It would lead him down a road that would ultimately devour what little conscience he had to begin with.

He began to play his own version of God, tinkering with human DNA. He recruited scientists and doctors and most important, hunters, whom he sent out into the world to find evidence of the mystical creatures known as the Ikati. He found, to his great surprise, the Church had been hunting the same creatures for millennia, using fanatical assassins who called themselves Expurgari, or purifiers. The irony wasn’t lost on Thorne that he and the most powerful religious institution on the planet had such a thing in common, even if their endgames were different. The Church wanted only to exterminate the Ikati. Thorne wanted to put them to good use, then exterminate them.

So the godless man and the pope became business partners. It didn’t work out so well for the pontiff—he was slaughtered on live television by one of the creatures with a taste for dramatic flair who’d infiltrated the Vatican. Then the Expurgari were slaughtered en masse when they landed in the Amazon the day of the Flash. Shortsighted to put all their eggs in one basket, so to speak. But the Church wasn’t known for doing things by halves. Good/evil, black/white, saved/damned . . . their entire history was built on a philosophy Thorne liked to call Full Bore or Bust. You were in, or you were out. Shades of gray did not exist, and so the Expurgari went the way of the dinosaur. It wasn’t as if they had an army of willing new recruits banging down their doors, either; by that point, the Church was bleeding the faithful like a hemophiliac after a bad fall.

But for Thorne, things had worked out well. He’d not only captured thousands of the creatures, including their Queen, he’d learned how to harvest their stem cells and manufacture a host of medicines that helped everything from acne to cancer.

It was far too late for his family, though. By the time he’d made the breakthrough, his wife and daughter were long gone.

It was the only failure of his life. In his darkest moments, Thorne sometimes wished there was a God, so he could curse Him, so there could be someone else to blame. But there was no one else. The blame was all his.

Regret can play strange games with a man’s mind.

“What’s the update on the team who went to Wales?” said Thorne, seated behind his massive desk in his massive office, staring at a massive screen on which was projected a massive image of the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee. What used to be Tennessee, the state where he was born.

Standing at attention on the other side of his desk, his third-in-command answered. “No update, sir. The signal went offline just after the distress call two days ago, and no contact has been made since.”

Thorne wasn’t exactly sure where Three was looking. His cast eye inevitably wandered off like some wayward pet. Combined with the ingrained habit of a former Marine to avoid direct eye contact with his superior, the walleye lent Three a furtive air that Thorne found alternatively fascinating and irritating. Topped by a thatch of wiry black hair, his head was oblong in the extreme, and his mouth was filled with an array of discolored and disheveled teeth. He had a nose that looked as if it belonged on a human-elephant hybrid. Overall, the effect was startling, and Thorne found himself wondering on occasions such as this why he’d never invented a pill to cure ugliness.

“No contact,” mused Thorne, “means no survivors.”

“A probable outcome, yes, sir.”

Thorne strummed his fingers atop the polished wood desk. He’d read the transcript of the helicopter pilot’s last transmission, and was intrigued by how quickly and dramatically the weather had changed during the flight. One minute, their equipment registered nothing. A clear day. Sunny skies. The next minute: a storm of biblical proportion.

Interesting. Also interesting was the loss of the collar’s signal immediately after the pilot’s last transmission. Granted, the signal had been weak and intermittent, possibly a decoy or a trap, but . . .

“Three, when was the last time we did a scan of the islands?”

Surprise registered in Three’s left eye. The other eye seemed to be perusing a Blue Period Picasso on the far wall, and was indifferent. “I believe the last registered sat scan of the British Isles was six years ago, sir. It was clear; no bipedal life forms detected.”

“Six years!” repeated Thorne, displeased. A lot could change in six years. Scanning technology, for instance. “Run another scan, Three,” he said, rising from his desk. “Divert the satellites from the nearest assets. I want the results back no later than zero six hundred.”

“Yes, sir!” barked Three. He saluted, executed a spin on his heel, and marched out of the office with a stiff-legged gait that would have made Hitler proud. Thorne tried not to roll his eyes. It was men like Three, after all, recruited from the various militaries of the world, who made such wonderfully unquestioning employees.

Men like his second-in-command, Two, who lay broken and burned in a hospital bed, fighting for his life.

Thorne sighed. Casualties, always casualties in war. Nothing to be done about it.

He leaned over and depressed the button for the intercom on his desk. “Yes, sir?” came the eager voice of his male secretary.

“Bring subject four-nine-six-two into the interrogation room, along with the Breast Ripper.”

The secretary’s voice didn’t waver. “Yes, sir!” he said cheerfully, and Thorne congratulated himself on hiring a man to the position. He doubted a woman would have quite the same reaction to those words.

Whistling, Sebastian Thorne left his office, on his way to another invigorating chat with the Ikati’s formidable, and quite delectable, Queen.

Perhaps today she’d have something useful to tell him.

If not, there was always tomorrow.

“This can’t be right. There’s nothing here,” said Magnus, frowning at the GPS coordinates glowing softly green on the windscreen display of the motorcycle. He looked up and around, and Lu followed his gaze.

They’d passed the deserted Czech border fifteen minutes ago, and were now headed south on the 6, a major north-south artery through Austria that connected with the defunct A22, which, if followed, would lead them directly into the heart of New Vienna. The GPS coordinates given to them by Nola had them navigating off the highway, however, onto a small collector road in what used to be perhaps an agricultural area, due to its parcels of flat land divided by even smaller roads than the one they’d followed off the highway. Now it was utterly desolate, with nary a leaf in sight, bald and ugly in the dim carmine light cast from the lurking cloud cover. Far in the distance, away on the flat horizon, Lu spied the glow of the grow fields outside New Vienna, and a shiver of dread coursed down her spine.

“There was nothing where we landed in France, either,” Lu reminded him.

“Yes, but Jack warned me about that; I knew Nola would be coming. I thought these coordinates would take us directly to the last safe house.” He was frowning, on edge, not liking the ambiguity of the situation. Lu had to agree. She felt like a sitting duck out here in the middle of nowhere.

“Well,” she said lightly, squinting up at the sky, clotted as congealed blood, “maybe we’ll get a sign.”

As if on cue, a pair of headlights cut through the darkness, perhaps a kilometer away.

“Magnus!”

“I see it.” He’d gone still as stone, his gaze sharp and calculating. “All right. There’s only one car. Most likely it’s the rendezvous, but just in case,” his gaze flicked to hers, “keep frosty.”