Halfway through the foyer, he paused and smoothed his hair down. Which was stupid and a hangover from his youth. Like any of the Brothers were going to care whether his cowlick was behaving?

Kicking himself in the ass, he marched up to the archway and knocked on the jamb.

Across the largely empty space where civilians had private meetings with their King, a couple of the Brothers looked over from the fireplace. It was Rhage, the biggest and blondest of the Brotherhood, and Butch, the used-to-be human with the Boston accent. The former was eating a half gallon of mint chocolate chip ice cream with a sterling silver spoon, the tub wrapped in a dish towel to keep the cold contained. The latter was reviewing what appeared to be pictures on a cell phone, swiping with his finger, his brow down low.

“Hey, Boone, what’s doing?” Rhage said around a full mouth. “I’m real sorry about your dad and stepmahmen.”

Butch looked up from the phone. “Me, too, son. That is tough stuff. On so many levels.”

To acknowledge the statements, Boone bowed yet did not say anything. He didn’t want to be rude, but as far as he was concerned, his sire and the male’s second mate never needed to be discussed at work again.

“I’m supposed to meet Tohrment?” he said.

“The brother should be here any minute.” Rhage motioned with the spoon. “Come on in.”

“I can wait out here?”

“Nah, it’s okay,” Rhage said. “You want some ice cream? I got tubs of chocolate chocolate chip and rocky road in the freezer. And you can have your own spoon.”

Boone shook his head because his throat had gone tight. Words of condolence were easier to handle than gestures. The former was what he was used to in the glymera—although in the case of Rhage and Butch, he knew they’d meant what they’d said the moment they’d seen him. The latter, the offer of ice cream from Rhage’s personal stash, he was not used to.

He had always taken care of himself because he’d had to.

“Thank you, but I ate before I came.” He didn’t like to lie, but it was better than tearing up over some rocky road.

“Let me know if you change your mind.” Rhage refocused on Butch. “So then what did V do?”

Butch didn’t answer right away. He was back at the phone, and he waited until he finished whatever series of images was on it before looking up again.

“V got the body down and packed it up.” The Brother put the cell in the pocket of his Peter Millar slacks. “He van’d the remains to Havers’s, and we’re just hoping someone comes along to claim her because we have no ID at this time. V’s asked me to take over and investigate.”

“Well, it is how you used to make a living, Mr. Homicide Detective.” Rhage ran the spoon around the inside of the container, gathering the gently melted part. “Where do you start?”

Boone tried to make as if he wasn’t eavesdropping by going on what he hoped looked like an idle wander around the large Oriental in the center of the room. Meanwhile, his ears were buzzing—and then there was no hiding his interest. As he came up to the desk where Saxton, the King’s solicitor, sat during business hours, he paused and leaned down. There was a stack of bright yellow 8.5-by-11s, and when he saw the warning printed on them, he had to pick one of the flyers up and turn toward the Brothers.

“What happened last night?” he asked.

“Another killing,” Butch said. “At Pyre’s Revyval.”

“The role-playing club?” Boone put the flyer back on top of the stack. “Which meets in that abandoned shirt factory.”

“That’s the one. You know anything about it?”

“Some of my cousins used to go there. I don’t know if they still do.”

“Could you call them for me? I want to talk to anyone who’s familiar with the scene.”

“Sure.” Boone took out his cell phone. “I’ll hit them up right now.”

Stepping away from the desk, he started texting his third cousin once removed and his second cousin on his blood mahmen’s side. As he was typing out the messages, he couldn’t help but think that someone else had lost somebody in their family the night before.

Were they in a conventional mourning? he wondered. Which would be painful for sure, but also, he imagined, a kind of relief to be “normal” inside the grief.

Instead of where he was with his sire. Nowhere.

He was just hitting send on the second text when Tohrment came in the Audience House’s front door. The Brother brushed snowflakes out of his black hair with its telltale white stripe in the front and then he unzipped his leather jacket. The weapons underneath gleamed in the mellow light of the foyer and made Boone more determined.

“Hey, son,” Tohrment said as he entered the dining room. “What’s doing?”

Boone cleared his throat and remembered his 1), 2), 3), and 4). “I was hoping to catch you for a minute—”

“No, you’re not going out into the field.” The Brother took off his jacket. “I know you’re convinced you’re going to go stir-crazy with nothing to do, but I told you what needed to happen before you’re released to go back on schedule. You’re going to have to go talk with Mary and get a mental health clearance from her. Then you’re going to take a couple of nights off until the Fade Ceremony. After that, we’ll reassess.”

Boone dropped his voice because he didn’t want to be overtly insubordinate. “There’s nothing in the handbook that requires—”

“There doesn’t have to be.” Tohrment turned his back to his Brothers and likewise got quiet. “I already made one mistake with you. I’m not making another.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You should never have been out in the field last night. You were distracted for good reason because of where your sire was, and I knew that, but it slipped through the cracks.”

“I took down a slayer just fine.”

Tohrment leaned in, his navy blue eyes nearly black. “You could have gotten killed because you forgot your vest. If you’d been stabbed in the heart and bled out, or had been mortally wounded by a bullet, it would have been on my conscience for the rest of my life—and no offense, that particular car trunk is full enough already without my trying to squeeze in baggage with your name on it.”

Boone opened his mouth. Shut it. Opened it again.

But damn it, what could he argue now?

“You don’t understand,” Boone muttered. “I’m going to lose my mind if I have to sit in that house and stew about—”

“You can help me.”

Boone glanced over at Butch. “With the death at Pyre?”

“Yeah. Bring me over to your cousins, and then we’ll go check the club out.” The Brother held his palm up to Tohr. “He’ll be with me the whole time. I’ll take care of him and accept all responsibility for his welfare.”

When Tohr looked like he was going to argue, the other Brother kept talking. “Come on, man, it’s not out in the field. We’re not going to be looking for the enemy, and before you throw out a line about the risk of us tripping over something we might have to do something about, unless you put him on house arrest, he’s liable to meet a lesser or shadow anywhere in the city—just like anybody else. I’ll make sure nothing happens to him, and have some pity on the kid. You wouldn’t want to be locked up with nothing to do under his circumstances, either.”

“I won’t take any chances,” Boone rushed in. “I’ll do whatever he tells me to.”

“It’s also a good opportunity to share basic investigation protocols.” Butch shrugged. “It’s a skill the trainees should have in case they get called in to respond to a crime. Like how not to disturb a scene. What to watch out for. How to document. There’s a legitimate training benefit.”

Tohr crossed his arms over his chest and cursed. And that was when Boone knew he was going to be allowed to help.

At just that moment, his phone went off with a text. Checking what had been sent, he turned the screen to face the Brothers.

“This is from my third cousin. He’ll see us later tonight.”

“Then let’s go to Pyre first.” Butch took out his phone and dialed something, then held the unit out to Boone. “Here’s the call that came in last night. Listen to it, and you can try that number again while I drive. I’ve already left a message once and no one’s gotten back to me.”

Boone glanced at Tohr as he took what was being offered to him. Putting the Samsung to his ear, he offered a conciliatory smile to the Brother.

Tohr pointed a finger in Boone’s face. “You get yourself killed doing this and I’m going to strangle you again even though you’re already dead. Are we clear?”

“Yes, sir,” Boone said as the recording kicked in. “Crystal clear—”

All at once, the world receded, his senses and awareness supplanted by the sound of a female’s desperate voice.

. . . Hello? Hello . . . I need help—oh, God, she’s dead. She’s . . . dead just like the other one . . .

* * *

Twenty minutes later, Butch pulled his best friend’s R8 V10 Performance Plus into a parallel parking spot downtown. The car was murdered, everything blacked out, and it was sleek as a space shuttle, capable of reaching Millennium Falcon speeds in spite of the fact that it weighed as much as Rhage. The thing was also a dinosaur in the best sense of the word, a throwback to the big-engined cars of the past that sounded like pro wrestlers and sucked gas like a sprinter used oxygen.

In other words, it was right up V’s alley.

And by “indent-parallel park,” Butch meant “really-frickin’-close to a plowed mound of snow big enough to ski down.” Ah, winter in Caldwell, New York. Where that white stuff metastasized like it had learned the trick of singularity and was trying to take over the world.