Wrath let his head fall back. “I keep thinking there’s a better way of dealing with this. I hate turning you into a secretary, Saxton.”

The male shrugged over his legal pad. “I don’t mind it a’tall. Anything to get the job done.”

“On that note, what’s our next one?”

Saxton took a piece of paper out of a thick folder. “Right. So this gentlemale wants to take on another shellan—”

Beth rolled her eyes. “What, like, Sister Wives, the vampire edition?”

“It is lawful.” Saxton shook his head. “Although frankly, as a gay male, I don’t know why anybody would want one, much less multiple—oh, I mean but for your good self, my queen. You would be worth making an exception for.”

“Watch it, solicitor,” Wrath growled.

“Kidding,” the solicitor shot back.

Beth smiled at how comfortable they’d become with each other. “Wait, so is the two-wives thing common?”

Saxton lifted one shoulder in an elegant shrug. “It used to be more prevalent when the population was larger. Now, we have fewer of everything: matings, births, deaths.”

Wrath put his lips by her ear. “Can you stay and have my break with me?”

A roll of his hips suggested his brain had taken a U-ie into horizontal territory. Or vertical—God knew he was strong enough to hold her off the floor for however long he wanted.

As her body began to warm … she thought of the ice cream she’d left in the hall. “Can you give me an hour? I have to—”

A loud crash out on the second-floor landing brought everyone’s heads around.

“What the fuck is that?” Wrath gritted.

Downtown in that alley, Xcor crouched and covered his bullet wound as popping sounds rang out all around him and screeching tires announced the arrival of more gang members.

Cover. He needed cover—now. These humans did not care about him, but their gunfire was thick as a downpour and as unpredictable and undiscriminating as a stampede of bulls.

Leaping backward, he threw his body against the building, and the pain in his shoulder was a stunner. No time to dwell on it. Looking to the left … the right …

The only thing he saw was a door about fifteen feet away, and he dropped to the ground and rolled to it, outing his own gun in the process. Discharging two shots into the steel locking mechanism, he kicked hard and dove into the darkness beyond.

The air inside was fetid … and sweet.

Sickly sweet. Like the rot of death.

Rancid … like a lesser.

As he shut himself in, shots continued to be fired, and it wasn’t going to be long before sirens would ring out. The question was, how many dead, how many wounded, and would any of that bunch of rats without tails find their way in here?

Alas, those silly questions would have to be answered after he figured out why this place smelled of his enemy.

Taking out his penlight, he flashed it around from his position on the dirty floor. The commercial kitchen had clearly been abandoned, spiderwebs hanging from the industrial fan over the stove and the empty racks above the counters … dust having settled on all surfaces … the detritus of a move hastily executed littering the way to the door.

Getting to his feet, Xcor panned his illumination in fat circles. Empty, tipped-over buckets that had once held commercial portions of sauces and yogurts cluttered a prep station, and topless tubs still full of mustard and ketchup revealed contents that had turned into solids, long since past rot and into a state of mummification. Farther in, a lineup of trays by a rusty industrial dishwasher had an errant spoon or fork in them, and opaque, half-broken glassware sat as if waiting for a ghostly washer to send them through the machine.

Crunching through the remnants of white china plates, he followed the scent that had commanded his attention.

The Lessening Society was made up of humans recruited into a war against vampires, weaklings transformed out of their pitiful state by the Omega—the side effect of which was a permanent stench somewhere between a two-day-old dead deer and spoiled milk.

One could always find the enemy by one’s nose …

The kitchen’s meat locker was in the far corner, its prison-worthy door cracked open, its interior another pitch-black slice of God only knew what.

As he reached forward for the latch, his skin glowed white in the flashlight beam, and the creak of him widening the gap was loud enough to make his ears hum. A mad-dash scattering of tiny paws suggested actual rats were fleeing his arrival, and he felt them go over the tops of his combat boots.

The stink was enough to make his eyes water.

The beam entered first.

And there it was.

Hanging in the center of the walk-in unit, suspended on a hook through the back of the neck, a human male was doing an excellent bovine imitation.

At least, Xcor assumed it was a male, going by the pants and the leather jacket. Facial identification was impossible: The rats were eating him from the crown down, using the chain that was keeping everything up off the floor as a motorway to get to their fragrant meal.

So this was tragically not his enemy, but an actual dead body.

Such a disappointment. He had been hoping for something that pertained to himself. Instead, only more humans—

The crashing sound of somebody stumbling into the darkness had him clicking off his flashlight, his senses going on high alert.

Even with the stench from his friend with the meat-hook bow tie, the copper scent of fresh blood preceded whoever it was. As did the grunting of the wounded.

Awww. Someone had a boo-boo.

The flailing continued as sirens announced the Caldwell police’s arrival—but the sounds were muffled, suggesting that the new arrival to the kitchen had had the presence of mind to shut them in together.

“Fuck!”

His visitor sent some of those empty plastic containers flying as he ran into the counter. Then there was more cursing. A groan as if he were laying himself down, likely on that stretch of stainless steel. Then shallow panting.

Losing patience with the entire drama, Xcor stepped free of the refrigerator. Unlike the injured gang member, he had some idea of the layout, and he managed to zero in on the guy, thanks to his hearing and a memory of where the center island was.

Things would have been much easier with sight, however. Apart from the obvious benefits of orientation, he did not enjoy the weightless feeling that came with blindness, nor the fact that he had to rely on his ears and sense of smell to navigate. There was also the reality that anything could be in front of his feet, ready to trip him up.

But he made it over toward the stricken human.

“You are not alone,” Xcor drawled into the darkness.

“What! Oh, God! Who—”

“Do I sound like one of your own?” He was careful to roll the R a little longer than he usually would, just in case his Old Language accent was not perfectly clear.

More breathing. Heavy, very heavy. Accompanied by the acrid smell of true terror.

“You humans…” Xcor took a couple more steps forward, no longer bothering to muffle the fall of his boots. “The problem with you is that you have no true enemies. You fight amongst yourselves over the blocks of city streets or the lines of countries, because there is nothing external to unite you. My kind, conversely? We have an enemy that necessitates a certain cohesion.”

Not enough to forestall his crown-ish ambitions, however.

At this point, the human started talking gibberish. Or mayhap that was a prayer of some sort?

Such weakness. It was deplorable—and exploitable as a moral imperative.

Xcor flicked on his flashlight.

In its beam, the gang member jerked around, his bloodstained body wiping clean a section of the countertop.

Plasma … as good as Windex, evidently.