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The neighborhood got shittier. Dogs barked in warning. A car passed by with no headlights on and rap thumping. And then an abandoned house. Followed by an empty lot. Until finally they came up to a decrepit two-story from the seventies that was surrounded by a nine-foot-high wooden fence.

“In here,” Butch said, looking around for a gate.

“Give me your leg, cop.”

As Butch grabbed the top of the fence and cocked his knee, V tossed him over the thing like he was the morning newspaper. He landed in a crouch.

There they were. Three lessers. Two of whom were dragging a male out of the house by his arms.

Butch went into an instant overboil. He was radioactive angry about what had been done to him, frustrated by his fears for Marissa, trapped by his human nature—and those slayers became the focal point of his aggression.

Except V materialized next to him and grabbed his shoulder. As Butch wheeled around to tell the brother to fuck off, Vishous hissed, “You can have at them. Just keep it quiet. We’ve got eyes everywhere and without Rhage around, I need to fight on all cylinders, true? So I can’t pull off no mhis. I’m not going to be able to mask this one.”

Butch stared at his roommate, realizing this was the first time he’d ever been given free rein to go fight. “Why are you letting me in now?”

“We gotta be sure whose side you’re on,” V said, unsheathing a dagger. “And this is how we’ll know. So I’ll take the two with the civilian and you hit the other one.”

Butch nodded once, then sprang forward, aware of a great roaring between his ears and within his body. As he gunned for the lesser that was about to move in on the house, the thing turned like he heard the approach.

The bastard merely looked annoyed as Butch ran up on him. “About time you backups showed.” The slayer pivoted away. “There are two females in here. The blonde’s really fast, so I want her—”

Butch tackled the lesser from behind and made like a vise, clamping on to the fucker’s head and shoulders. It was like mounting a rodeo horse. The slayer went shit wild and spun around, grabbing at Butch’s legs and arms. When that didn’t work, the thing slammed the two of them back against the house hard enough to dent the aluminum siding.

Butch stayed locked on, his forearm tight against the lesser’s esophagus, his other hand on his straining wrist, pulling back. To get an even better hold, he linked his legs around the slayer’s hips, crossed his ankles, and squeezed with his thighs.

It took a while, but asphyxia and exertion eventually slowed the undead down.

Except, holy hell, by the time the lesser’s knees started to wobble, Butch knew what a pinball felt like. He’d been knocked against the house’s exterior, then its front doorjamb, and now they were in the hall and he was getting banged back and forth in the narrow space. His brains were pinging around the inside of his skull and his internal organs were like scrambled eggs, but, goddamn it, he was not letting go. The longer he kept the lesser occupied, the more chance those females had to escape—

Oh, shit, it was Tilt-A-Whirl time. The world spun and Butch hit the floor first, the lesser turtling over on top of him.

Bad place to be. Now he was the one who couldn’t breathe.

He threw out a leg, kicked against the wall, and slid out from under, wrenching the lesser’s torso. Unfortunately, the bastard pulled a twist move, too, and the two of them started rolling around and around on the nasty orange carpet. Finally, Butch’s strength wore out.

With little effort, the slayer flipped him over so they were face-to-face, then cranked Butch into a submission hold, immobilizing him.

Okay…now would be a great time for V to show up.

Except then the lesser looked down and met Butch’s eyes, and everything just slowed down. Ground to a halt. Stopped. Dead.

Another kind of vise action bolted them together, but this was a locking of stares and Butch was the one in control, even though he was on the bottom of the body pile. The lesser