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BROWNSWICK SCHOOL FOR GIRLS, CALDWELL, NEW YORK

Ants under the skin

As Rhage transferred his weight from one shitkicker to the other, he felt like his bloodstrea the underside of every fucking square inch of his flesh And that wasn’t the half of it Rando fingers to twitch, knees to jerk, shoulders to tighten like he was about to go tennis racket on so

For the one millionth time since he’d ed, overgrown meadow up ahead Back when the Broick School for Girls had been a functioning entity, the field in front of hi lawn that had been welland summer, de-leafed in the autumn, and snow-covered pretty as a children’s book in the winter Now, it was a touch-football field fronarled bushes that could do ion, saplings that were the ugly, misshapen stepchildren of the rass that could trip you like a little bitch if you were trying to sprint

Likewise, the brick buildings, which had sheltered and provided living and instructional spaces to the privileged elite’s offspring, were aging badly without regular , off-kilter shutters opening and shutting in the cold wind as if the ghosts couldn’t decide whether they wanted to be seen or just heard

It was the ca everyone had packed up after thething since

But the facilities were not empty

As Rhage took a deep inhale, his gag reflex did a couple of push-ups in the back of his throat Soin the abandoned dormitories and classrooms that it was i stench of the whole Christ, it was like putting your face in a chu like the world were about to run out of oxygen

Assu someone had added baby powder to all the day-old fish heads and goo

For that sweet finish, don’tcha know

As his skin went on another shimmy-shimmy, he told his curse to hold its hey-nannies, that hell yeah, it was going to get let off the chain ASAP He wasn’t even going to atte to throw the brakes on it was ever successful, anyway—and whereas giving the beast free rein was not always a good thing, tonight it was going to be an offensive bene The Black Dagger Brotherhood was facing how many lessers? Fifty? A hundred and fifty?

That was a lot to handle, even for thein was going to come in handy

Talk about your ringer froo, the iven hira that it did, in fact, ery Courtesy of the dragon, unless he y levels properly and moderated his emotions, all hell broke loose

Literally

Yup, in the course of the last century, he had beco didn’t eat his nearest and dearest, or get thehtly neith a “Jurassic Park Is Alive” headline But hat he and his brothers were facing right now—and how isolated this careat purple-scaled bastard with the chain-saw teeth and the hollow-legged hangry was going to get his Nobu on Although, again, a lesser-only diet hat they were looking for

No brothers as Hot Pockets, please And no humans as tapas or dessert, thank you very much

The latter was more out of discretion than affection Shit knew those rats without tails never went anywhere without two things: a half dozen of their evolutionarily inferior, nocturnally codependent, fuck-twit buddies, and their goddamn cell phones Man, YouTube was a total pain in the ass when you wanted to keep your ith the undead under wraps For nearly two thousand years, va Society had been no one else’s business except for the combatants involved, and the fact that hu the environ each other what to think and say was only one of the reasons he hated them

Fucking Internet

Changing gears so he didn’t get loose too soon, Rhage GoPro’d his vision to acover about twenty feet away from him Assail, son of Whoever-the-Fuck, was dressed in funeral-cortege black, his Dracula-dark hair requiring no caht witha solid—and a one-eighty The drug dealer had coood on his pro Society by delivering the Fore-lesser’s head in a box to Wrath’s feet

And also divulging the location of this bolt-hole the slayers had been using as HQ

Which was how everyone had ended up here, up to their nuts in the overgroaiting for the countdown on their V-synchronized watches to hit 0:00