He had been so vengeful and so petty. A terrible combination.
Now he was here, abruptly old and infirmed, with no one to help him, no son to bear him up, no legacy left within his Lessening Society. He was doomed to be where all of history retreated with enough passage of days and nights: A distant memory that died out when the last of those who knew him went unto their graves.
He had been hubristic about his future. And now… it was too late.
In disgust with himself, he was going to turn away and head to the place where he would find one last chance for a rival… when he noticed movement upon the bedding platform.
Shuffling forward, he stood over the black bloody mess he had lamely tossed over. The components of what had been his sexual organs were twisting and turning upon themselves, melting, melding… reforming. Germinating.
It was a tender mass, however, and he wished he could remain and protect his only begotten. Knowing he had to leave it in such a vulnerable state, the Omega stood over his progeny and played witness to the mass doubling in size, and then incrementally coalescing into an infant: Arms and legs, chubby and uncoordinated, sprouted from the trunk, as the head also emerged. Movement unrelated to the gestation was next, the limbs beginning to flex and churn.
Underneath the veil of black blood, the skin was white and matte, like bone.
“My son,” he whispered.
If the evil had been capable of love, he knew that the feeling so many lived and died for was what was coursing through him the now, the strange, unfamiliar weight behind his breast forging a connection with the burgeoning young that was nothing logical, everything instinctual.
And indeed, though he resented it, he knew that the sensation was in fact love because he had felt it for one other. His sister, however, the so-called great Virgin Scribe, had always been too busy for him, too concerned with her single act of creation, to pay any attention to the brother who had followed her everywhere when they had first been called into existence by the Creator. Her negligence had been the seat of his hatred for the vampires.
So petty. So childish.
“I must needs go.” He brushed his hands over eyes that watered. “You shall survive. With or without me. You’ve done it once before.”
Though he wanted to stay, he had to get into the Brotherhood’s most sacred place, to those jars the fighters had collected over the course of the war. In them, though dried and in some cases ancient, were the hearts that had pumped his blood through the bodies of his inductees, trophies for the Brothers as dead vampires had been his trophies against the Scribe Virgin. If he could consume those repositories, he could fuel himself by accessing the residue of his essence left in those chambers. Yes, it would be only scraps, but there was volume. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of cardiac muscles would be available to him, and even morsels could fill one up if there were enough upon the plate.
He was also certain where they were located. The Creator had been forced, out of fairness, to allow the Omega one advantage to cure an act of overreaching by the Scribe Virgin.
So no, he would not die, never, not ever. No extinction for him.
Fuck that prophecy.
But just in case? His son would live on after him—and as he had to force himself to go, and as he worried over what would happen to the young if he did not survive, there was an irony. The Omega’s need to ensure the continuation of a part of himself, of a fraction of who and what he was?
It was the one and only thing he had ever had in common with mortals.
Now he understood why humans cherished their children.
And vampires, too.
CHAPTER ONE
Present Day
267 Primrose Court
Caldwell, New York
No, not this one. This one is not for you.”
As Detective Treyvon Abscott stepped in the path of Detective Erika Saunders, she stopped. Then again, that was what you did when you hit a brick wall. Her partner was a former college football player, an honorably discharged Marine, and at least four inches taller and seventy pounds heavier than she was. But even with all that going for him, he still braced his weight and put both palms out in front of himself, as if he were protecting his end zone against the likes of a Mack truck.
“Dispatch sent me here.” Erika crossed her arms over her chest. “So I know you’re not standing in my way right now. You’re just really not.”
Behind her colleague, a run-of-the mill two-story house with an attached two-car garage was strobe-lit in blue, the flashing lights of the squad cars parked in front of the driveway reflecting off the storm windows, turning a family’s home into a disco ball of tragedy.