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One thing was clear: There was no way she was going to meet that man this morning, even though 816 Wallace Avenue was in the best part of the city and it was broad daylight.

By four that afternoon, Wrath was about to explode.

He hadn’t been able to get back to Beth’s the night before.

And she hadn’t shown this morning.

Her failure to come to him meant one of two things: Something had happened to her or she was blowing him off.

He checked the braille clock with his fingertips. Sundown was still hours away.

Goddamned summer days. Too long. Way too long.

He stalked to the bathroom, splashed his face with water, and braced his arms on the marble counter. In the glow from the candle set next to the sink, he stared at himself, seeing nothing more than an indistinct rush of black hair, two smudgy eyebrows, and the outline of his face.

He was exhausted. He hadn’t slept all day, and the night before had been a train wreck.

Except for the part with Beth. That had been…

He cursed and toweled off.

God, what the hell was wrong with him? Being inside of that female was the worst of all the shit that had gone down last night. Courtesy of that stunning little interlude, his mind was wandering, his body was in a perpetual state of arousal, and his mood was in the crapper.

At least the latter was SOP for him.

Man, last night had been a total disaster.

After leaving the brothers, he and Vishous had gone across town to check out the mechanics shop. It was closed up tight as a tick, and after scoping the outside and breaking in, they’d determined it wasn’t used as a center. The decrepit building was too small above ground for one thing, and there was no hidden basement that they could find. Also, the neighborhood wasn’t prime. There were a couple of all-night diners around, one of which was frequented by the cops. Too much exposure.

He and Vishous were heading back to Darius’s, via a quick detour through Screamer’s to satisfy V’s craving for Grey Goose, when they walked into a problem.

That was when things had gone from bad into the FUBAR zip code.

In an alley, a civilian vampire was gravely wounded, with two lessers about to finish the job on him. Killing the lessers had taken some time because they were both well experienced, and the other vampire was dead when the fighting was over.

The young male had been toyed with cruelly, his body a pincushion of shallow stabs. Going by the raw patches on his knees and the gravel in his palms, he’d tried to drag himself away a number of times. There’d been fresh human blood around his mouth and the smell of it in the air, too, but they couldn’t stick around to check out the female he’d bitten.

Company had been coming.

Right after the lessers had poofed to their royal reward, the sound of cop sirens had broken out, an acoustic rash that meant someone had called 911 after having heard the fighting or seen the flashes of light. They’d barely had time to get gone with the corpse in Vishous’s Escalade.

Back at Darius’s, V had searched the body. In the male’s wallet there had been a slip of paper with the old language’s characters on it. Name, address, age. He’d been six months out from his transition. So damn young.

An hour before dawn, they’d taken the body to the very edge of town, to a good-looking house set way back in the woods. An older civilian couple had answered the door, and their terror at finding two warriors on the other side had smelled like burning garbage to Wrath. When they’d confirmed that they had a son, Vishous had gone back to the car and picked up the remains. The father had burst from the doorway, going for his boy, taking him from Vishous’s arms. Wrath had caught the mother as she’d crumpled.

The fact that the death had been avenged had calmed the father a little. But it hadn’t felt like enough. Not to Wrath.

He would see all lessers dead before he could rest.

Wrath closed his eyes, listening to the beat of Jay-Z’s The Black Album, trying