Lover Revealed

will have to see me there.'

'No, because I am not required to render you mine eyes. And you assume you will stay on the council, which is doubtful. Wrath will have no cause to deny the sehclusion motion. You will be without a mate and I will not function as your ghardian, so you will have no one to grant permission for your presence to be out in the open. Not even your bloodline can override the law.'

Marissa's jaw unhinged. Holy heaven… she would be a total social outcast. A veritable… no one. 'How can you do this to me?'

He glanced over his shoulder. 'I am tired of myself. Tired of fighting the urge to defend you from choices you make—'

'Choices! Living as a female in the aristocracy I have no choices!'

'Untrue. You could have been a proper mate to Wrath.'

'He didn't want me! You knew that, you saw it with your own two eyes! That's why you wanted to have him killed!'

'But now when I think on it, I wonder… why did he feel nothing for you? Perhaps you didn't work hard enough to engage his interest.'

Marissa felt a raw fury. And the emotion grew hotter as her brother said, 'And as for choices, you could have stayed out of that human's hospital room. You chose to go in there. And you chose to… you could have… not layed with him.'

'Is that what this is about? For God's sake, I'm still a virgin.'

'Now you lie.'

The three words snapped her out of her emotions. As the heat drained away, clarity came, and for the first time, she tally saw her brother: brilliant of mind, devoted to his patients, loving of his dead shellan… and utterly rigid. A male of science and order who liked rules and predictability and enjoyed a precise vision of life.

And he was clearly willing to protect that worldview at the cost of her future… her happiness… her very self.

'You are absolutely correct,' she said with a strange calm. 'I do have to go.'

She glanced at the boxes that were filled with the clothes she'd worn and the things she'd bought. Then her eyes found him again. He was doing the same, staring at them as if measuring the life she'd led.

'I shall let you keep the Diirers, of course,' he said.

'Of course,' she whispered. 'Good-bye, brother.'

'I am Havers to you now. Not brother. And never again.'

He dropped his head and walked out of the room.

In the silence that followed there was the temptation to fall on the bare mattress and cry. But there was no time. She had maybe an hour before light.

Dear Virgin, where would she go?

Chapter Sixteen

When Mr. X came back from meeting the Omega on the other side, he felt like he had heartburn. Which seemed logical, as he'd been fed his own ass.

The master had been teed up about a variety of things. He wanted more lessers, more vampires bleeding out, more progress, more… more… But the thing was, no matter what he was given, he would always be unsatisfied. Maybe that was his curse.

Whatever. The calculus of Mr. X's failure was up on the blackboard, the mathematical equation of his destruction outlined in chalk. The unknown in the algebra was time. How long before the Omega snapped and Mr. X got recalled for eternity?

Things needed to move faster with Van. That man had to get on board and in place ASAP.

Mr. X went over to his laptop and fired the Dell up. Sitting down next to the dried brown stain of a blood pool, he called up the Scrolls and found the relevant passage. The lines of the prophecy calmed him:

There shall be one to bring the end before the master, a fighter of modern time found in the seventh of the

twenty-first,

and he shall be known in the numbers he bears: One more than the compass he apperceives, Though mere four points to make at his right, Three lives has he,

Two scores on his fore,

and with a single black eye, in one well will he be birthed and die.

Mr. X eased back against the wall, cracked his neck, and looked around. The stinky remnants of the meth lab, the filth in the place, the air of bad deeds done without remorse were like a party he didn't want to be at but couldn't leave. Just like the Lessening Society.

Except it was going to be okay. At least he'd spotted the lesser exit.

God, it had been so weird how he'd found Van Dean. X had gone to the ultimate fighting brawls to troll for new recruits and Van had immediately stood out from the others. There was just something special about him, something that elevated him above his opponents. And watching the guy move that first night, Mr. X had thought he'd spotted an important addition to the Society… until he'd noticed the missing finger.

He didn't like to bring in anyone with a physical defect.

But the more he saw Van fight, the more clear it was that an absent pinkie was no liability at all. Then a' couple nights later he saw the tattoo. Van always fought with a T-shirt on, but at one point the thing got shoved up around his pecs. On his back, in black ink, an eye stared out from between his shoulder blades.

That had been what sent Mr. X into the Scrolls. The prophecy was buried deep in the text of the Lessening Society's handbook, an all-but-forgotten paragraph in the midst of the rules of induction. Fortunately, when Mr. X had become Fore-lesser the first time, he'd read the passages thoroughly enough to remember the damn thing was there.

As with the rest of the Scrolls, which had been translated into English in the 1930s, the wording of the prophecy was abstract. But if you were missing a finger on your right hand, then you had only four points to make. 'Three lives' was childhood, adulthood, and then life in the Society. And according to the fight crowd, Van was homegrown, born in the city of Caldwell, which was also known as the Well.

But there was more. The man's instincts were twitchy as hell. All you had to do was watch him in that chicken-wire ring to know that north, south, east, and west were only part of what he was sensing. He had a rare talent for anticipating the way his opponent was going to move. It was the gift that set him apart.

The clincher, however, was the appendix removal. The word score could be construed in a variety of ways, but it very conceivably referred to scarring. And everyone had a belly button, so if you'd had your appendix removed as well, you'd have two scars on your 'fore,' wouldn't you?

Plus it was the right year to find him.

Mr. X reached for his cell phone and called one of his subordinates.

As the line rang, he was aware that he needed Van Dean, that modern fighter, that four-fingered bastard, more than anyone he'd met in his life. Or after his death.

When Marissa materialized in front of the dour gray mansion, she put her hand up to her throat and tilted her head back. God, so much stone rising from the earth, whole quarries stripped to gather the load. And so many leaded-glass windows, the diamond panes looking like bars. And then there was the twenty-foot-high retaining wall that wrapped around the courtyard and the grounds. And the security cameras. And the gates.

So secure, So cold.

The place was precisely as she'd expected it to be, a fortress not a home. And it was surrounded by a buffer of what in the Old Country was called mhis so that unless you were supposed to be here,