spaced by miles and neighbors who were just as reclusive and trigger-happy as someone reclusive and trigger- happy himself could want.
Lash, son of the Omega, sat at a beat-up kitchen table in a single-room hunting cabin in one of the stretches of forest. Across the weathered pine surface in front of him he’d spread every Lessening Society financial record he’d been able to find or print out or call up on his laptop.
This was such bullshit.
He reached over and picked up an Evergreen Bank statement that he’d read a dozen times. The Society’s largest account had one hundred twenty-seven thousand five hundred forty-two dollars and fifteen cents in it. The others, which were housed among six other banks, including Glens Falls National and Farrell Bank amp; Trust, had balances of between twenty bucks and twenty thousand.
If this was all the Society had, they were teetering on the crumbling ledge of bankruptcy.
The raids over the summer had yielded some good resellables in the form of looted antiques and silver, but realizing those funds was proving complicated, because it involved a lot of human contact. And there had been some financial accounts that had been seized, but again, siphoning off money from human banks was a complicated mess. As he’d learned the hard way.
“Y’all want some more coffee?”
Lash looked up at his number two and thought it was a miracle Mr. D was still around. When Lash had first entered this world, reborn by his true father, the Omega, he had been lost, the enemy now his family. Mr. D had been his guide, although like all tourist maps, Lash had assumed the bastard would wear out his usefulness as the new locale was internalized by the driver.
Not so. The little Texan who had been Lash’s entree was now his disciple.
“Yeah,” Lash said, “and how about food?”
“Y’sir. Got you some good ol’ fatback bacon, right chere, and that cheese you like.”
The coffee was poured nice and slow into Lash’s mug. Sugar was next, and the spoon used to stir made a soft clinking sound. Mr. D would have cheerfully wiped Lash’s ass if asked, but he wasn’t a pussy. The little fucker could kill like no one’s business, the Chucky doll of slayers. Great short-order cook, too. Made pancakes that were a mile high and fluffy as a pillow.
Lash checked his watch. The Jacob amp; Co. had diamonds all over it, and in the dim light from the computer screen they were a thousand points of light. But the thing was a replacement faker he’d gotten off eBay. He wanted another real one except…holy Christ…he couldn’t afford it. Sure, he’d kept all the accounts of his “parents” after he’d killed the pair of vampires who’d raised him as their own, but though there was a good load of green in those baskets, he was leery of spending any of it on frivolous shit.
He had bills to pay. Like for mortgages and weapons and ammo and clothes and rent and car leases. Lessers didn’t eat, but they consumed a lot of resources, and the Omega didn’t care about cash. But then, he lived in hell and had the ability to conjure out of thin air anything from a hot meal to the Liberace cloaks he liked to jack his black shadow body into.
Lash hated to admit it, but he had the feeling his true father was a little light in the loafers. No real man would be caught dead in that sparkly shit.
As he lifted his coffee cup, his watch glimmered and he frowned.
Whatever, that was a status symbol.
“Your boys are late,” he bitched.
“They be comin’.” Mr. D went over and opened the seventies-era refrigerator. Which not only had a squeaking door and was the color of a rotten olive, but drooled like a dog.
This was ri-fucking-diculous. They needed to upgrade their cribs. Or if not all, at least one for his HQ.
At least the coffee was perfect, although he kept that to himself. “I don’t like waiting.”
“They be comin’, don’tchu worry. Three eggs in your omelet?”
“Four.”
As a series of crack and splits radiated through the cabin, Lash tapped the tip of his Waterman on the Evergreen statement. Expenses for the Society, including cell phone bills, Internet hookups, rent/mortgages, weapons, clothes, and cars ran easily fifty grand a month.
When he’d first been getting a feel for his new role, he’d been damn sure someone in the ranks was peeling skin off the apple. But he’d been watching things carefully for months, and there was no Kenneth Lay going on that he could find. It was a simple matter of accounting, not fudging the books or embezzlement: Costs were higher than revenues. Period.
He was doing his best to arm his troops, even stooping so low as to buy four crates of guns from bikers he’d met in jail over the summer. But it wasn’t enough. His men needed better than rehabbed Red Ryders to take out the Brotherhood.
And while he was at the wish list, he had to have more men. He’d thought the bikers would be a good pool to recruit from, but they were proving too cohesive. Based on his dealings with them, his intuition told him he had to bring them all on or none-because sure as shit if he cherry-picked, the ones chosen would return to their clubhouse and tell their buddies about their fun new job killing vampires. And if he took them all, then he was running the risk of their splitting off from his authority.
One-by-one recruiting was going to be the best strategy, but it wasn’t like he’d had time to do any of it. Between the training sessions with his father-which, in spite of his issues with Daddy-o’s wardrobe, were proving monstrously helpful-and his monitoring the persuasion camps and looting repositories, and trying to get his men to focus on the job at hand, he had not even an hour left in the day.
So shit was getting critical: To be a successful military leader required three things, and resources and recruits were two of them. And although being the son of the Omega gave him loads of benes, time was time, stopping for no man, no vampire, and no scion of evil.
Considering the state of the accounts, he knew he had to start with resources first. Then he could go about getting the other two.
The sound of a car pulling up to the cabin had him palming a forty and Mr. D going for his.357 Magnum. Lash kept his heat under the table, but Mr. D was all Times Square about his, holding the piece straight out, his arm extended in a line directly from his shoulder.
When there was a knock, Lash said sharply: “You’d better be who I think you are.”
The lesser’s answer was the right one. “It’s me ’n’ Mr. A ’n’ your pickup.”
“Come on in,” Mr. D said, ever the good host, even though his.357 was still up and ready for action.
The two slayers who walked through the door were the last of the pale ones, the final pair of old-timers who had been in the Society long enough to have lost their individual hair and eye coloring.
The human who was dragged in with them was a six-foot stretch of nothing particularly interesting, a twenty- something white boy with an average face and a hairline that would be giving up the ghost in another couple years. The guy’s Wonder-bread, who-cares looks no doubt explained why he dressed the way he did: He had a leather jacket with an eagle embossed on the back, a Fender Rock amp; Roll Religion shirt, chains hanging from his jeans, and kicks by Ed Hardy.
Sad. Truly sad. Like putting twenty-fours on a Toyota Camry. And if the boy was armed? No doubt it was with a Swiss Army knife that got used mostly for the toothpick.
But he didn’t have to be a fighter to be useful. Lash had those. From this POS he needed something else.
The guy looked at Mr. D’s welcome Magnum and glanced back at the door as if he were wondering if he could outrun a bullet. Mr. A solved the issue by closing them all in together and staying right in front of the exit.
The human looked at Lash and frowned. “Hey…I know you. From jail.”
“Yeah, you do.” Lash stayed seated and smiled a little. “So you want to know what the good and bad thing is about this meeting?”
The human swallowed and went back to focusing on Mr. D’s muzzle. “Yeah. Sure.”
“You were easy to find. All my men had to do was go to Screamer’s and stand around and…there you were.” Lash eased back in his chair, the cane seat creaking. As the human’s stare flicked over, there was a temptation to tell the guy to forget about the sound and worry about the forty under the table that was aimed at his family jewels. “You been staying out of trouble since I saw you in jail?”
The human shook his head and said, “Yes.”
Lash laughed. “You want to try that again? You’re not in sync.”
