Raze hit the ground running in the Windy City. Within an hour of his plane landing, he’d swept through the building that had once housed Grimm’s operation (presently a printing shop) and checked his way through a quarter of the list of Grimm’s known haunts. Then, impatient, he took a chance and headed to Wrigley Field.

Although the ballpark was dark and quiet for the night, Raze knew wrong when he came across it and he damn well felt it as he drove by. Parking a few streets away, he slid out from behind the wheel and opened the back door of his rental to grab his blades. He strapped them on with the efficiency of long practice: daggers on each thigh and two katanas crisscrossing his back. Then he darted over on foot, moving so quickly the mortal eye couldn’t catch him.

As he approached, he picked up the faint sound of a melodious male voice coming from the field, followed by a chorus of murmurs in reply-sounds too slight for anything but a vampire’s hearing to catch. Grimm had been big on staging, too, which made Raze wonder just how closely this protégé had been to Grimm and how long he or she had been working in the shadows.

He rounded the back of the ballpark and climbed up the rear of the bleachers. Pulling his head up over the top, he looked down at the darkened field below. A lone man stood before a group of approximately two hundred robed and kneeling minions. Segmented into pairs with the men in black and the women in red, they formed a perfect pattern of stripes in the center of the field.

Raze listened to a couple lines of bullshit about the supremacy of the vampire nation, then he tuned it out and focused on the leader. The man was tall and lean, dark-haired and dressed in a three-piece suit. He had a mesmerizing cadence to his speech, a lulling sonorousness that was evident even though Raze had stopped picking out the words.