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“FYI, I’m in a bad mood, and you’re making me lethal.”

“That’s how you both ended up in the Brotherhood.

Interesting.”

“I want your word, sin-eater. Not a narrative that bores me.”

Moved by something Rehv didn’t want to name, he placed his hand over his heart. In the Old Language, he said clearly, “I hereby proffer my vow unto you. Never again shall your blooded twin leave my premises with drugs upon him.”

Surprise flared in Z’s scarred face. Then he nodded. “They say never to trust a symphath. So I’m going to bank on the half of you that’s my Bella’s brother, feel me?”

“Good plan,” Rehv murmured as he dropped his hand. “ ’Cuz that’s the side I pledged with. But tell me something. How’re you going to make sure he doesn’t buy from someone else?”

“To be honest, I have no idea.”

“Well, best of luck with him.”

“We’re going to need it.” Zsadist headed for the door.

"Yo, Z?”

The Brother looked over his shoulder. “What.”

Rehv rubbed his left pec. “Have you . . . ah, have you picked up a bad vibe tonight?”

Z frowned. "Yeah, but how’s that any different? Haven’t had a good one in God only knows how long.”

The door eased shut, and Rehv put his hand back over his heart. The damn thing was racing for no evident reason. Shit, it was probably best that he see the doc. No matter how long it took—

The explosion ripped through the clinic with a roar like thunder.

Chapter Nineteen

Phury took form in the pines behind the garages of Havers’s clinic—just as the security alarms in the place started going off. The shrill electronic screams made the neighborhood’s dogs bark, but there was no danger of the police being called. The warning sounds were calibrated so that they were too high for humans to hear.

Fuck . . . he was unarmed.

He bolted toward the clinic entrance anyway, ready to fight with his bare hands if he had to.

It was a beyond-worst-case scenario. The steel door was hanging open like a split lip, and inside the vestibule the elevator doors were pushed wide, the shaft with its veins and arteries of cables and wires exposed. Down below, the roof of the elevator car had a blast hole in it, the equivalent of a bullet wound in a male’s chest.

Plumes of smoke and the scent of baby powder boiled up, riding a draft from the underground clinic. The sweet-and -sour combo, along with the sounds of fighting below, unsheathed Phury’s fangs and curled his fists.

He didn’t waste time wondering how the lessers had known where the clinic was, and he didn’t bother with the ladder mounted on the shaft’s concrete wall, either. He leaped down and landed on the part of the elevator’s roof that was still solid. Another jump through the blown part and he was facing total chaos.

In the clinic’s waiting area, a trio of granny-haired slayers were doing the thumpty dance with Zsadist and Rehvenge, the fight busting apart the land of plastic chairs and dull magazines and cheerless potted plants. The paled-out bastards were obviously well-trained long-timers, given how strong and sure they were, but Z and Rehv were taking no shit.

With the fight moving so fast, it was a jump-in-and-swim sitch. Phury grabbed a metal chair from the registration desk and swung it like a bat at the nearest slayer. As the lesser went down, he lifted the chair up and stabbed one of its spindly legs right into the fucker’s chest.

Just as the pop and flash rang out, screams rippled down the clinic’s hallway from the blocks of patient rooms.

“Go!” Z barked as he threw out a kick and caught one of the lessers in the head. “We’ll hold them here!”

Phury exploded through the double flap doors.

There were bodies in the hall. A lot of them. Lying in pools of red blood on the pale green linoleum.

Though it killed him not to stop and check on those he was passing, his focus had to be on the medical staff and patients who were very definitely alive. A group of them was fleeing toward him in a panic, their white coats and hospital johnnies flapping like a load of wash hung out to dry in