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“Do you share a young?”

“No, thank God.”

Ehlena frowned. “Is this a relationship, though?”

“I guess you could call it that.”

Feeling like a total raving idiot for getting caught up in him, Ehlena put her napkin on the table beside her plate and offered a very professional smile as she got to her feet and picked up her coat.

“I should go now. Thanks for dinner.”

Rehv cursed. “I shouldn’t have said anything—”

“If your goal was to get me in bed, you’re right. Bad move. Still, I’m glad you were honest—”

“I wasn’t trying to get you into bed.”

“Oh, of course not, because you’d be cheating on her.” Christ, why was she getting so upset over this?

“No,” he snapped back, “it’s because I’m impotent. Believe me, if I could get hard, bed would be the first place I’d want to go with you.”

TWENTY-EIGHT

Spending time with you is like watching paint dry.” Lassiter’s voice echoed up to the stalactites hanging from the Tomb’s high ceiling. “Except without the home improvement—which is a tragedy, given how this place looks. Do you guys always go for the gloom and doom? You never hear of Pottery Barn?”

Tohr rubbed his face and glanced around the cave that had served as the Brotherhood’s sacred meeting place for centuries. Behind the massive stone altar he was sitting next to, the black marble wall with all the Brothers’ names on it stretched out across the back of the cave. Black candles on heavy stanchions threw flickering light over all the carvings in the Old Language.

“We’re vampires,” he said. “Not fairies.”

“Sometimes I’m not so sure about that. You see that study your king hangs out in?”

“He’s nearly blind.”

“Which explains why he hasn’t hanged himself in that pastel train wreck.”

“I thought you were bitching about the gloom-and-doom decorating?”

“I free-associate.”

“Clearly.” Tohr didn’t look at the angel, as he figured eye contact would only encourage the guy. Oh, wait. Lassiter didn’t need help.

“You expecting that skull on the altar to talk to you or some shit?”

“Actually we’re both waiting for you to finally take a breath.” Tohr glared at the guy. “Anytime you’re ready. Anytime.”

“You say the sweetest things.” The angel sat his glowing ass down on the stone steps next to Tohr. “Can I ask you something?”

“Is ‘no’ really an option?”

“Nope.” Lassiter shifted around and stared up at the skull. “That thing looks older than I am. Which is saying something.”

It was the first Brother, the inaugural warrior who fought the enemy bravely and with power, the most sacred symbol of strength and purpose within the Brotherhood.

Lassiter stopped fucking around for once. “He must have been a great fighter.”

“I thought you were going to ask me something.”

The angel stood with a curse and shook out his legs. “Yeah, I mean…how in the fuck have you sat there for so long? My ass is killing me.”

“Yeah, brain cramps are a bitch.”

Although the angel did have a point about time having passed. Tohr had been sitting there, staring at the skull and at the wall of names beyond the altar, for so long his butt wasn’t so much numb as indistinguishable from the steps.

He had come here the previous night, drawn by an invisible hand, compelled to seek inspiration, clarity, reconnection to life. Instead, he had found only stone. Cold stone. And a lot of names that had once meant something to him and now were nothing but a grocery list of the dead.

“It’s because you’re looking in the wrong place,” Lassiter said.

“You can go now.”

“Every time you say that, it brings a tear to my eye.”

“Funny, mine too.”

The angel leaned down, the scent of fresh air preceding him. “Neither that wall nor that skull will give you what you’re looking for.”

Tohr narrowed his eyes and wished he were strong enough to fight the guy. “They won’t? Well, then they’re making a liar out of you. ‘Now is the time. Tonight everything changes.’ You give portent a bad name, you know that? You are just so full of shit.”

Lassiter smiled and idly adjusted the gold hoop that pierced his eyebrow. “If you think being rude is going to get my attention,