“Shut it, V. For once, just shut your damn mouth.”

Wrath let go of the guy’s leather jacket and stepped back. Jesus Christ, he had to leave or this confrontation was going to escalate into exactly what Butch was bracing himself for.

Wrath jammed a finger in V’s face. “Don’t follow me. We clear? You don’t follow me.”

“You stupid fool,” V said with total exhaustion. “You’re the king. We all must follow you.”

Wrath dematerialized with a curse, his molecules scrambling across town. As he traveled, he couldn’t believe V had thrown Beth and the baby thing under the bus. Or that Beth had shared that kind of private stuff with Doc Jane.

Talk about having your head up your ass, though. V was crazy if he thought Wrath was putting his beloved’s life at risk by impregnating her when she went into her needing a year or so from now. Females died on the birthing table, more often than not.

He would give his own life for the race if he had to, but no fucking way was he putting his shellan’s at risk like that.

And even if she were guaranteed to live through it, he didn’t want his son ending up right where he was…trapped and choiceless, serving his people with a heavy heart as one by one they died in a war he could do little if anything to end.

The St. Francis Hospital complex was a city all unto itself, the sprawling conglomeration of architectural blocks erected from different eras, each component forming its own mini-neighborhood, the parts connected to the whole by a series of winding drives and sidewalks. There was the McMansion-style administration section and the suburban simplicity of the ranch-level outpatient units and the apartment-like inpatient high-rises with their stacked windows. The sole unifying feature on the acreage, which was a godsend, was the red-and-white directional signs with their arrows pointing left and right and straight ahead depending on where you wanted to go.

Xhex’s destination was obvious, however.

The emergency department was the newest addition to the medical center, a state-of-the-art, glass-and-steel facility that was like a brilliantly lit, constantly humming nightclub.

Hard to miss. Hard to lose sight of.

Xhex took form in the shadow of some trees that had been planted in a circle around some benches. As she walked toward the ER’s bank of revolving doors, she was at once in the environment and utterly away from it. Though she altered her path around other pedestrians and smelled the tobacco from the designated smokers’ hut and felt the cold air on her face, she was too distracted by a battle within herself to notice much.

As she entered the facility, her hands went clammy and cold sweat bloomed on her forehead, the fluorescent lights and the white linoleum and the staff milling around in their surgical scrubs paralyzing her.

“You need some help?”

Xhex wheeled around and brought her hands up, snapping into fighting position. The doctor who’d spoken to her held his ground, but seemed surprised.

“Whoa. Easy, there.”

“Sorry.” She dropped her arms and read the lapel of his white coat: MANUEL MANELLO, M.D., CHIEF OF SURGERY. She frowned as she sensed him, smelled him.

“You okay?”

Whatever. None of her biz. “I need to go to the morgue.”

The guy didn’t seem shocked, as if someone with her kind of moves might well know a couple of toe-tagged stiffs. “Yeah, okay, that hallway over there? Take it all the way back. You’ll see a sign for the morgue on the door. Just follow the arrows from there. It’s in the basement.”

“Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.”

The doctor walked out the revolving door she’d come in, and she went through the metal detector he’d just passed through. Not a peep, and she shot a tight smile at the rent-a-cop who was once-overing her.

The knife she carried at the small of her back was ceramic and she’d replaced her metal cilices with ones made of leather and stone. No probs.

“Evenin’, Officer,” she said.

The guy nodded her along, but kept his hand on the butt of his gun.

Down at the end of the hallway, she found the door she was looking for, punched through it, and hit the stairs, tracking the red arrows like the doctor had said. When she hit a stretch of whitewashed concrete wall she figured she was getting close, and she was right. Detective de la Cruz was standing farther down the corridor, next to a pair of double stainless-steel doors marked with the words MORGUE and AUTHORIZED STAFF ONLY.

“Thank you for coming,” he said as she got closer. “We’re going into the viewing room farther down. I’ll just tell them you’re here.”

The detective pushed open one side of the doors, and through the crack she saw a fleet of metal tables with blocks for the heads of the dead.

Her heart stopped, then roared, even though she told herself over and over again that this wasn’t her damage. She wasn’t in there. This wasn’t the past. There was no one with a white coat standing over her doing things “in the name of science.”

And besides, she’d gotten over all of that, like, a decade ago-

A sound started off softly and grew in volume, echoing from behind her. She spun around and froze, fear so strong it stuck her feet to the floor…

But it was just a janitor coming around the corner, pushing a laundry bin the size of a car. He was leaning forward against the rim, throwing his back into it, and he didn’t look up as he passed.

For a moment, Xhex blinked and saw another rolling cart. One full of tangled, unmoving limbs, the legs and arms of the dead bodies overlapping like kindling.

She rubbed her eyes. Okay, she had gotten over what had happened…as long as she wasn’t in a clinic or a hospital.

Jesus Christ…she had to get the fuck out of here.

“You okay to do this?” de la Cruz asked from right next to her.

She swallowed hard, and manned up, doubting the guy would understand that what was spooking her was a pile of sheets on a ride, not the corpse she was about to see. “Yup. Can we go in now?”

He stared at her for a moment. “Listen, you want to take a minute? Have some coffee?”

“Nope.” When he didn’t move, she headed to the door marked PRIVATE VIEWING herself.

De la Cruz scooted in front of her and opened the way. The anteroom beyond had three black plastic chairs and two doors and it smelled like chemical strawberries, the result of formaldehyde mixing with a Glade PlugIn. Over in the corner, away from the seats, there was a short table with a pair of paper cups half-filled with what looked like mud-puddle coffee.

Apparently, you had pacers and sitters, and if you were a sitter, you were expected to balance your vending-machine caffeine on your knee.

As she looked around, the emotions that had been felt in the space lingered, like mold left after fetid water. Bad things happened here for people who walked through that door. Hearts were broken. Lives were shattered. Worlds were never the same.

Coffee was not what you should feed these folks before they did what they’d come here to do, she thought. They were nervous enough.

“This way.”

De la Cruz took her into a narrow room that was wallpapered in flocked claustrophobia as far as she was concerned: The thing was pint-size with almost no ventilation, had fluorescent lights that hiccuped and flickered, and its one window hardly looked out over a meadow of wildflowers.

The curtain hanging on the far side of the glass was pulled across, blocking the view.

“You okay?” the detective asked again.

“Can we just do this.”

De la Cruz leaned to the left and hit a doorbell button. At the sound of the buzz, the drapes parted down the middle in a slow swish, revealing a body that was covered by the same kind of white sheet that had been in the laundry bin. A human male in pale green scrubs stood at the head, and when the detective nodded, the man reached forward and folded the shroud back.