Which would both cut off cardiac function as the peritoneal sac flooded and fatally compromise blood pressure.

It was the kind of catastrophic injury that required immediate surgical intervention—and even assuming you had all the necessary technology and equipment available in a sterile clinical situation, success wasn’t on lock.

“V! We gotta move him—”

Bullets sizzled by and they both hit the ground. And with a terrible mental recalculation, V’s processing unit came to an untenable conclusion: Rhage’s life or theirs.

Fuck! I did this to him, V thought.

If he hadn’t told the brother about the vision, Rhage wouldn’t have run out early and he would have been more in control during the fight—

Vishous upped his muzzles and dropped three slayers who were closing in, while Butch twisted on the ground and did the same in the opposite direction.

“Rhage, stay with us,” V grunted as he popped out the empty clips and refilled the butts of his guns one after the other. “Rhage, you’ve got to—shit!”

More shooting. And he was hit in the goddamn arm.

As his own blood flowed, he ignored it, his brain reengaging to find a solution that didn’t equal Rhage on a funeral fucking pyre. He could call his Jane in, because she couldn’t be killed. But she couldn’t perform open-heart surgery here, for fuck’s sake. What if—

The flash of light was so bright, so sudden, that he wondered who the hell was wasting time stabbing a slayer back to the Omega—

The second blast of illumination had him cranking around and looking down at Rhage. Oh . . . shit. Twin shafts of brilliant light streamed out of the brother’s eye sockets, lasering up into the sky in parallel streams that could have bull’s-eyed the face of the moon.

“Fuuuuuck!”

Total change of plan. The motherfucking theme of the night.

V hauled over to Butch and peeled him off Rhage. “Move it!”

“What are you doing—Holy Mary, mother of God!”

The pair of them broke out in a crouched run, their heads ducked, their legs ripping across the open area as they jumped over writhing lessers and varied their course to make themselves more difficult targets. When they reached the closest abandoned classroom building, they one-after-the-othered around the corner and went into auto-cover, V taking the front, Butch on the back.

With his chest pumping, Vishous leaned around. Out in the center of the clearing, the change was torturing Rhage’s downed body, his arms and legs contorting as his torso jerked and twisted, the beast emerging from the flesh of the male, the great dragon breaking free from the DNA it was forced to share.

If Rhage hadn’t died out there already, this was surely going to kill him.

And yet there was no way of stopping the transformation. The Scribe Virgin had embedded the curse into every single one of Rhage’s cells, and when the thing came out, the process was a train that no one could slow down or stop.

Death was going to take care of the problem.

Rhage’s death . . . was going to stop all this.

V closed his eyes and screamed inside.

A second later, he popped his lids and thought, No fucking way. No fucking way he was going to let this happen.

“Butch,” he barked. “I gotta go.”

“What? Where are you—”

That was the last thing Vishous heard as he up and disappeared.

FOUR

No pain.

There was no pain from the gunshot in Rhage’s chest. And that was his first clue that shit was critical. Wounds that hurt tended not to be the kind that put you into shock. No sensation? Probably a good indication, along with the fact that he’d been blown off his shitkickers and the hit was right at his breastbone, that he was in mortal danger.

Blink. Try to breathe. Blink.

Blood in his mouth, thick in his throat . . . a rising tide that went against his efforts to get oxygen down to his lungs. Hearing had been reduced to a muffled version of same, as if he’d lain back in a bathtub and the water level had come up over both his ears. Sight was in and out, the night sky above him revealed and obscured as things failed and kick-started again. Breath was getting harder and harder to draw, a gathering weight settling on his chest, first like a duffel bag, then a linebacker . . . now in station wagon territory.

Fast, this was happening very fast.

Mary, he thought. Mary?

His brain spit out his shellan’s name—maybe he was even saying it?—as if his mate could hear him somehow.

Mary!

Panic flooded into his bloodstream and poured right into his rib cage—along with the plasma he was no doubt leaking all over the fuck. His only thought, more than of his death or the battle or even his brothers’ safety, was . . . oh, God, let the Scribe Virgin hold up her side of the bargain.

Let him not end up in the Fade alone.

Mary was supposed to be able to leave the earth with him. She was supposed to be allowed to follow him when he went unto the Fade. That was part of the arrangement he’d made with the Scribe Virgin: He kept his curse, his Mary survived her leukemia, and because his mate was infertile from her cancer treatments, she got to stay with him for however long she wanted.

You’re going to fucking die tonight.

Just as he heard Vishous’s voice in his head, the brother’s face shot into his vision, replacing the heavens. V’s mouth was moving, that goatee shifting around as he enunciated his words. Rhage tried to bat the male away, but his arms weren’t listening to his brain.

Last thing he needed was someone else dying. Although as the son of the Scribe Virgin, V was probably the least likely to worry about something as vanilla as popping his cog. But as Butch, the number three in the troika, arrived on a slide-in and started yapping, too? Now, there was a guy with no Grim Reaper hall pass—

Shooting. Both of them started shooting.

No! Rhage ordered them. Tell Mary I love her and leave me the fuck here before you get—

V recoiled as if some kind of lead had found something of his.

And that was when it happened.

The scent of his brother’s blood was what did it. The second that copper sting hit Rhage’s nose, the beast awoke within its cage of his flesh and began to come out, the change initiating internal earthquakes that snapped his bones and shredded his internal organs and transformed him into something else entirely.

Now there was pain.

As well as the sense that this effort was a waste of fucking time. If he was dying, the dragon was just taking his place at the crap table.

“Tell Mary to come with me,” Rhage shouted as he went completely blind. “Tell her . . .”

But he had the sense that his brothers had already taken off, and thank God for it: V’s blood was no longer on the air and there was no reply coming back at him.

Even as his life force ebbed, he did his best to go with the flow as the ripping and tearing racked his dying body. Even if he’d had the energy, fighting that tide was wasted effort, and didn’t make things any easier. Still, as his mind and soul, his own emotions and consciousness, receded, it was eerie that he didn’t know whether it was the death, or the transformation that was backseating him.

As the beast’s nervous system took over completely and the sensations of pain disappeared, Rhage retreated into a metaphysical float zone, like who and what he was had been put in a snow globe up on the time continuum’s shelf.

Only in this instance, he had the sense he would not be taken back down.

And it was funny. Each and every entity that had consciousness and an awareness of its own mortality inevitably wondered, from time to time, about the when and where, the how and why of its demise. Rhage had been guilty of that morbid drift of thought himself, especially during his pre-Mary period, when he’d been alone with nothing but a catalog of his failures and weaknesses to keep him company during the dense, deserted hours of daylight.