Butch’s blessing and curse went to work as he took a deep, even inhale. The transfer started on a wisp of inky smoke that passed from the slayer’s mouth into Butch’s, but soon grew to a river of the shit, the essence of the Omega funneling from one to another in a sickening rush.
When it was over, the slayer was going to be nothing but an ashy residue. And Butch was going to be sick as a dog and relatively useless.
V jogged over, ducking a throwing star and manhandling a pinwheeling lesser back into Hollywood’s punching zone.
“What the fuck are you doing,” he bitched as he peeled Butch off the pavement and dragged him out of his suck zone. “You wait until afterward, true.”
Butch curled over to the side and dry-heaved. He was semipolluted already, the stink of the enemy rising from out of his pores, his body struggling with its load of poison. He needed to be healed here and now, but V wasn’t going to take the chance of their—
Later, he would marvel at getting blindsided twice in one fight.
But such introspection was hours off, as it turned out.
The baseball bat caught him in the side of the knee and the fall that came right after the blow was a yard sale in the worse way. He went down hard, his leg pretzeling beneath his considerable weight at an angle that turned his hip into a screaming ball of agony—which suggested that karma might not be about payback so much as it struggled with independent thinking: As he was felled by an injury like the one he’d just given someone, he cursed himself and the bastard with the Louisville Slugger and the Johnny-disloyal-Damon aim.
Time for some quick thinking. He was flat on his back with a leg that hummed like an engine on overdrive. And that bat could do a lot of damage—
Butch came from out of nowhere, lurching with all the grace of a wounded buffalo, the bastard’s heavy body careening into the slayer just as that bat went over-the-shoulder with an aim at V’s head. The pair of them slammed into the bricks, and after a beat of motionless, fuckin’hell-that-was-a-stinger, the lesser pulled a full-torso jerk and gasped.
It was like watching eggs slide down the side of a kitchen cabinet: The slayer’s bones went liquid and the thing slumped onto the pavement, leaving Butch to collapse back with his black-blooded dagger in his hand.
He’d gutted the motherfucker.
“You . . . okay . . .” the cop groaned.
All V could do was look over at his best friend.
As the others continued fighting, the pair of them just stared at each other against the audio backdrop of grunts and metal-to-metal strikes and inventive cursing. There should be something said between them, V thought. There was just so much . . . to be said.
“I want it from you,” V bit out. “I need it.”
Butch nodded. “I know.”
“When.”
The cop nodded down at V’s fucked-up leg. “Get healed up first.” Butch groaned and got to his feet. “On that note, I’ll go get the Escalade.”
“Be careful. Take one of the brothers with—”
“Fuck off with that. And you stay put.”
“I’m not going anywhere with this knee, cop.”
Butch walked off, his stride only marginally better than V could have pulled off with the dislocated mess he was rocking. Craning his neck, he looked over at the others. They were prevailing—slowly but surely, the tide was turning in their favor.
Until about five minutes later.
When seven more slayers showed up at the alley.
Clearly the second wave had likewise called for backup, and these were also new recruits who were unsure how to handle the mhis: They’d obviously been provided an address by their comrades, but their eyes could see nothing but an empty alley.
They were going to get over the what-the-hell’s fast, however, and breach the barrier.
Moving as quickly as he could, V shoved his palms into the ground and dragged his ass into an inset doorway. The pain was so bad, his vision momentarily fritzed out, but that didn’t keep him from stripping his glove off and putting it into his jacket.
He hoped like hell Butch didn’t double back and come to fight. They were going to need transport as soon as this was over.
As the enemy’s next wave surged forward, he let his head flop onto his chest and breathed so shallowly his rib cage barely moved. With his hair falling into his face, his eyes were shielded, and he was able to stare through the black veil at the onslaught of slayers. Given the incredible number of fresh inductees, he knew that the Society had to be drawing psychos and socios from Manhattan—the pool in Caldwell simply wasn’t big enough to account for this surge in forces.