Xhex smiled as much as she could—which was not much. And then she lifted her hand in a casual wave.

He flushed, like he could read her mind and knew she was managing him. But after a moment, he lifted his own palm.

They both looked away at the same time.

The tap on her knee brought her head to her hellren. “You finished already?” she asked John Matthew.

Her male shook his head. Then he signed, You want to take a walk?

How the fuck did he know her so well? Then again, they had been together for what seemed like an eternity.

“Yeah,” she said softly, “I would.”

The two of them got up together, and they left their plates—because if you picked anything off the table and tried to take it into the kitchen, you were going to have to look into Fritz’s hangdog face, his heart broken, his eyes watering with self-condemnation at the utter failure in his duty to clear.

Rhage had tried it once with a napkin, and the entire household had ended up with a case of the guilts from the doggen’s unrelenting self-flagellation.

As she and her mate went down the table to the archway into the foyer, they nodded and smiled at people. John Matthew clapped Blay and Qhuinn on the shoulders. She studiously ignored V’s heavy-lidded eyes.

Nope, sorry, V, she thought.

The next thing she knew, they were in the study, but they kept going. Opening up one of the French doors, she held it wide for John Matthew, and then they were outside on the barren terrace. Although it was spring, they were in way upstate New York—and on a mountain. So no lawn furniture, and the pool was battened down, and the formal garden’s flower beds and fruit trees remained insulated for winter.

John Matthew closed the doors behind them, and he hung back, letting her walk around. Sometime later, maybe it was five minutes, maybe it was ten … maybe it was twelve hours … she stopped and looked at the night sky.

“They say there are aliens all the time up here.” When he whistled in an ascension, she glanced over her shoulder. “No, really. People upstate see them regularly. The thought is that it’s, like, secret shit from Plattsburgh.”

John Matthew pursed his lips in a well, huh kind of way.

“Yeah. Not everything that flashes across the heavens is a shooting star.”

She mostly kept the bitterness out of her voice, even though she could give a shit about whether humans were taking pictures of aliens or weather balloons. For fuck’s sake, she was a vampire. Like ET didn’t actually exist?

“I figured out why I’m having the dreams.” The words were spoken quick, like maybe she could duck the whole fucking thing if she spit the syllables out fast enough. “Nate.”

John Matthew nodded. And signed, I should have made the connection.

“Me, too. But yeah, he’s the reason I’m having the nightmares. What he went through is bringing it all back. You know.”

She hated the weakness, the emotion, the fact that under her surface were pain and suffering she had not volunteered for and couldn’t seem to lose. Then again she’d been sold by her own family into that lab, in retribution for a violation they could not forgive.

Murhder had been a former lover of hers. And it was because of that relationship that her own blood had taught her a lesson. Or thought they had—

John Matthew whistled, and when she glanced at him, he signed, But Vishous’s vision wasn’t about the lab. It was about wolven.

“I’m not going to worry about his prognostication crap. For all we know, he had Arby’s at one a.m. and his smokehouse brisket didn’t sit well with him.”

So what are you thinking?

“I’m not.” She cursed when it was clear he wasn’t buying her lie. “Oh, come on. Is my symphath rubbing off on you?”

John Matthew just shrugged. And as he stared at her, she looked down his huge body. He was dressed in black, his skintight T-shirt and his leathers as dark as the shadows he would stalk along in the field as he protected the vampire race from its new enemy.

“I love you,” she said roughly.

Her hellren mouthed a curse. Then signed, Fuck, you’re thinking of going to the Colony, aren’t you.

Darkness abounded, dense and fraught with shadow. O’erwhelming the land as it claimed the souls of the unjust. The earth a vast grave o’er which the dead roamed, searching, searching for all that they had lost …

 

AS NIGHT FELL in Walters, Lydia was sitting at her kitchen table with a mug of Campbell’s tomato soup between her palms, the old poem rattling through her head in her grandfather’s voice, in her grandfather’s language. The fragments were all that remained in her memory of the full piece, as if the words were fabric that had disintegrated with age.

“Stop it, stop it, stop it …”

As she spoke out loud, she took another sip from the lip of the mug. She tasted nothing, couldn’t have said whether it was hot enough, didn’t know if she had made it with water or milk.

Lies were a sickness, her grandfather had always said. And too many of them could be terminal.

The weight on her chest sure as hell felt like a disease.

Glancing to the window beside the little table, everything outside was dark—and not dark in the way things had been in Boston. Not city-dark. Walters was country-dark, like where she had grown up outside of Seattle, no ambient anything throwing off a glow, no soft, urban-diffused illumination to reassure a person who was jumpy and unhappy that all was not lost. All was not a void that you could fall into.

Especially if you were a sinner. Or if you lied.

“Forgive me, Grandfather,” she whispered.

She put the mug down, finding the normally comforting smell revolting. And as she glanced at the level to see how much she’d actually taken in, the sight of the heavy, viscous red soup was worse.

It reminded her of blood.

Bolting up, she took her sad-sack dinner to the sink and looked away as she rinsed out the mug.

The kitchen had been renovated last in the late eighties, the cabinets a Home Improvement-era mauve, the linoleum floor a pink and blue color scheme that matched. The appliances were black and coordinated with nothing. The sink was stainless steel and matte from use and cleaning.

But none of that was what she dwelled on, and not because she’d gotten used to the Candy-style decor: There was a window over the sink. Another by the table. A third in the door that opened to the detached garage and the backyard.

Her hands shook as she rushed around and pulled the flimsy curtains shut. Then she hustled out of the kitchen, and zeroed in on the stout front door and its dead bolt. As she turned the brass grip and pulled, the catch of the lock in its sturdy metal cage made a clapping sound.

Putting her other hand on top of the first, she bent her knees and leaned all of her weight back. Then she pulled again.

“It’s locked.”

Even as she told herself the obvious, she didn’t believe it. And as she straightened, she wanted to test things again and again, like she could maybe make it all stronger by the repeated challenges.

Spinning around, she fell back against the wood panels and hugged herself.

The house was so small that aside from the kitchen and the parlor she’d just raced through, there was only one other room on the first floor: A study with a desk, a random bean bag chair, and a side table that she’d put her wireless printer on. Given that the home office was on the far side of the stairs, there was absolutely no light carried in from the kitchen.