At least that last one was good news.

Other voices, now. Deep and quiet. Tohr had called for someone(s), but John didn’t bother trying to see who it was.

Instead, he stared straight up at the gray sky overhead. Funny, back before his transition, he had thought he had good eyesight—or maybe it had been more like he hadn’t had bad eyesight. Near or far, he’d gotten what he needed in terms of visual information.

After the change? It was as if a cloudy film had been removed, his ability to notice minute details about objects and people from a football field’s distance away in near pitch darkness such a shock, he could remember thinking surely it was a superpower.

Now, as he watched the sky, he could see the different shades of gray in the storm’s underbelly, the currents of wind swirling in slow-motion banks of snow-swollen clouds. The effect was quiet, beautiful … calming, like silk billowing in an open doorway.

Xhex and that male felt miles away. Then again, so did his corporeal form, even as his vantage point suggested he wasn’t having an out-of-body experience.

Am I dying, he asked mutely.

When no one answered, he wasn’t surprised. They couldn’t hear him, and even if they could have, he couldn’t connect with whoever was around him.

Sadness washed through him. He didn’t want to leave things with Xhex like this.

Even if he was the only one who knew they were estranged.

Murhder and Xhex stepped back from the embrace at same time, and as he stared down at her, he figured out what his emotion had been when she’d told him that she was mated to someone. It had been a quiet relief. A door closing not with a slam, but with a click.

Not that he’d come back here thinking they had any future together. It was just a resolution he had not expected to find, and yet valued more than he would have guessed.

“If he ever hurts you,” Murhder said, “I’ll skin him alive.”

“John, you mean?” She shook her head. “He’s a prince of a guy. I think you’d like him, actually.”

God, it had been so long since Murhder had thought in terms of liking or not liking another living being. But that was what happened when you were all about survival. And when your brain was an unreliable mess.

“Let’s do this,” he said as he looked across the snow-blanketed meadow.

Xhex nodded and they started off side by side, her boots and his heavy treaded shoes punching through the icy top level and compressing the softer flakes underneath with muffled crunches. Before leaving Darius’s old house, the Brothers had given him a heavy parka and thick snow pants as well as gloves and the shoes. No weapons. Not that he’d asked for his own back.

Looking around, he saw nothing but trees on the periphery. Talk about sitting ducks. As the pair of them crossed this open area, they were completely without cover, but he wasn’t worried. There were no foreign scents on the cold wind, and the Brothers were no doubt on the fringes and playing nursemaid. If anyone rode up on them?

Shit was going to go down.

The closer they got to the farmhouse, the worse the structure looked. Between its swaybacked roof, distorted windows, and loose clapboards, the place looked like it was on its last legs—and he felt a renewed sense of guilt.

Not that regrets over this female had ever needed help getting over his fence and into his backyard.

If only he’d been faster at that lab. Or if that male hadn’t gotten shot. Or if—

“How did she find you?” Xhex asked.

“Eliahu Rathboone.” His breath left his mouth in puffs as he spoke. “My B&B. She said she saw the portrait of me on TV.”

As a cutting wind came up against them, Murhder put his gloved hands into the borrowed parka’s pockets and thought about Fritz providing the insulated clothes. The butler had not been surprised to see him and had offered the same wrinkled smile he always had. In his eyes, though, the doggen’s sadness had been evident and Murhder got it. Back in his old life, he’d crashed so many times at Darius’s, he’d been a member of the household. Now? Being an outcast meant he was worse than a stranger.

He was family with bad baggage.

And on top of that? Darius, the Brother who had brought that butler and Murhder together, was now dead, the conduit between them gone, one more emptiness to register on the long list of people who were no longer there.

Speaking of which … they were about twenty yards away when the dark windows of the shack made him worry. He’d expect any exterior glass to be shuttered during the daylight hours, but the sun wasn’t a problem now. Why no interior lights? Eyeing the anemic wires that came out of the forest and attached to a corner of the roof, he worried that she’d lost power.

Or what if she’d moved from where she’d received Havers’s surgical aftercare, but stayed in the same town? The fact that the female hadn’t included her home’s location or a phone number had made sense to him because she hadn’t been any surer of where he was than he had been of her identity. And as vampires living in a world dominated by humans, everyone was careful.

Especially someone like her who had been tortured by the other species.

But now, he wondered. Was this all a ruse? Except then how had she known what had happened as he’d broken into the lab?

These questions burned up the short distance to the front door, and out of the corner of his eye, he noted that Xhex had discreetly taken out a handgun.

Curling up a fist, he knocked to announce their presence—and did not like the way the panels rattled in the frame. When there was no answer, he knocked again.

The door had an old-fashioned iron latch instead of a modern knob, and as he lifted the weight, he expected the metal to fall right off its mounting. Instead, he got resistance as he tried to push and then pull things open.

He knocked a third time. And then his training and experience as a Brother took over. This position at the door was too much exposure, sentries in the woods notwithstanding.

Murhder turned his shoulder to the flimsy barrier and busted through it, his momentum carrying him into an ice-cold center room.

Silence.

Taking out a penlight, he moved the thin beam around, fine dust turning what was a spotlight into a flood. There was a threadbare sofa. A TV, which surprised him until he recognized it as being from the nineties. A desk with …

Walking across the floorboards, he trained the light on a letter that was partially written on paper that was the same as the missives that had been sent to him. And sure enough, in the same hand, the salutation was to Eliahu Rathboone.

He didn’t bother reading the two and a half paragraphs.

“She’s here. Or she was—”

The moan was so soft, a creak of the floor beneath his feet nearly drowned it out. Hurrying toward the sound, he went into what looked like a cold-water kitchen, everything painfully neat on the pitted counters, the old seventies-era refrigerator making a rhythmic choking noise.

The bedroom was in the back on the right, and now he could scent a female. But she had a terrible visitor with her.

Death.

The acrid and achingly sad scent of the dying was heavy in the still, frigid air, and as Murhder breached a narrow doorway, he clasped the shard of seeing glass once more.

“You found me,” a weak voice said.

In the glow of the penlight, a bed was revealed, and upon it, under layers of handmade quilts, a female was on her side facing him, her skeletal visage on a thin pillow. Wisps of hair, gray and curled, formed a halo around the stark bones of her features, and her skin was the color of fog.

Murhder went to her, dropping to his knees.

As her sunken eyes sought his, a tear escaped and dropped off the bridge of her nose. “You came.”

“I did.”

Strangers they were. And yet as he reached for her hand, it was a family connection.

“I have no more moons left,” she whispered. “And my night skies are going starless.”

“I will do what you need me to do.” He rushed the words, in the event she passed right now. “I will find your son, and I will get you medical help—”

“Too late … for me.”

He looked over his shoulder at Xhex. “Get the Brothers. Bring them here to help her—”

The hand in his own squeezed. “No, it’s all right. I know you will not fail … I cannot hold on any longer, and I do not want my beloved son to see me like this.”

Xhex disappeared, and he was relieved. She would bring aid.

“What is your name, female?” he asked as those lids lowered.

“Ingridge.”

“Where are your people?”

“I have been shamed. Leave them be … I told you where my son is. Go, rescue him, make him safe. He would have come unto me here if he had escaped. He knows of this place. We were to meet here if e’er we were separated.”

“Ingridge, stay with me,” Murhder prompted as she fell silent. “Ingridge … stay …”

“Find my son. Save him.”

“Don’t you want to see him again?” Murhder was aware he could not promise such a reunion, but he would say anything to keep her on this side of the grave. “Hold on, help is coming—”

“Save him.”

Beneath the faded quilts, her body jerked and she inhaled sharply as if a sudden pain had gripped her. And then came an exhale that lasted as long as eternity.

“Ingridge,” he choked out. “You need to stay here …”

As he tried to find words to compel her unto life rather than death, he thought about the testimony of wahlkers, those who had come up to the brink of death yet returned unto the living, those stories of a foggy landscape that parted to reveal a white door. If you opened the door, you were lost from the earthly world forever.

“Do not open that portal,” he said sharply. “Do not step through. Ingridge, come back from the portal.”

He had no clue whether the command made sense or even if she could hear him. But then her eyes popped open and she seemed to focus on him.

“Natelem is his name. I told you where to find him—”