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“And I’m bringing it so that when the dopamine kicks in and you cool off you won’t get a chill.”

Xhex offered him her arm without looking at him because she knew he was too much of a pride-filled dickhead to lean on her otherwise. And he needed to lean on her. He was weak as shit.

“I hate when you’re right,” he said.

“Which explains why you’re usually so short-tempered.”

Together they walked slowly out of the office and into the alley.

The Bentley was there waiting, with Trez behind the wheel. The Moor asked no questions and made no comments, as was his way.

And, of course, all the crushing quiet always made you feel worse when you were being an ass.

Rehv ignored the fact that Xhex settled him into the backseat and slid in next to him as if she were worried he would get carsick or some shit.

The Bentley took off with the smoothness of a magic carpet ride, and that was so fucking apropos, because he felt as if he were on one. With his symphath nature battling his vampire blood, he was doing the seesaw between his bad side and his halfway decent one, and the shifts in moral gravity were making him nauseous as fuck.

Maybe Xhex was right to be concerned about the throwing-up thing.

They hung a left on Trade, hooked up with Tenth Avenue, and shot down toward the river, where they got on the highway. Four exits up, they turned off and glided through a high-rent district, where big houses on parklike lots were set back from the road, kings waiting to be knelt before.

With his red, two-dimensional vision Rehv didn’t see much with his eyes. With his symphath side, he knew too much. He could sense the humans in the mansions, knew the inhabitants by the emotional footprint they emitted, thanks to the energy their feelings released. Whereas his sight was flat as a TV screen, his sense of the people was in three dimensions: They registered as psychic grid patterns, their interplay of joy and sadness, guilt and lust, anger and hurt creating structures that to him were as solid as their houses.

Though his stare couldn’t penetrate the retaining walls and well-planted trees, couldn’t breach the stone-and-mortar of the manses, his evil nature saw the men and women inside as clearly as if they stood before him naked, and his instincts came alive. He focused on the weaknesses percolating in those emotional grids, finding the loose parts in the people’s boxes and wanting to rattle them even more. He was the canny cat to their meek mouse, the clawed stalker who wanted to toy with them until their little heads bled with their dirty secrets and their dark lies and their shameful worries.

His evil side hated them with calm detachment. To his symphath nature, the weak were not to inherit the earth. They were to eat it until they choked to death. And then you were to grind their carcasses in the mud of their blood to get to your next victim.

“I hate the voices in my head,” he said.

Xhex glanced over. In the glow of the backseat, her hard, smart face was curiously beautiful to him, probably because she was the only one who truly understood the demons he fought, and that connection made her lovely.

“Better to despise that part of you,” she said. “The hate keeps you safe.”

“Fighting it’s a bore.”

“I know. But would you have it any other way?”

“Sometimes, I’m not so sure.”

Ten minutes later, Trez pulled them through the gates of Havers’s property, and by then the numbness in Rehv’s hands and feet was returning, and his core temperature had dropped. As the Bentley went around back and stopped at the clinic’s entrance, the sable duster was a godsend, and he huddled into it for warmth. When he got out of the car, he noted that the red vision receded as well, the world’s full palette of colors returning to his sight, his depth perception putting objects in the spatial orientation he was used to.

“I’m staying out here,” Xhex said from the backseat.

She never went into the clinic. But then, considering what had been done to her, he could understand why.

He palmed his cane and leaned into it.