The cotton-candy/rancid-meat stench of lessers leaking everywhere swirled around in the cold gusts, mixing into a war salad with the echoes of gunshots and the shouts of the enemy. Anger in his gut drove him forward and kept him focused at the same time as he tried to drop targets without getting shot himself.

As soon as he got to Rhage, he was going to fat-lip that goddamn beauty queen.

Assuming destiny didn’t black-shroud the SOB first.

The good news? With the Fore-lesser gone, the Lessening Society’s response was no more coordinated than the Brotherhood’s attack had been, and the fact that the enemy was poorly armed and pathetically untrained was another bene. There seemed to be a five-to-one slayer-to-gun ratio, and a one-in-ten competent fighter rate—and given the numbers? That might just save their asses.

Left, pop! Right, pop! Dodge. Drop and roll. Spring up and keep running. Over two downed slayers—thank you, Assail, you crazy sonofabitch—pop! right in front of him.

The magic happened about five minutes and fifty thousand years into the fight. Without warning, he separated from his body, peeling free of the flesh that was working so hard and with such accuracy, his spirit floating above the adrenaline that forest-fired his arms and legs, his essence witnessing himself pumping off rounds and pressing forward from a position over his own right shoulder.

It was the zone, and usually something that took him over pretty much as soon as he started fighting. But with Rhage under his skin, up his ass, and fucking his head, the shit was late to the party.

It was because of his above-the-fray perspective that he noticed the catch-22 first.

Sometimes the counter-intuitive, the WTF, the against-the-grain, was as important as all the things you expected to see in a battle.

Like, for example, three figures running laterally across the theater of engagement for the exit. Yeah, sure, it could be lessers who’d pissed their pants and were deserting—except for one thing: The Omega’s blood in their bodies was one fuck of a GPS locator, and having to tell that kind of boss that you’d pantywaisted out of an engagement like this would guarantee the sort of torture that made Hell look like a couch surf.

Goddamn it, he couldn’t let them go. Not when they could end up calling cops and adding another layer of FUBAR to this funhouse.

Assuming they hadn’t already done that.

With a curse, Vishous took after the three free-thinkers, dematerializing out in front of where the trio seemed to be heading. As he re-formed, he knew they were fucking humans even before he saw that the one in the rear was running backward with what was no doubt a cocksucking Apple, iConformist POS front and center and on video record.

He fricking iHated anything with a goddamn Macintosh trademark.

V jumped out into the guy’s path, which of course J. J. Abrams didn’t notice, because, hello, he was too busy getting footage.

Vishous extended his shitkicker, and as the human went into gravity shock, the phone airborned and V caught the thing and shoved it into his leather jacket.

Next move was to stomp the guy’s sternum and put a gun in his face. Staring down at the holy shit and sputter that was going on, it took all of V’s self-control not to slit the guy’s throat, then go Jason Voorhees all over the pair who were still on the run. He’d beyond had it with humans. He had real work to do, but noooo, he was once again wiping the asses of these rats without tails so that the rest of them didn’t get upset that vampires walked among them.

“D-d-d-d-don’t h-h-h-h-hurt me,” came the whine. Along with a whiff of urine as the guy pissed himself.

“You are so fucking pathetic.”

Cursing again, V pulled a mental snatch-and-grab, checking to see if the CPD had been contacted—which was a “no”—before wiping clean the kid’s memories of his pot smoking rendezvous with his buddies being interrupted by all hell breaking loose.

“You had a bad trip, you dumb-ass,” V muttered. “Bad trip. This is all just a bad fucking trip. Now run the fuck along back to Daddy and Mommy’s.”

Like the good little preprogrammed toy he now was, the kid was up on his new old-school Converses and tearing off after his friends, a look of total confusion on his flushed face.

Vishous pulled another jump ahead and intercepted Frick and Frack. And what do you know, V’s mere presence, materializing out of thin air, was enough to bust through their panic—the pair hard-stopped like they were chained dogs that had run out of steel links, jerking back in their shoes and pinwheeling their matching Buffalo Bills parkas.

“You asshats are always in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Mentally lights-outing them, he patted them down, cleaning their pockets and their short-terms at the same time—then he sent them off on their pussyfooted flee once again, praying that one or the other of them had an undiagnosed heart condition that would suddenly show up under the strain and kill him outright.

Then again, V was a nasty bastard, so there you had it.

No time to waste. He headed back to try to catch Rhage, re-outing his forties and looking for the most efficient way to the sonofabitch. Too bad dematerializing into the thick of things was a no-go, but shit, there were guns pointing in every direction of the compass. At least necessary coverage came quick, first in a series of maple trees and then in the form of a building that had to have been yet another dormitory.

Slamming his back against the cold, hard brick, his ears tuned out the heaving breathing of his lungs. The heaviest discharges from firearms were on the left, up and forward of his position, and he quickly dumped both clips even though he had three bullets remaining in one and two in the other. Fully restocked, he jogged toward the far corner of the building and put his head—