No, it was a parkland or such.

No . . . it was something else.

When at last a left was taken into a property of sorts, he could not tell where he was. A rather lot of empty, overgrown land . . . a rather lot of abandoned buildings. A school? Yes, he thought.

But the place was not for humans anymore.

The scent of lessers was in the air to such a penetrating degree that his body responded to the layers of stench, adrenaline pumping, instincts firing up and ready to fight—

The first of the mutilated slayers presented themselves in a scattering across the thick undergrowth, and as the vehicle continued onward, more and more appeared.

Closing his eyes, he calmed himself and dematerialized to the flat roof of a five-story building up ahead of where the truck eventually stopped. Stepping carefully over fallen branches and banks of decaying leaves floating in cold puddles of water, Xcor worked his way over to the edge. The true scale of what had to have been a massive attack on the Lessening Society was evidenced by the acres of carnage in the very center of campus: A great swath of trampled grasses and trees was layered with body parts, half-dead, semi-alive slayers, and a tidal wave’s worth of the Omega’s black, oily blood.

It was like a depiction of Dhund itself.

“The Brotherhood,” he said unto the wind.

That was the only explanation. And as he considered what their attack strategy had to have been, he was envious that they had been given the gift of this battle. How he wished it had been for him and his soldiers—

Xcor wrenched around.

Something was moving on the roof behind him. Speaking. Cursing.

In the darkness, and with utter silence, he withdrew a steel blade from his chest holster and sank low on his thighs. Stalking forward in the cold gusts, he tracked the sounds that he was downwind of and tested the air. It was a human.

“—footage! No! I’m telling you, it’s some shit!”

Xcor loomed behind the feeble rat without a tail, and remained unnoticed as the human spoke into his cell phone.

“I’m up on a roof—I caught the fuckin’ thing on vid! No, Chooch, T.J. and Soz took off, but I came up here—it was a dragon—what? No, Jo, the LSD wore off this morning—no! If it’s a flashback, why did I just post it on YouTube?”

Xcor raised his knife over his shoulder.

“No! I’m serious I—”

The human shut up as Xcor struck him on the back of the head with the hilt of his weapon. And as the body went limp and sagged to the side, Xcor took the phone and put it up to his ear.

A female voice was saying, “Dougie? Dougie! What happened?”

Xcor ended the connection, put the phone in his jacket, and leaned over the lip of the roof. The three lessers he’d come in with hadn’t made it far from their food truck. They seemed dumbfounded by what they were surrounded by, incapable of responding given the magnitude of the losses.

Best he address them first before they took off.

Stepping over the collapsed male, he jumped off the building, dematerializing as he fell, and rematerializing on the ground before he crash-landed and killed himself.

The slayers saw him, and that was exactly what he wanted.

It would make the killing of them a bit more of a challenge.

As the three raced to get back into their truck, he ghosted himself on top of the one in the rear, stabbing it in the chest on a reach around and sending it back to the Omega on a brilliant flash and a pop! Next, he lunged forward and grabbed the second one around the shoulders, wrenching it off balance and slitting its throat before casting it aside. The third he captured by the hair just as it attempted to shut itself in the truck on the driver’s side.

“No, mate,” he growled as he jerked the thing off its feet. “All for one, one for all.”

The lesser landed flat on its back, and before it could respond, Xcor drove his boot into its face, crushing the bone structure, collapsing the features, rendering the eyes nothing but loose pools of fluid.

Xcor looked over his shoulder. It would be unlike the Brotherhood to leave a mess like this for humans to find. Even though the campus was abandoned, soon enough, random Homo sapiens of the youthful variety would breach the untidy landscape. Just as the one on that roof had.

Something must have happened during the course of the fighting. A critical injury, perhaps, that precluded clean-up, at least in the short term—

Xcor never saw it coming. Never heard a thing.

One moment, he was fully cognizant of his environs.

And the next, someone or something had done unto him what he had wrought upon that human on the roof.

He didn’t even have time for a last thought, so decisive was the blow to his head.

* * *

Vishous lowered his arm slowly as he stared down at the massive male who had just collapsed at his shitkickers.

Then he immediately brought his gun back up, two-handing the thing and moving it in a circle around himself.

“Where ya boys at, true?” he said under his breath. “Huh, motherfuckers? Where you at?”

There was no way Xcor, head of the Band of Bastards, had come here alone. No fucking way.

V just wasn’t that lucky.

Except nothing came at him. No one counter-attacked. Nobody ran out from a building or from behind a tree with a gun up, shooting. All there was were slayer parts and torsos on the ground, the cold wind hitting him in the face, and a whole lot of quiet.

The sound of a whistle over on the left alerted him to Butch’s position. And then there was another from the right. A third from way up ahead.