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“I’m sorry, Blay,” he said, because he had no idea what else to do.

“Yeah, I bet you are. Makes things hella awkward, huh.” Blay palmed the parka and slung the Prada bag up onto his shoulder. “But it’s all good. I’m getting out of town for a while, and you two are solid. So cool. Now I gotta go. I’ll text you in a couple of days.”

Qhuinn was more than willing to bet that the you there was referring only to John.

Shit.

Blay turned away. “Later.”

As his best friend in all the world showed them his back and headed for the door, Qhuinn opened his useless lips and prayed that the right thing would come out. When nothing did, he prayed that something would jump free. Anything—

The scream that came up from the first floor was high-pitched.

Blay’s mother.

The three of them were out of that bedroom like a bomb had gone off in it, shooting down the hall, thundering down the stairs. In the kitchen, they found that the nightmare of the war had come home.

Lessers. Two of them. In Blay’s motherfucking house.

And one of them had his mother up against his chest in a choke hold.

Blay let out a primal yell, but Qhuinn caught him before he surged forward. “There’s a knife against her throat,” Qhuinn hissed. “He’ll slice her where she stands.”

The lesser smiled as he dragged Blay’s mom across the kitchen and out of the house, toward a minivan that was parked by the garage.

As John Matthew dematerialized out of sight, another slayer came in from the dining room.

Qhuinn let Blay go, and the two of them went on the attack, plowing first into that slayer and then engaging another as it walked in the back door.

While the hand-to-hand went wild and the kitchen got trashed, Qhuinn prayed like hell that John had taken form inside the open van and was rolling out one fuck of a two- fisted welcome.

Please let Blay’s mom not get taken down in the cross fire.

As yet another slayer came through the door, Qhuinn head-butted the lesser he was trading punches with, palmed one of his brand-new spanking forty-fives, and rammed the muzzle under the bastard’s chin.

The bullets decimated the fucker’s head, blowing the top of it clear off—which gave Qhuinn plenty of time to stab the thing in the heart with the knife he had at his hip.

Pop! Pop! Fizz-fizz! Oh, what a relief it is.

As the thing disappeared in a flash of light, Qhuinn didn’t pause to enjoy his first lesser kill. He spun around to check on Blay and was shocked to his balls. The guy’s father had come pounding into the room and the two were hauling ass. Which was kind of a surprise, as Blay’s dad was an accountant.

Time to back up John.

Qhuinn beelined it out the back door, and just as his boots hit grass, a brilliant flash of light from the minivan told him that help wasn’t going to be necessary.

In a smooth move, John jumped out of the Town & Country and slammed the door shut; he pounded on the quarter panel and the thing reversed at a dead run. Qhuinn caught a brief impression of Blay’s mom white-knuckled behind the wheel as she shot backward down the driveway.

“You okay, J-man?” Qhuinn said, hoping like hell that John Matthew didn’t get killed on Qhuinn’s first night as his ahstrux nohtrum.

Just as John lifted his hands to sign, there was a crash of glass.

The two of them wheeled around to the house. Like something out of a movie, a pair of bodies flew out of the family room’s picture window. Blay’s was one of them, and he landed on top of the lesser he’d tossed out the house like a stained mattress. Before the slayer could recover from the impact, Blay grabbed on to its head and cracked the fucker’s neck like a chicken.

“My father’s still fighting in the house!” he yelled as Qhuinn tossed him the knife. “Down in the cellar!”

As John and Qhuinn shot back inside, a third flare of light went off, and then Blay caught up with them at the basement stairs. The three of them rushed to where new sounds of fighting came from.

When they got to the bottom of the stairwell, they stopped dead. Blay’s father was facing off with a lesser, a Civil War sword in one hand, a dagger in