At the razor’s edge of dawn, just before the light began to gather in the eastern sky, Wrath took form in the dense woods at the northern side of the Brotherhood’s mountain. No one had showed back at Hunter-bred, and the day’s imminent rays had forced him to leave.

Small sticks cracked loudly under his shitkickers, the thin pine fingers brittle in the cold. There was not yet snow to muffle the sounds, but he could smell it in the air, feel that frosty bite deep in his sinuses.

The hidden entrance to the Black Dagger Brotherhood’s sanctum sanctorum was at the ass end of a cave, far in the back. His hands located the trigger on the stone door by feel, and the heavy portal slid behind the rock wall. Stepping onto smooth black marble pavers, he followed them forward as the door closed behind him.

At his will, torches flamed up on either side of him, extending far, far, far into the distance and illuminating the massive iron gates that had been installed in the late eighteenth century, when the Brotherhood had turned this cave into the Tomb.

As he got closer, the gate’s thick slats seemed to his blurry vision to be a lineup of armed sentries, the flickering flames animating what did not in fact move. With his mind, he parted the two halves and continued on, down a long hall fitted from floor to forty-foot ceiling with shelving.

Lesser jars of all types and kinds were stacked side by side, a display that marked generations of kills made by the Brotherhood. The oldest jars were nothing but crude, hand-thrown vases that had been brought over from the Old Country. With each yard farther, the vessels grew more modern, until you got to the next set of gates and found mass-produced shit made in China and sold at Target.

There wasn’t a lot of space left on the shelves and he was depressed by that. He had helped build with his own hands this repository of the enemy’s dead, along with Darius and Tohrment and Vishous, the bunch of them laboring for a month straight, working during the day, sleeping on the marble pavers. He had been the one to decide how far down into the earth to go, and he had extended the shelving corridor yards and yards past what he had thought was needed. When he and his brothers had finished erecting everything, and had stacked the older jars, he’d been convinced that they wouldn’t need so much storage space. Surely by the time they had filled even three-quarters of this, the war would be over.

And here he was, centuries later, trying to find enough room.

With a dreaded sense of portent, Wrath measured with his bad eyes the last remaining spaces on the original set of shelving. It was hard not to take it as evidence that the war was coming to an end, that the vampire equivalent of the finite Mayan calendar was on these rough-hewn stone walls.

It was not with victory’s glow of success that he envisioned the final jar being set up next to the others.

They were either going to run out of race to protect or run out of Brothers to do the protecting.

Wrath took the three jars out of his jacket and placed them together in a little group; then he stepped back.

He had been responsible for a lot of these jars. Before he’d become king.

“I already knew that you have been out fighting.”

Wrath’s head shot around at the sound of the Scribe Virgin’s commanding voice. Her Holiness was hovering just inside the iron gates, her black robes about a foot off the stone floor, her light shining out from beneath the hems.

It had once been blindingly bright, that glow of hers. Now it barely cast shadows.

Wrath turned back to the jars. “So that’s what V meant. About pulling the trigger on me.”

“My son came to me, yes.”

“But you already knew. And that’s not a question, by the way.”

“Yeah, she hates those.”

Wrath looked over and watched V step through the gates.

“Well, check this shit out,” Wrath uttered. “The mother and son reunion…is only a moment away.” He let the paraphrased lyric drift. “Not.”

The Scribe Virgin came forward, moving slowly past the jars. Back in the old days-or, hell, as recently as the year before-she would have assumed control of the conversation. Now she just floated along.

V made a disgusted noise, like he’d waited long enough for his Mommie Dearest to no-more-wire-hanger his king, and wasn’t impressed that she hadn’t manned up. “Wrath, you didn’t let me finish.”

“And you think I will now?” He reached up and fingered the lip of one of the three jars he’d added to the collection.

“You will let him finish,” the Scribe Virgin said, her tone disinterested.

Vishous strode forward, his shitkickers solid against the floor he himself had helped lay. “My point was, if you’re going to go out, do it with backup. And tell Beth. Otherwise you’re a liar…and you have a better chance of leaving her a widow. Damn it to hell, ignore my vision, fine. But at least be practical.”

Wrath paced up and back, thinking that the setting for this convo was too fucking perfect: He was surrounded by evidence of the war.

Eventually, he stopped in front of the three jars he’d gotten tonight. “Beth thinks that I’m going upstate to meet with Phury. You know, to work with the Chosen. The lying sucks. But the idea we only have four Brothers in the field? Worse.”

There was a long silence, during which the chattering flicker of the torch flames was the only sound.

V broke the quiet. “I think you need to have a meeting with the Brother hood, and come clean with Beth. Like I said, if you’re going to fight, fight. But do it with full disclosure, true? That way you’re not out alone. And neither are any of us. Right now when rotation hits, someone ends up fighting without a partner. Your coming in legit would solve that.”

Wrath had to smile. “Christ, if I’d thought you would agree with me, I might have said something sooner.” He looked over at the Scribe Virgin. “But what about the laws. Tradition.”

The mother of the race turned to face him and in a distant voice said, “So much has changed. What is one more. Be well, Wrath, son of Wrath, and Vishous of mine womb.”

The Scribe Virgin disappeared like breath in the cold night, dissipating into the ether as if she’d never been.

Wrath leaned back against the shelving, and as his head started to pound, he popped up his sunglasses and rubbed his useless eyes. When he stopped, he shut his lids and grew as still as the stone that surrounded him.

“You look beat,” V murmured.

Yes, he was, wasn’t he. And how sad was that.

Drug dealing was a very lucrative business.

In his private office at ZeroSum, Rehvenge went over the night’s receipts at his desk, meticulously checking off the amounts to the penny. iAm was doing the same over at Sal’s Restaurant, and the first order of business at each nightfall was to meet here and compare results.

Most of the time they came up with the same total. When they didn’t, he defered to iAm.

Between the alcohol, drugs, and sex, gross receipts were over two hundred and ninety thousand for ZeroSum alone. Twenty-two people worked at the club on salary, including ten bouncers, three bartenders, six prostitutes, Trez, iAm, and Xhex; costs for them all ran about seventy-five grand a night. Bookies and authorized floor dealers, meaning those drug pushers he allowed to sell on his premises, were on commission, and whatever was left after they’d taken their cut was his. Also, every week or so, he or Xhex and the Moors executed major product deals with a select number of distributors who had their own drug networks either in Caldwell or in Manhattan.

All told, and after personnel costs, he had roughly two hundred thousand a night to pay the cost of the drugs and alcohol that he sold, cover heat and electricity and capital improvements, and take care of the cleaning crew of seven that came in at five a.m.