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blurring her vision, scalding her face. She heard doors being kicked open. Heard two more shots—one for Silver, and one for Von. She sobbed.
    James William Wallace stopped beside her, his shoes gleaming with blood. Kneeling, he slung her over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry, then straightened with a grunt and headed down the stairs.
    Annie’s view of the floor dimmed, then melted away into darkness. She wondered if the drugs numbing her body and her grieving heart would hurt the baby. Then she wondered if it would matter. Wondered if she even cared.
    As Annie tumbled into unconsciousness, three words followed her into the dark, three words spoken by the man who had once been her father.
    “Burn it down.”

3
A BITTER PILL
     
    N EW O RLEANS
S T . L OUIS N O . 3 CEMETERY
Three days earlier . . .
     
    Night of March 27–28
     
    M OTHERFUCKING VAMPIRE WAS BREAKING into a cemetery.
    Parked across the street from crypt-filled St. Louis No. 3 and the black van Dante Prejean and Heather Wallace had arrived in, Shadow Branch section chief Sam Gillespie watched as Prejean boosted the petite FBI agent over the cemetery’s locked wrought-iron gate, following her in a heart-stopping blur of motion a second later.
    The pair trotted down the cemetery’s central cement path and out of sight.
    Gillespie tipped back his bottle of Pacifico and drained it, the beer tasting warm and a little flat. Being the last of the six-pack he’d brought with him, he’d nursed it to make it last. He unwrapped a stick of Juicy Fruit and popped it into his mouth. Placing the empty bottle on the rented Nissan’s passenger side floorboards, he grabbed his binoculars and slipped out of the car. He glanced at the trunk. He wanted to take the scoped sniper rifle with him—just in case the moment was finally right.
    The moment to slay a monster packaged in a riveting and dangerous form; a monster who unmade people and murdered others. A monster fathered by a being that, until two days ago, Gillespie had been blissfully unaware existed—a motherfucking fallen angel.
    A monster partially created and released by the SB itself—Dante Prejean.
    Yeah, great. Sure. And if a curious cop stopped to see what he was doing loitering outside a closed cemetery in the wee hours? A black man with a rifle? Let alone a black man with a rifle babbling about slaying monsters and making the world a safer place? Gillespie shook his head. He could just imagine how well that would go over. He’d be Tasered to the ground and pissing himself before he could even reach for his ID.
    He couldn’t afford to be arrested. Couldn’t afford for the SB to discover where their AWOL section chief had gone or what he planned to do to their pet monster. But he also couldn’t afford to let an opportunity to put Prejean down slip past him.
    Gillespie scrubbed a hand over his head, the buzzed-to-the-scalp hair smooth beneath his palm. No choice. He’d have to risk the rifle. He walked behind the Nissan and unlocked the trunk, then bent into the interior, his Gore-Tex jacket rustling. Tossed aside the blue tarp and flipped open the latches on the rifle case.
    Once he had the rifle out of its smart-foam interior and the scope screwed onto the barrel, he wrapped it up in the tarp. Trotting across the street, Gillespie headed for the shadows beneath an oak rooted into the strip of lawn along the sidewalk in front of the cemetery gates. The burnt-oil stink of exhaust from cars cruising the street behind him stung his nostrils. Considering it was after midnight, the amount of traffic surprised him.
    Looks like the city comes to life after midnight. A vampire of brick and concrete and wrought iron, cloaked in ghost-gray Spanish moss.
    Night-thick shadows stretched from beneath the oak’s twisted branches, veiling Gillespie from the traffic rushing along Esplanade Avenue. He rested his back against the oak’s rough trunk, the tarp-hidden rifle propped beside him. He slipped off his gold