ohn Matthew squared off at his target and tightened his grip on his blade. On the far side of the gym, across a sea of blue mats, there were three punching bags hanging from the bottom lip of the bleacher section. As he concentrated, the middle one became a lesser in his mind. He pictured the white hair and the pale eyes and the pasty skin that haunted his dreams, and he started to run, his bare feet slapping over thick plastic skin.

His little body had neither speed nor strength, but his will was enormous. And sometime in the next year or so, the rest of him would catch up to the power of his hatred.

He. Couldn't. Fucking. Wait. For his transition to hit.

Lifting his blade over his head, he opened his mouth to scream a war cry. Nothing came out, because he was a mute, but he imagined he was making a whole lot of noise.

As far as he was concerned, the lessers had killed his parents. Tohr and Wellsie had taken him in, told him what he really was, showed him the only love he'd known. When those bastard slayers had murdered her and Tohr had disappeared, John had been left with nothing but his revenge¡ªrevenge for them and the other innocent life that had been lost back in January.

John approached the bag running flat out, with his arm above his shoulder. At the last instant, he ducked into a ball, rolled on the mats, then shot up off the ground with the blade, hitting the bag from underneath. If it had been a real combat scenario, the knife would have gone into the lesser's gut. Deep.

He twisted the hilt.

Then he sprang to his feet and spun around, imagining the undead falling to its knees, holding on to the hole in its abdomen. He stabbed the bag from up top, seeing himself bury the blade in the back of the neck¡ª

"John?"

He whirled around, panting.

The female who approached made him tremble¡ªand not just because she'd surprised the shit out of him. It was Beth Randall, the half-breed queen, the female who was also his sister, or so blood tests proved. Strangely, whenever she was around, his head went on a little vacation, his brain seizing up, but at least he didn't pass out anymore. Which had been his first reaction to meeting her.

Beth came across the mats, a long, lean female dressed in jeans and a white turtleneck, her dark hair the exact color of his. As she came closer, he could smell Wrath's bonding scent on her, a dark perfume specific to her hellren. John suspected the marking happened through sex, as the spice was always strongest at First Meal when they came down from their bedroom.

"John, will you join us up at the house for the last meal of the night?"

I have to stay and practice, he signed in American Sign Language. Everyone in the household had learned ASL, and the concession to his weakness, to his lack of voice, irked him. He wished they didn't have to make any allowances for him. He wished he were normal.

"We'd like to see you. And you spend so much time here."

Practice is important.

She eyed the blade in his hand. "So are other things."

As he continued to stare at her, her dark blue eyes looked around the gym as if she were trying to find an appealing argument.

"Please, John, we're¡­ I'm worried about you."

At one time, three months ago, he would have loved to have heard those words from her. From anybody. But no more. He didn't want her concern. He wanted her to get out of his way.

When he shook his head, she took a deep breath. "All right. I'm going to leave more food in the office, okay? Please¡­ eat."

He inclined his head once, and when she lifted her hand as if to reach out, he stepped away. Without another word, she turned around and walked back across the blue mats.

When the door shut behind her, John jogged back to the far side of the gym and crouched to start running. As he took off once again, he lifted his blade high, rank hatred powering his arms and legs.

Mr. X flipped into action at high noon, walking into the garage of the house he recharged in, getting into the don't-notice-me minivan that disguised him among Caldwell's human traffic.

He had no interest in his assignment, but you acted when the master called in a command and you were the Fore-lesser. It was either that or you got canned, something Mr. X had been through once before and not enjoyed: Having the Omega slap a pink slip on you was about as much fun as eating a barbed-wire salad.

The fact that Mr. X was back on the flipping planet and in this role once again was still a shocker to him. But it seemed as if the master had grown tired of his revolving door of Fore-lessers and wanted to make one stick. As Mr. X had evidently been the best of the lot in the last fifty or sixty years, he'd been called into service for another round.

Reissued out of hell.

And so he was going to work today. As he pushed the key into the ignition and the Town & Country's anemic engine coughed over, he was utterly uninspired, no longer the leader he'd first been. But it was hard to get motivated in this kind of lose/lose situation. The Omega was going to get pissed off again and take it out on his number one. It was inevitable.

In bright noonday sun, Mr. X headed out of the fresh and perky subdivision, passing by Monopoly houses that had been built in the late 1990s. The things all shared a common architect, the gene pool of features locking the homes into cheap variations on duck-and-bunny adorable. Lot of front porches with insubstantial molding. Lot of plastic shutters. Lot of seasonal decorations, this time themed out on Easter.

Perfect hiding place for a lesser, a bramble of frazzled soccer moms and hassled midmanagement daddies.

Mr. X took Lily Lane out to Route 22, pausing at the stop sign to the big road. Using a GPS tracker, he got a ballpark location on the place in the woods that the Omega had asked him to pay a visit to. Travel time to destination was twelve minutes and that was good. The master was all impatient, eager to see if his plan with that Trojan human had worked, all jonesing to know if the Brotherhood had taken their little pal back.

Mr. X thought about the guy, sure that the two of them had met before. But even as he wondered about the where and when of it, none of that mattered today. And it hadn't mattered when Mr. X had been working the tough bastard over, either.

Jesus, that had been a hard SOB. Not one word about the Brotherhood had passed the man's lips, no matter what was done to him. Mr. X had been impressed. Guy like that would have been quite an asset if they could have turned him.

Or maybe that had already happened. Maybe that human was one of them now.

A little later, Mr. X parked the Town & Country on Route 22's shoulder and hoofed it into the woods. Snow had fallen last night in some freak March storm, and it padded the pine boughs, like the trees had geared up to play football with each other. Kind of pretty, actually. If you were into the nature shit. The farther he went through the forest, the less he needed the tracker because he could feel the master's essence, sure as if the Omega was up ahead. Maybe the human hadn't gotten picked up by the Brothers¡ª

Well, what do you know.

As Mr. X emerged into a clearing, he saw a scorched circle on the ground. The heat that had flared there had been great enough to melt the snow and mud-up the ground for a time and the now refrozen earth showed the contours of the burst. All around, remnants of the Omega's presence lingered, like the stink of summer garbage long after the trash had been picked up.

He breathed in through his nose. Yup, there was something human in the mix, too.

Holy shit, they'd killed the guy. The Brotherhood had exterminated that human. Interesting. Except¡­ why hadn't the Omega known the man was dead? Maybe there hadn't been enough in him to have him get called home to the master?

The Omega wasn't going to like this report. He was allergic to failure: it made him itchy. And itchy led to bad things for Fore-lessers.

Mr. X knelt down to the withered earth and envied the human. Lucky bastard. When a lesser bit it, what waited for him on the other side was an endless liquid misery, a horror bath that was every Christian's vision of hell times a thousand: After slayers were killed, they returned to the veins of the Omega's body, circling and recircling in an evil swill of other dead lessers, becoming the very blood the master put in you when you were inducted into the Society. And for these reconstituting slayers there was no end to the burning cold or the driving starvation or the crushing pressure because you remained conscious. For eternity.

Mr. X shuddered. An atheist in life, he hadn't thought of death as anything other than a dirt nap. Now, as a lesser, he knew exactly what was waiting for him when the master lost patience and "fired" him again.

And yet there was hope. Mr. X had found a little loophole, assuming the pieces fell together right.

By a stroke of luck, he might have found a way out of the Omega's world.