The Shadows

“You need to leave,” Doc Jane hollered as she looked up from checking Selena’s eyes with a light. “Unless you want to get bitten.”

As Manny shot him a look that was full of eyebrow, Trez could feel the strength coming back to him. And he wasn’t the only one who noticed. iAm wrapped heavy arms around his chest.

“I’ll be out in a second for a consult?” Doc Jane said to her partner.

“Roger that.” Manny lifted a hand to Trez. “Sorry, man.”

You had to respect his turnaround time, Trez thought as the guy disappeared.

“She has limited mobility in her arms, fingertips to shoulders,” Ehlena announced as she went to the base of the table and took hold of Selena’s leg. “Hip socket. Knee. Ankle. Same.”

“Vitals are stable,” Doc Jane reported. “I want another set of X-rays as soon as I’m sure she’ll stay with us.”

Jane glanced over at Trez. “You brought her back. You saved her life.”

As if she heard the words and understood them, Selena looked over at him. Trez opened his mouth to respond, and didn’t make it. Like someone had unplugged him from the world, everything faded to black and he went floating into unconsciousness.

The only thing he was aware of? Even after he passed the fuck out?

The steady beep-beep-beep of the machine marking Selena’s heartbeat.

TWELVE

BROWNSWICK SCHOOL FOR GIRLS, CALDWELL, NEW YORK

Denzel got it right in American Gangster.

The best drug dealers were good businessmen. And it didn’t take nothing from Harvard to get there.

Mr. C, Forelesser of the Lessening Society, weren’t no fucking suit with a bullshit piece of paper framed on his wall. But he was born and bred on the streets and damn good at moving product.

As sundown happened outside his broken office windows, he kept bundling his cash, the stacks of ragged twenties kept together with rubber bands he’d stolen from the copier stations at FedEx Office. Didn’t look like much, but that was something the movies usually got wrong.

Mr. C leaned down and handful’d another fist of crumpled, stained Andrew Jacksons out of the Hefty bag on the floor. His men were required to empty their pockets every dawn here in the headmaster’s office, and even if it took him all day, nobody helped him count.

At this point, after nearly a year of being in business, he had roughly a hundred carriers working for him, the number floating up and down depending on how his recruiting efforts kept up with the Black Dagger Brotherhood’s killing efficiency. His idea for putting the Lessening Society all in one place, in this defunct prep school, had been smart. He could run the slayers like a military unit, housing them together, keeping them on a schedule, monitoring every breath and each sale personally.

There was a fuckload of rebuilding to be done.

Soon after the Omega had come to him and elevated him to Forelesser, he’d realized the promotion was for shit. The Society had had no money. No real guns or ammo. No crib. No organization and no plan. All that was different now: An unusual, uneasy alliance had solved the first problem, and that was taking care of the second and third. The fourth was on him.

At this point, all he had to do was keep shit gaining. Make sure his men were in line. Track the cash coming and going. Start collecting some war toys. Once he was probably armed?

He was going to slaughter the Black Dagger Brotherhood, and go down in history as the one who’d finally gotten the motherfucking job done.

Mr. C finished the count just as the last threads of light were draining out of the now-night sky. Getting up, he strapped on a pair of forties and put the bundles of cash into a duffel bag. The total was four hundred thousand dollars.

Not bad for forty-eight hours of work.

As he left, there was no reason to lock up anything, because access was everywhere. The headmaster’s office had windows like sieves and doors that hung off their hinges, and on a larger scale, the decrepit grounds of the rotting boarding school were lined by an iron fence with more broken sections than ones that were upright.

What kept people out?

The slayers that roamed the property constantly, sentries whose sole job was to jack anyone who came too close.

Good news? The place was rumored to be haunted, so when those punk-ass fifteen-year-olds tried to come walkin’, a couple of Omega tricks took care of that little problem. Bonus? His boys liked freakin’ the fools out, and it was better than killing the bitches. Dead bodies were a pain in the ass, and he didn’t want the human police involved.

After all, there was one and only one rule in the war against the vampires: No humans were welcome at the party.

Outside, Mr. C got into his black-on-black Lincoln Nav and turned around on the unmowed, dead grass. In the twilight, he could sense his boys moving over the grounds even though he couldn’t see them, the echo of the Omega’s blood in them better than GPS chips shoved up their asses.