

"Your reticence to concede my maternity of you changes nothing," she said in a hard tone. "A book unopened alters not the ink on its pages. What is there is there."

Without permission, V stood and met his mother's hooded face, eye for eye, strength for strength.

Phury was no doubt blanching white as flour, but whatever. He'd match the decor that way. Besides, the Scribe Virgin wasn't going to toast her future Primale or her precious little boy. No way. So he didn't give a fuck.

"Let's get this over with, Mom. I want back to my real life-"

V found himself flat on his back and not breathing in the blink of an eye. Though there was nothing on top of him and his body didn't seem to be compressed, he felt like he had a grand piano on his chest.

As his eyes bugged out and he fought to drag some air into his lungs, the Scribe Virgin floated over to him. Her hood lifted from her face of its own volition, and she stared down at him with a bored expression on her ghostly, glowing face.

"I would have your word that you will comport yourself with respect toward me whilst we are before my assembled Chosen. I concede that you have some liberties by definition, but I will not hesitate to determine you a worse future than the one you wish to forsake if you reveal them in public. Are we in agreement?"

Agreement? Agreement? Yeah, right, that kind of shit presupposed free will, and from everything he'd learned over the course of his life, it was clear he had none.

Fuck. Her.

Vishous exhaled slowly. Relaxed his muscles. And embraced the suffocation.

He held her stare… as he began to die.

After about a minute into the self-imposed drowning, his autonomic nervous system kicked in, his lungs punching against his chest walls, trying to drag down some oxygen. He locked his molars, pressed his lips together, and tightened his throat so that the draw reflex was rendered impotent.

"Oh, Jesus," Phury said in a shaky voice.

The burn in V's lungs spread throughout his torso as his vision started to fuzz and his body shook in the battle between mental will and the biological imperative to breathe. Eventually the war became less a fuck-you to his mother and more a fight to gain what he wanted: peace. Without Jane in his life, death was really his only option.