“Jesus Ch-” A grunt cut off the swearing.

Wrath poked his head out of the window and whispered, “You’re supposed to be a good Catholic. Isn’t that blasphemy?”

Butch’s tone was like someone had pissed out a fire on his bed. “You just threw half a car at me with nothing but a quote from Mrs. fucking Doubtfire.”

“Put on your big-girl pants and deal.”

As the cop cursed his way over to the Escalade, which he’d managed to park under some pine trees, Wrath headed back to the closet

When Butch returned, Wrath heaved again. “Two more.”

There was another grunt and a rattle. “Fuck me.”

“Not on your life.”

“Fine. Fuck you.”

When the last crate was cradled like a sleeping baby in Butch’s arms, Wrath leaned out. “Buh-bye.”

“You don’t want a ride back to the mansion?”

“No.”

There was a pause, as if Butch were waiting for the lowdown on how Wrath intended to spend what little was left of the night hours.

“Go home,” he told the cop.

“What do I tell the others?”

“That you’re a fucking genius and you found the gun crates when you were out hunting.”

“You’re bleeding.”

“I’m getting sick of people telling me that.”

“Then word up, stop being an ass and go see Doc Jane.”

“Didn’t I already ‘bye’ you?”

“Wrath-”

Wrath shut the window, went over to the dresser, and put the three jars in his jacket.

The Lessening Society wanted to claim the hearts of their dead as much as the Brothers did, so as soon as the slayers heard a man of theirs was down, they reconnoitered and headed to the lesser’s addy. Surely one of those bastards he’d killed tonight had called for backup in the process. They had to know.

They had to come back here.

Wrath chose the best defensive position there was, which was in the back bedroom, and angled his click-click-bang-bang at the front door.

He wasn’t leaving until he absolutely had to.

Caldwell’s outskirts were either farm or forest, and the farms likewise came in two varieties, being either dairy or corn-with dairy predominating, given the short growing season. The forests were also binary, with a choice between the pines that led up the flanks of mountains or the oaks that led into the spun-off swamps of the Hudson River.

No matter what the landscape, naturalis or industrialis, you had roads that were less traveled and houses spaced by miles and neighbors who were just as reclusive and trigger-happy as someone reclusive and trigger-happy himself could want.

Lash, son of the Omega, sat at a beat-up kitchen table in a single-room hunting cabin in one of the stretches of forest. Across the weathered pine surface in front of him he’d spread every Lessening Society financial record he’d been able to find or print out or call up on his laptop.

This was such bullshit.

He reached over and picked up an Evergreen Bank statement that he’d read a dozen times. The Society’s largest account had one hundred twenty-seven thousand five hundred forty-two dollars and fifteen cents in it. The others, which were housed among six other banks, including Glens Falls National and Farrell Bank amp; Trust, had balances of between twenty bucks and twenty thousand.

If this was all the Society had, they were teetering on the crumbling ledge of bankruptcy.

The raids over the summer had yielded some good resellables in the form of looted antiques and silver, but realizing those funds was proving complicated, because it involved a lot of human contact. And there had been some financial accounts that had been seized, but again, siphoning off money from human banks was a complicated mess. As he’d learned the hard way.

“Y’all want some more coffee?”

Lash looked up at his number two and thought it was a miracle Mr. D was still around. When Lash had first entered this world, reborn by his true father, the Omega, he had been lost, the enemy now his family. Mr. D had been his guide, although like all tourist maps, Lash had assumed the bastard would wear out his usefulness as the new locale was internalized by the driver.

Not so. The little Texan who had been Lash’s entrée was now his disciple.

“Yeah,” Lash said, “and how about food?”

“Y’sir. Got you some good ol’ fatback bacon, right chere, and that cheese you like.”

The coffee was poured nice and slow into Lash’s mug. Sugar was next, and the spoon used to stir made a soft clinking sound. Mr. D would have cheerfully wiped Lash’s ass if asked, but he wasn’t a pussy. The little fucker could kill like no one’s business, the Chucky doll of slayers. Great short-order cook, too. Made pancakes that were a mile high and fluffy as a pillow.

Lash checked his watch. The Jacob amp; Co. had diamonds all over it, and in the dim light from the computer screen they were a thousand points of light. But the thing was a replacement faker he’d gotten off eBay. He wanted another real one except…holy Christ…he couldn’t afford it. Sure, he’d kept all the accounts of his “parents” after he’d killed the pair of vampires who’d raised him as their own, but though there was a good load of green in those baskets, he was leery of spending any of it on frivolous shit.

He had bills to pay. Like for mortgages and weapons and ammo and clothes and rent and car leases. Lessers didn’t eat, but they consumed a lot of resources, and the Omega didn’t care about cash. But then, he lived in hell and had the ability to conjure out of thin air anything from a hot meal to the Liberace cloaks he liked to jack his black shadow body into.

Lash hated to admit it, but he had the feeling his true father was a little light in the loafers. No real man would be caught dead in that sparkly shit.

As he lifted his coffee cup, his watch glimmered and he frowned.

Whatever, that was a status symbol.

“Your boys are late,” he bitched.

“They be comin’.” Mr. D went over and opened the seventies-era refrigerator. Which not only had a squeaking door and was the color of a rotten olive, but drooled like a dog.

This was ri-fucking-diculous. They needed to upgrade their cribs. Or if not all, at least one for his HQ.

At least the coffee was perfect, although he kept that to himself. “I don’t like waiting.”

“They be comin’, don’tchu worry. Three eggs in your omelet?”

“Four.”

As a series of crack and splits radiated through the cabin, Lash tapped the tip of his Waterman on the Evergreen statement. Expenses for the Society, including cell phone bills, Internet hookups, rent/mortgages, weapons, clothes, and cars ran easily fifty grand a month.

When he’d first been getting a feel for his new role, he’d been damn sure someone in the ranks was peeling skin off the apple. But he’d been watching things carefully for months, and there was no Kenneth Lay going on that he could find. It was a simple matter of accounting, not fudging the books or embezzlement: Costs were higher than revenues. Period.

He was doing his best to arm his troops, even stooping so low as to buy four crates of guns from bikers he’d met in jail over the summer. But it wasn’t enough. His men needed better than rehabbed Red Ryders to take out the Brotherhood.

And while he was at the wish list, he had to have more men. He’d thought the bikers would be a good pool to recruit from, but they were proving too cohesive. Based on his dealings with them, his intuition told him he had to bring them all on or none-because sure as shit if he cherry-picked, the ones chosen would return to their clubhouse and tell their buddies about their fun new job killing vampires. And if he took them all, then he was running the risk of their splitting off from his authority.

One-by-one recruiting was going to be the best strategy, but it wasn’t like he’d had time to do any of it. Between the training sessions with his father-which, in spite of his issues with Daddy-o’s wardrobe, were proving monstrously helpful-and his monitoring the persuasion camps and looting repositories, and trying to get his men to focus on the job at hand, he had not even an hour left in the day.