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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—

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