“Vampire…” Rehv murmured. “Look at you go with the nursing care.”

“Get out of my fucking past.”

“You saved him, didn’t you.” Rehv flipped his eyes open. “Phury was sick. You went and got Wrath because you had nowhere else to go. The savage as savior.”

“FYI, I’m in a bad mood, and you’re making me lethal.”

“That’s how you both ended up in the Brotherhood.

Interesting.”

“I want your word, sin-eater. Not a narrative that bores me.”

Moved by something Rehv didn’t want to name, he placed his hand over his heart. In the Old Language, he said clearly, “I hereby proffer my vow unto you. Never again shall your blooded twin leave my premises with drugs upon him.”

Surprise flared in Z’s scarred face. Then he nodded. “They say never to trust a symphath. So I’m going to bank on the half of you that’s my Bella’s brother, feel me?”

“Good plan,” Rehv murmured as he dropped his hand. “ ’Cuz that’s the side I pledged with. But tell me something. How’re you going to make sure he doesn’t buy from someone else?”

“To be honest, I have no idea.”

“Well, best of luck with him.”

“We’re going to need it.” Zsadist headed for the door.

"Yo, Z?”

The Brother looked over his shoulder. “What.”

Rehv rubbed his left pec. “Have you… ah, have you picked up a bad vibe tonight?”

Z frowned. "Yeah, but how’s that any different? Haven’t had a good one in God only knows how long.”

The door eased shut, and Rehv put his hand back over his heart. The damn thing was racing for no evident reason. Shit, it was probably best that he see the doc. No matter how long it took-

The explosion ripped through the clinic with a roar like thunder.

Chapter Nineteen

Phury took form in the pines behind the garages of Havers’s clinic-just as the security alarms in the place started going off. The shrill electronic screams made the neighborhood’s dogs bark, but there was no danger of the police being called. The warning sounds were calibrated so that they were too high for humans to hear.

Fuck… he was unarmed.

He bolted toward the clinic entrance anyway, ready to fight with his bare hands if he had to.

It was a beyond-worst-case scenario. The steel door was hanging open like a split lip, and inside the vestibule the elevator doors were pushed wide, the shaft with its veins and arteries of cables and wires exposed. Down below, the roof of the elevator car had a blast hole in it, the equivalent of a bullet wound in a male’s chest.

Plumes of smoke and the scent of baby powder boiled up, riding a draft from the underground clinic. The sweet-and -sour combo, along with the sounds of fighting below, unsheathed Phury’s fangs and curled his fists.

He didn’t waste time wondering how the lessers had known where the clinic was, and he didn’t bother with the ladder mounted on the shaft’s concrete wall, either. He leaped down and landed on the part of the elevator’s roof that was still solid. Another jump through the blown part and he was facing total chaos.

In the clinic’s waiting area, a trio of granny-haired slayers were doing the thumpty dance with Zsadist and Rehvenge, the fight busting apart the land of plastic chairs and dull magazines and cheerless potted plants. The paled-out bastards were obviously well-trained long-timers, given how strong and sure they were, but Z and Rehv were taking no shit.

With the fight moving so fast, it was a jump-in-and-swim sitch. Phury grabbed a metal chair from the registration desk and swung it like a bat at the nearest slayer. As the lesser went down, he lifted the chair up and stabbed one of its spindly legs right into the fucker’s chest.

Just as the pop and flash rang out, screams rippled down the clinic’s hallway from the blocks of patient rooms.

“Go!” Z barked as he threw out a kick and caught one of the lessers in the head. “We’ll hold them here!”

Phury exploded through the double flap doors.

There were bodies in the hall. A lot of them. Lying in pools of red blood on the pale green linoleum.

Though it killed him not to stop and check on those he was passing, his focus had to be on the medical staff and patients who were very definitely alive. A group of them was fleeing toward him in a panic, their white coats and hospital johnnies flapping like a load of wash hung out to dry in the wind.

He caught them by grabbing arms and shoulders. “Get in the patient rooms! Lock yourselves in! Lock those damn doors!”

“No locks!” someone hollered. “And they’re taking patients!”

“Damn it.” He looked around and saw a sign. “This medicine closet have a lock?”

A nurse nodded while she unclipped something from her waist. With a shaking hand she held a key out to him. “Only from the outside, though. You’ll have… to lock us in.”

He nodded over to the door that read, STAFF ONLY. “Move it.”

The loose group shuffled over and filed into the ten-by-ten room with its floor-to-ceiling shelves of medications and supplies. As he shut the door, he knew he would never forget the way they looked, huddled under the low ceiling’s fluorescent lights: seven panicked faces, fourteen pleading eyes, seventy fingers finding and linking together until their separate bodies were one solid unit of fear.

These were people he knew: people who had taken care of him with his prosthesis issues. People who were vampires like him. People who wanted this war to stop. And they were being forced to trust him because at the moment he had more power than they did.

So this was what being God was like, he thought, not wanting the job.

“I will not forget you.” He shut the door on them, locked it, and paused for a second. Sounds of fighting were still coming from the registration area, but everything else was quiet.

No more staff. No more patients. Those seven were the only survivors.

Turning from the supply closet, he headed away from where Z and Rehv were in battle, tracking a pervasive sweet scent that led in the opposite direction. He ran down past Havers’s lab, down farther by the hidden quarantine room Butch had been in months ago. All along the way, smudged prints left by black-soled combat boots mingled with the red blood of vampires.

Christ, how many slayers had gotten in here?

Whatever the answer to that was, he had an idea where the lessers were headed: the evac tunnels, likely with abductions. Question was, how did they know to go this way?

Phury busted through another set of double doors and stuck his head into the morgue. The banks of refrigerated units and the stainless-steel tables and the hanging scales were untouched. Logical. They wanted only what lived.

He went farther down the hall and found the exit the slayers had used to get out with the abductees. There was nothing left of the steel panel into the tunnel, the thing blown apart just like the back entrance and the elevator roof had been.

Shit. Totally clean op. In and out. And he was willing to bet this was just the first offensive. Others would be coming to loot, because the Lessening Society was medieval like that.

Phury hotfooted it back toward the fighting out in the registration area in case Z and Rehv hadn’t already taken care of business. On the way, he put his phone up to his ear, but before V answered the call, Havers stuck his head out of his private office.

Phury hung up so he could deal with the doctor, and prayed that V’s security system had been notified when the alarms had been triggered. He thought it likely had been, as the systems were supposed to be linked.

“How many ambulances do you have?” he demanded as he came up to Havers.

The physican blinked behind his glasses and held out his hand. In his rattling grip was a nine-millimeter. “I have a gun.”