That was it, wasn’t it, Cormia thought. That was precisely what she had always had to do. Lie.

Bella shifted on the pillows, pulling herself up. “I don’t know how much you’ve heard about me, but I have a brother. Rehvenge. He’s a hardheaded handful, always has been, but I love him and we’re very close. My father died when I was four, and Rehv stepped in as head of the household for my mother and me. Rehv took great care of us, but he also was controlling as hell, and eventually I moved out of the family house. I had to… He was driving me nuts. Jesus, you should have heard the fighting. Rehv meant well, but he’s old-school, very traditional, and that meant he wanted to make all the decisions.”

“He sounds like a male of worth, though.”

“Oh, he absolutely is. But the thing was, after twenty-five years under him, I was just his sister, not me, if that makes any sense.” Bella reached out and took Cormia’s hand. “The best thing I ever did for myself was get away and get to know myself.” A haunted light came into her eyes. “It was not easy, and there were… consequences. But even with what I had to go through, I highly recommend figuring out who you are. I mean, do you know who you are as a person?”

“I am a Chosen.”

“And what else.”

“That’s… all.”

Bella’s hand gave a squeeze. “Give you some thought, Cormia, and start small. What’s your favorite color? What do you like to eat? Are you an early riser? What makes you happy? Sad?”

Cormia looked across the room at the incense burner and thought about all the prayers she knew, prayers that covered for every eventuality. And the chants. And the ceremonies. She had a whole spiritual vocabulary at her disposal, not just of words but of actions.

And that was about it. Or was it?

She shifted her eyes to meet Bella’s. “I know… I like lavender tea roses. And I like to build things in my head.”

Bella smiled and then hid a yawn with the back of her hand. “That, my friend, is a good start. Now, you want to finish Project Runway? With the TV on, you’ll feel less awkward about being in your head while you’re with me, and Fritz won’t be here with dinner for another twenty minutes.”

Cormia eased back into the pillows beside her… friend. Not her sister, her… friend. “Thank you, Bella. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. And I love the incense. Very calming.”

Bella pointed the remote at the flat screen and pushed some buttons, and Tim Gunn appeared in the sewing room, his silver hair as neat as pressed cloth. In front of him, one of the designers was shaking her head and looking at her partially constructed red dress.

“Thank you,” Cormia said again, without looking over.

Bella just reached out and gave Cormia’s hand a squeeze, and they both focused on the screen.

Lash stumbled out of his parents’ home with blood on both his hands. His knees were unhinged, his stride jerky. As he tripped over his own feet, he looked down. Oh, God, the stuff was on his shirt and his boots, too.

Mr. D popped up out of the Focus. “You hurt?”

Lash couldn’t find any words to answer. Limp and shaky, he could barely stand. “It took… so much longer than I thought.”

“Here, now, suh, let’s get you in the car.”

Lash allowed the little guy to take him around to the passenger side and settle him in the seat.

“Whatchu got in your hand there, suh-”

Lash shoved the lesser to the side, bent over, and dry-heaved a couple of times over the ground. Something black and oily came out of his mouth and dribbled down his chin. He wiped it off and looked at it.

Not blood. At least, not the kind… “I killed them,” he said hoarsely.

The lesser knelt down in front of him. “ ’Course you did, and you made your daddy proud. Them bastards ain’t your future. We are.”

Lash tried to stop the scenes from replaying in his head. “My mother screamed the loudest. When she saw me kill my father.”

“Not your father. Not your mother. Animals. Those things were animals in there. Like taking down a deer… or, yeah, like a rat, you know? A vermin.” The slayer shook his head. “They wasn’t you. You just thought they was.”

Lash looked down at his hands. The knife was in one. A chain in the other. “So much blood.”

“Yeah, they done bleed a ton, those vampires.”

There was a long silence. Like, one that lasted for a year.

“Say, there, suh, you got like a pool thing ’round this place?” When Lash nodded, the lesser said, “ ’Round back?” Lash nodded again. “Okay, we gonna take you there and let you wash up. We got you some fresh clothes in the back of this here car and you gonna put ’em on.”

Before Lash knew it, he was in the estate’s pool house under a shower, washing the remnants of his parents away from his skin and watching the red funnel down the drain at his feet. He rinsed off the knife and the chain as well, and when he stepped out to towel off, he put the stainless-steel link around his neck first.

There were two dog tags hanging off the thing. One was his rottweiler’s last license, and the other the record of King’s final rabies shot.

Lash’s change of clothes went on quick enough, and he transferred his father’s wallet from the soiled pants he’d had on to the clean ones Mr. D had gotten for him. He was going to have to keep using the boots, but the stains were browning up, looking less red, which made it more bearable.

He came out of the pool house and found the little slayer sitting on one of the glass-topped tables by the lawn chairs.

The lesser hopped down off it. “You want me to call for the backup now?”

Lash looked at the Tudor. Driving over here, he’d intended to ransack the place. Take anything that was worth a dime. Use a fleet of what the Omega had told him were his troops to strip the place down to its wallpaper and floorboards.

It seemed like the Conan thing to do. The perfect declaration of his new status. You don’t just crush your enemies, you take their horses and burn their huts and hear the lamentations of their women…

Trouble was, he knew what was inside that house. With the bodies of his parents and the doggen in it, he was staring at a mausoleum, and the idea of desecrating the place, of sending in a swarm of lessers to defile it, was too wrong.

“I want to get out of here.”

“We’ll come back then?”

“Just get me the fuck out of here.”

“Whatever you like.”

“Right answer.”

Moving like an old man, Lash walked back around to the front of the house and kept his eyes straight ahead, avoiding the windows he passed.

When he’d slaughtered the doggen in the kitchen, there had been a roasting chicken in the oven, the kind that had one of those little popup thingies that let you know when it was done. After he’d bled out the last of the servants, he’d stopped by the Viking stove and turned the light on. The chicken’s popper had gone off.

He’d opened the slim drawer to the left of the stove and taken out two white-and-red-striped oven mitts that had Williams-Sonoma tags on them. Turning the oven off, he’d slid the roasting pan from the heat and put it on the gas burners. Golden brown with corn-bread stuffing. Giblets were in the bottom, on their way to spicing up the gravy.

He’d turned off the potatoes that were boiling in water, too.

“Get me out of here,” he said as he slid into the car. He had to move his legs inside using his hands.

A moment later, the Focus’s sewing-machine engine turned over, and they started down the driveway. In the dense silence of the shit box, Lash took his father’s wallet out of his fresh cargo pants, flipped the thing open, and checked through the cards. ATM, Visa, Black AmEx…

“Where you want to go?” Mr. D asked as they came to Route 22.