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V tried to imagine giving up his proclivities. “My monster needs to get out. Especially now.”

“Now?”

“Come on, Mom. You know everything about me, right? So you know my visions have dried up and I’m half-psychotic from lack of sleep. Hell, you gotta know I took a jump off this building last week. Longer this goes on, the worse I’m going to get, especially if I can’t get a…workout in.”

She waved her hand, dismissing him. “You see nothing because you are at a crossroads in your own path. Free will cannot be exercised if you are aware of the ultimate outcome, therefore the prescient part of you naturally suppresses itself. It will return.”

For some crazy reason that eased him, even though he’d fought the intrusions of other people’s fates since they started appearing to him centuries ago.

Then something dawned on him. “You don’t know what’s going to happen to me, do you. You don’t know what I’m going to do.”

“I would have your word that you shall fulfill your duties on the other side. That you shall take care of what must be done there. And I would have it now.”

“Say it. Say you don’t know what you see. If you want my vow, you give me this.”

“Why for?”

“I want to know you’re powerless about something,” he bit out. “So you know how I feel.”

The heat of her rose until the penthouse was like a sauna. But then she said, “Your destiny is mine. I know not your path.”

V crossed his arms over his chest, feeling like a noose was around his neck and he was standing on a rickety chair. Fuck. Him. “You have my bonded word.”

“Take this and accept your nomination as Primale.” She held out a heavy gold pendant on a black silk cord. When he took the thing, she nodded once, a sealing of their pact. “I shall go forth and inform the Chosen. My sequester ends several days hence. You will come to me then and be installed as the Primale.”

Her black hood lifted without hands. Just before it lowered over her glowing face she said, “Until we meet hence. Be well.”

She disappeared without sound or movement, a light extinguished.

V went over to the bed before his knees let go. As his ass hit the mattress, he stared at the long, thin pendant. The gold was ancient and marked with characters in the Old Language.

He didn’t want young. Never had. Although he supposed that under this scenario, he was nothing more than a sperm donor. He wasn’t going to have to be a father to any of them, which was a relief. He wouldn’t be good at that shit.

Shoving the pendant into the back pocket of his leathers, he put his head in his hands. Visions of growing up in the warrior camp came to him, the memories crystal-clear and sharp as glass. With a nasty curse in the Old Language, he reached over to his jacket, took his phone out, and hit speed dial. When Wrath’s voice came on the line, there was a whirring noise in the background.

“You got a minute?” V said.

“Yeah, what’s doing?” When V didn’t hold forth, Wrath’s voice got lower. “Vishous? You all right?”

“No.”

There was a rustling, then Wrath’s voice came from a distance. “Fritz, can you come back and vacuum a little later? Thanks, my man.” The whirring noise shut off and a door closed. “Talk to me.”

“Do you…ah, do you remember the last time you got drunk? Like, really drunk?”

“Shit…ah…” In the pause, V pictured the king’s black eyebrows sinking down behind his wraparounds. “God, I think it was with you. Back in the early nineteen hundreds, wasn’t it? Seven bottles of whiskey between the two of us.”

“Actually, it was nine.”

Wrath laughed. “We started at four in the afternoon and it took us, what, fourteen hours? I was faced for a whole day afterward. Hundred years later and I think I’m still hungover.”

V closed his eyes. “Remember just as dawn was coming, I, ah…told you I’d never known my mother? Had no clue who she was or what happened to her?”

“Most of it’s fog, but yeah, I recall that.”

God, they’d both been so polluted that night. Drunk off their asses. And that had been the only reason V had yakked even a little about what rotted in his head twenty-four/seven.

“V? What