But that momentum ended abruptly as her magazine emptied.

  She didn’t have anything to reload with.

  Yet.

  Ducking into the smoke, she ran forward instead of back where the tunnel was, scrambling between the workstations in a jagged fashion, crunching over glass, jumping over bodies that her mind simply refused to process. She needed to find one of her guards. If she could just locate one of them, they’d have backup magazines on their tool belt—

  Pop-pop-pop!

  As a fresh wave of gunshots rang out, she tucked herself in behind one of the counter setups. Praying that the wolf was okay, she—

  Remembered what the workstations were stocked with.

  Opening the cabinet below the sink, she scanned what was under there. Then pulled the knob on the set of double doors next to it—

  A light came on inside the storage unit, and the lineup of glass jars and beakers was labeled clearly: There were a lot of skulls and crossbones on the containers.

  “Thank you, God.”

  Reaching inside, she took out a clear yellow liquid that was marked with so many warnings, it might as well have been in an opaque jar.

  “Okay, you can do this. You can…”

  Her breath was sawing in and out of her mouth, and her hands shook, and as she looked down at herself, she saw that her pantyhose had ripped, there was blood on her knees, and her skirt was covered in dust and smudges.

  In an odd flare of pride, she realized she had done all that running in fucking heels.

  And Daniel was right. Like him, she had a terminal diagnosis, but she didn’t want to go out on a morphine drip in a hospital bed, just fading away.

  Fuck that. She wanted to go out with a bang.

  Jumping up, she hauled back the container of liquid nitroglycerin, a substance so unstable that the slightest impact could cause it to explode. Then she waited—

  The cyborg emerged from all the swirling, noxious smoke like a wraith, its frozen face locking on her and showing no emotion at all as it triangulated its gun muzzle and got ready to take out its target.

  “I love you, Gus St. Claire!” Cathy screamed as she let loose with the beaker.

  And braced herself to be blown apart.

  FORTY-ONE

  UP ON THE first level of the house, Blade was taking a little rest.

  Well, not really. But his weight wasn’t on his feet anymore. Which would have been nice given his injured leg, he supposed.

  Too bad it was all on his arms.

  As smoke from the destruction below percolated up through the ventilation system, Kurling’s cyborg soldiers had subdued him quickly, and he hadn’t been surprised to be strung up from the banister of the stairway, his arms over his head, his toesies dangling in his shoes. His cousin had performed none of the work. Of course he hadn’t. Kurling was a gentlemale of the prime order, and thus had had one of his mechanical minions bring over a settee so he could watch the hog-tying comfortably.

  The symphath was still sitting there, composed as someone listening to a concerto, his legs crossed at the knees, one hand propping a slight lean to the side.

  “I truly do not know what is worse,” the symphath murmured. “What your sister did to disgrace us, or what you did to ahvenge her.”

  Blade shrugged. Or tried to. With his arms in their current position, there wasn’t much shoulder movement available to his biomechanics.

  “That’s a bit”—he took a labored breath—“like wondering whether you… are lazy or just incompetent.”

  Kurling laughed softly. “That is a weak taunt.”

  “I am a bit… compromised… at the moment.”

  “True. And I shall forgive you for that. But not anything else.”

  The male rose to his feet, and tugged his black combat sweater down so that it was smooth over his chest. There were guns at his hips, but he had not taken them out. Of course he hadn’t. This operation, like cleaning his quarters or preparing his own food, was beneath his efforts.

  No, he was saving the glory for himself. The dirty work, for others.

  “How did… you find out,” Blade asked as his cousin came in close. “About me and the labs.”

  “I followed you one night. I couldn’t understand why you were disappearing with such regularity. At first I assumed that your sister’s lower standards had infected you and you were forging relations with a vampire down in Caldwell. But you were not, were you. You were out in the field. In the mountains. By the sea and in the desert. I must commend you for your thoroughness. You were quite effective.”

  “Why’d it… take you so… long.”

  “For things to come to this?” Kurling shrugged easily, sure as if he were showing off his freedom of movement. “Well, firstly, I needed my own army. You used humans, I wanted to improve on that, and it took me some time to gather the necessary contacts. You inspired me to start looking into the underground, actually. It’s amazing what you can buy, what secrets are available to the highest bidder. These units”—he indicated the soldiers that were standing all around like radios ready to be turned on, or laptops prepared to be booted up, or cars itching for a driver—“are the future of human warfare. It’s just going to take those rats without tails a decade or two to get the technology cheap enough and the squabbling over rights settled. Issues with you aside, we in the Colony will of course need to have our own stockpile of these weapons, and I have a production facility going already. Further, some of the technological problems the humans hadn’t quite worked out needed to be solved. Battery life is such a difficulty.”

  “My heart bleeds for you,” Blade muttered.

  “Oh, it will.”

  The knife came out from behind his cousin’s back, having obviously been nestled in a holster there. And the blade was solid gold, the precious metal gleaming.

  “This is your weapon, cousin.” Kurling held the thing up. “I stole it from your quarters two years ago, but you never noticed. You were too busy being weak—do you have any idea what would have happened if the Colony found out you were ahvenging your whore of a sister? Who fucked a vampire? She brought shame upon the whole of our bloodline—especially those of us who have led our lives in the right and proper way. I have no mate, no prospects, no life because of her, and then you”—the tip was angled forward—“you do something even worse. You are going to get all of us killed. Rehvenge may have reset some of the rules, but the Colony has its own underground and the assassins will come for each one of us. You must be eradicated for the rest of the bloodline to survive.”

  Blade’s belly pumped in and out as the point of the gleaming golden knife came to rest against his naked abdomen.

  “And as long as I kill you, the infection can be controlled. The rest of us will not be tainted by your inexplicable actions—”

  “Not… inexplicable.”

  “No? What else would you call them? Xhexania brought shame to your immediate family, and after she was dealt with appropriately, you go off and destroy the very thing that cleansed our bloodline of her infection? I cannot fathom why you would do such a thing.”

  Blade stared into eyes that were the color of his own, and thought for an instant of the two of them as youngs, playing outside one of the disguised kiosks that fed into the Colony’s maze of subterranean tunnels.

  Now they were here, enemies by circumstance and action.

  “Because I am not like you,” he heard himself answer. “That is why I did it. That is why it is anything but inexplicable.”

  Kurling blinked as if the response was as confusing as the deeds that had been done in the name of love for a sister who had been treated unfairly by those who should have stood by her the most.

  “Well, enough with the catch-up, cousin,” the symphath said. “Let us commence this so that we shall both get our due.”

  With that, the knife was driven in hard, the gold cleaving through clothing, skin, and organ, smooth as a surgical strike.

  And then came the twist.

  As Kurling jerked his fist, the knife bored a bigger hole through Blade’s lower abdomen—

  His scream ripped through the foyer, echoing throughout the house, the acreage… the whole world:

  “Xhexxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.”

  If Blade was going out, he wanted his beloved sister’s name to be the last thing he uttered—

  In his delirium, things that couldn’t possibly be true seemed to happen—

  This was not possible. There was no way that the doors of the mansion exploded open and the very female he had called out to burst through curls of smoke as if she had answered to her name.

  Except it was his sister. And she was not alone.

  Warriors, strong of back, with black daggers strapped, handles down, to their chests, flooded the foyer and engaged with the animatronic soldiers, the fighting propagating like an immune response to cancer in an otherwise healthy person.

  Xhex went right for their cousin.

  And in his surprise, Kurling was no match for her.

  Then again, Kurling would have been no match for her even if he had been prepared. She overpowered him with her better skill, taking him to the ground with a smooth and ready move, mounting him and pinning him in place with a strong arm and a grip on his throat.

  How she got control of the gold dagger, Blade did not immediately know. But perhaps Kurling had retained his fierce grip, and then extracted it as the weapon of his choice as he was attacked. But however the transfer happened, the blade was relocated from his abdominal cavity to her palm.

  And she wielded it with brutal efficiency: As Kurling tried to bat her superior strength away, she took his eyes.

  First the left.

  Then the right.

  Popping them out of their sockets with the tip that was marked with the blood from Blade’s veins.

  As he started to lose consciousness, Blade was in terrible pain… but there was a smile on his face.

  The death he had always wondered about had come for him finally, all those narrow misses as he had snuck around the human world and fought to defend that which he had failed, culminating in this final mortal calamity.

  He was good with how he was leaving the earth, however.

  He had taken care of things far better than he’d cared to admit, in the words of the silver wolf.

  And in return, his sister had not just come for him, she had brought her mate and the Black Dagger Brotherhood with her.

  Wasn’t family divine.

  FORTY-TWO

  WHEN HER WOLVEN side was in charge, Lydia was not much more than a backseat driver, able to offer suggestions as to actions, but unable to control things.

  And in this wartime scenario, she had little of value to add. Her wolf was a predator with practice, and really, how could she improve on that?

  As the artificial soldier battled against the attack waged against it, she just went along for the ride, swirling around with her other side as fangs were sunk into limbs that had metal bones and wires for ligaments, but that were nonetheless subject to being torn apart.

  Not even the electrical shocks slowed her wolf down—

  The explosion was off to the left, and it was so loud and forceful, the ground battle was paused as the wolf and the soldier briefly reoriented awareness toward the sound.

  Car parts, everywhere.

  Not car parts, really, but metal shrapnel flying so fast that there was no time to duck—and the distraction was something the soldier recovered from quicker than the wolf did. The flip-over came without warning, and as Lydia became aware that she was now staring out of the wolf’s eyes at the ceiling instead of the floor, she knew her other form was in danger of losing this battle.

  And that was when she remembered Daniel rolling the unit over and checking the back of the neck for the power source.

  If there was a way she could disconnect the battery from the motherboard? But she was going to need her human side to do it.

  And another distraction…

  As Lydia attempted to regather the reins, her wolf did not want to relinquish control of their joint system. She won, however, by sheer force of will. Then again, when you needed to get back to your one true love with a medical bag, you had strength reserves you didn’t normally access.

  As the shifting occurred, she knew it was a long shot, but it was all she had—

  The change was not as smooth as it usually was. But that didn’t matter, and beneath the cyborg, she transformed into her human incarnation.

  Which made the fucking thing freeze. Like she had broken its brain.

  With its dead eyes locked, expressionless, but clearly confused, on her female face, she had a split second to get something, anything she could, to use as a weapon. Shoving her hands down to the cyborg’s waist, she furiously fumbled with whatever was there—

  The gun seemed to find her grip instead of the other way around, as if the nine millimeter wanted to put an end to this whole thing as much as she did.

  Lydia was not a confident shooter. She wasn’t sure how the safety worked. She only had one hand.

  But the image of Daniel seizing up on the floor of that concrete hallway, with Gus empty-handed beside him, gave her some kind of core knowledge in weaponry she’d never had before.

  Pop!

  It happened so fast, she wasn’t even sure what she had done. But as the side of the soldier’s neck blew out and the thing collapsed on her, she stared at the gun in wonder.

  Then she kicked the bucket of dead bolts off.

  Panting, prepared for anything, she glanced at the cyborg. It was so completely almost human that she had an odd communion with the fucking thing. Lydia looked human on the outside, too. But at least her window dressing held a conscience that no artificial life ever could—

  Her arm swung the gun around without a conscious thought as a figure she hadn’t noticed emerged from the foggy, nauseating fumes.

  C.P. Phalen looked like something out of a Jackass movie, her hair and face singed with soot, her Armani uniform all out of whack, one heel broken, the other stiletto cocked to the side as if her ankle had been dislocated.

  Under her arm, cradled against her chest, was a medic bag that was as debris-covered as she was.

  In a bored, exhausted voice, the woman said, “If you shoot me after all of this shit, I’m never having you or your man as a houseguest again. Ever.”

  * * *

  In the emergency exit hallway, Gus had Daniel out flat with the man’s head cocked back at an awkward angle to free up as much airway as he could. He had two fingers on the side of Daniel’s neck, and as long as there was that too-fast pulse, no chest compressions were needed. It was only if things went still that he would double-fist up, and start pumping.

  The initial round of spasming paralysis had passed, and now the limbs were lax. And as one side of Gus’s awareness calculated the infinitesimal chances that Phalen or Lydia would come back alive—much less with anything he could use to help the man—the pharmaceutical researcher in him was wondering what the hell was going on with his patient.

  Daniel’s skin had gone white, all over his body: As a Caucasian, he hadn’t had a lot of melanin to begin with, but now it was as if vitiligo had taken him over. The only color anywhere on the chest or arms came from moles or the occasional freckle, and the flesh was cold to the touch, like all surface circulation had ceased.

  And then there was the hair thing.

  The dusting of hair on his forearms was falling off, or sloughing off, if Gus ran a hand over the limb. Likewise, on the scalp, all of the follicles seemed to be releasing, the post-chemo regrowth fuzz drifting off.

  Except Daniel’s heart was still beating, and he was breathing—in a wheezing fashion, it was true, but there was respiration—

  “Ah! Fuck!”

  As Gus yelped, he brushed frantically at his leg, and in the back of his mind, he was glad no one else was around to see him sissy-scramble away from the scorpion that had crawled up onto his thigh.

  Courtesy of his flipout, the thing went flying and landed on the concrete floor. And when it just sat there for a second, like he’d stunned it, he grabbed for the container and put the glass box over the arachnid.

  The confinement seemed to reorient the thing, and the scorpion started pacing around, like she was ready to sting again.

  “No worse for wear, are you,” he murmured as the creature pivoted toward him and seemed to meet his eyes. “And don’t look at me like that. Did you see what happened when you envenomated that guy? I’m not looking to be white, thank you very much—”

  The steel door of the tunnel swung open, and Gus didn’t bother trying to protect himself. It was either the two women he most wanted to see in the world. Or it was death in the form of something with a gun.

  Or maybe a wolf who was hungry?

  Whatever. He was too shell-shocked after everything—

  “Daniel—is he alive?”

  The words didn’t really compute, but the sight of Lydia Susi emerging buck-ass naked through the smoke, blood streaking from minor wounds, plaster dust in her hair, kind of made sense.

  And then he saw his Phalen.

  Catherine Phillips Phalen looked like hell in a handbasket, and the fact that she was walking on the side of her ankle was something he was going to have to take care of. If he got the chance.

  As Lydia dropped to her knees by Daniel and shifted his head into her lap, Gus’s dream woman walked up and set down the med bag right beside him.

  “Is he going to live?” Lydia asked. “What’s going on with him?”

  Gus forced himself to snap to attention. “If I—ah, if I could get him out to a patient room, I could probably find out. But right now, as far as I can tell, his vitals are steady—for the moment.”

  “We cleared the place,” she said. “Before we came back here. The remaining two soldiers, we took care of them. So we can go out there again.”

  As she focused on Daniel and started to murmur to her man, Gus looked up at Phalen. “Hi,” he said stupidly.