“Now you tie yourself,” Z yelled up. “Before you do anything. Or I’ll pull you down myself.”

Balthazar smiled under his arm. “You can’t do that.”

Z yanked the rope to answer that one.

“But I’ll shatter into a thousand pieces,” the Bastard said. “That’s what you’re worried about, right? Seems silly to prove the danger by creating it—and then who will fix this shutter?”

“There’s a bush under you. FYI.”

“Oh! Well, then it’s not that dangerous to begin with, and messing about with hooks will not only ruin the structural integrity of this house, but it’ll slow me down and accomplish nothing. Kind of like this conversation.”

“Has anyone told you you make no damned sense?”

Balz turned back to the faulty shutter. “It’s come up once or twice. Fortunately, I can get very hard of hearing when I want to.”

Z closed his eyes. When he reopened them—prepared to tell the fucker to go ahead, it was his goddamn life to wager on the asshat wheel of craps—Balz was already in a yank with the bottom of the half-shut shutter, gloved hands locked on like loaves of bread, body arching back. If that thing decided to get with the program, the Bastard was going to free-fall into—

“Not going to budge,” Balz puffed. “Shit. Let me try the next one.”

“What do you think is wrong with them?” Z said.

Distantly, the wind let out a roar, the sound like that of a train on the approach. Good thing the mansion weighed as much as the mountain or it might get blown off.

“I think the motors have burned out,” Balz yelled down. “You can smell the electric fire up here.”

The Bastard crab-walked over to the next fixed sash. Pull. Tug. Nowhere.

“Wait, I have an idea.” The male took the rope off his waist and tied it onto the bottom of the shutter. “You have better leverage than I do.”

“Get out of the way.” Before the Bastard could do what he inevitably would with the arguing, Z cut in with, “You’re wrong. So shut the fuck up.”

“How do you know what I was going to say?”

“History.”

But the Bastard still put his gloved hands back on the shutter.

“You’re going to fall off the damn house if this lets go.” Z shook his head. “Just be reasonable. Please?”

Well. What do you know. The magic word.

Balz backed off with all kinds of muttering. And then Z wound the nylon rope around his hands a couple of times and gave it a try all on his lonesome, easing into the full power of his body like a tow truck trying to get a car out of mud. Finally, he sank down into his glutes, his arms and shoulders straining, his lips pulling away from his fangs.

There was a tremendous screech, and then the shutter came down on a oner.

“Oh, shit!”

Z fell back on his ass, the snow catching his body like a baseball mitt, all support, no cushioning. As the rope went lax and flapped onto his legs, Balz swung loose up at the window, one foot fixed, the other free, one hand locked on the track of the next shutter, the other up and out. He recovered quick, velcroing once again.

“You okay?” the Bastard called down.

Z upped to his feet and brushed the snow off his backside. “I told you so.”

“Let’s do the same thing on the next one.”

Zsadist glanced to the other end of the house. Qhuinn and Blay were working on their set of shutters on the lower level, or should have been. The former seemed frozen as he focused on something off toward the tree line.

Z put his fingers between his front teeth and whistled. As the sound traveled, Qhuinn’s focus shifted around.

After a moment, the brother whistled back two short bursts.

“Do they need help?” Balz asked from above.

“All clear.” Z nodded to the next failed shutter. “Okay, Spidey, rope me up with that one. Let’s get this done and see what else is wrong with this old ark.”

It was all going to be fine.

That’s what was going through Blay’s mind as he and Qhuinn reentered the garage with the ladder. The busted shutters were down where they should be and locked into place, the motor lines cut so that there was no malfunction risk when the full electricity came back on. After the storm, there were going to be a lot of repairs, and there would be time to rewire things then. What couldn’t be risked was a daylight retraction.

Just as they were heading back into the house, a muffled roar sounded out somewhere in the distance. And a second. A third.

At which point the lights came back on fully, the generators settling in to a dim, pervasive purr.

“Ruhn is the fucking master,” Qhuinn said as they tilted the ladder against the wall in the mudroom and stomped the snow off the treads of their shitkickers.

The cheer of the doggen in the kitchen was like that of a group being rescued off a deserted island. By a Carnival cruise ship. With a stocked bar and the buffet already set out. And Charo performing on the Lido Deck.

“Such the man,” Blay agreed.

As they walked into the kitchen and were applauded unnecessarily by the staff, Blay unzipped his parka, but kept the puff where it was in case this was just a pause and they would be going out again. In the foyer, people were gathering once more, the check-in happening organically, as if the electricity coming back on required a reckoning—

The crash was loud as a bomb.

And succeeded by shattering glass, a blast of cold air, and a resonant pine smell.

Before anyone could react, Rhage and Butch came running out of the library. The pair of them looked like they’d been in a slap fight, their faces red, noses runny, eyes blinking like they couldn’t see. Snow covered their hair, their shoulders, their shitkickers.

“Tree,” Rhage panted.

Butch grabbed the front of his own parka like he was having a coronary. “Big tree—”

“Coming after us!”

“What the hell are you talking about?” someone demanded.

“And what just hit the house?” somebody else shouted.

“Fucking tree!” Rhage ground out as he braced his hands on his knees and bent over to breathe better. “And it’s in the house.”

At that moment, up at the head of the grand staircase, Wrath and Beth appeared with their son. The Queen was carrying L.W., the young was carrying his golden retriever stuffed animal—the one that was bigger than he was—and Wrath had his hand locked on George’s lead.

“Is everyone okay?” Beth called down. “We heard a crash.”

“And smell a whole lot of pretty-much-Pine-Sol,” the King said as they started their descent. “What’s going on in the library?”

Blay shook his head and glanced at Qhuinn, ready to raise a question about what was going to go wrong next—

When the lights went off unexpectedly.

Where there had been illumination, there was a sudden and pervasive return of the pitch black, no security lights on, no fireplaces lit to glow, the candles canned because of all the Thomas Edison.

Later, Blay would remember wheeling around in space and throwing his arms out toward the grand staircase. It was as if he knew what was going to happen, what misstep was going to occur, what off-kilter was going to result in a tragic fall.

Wrath would be fine on the descent. As a blind male, whether or not there was light did not matter to him. For Beth, however, the abrupt loss of her sight would be a shock—and Blay didn’t know exactly what occurred, but he, and everyone else, heard her shout of alarm.

After which came the fall.

L.W. began to wail at the same time a sickening series of bumps and thumps came down the stairs, bruises or worse occurring—and there was nothing to be done. The momentum worked with gravity’s inexorable pull to a terrible result, and in the darkness, no matter how far Blay reached forward, no matter how much he strained, there was nothing he could do to stop the inevitable.

It was a hole in one. Nothing planned, certainly not the horrible result.

And all the while, the child screamed.

“There’s another one,” Balz called down from the now-shuttered bank of windows. “There.”

Zsadist stood up again from the snowpack and brushed his leathers off. You’d think he’d have developed a core competency in catching his weight on the free fall, but nope. His butt had taken the brunt of things. Three times now.

As he looked in the direction Balz was pointing toward, he got a snowflake right in the eyeball. Rubbing the sting away, he said, “Yeah, we need that closed, too. Take the rope up?”

“Will do.”

There was no reason to raise the whole setting-hooks thing again. Balz was right about his climbing expertise. The Bastard’s scaling and staying put was totally impressive, and it made a male wonder exactly what the guy had gotten into over the years.

Then again, that wasn’t a question Z really wanted answered.

Stepping back, he reviewed the expanse of the house, you know, just in case any shutters had decided to magically retract. Which they hadn’t. But a male got paranoid when he thought of his shellan and his young.

What if one of those things decided to pop loose in the middle of the day? What if the electricity came back on or had a surge or . . . something . . . and suddenly the mansion went wide-open glass at noontime?

Jesus, why hadn’t he worried about this before.

As a hot flash of terror went through him, at least his toes warmed up a little in his shitkickers. Meanwhile, the Bastard was already over at the other window, the rope hanging off his ass like a tail, his thin-gloved hands working the upper left-hand corner of the shutter where the motor was, his lower body flush with the exterior wall while his upper torso curved away to give him space to work.

“Almost done,” he called out. “Then I’m going to—”

All at once, the window he was at lit up like the sun had risen inside the room on the far side, yellow light cascading out into the night, into the storm.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t all.