In reality, he’d found growing up without parents, and waiting around in a valiant hope that some couple would come and declare they wanted to adopt a scrawny kid who couldn’t talk, to be pretty grim, even if he’d had a warm place to sleep, three squares a day, and free dental.

And then there had been the Christmas season.

For reasons that, in retrospect, now totally escaped him, every December the orphans were loaded onto a bus and taken to the local mall. They weren’t allowed to sit on Santa’s lap, because the season wasn’t about all that—but they were instructed to walk around and see all the presents they would not be getting, and all the families they were not a part of, and all the normal that, through no fault of their own, they could not participate in. And this was back before online shopping, when throngs of people crowded into those shopping centers, carrying out bags and bags of Christmas morning loot into parking lot sections that were standing room only for new car arrivals.

He’d never understood the why of that trip.

Reaching up to his shoulder, he pushed at the wound and rotated the socket. The pain made him remember something else. Back when he’d been growing up, he could recall the nuns and adults at the orphanage telling the children that youth was wasted on the young.

Like the Christmas mall trip, he’d never understood why they felt compelled to point a blaming finger at something a kid couldn’t fix and didn’t get. You were the age you were, and death was just not a preoccupation for somebody who’d been on the planet for only eight years. Ten years. Fifteen years.

More to the point, if you’d already lost your mom and dad and had no one who cared for you in the world, what did anything else matter? If dying meant you lost everything, hello. John hadn’t even had clothes of his own. Books. Toys. Even the pillow he put his head on every night had “Our Lady of Mercy Orphanage” stamped on it in ink.

No possessions. No control over his destiny. Nothing ahead of him.

He might as well already be dead, he’d always thought.

As the cold wind off the river curled around his legs, the chill made the scene in front of him replace the images of the past. And for some reason, he thought about how old he was. In calendar years, he was not even thirty. For a human, that was the tail end of the transition into proper adulthood. For a vampire, it was a drop in the bucket, a blip on a centuries-and-centuries-long lifespan.

Assuming you didn’t die young.

He thought about his wound and the spread of the stain in his skin.

Death had taken ahold of him. He knew this without any doubt.

So now he understood about the youth wasted on the young thing. It was hard to fully comprehend the prospect of dying, the way it consumed the mind and the soul, the way it eclipsed previously “important” preoccupations, the way it reordered your priorities … until you were forced to stare your grave in the eye.

Children had no capacity not just to appreciate mortality, but to see clearly that they had made a bargain at birth that, even though there was no consent, was nonetheless an enforceable agreement with a payment due.

All things that lived died.

The best that anyone who breathed could do was a skate-by into old age, dodging the slings and arrows of biological failings and accidents, until you could sit back with your aches and pains and mourn the loss of your relevancy, your generation, your place in the population pecking order.

He had never expected to die. Ironic, given that he hunted the enemy every night as his vocation.

But here he was, standing out in the open, a sitting duck for a lesser, not worried that he had no weapons, no phone, and no backup.

Then again, he’d already decided his life was a moot point. The question was, with whatever time he had left, what did he want to do?

What was important to him?

Who mattered?

Privacy in a partnership was a tricky thing.

As Xhex re-formed downwind from her mate, and stared across a snow-covered park at his back, she didn’t know what to do. He wasn’t answering her texts, he hadn’t told her he was leaving the house, and he was alone not just in fact, but on an existential level.

And no, that wasn’t extrapolation. Her symphath side knew this as fact: His grid was lit up around his core along the lines of separation and isolation.

Though his body was no more than a hundred yards away from her, he was virtually untouchable.

“You going to go talk to him?”

Murhder’s voice made her jump, and reminded her that, unlike John, she was not alone. She and the former Brother had left the training center via the underground tunnel’s evac route, pausing only to help themselves to the parkas and gloves that were part of the emergency supply of equipment and provisions stacked by the reinforced steel door.

Probably a security breach, using that exit, but she knew what was in Murhder’s heart and soul thanks to his grid—and he would do no evil nor cause any to be done to the Brotherhood or their household.

Once they had emerged on the far side of the mountain, she had located John downtown thanks to her blood in his veins from feeding. And so she and Murhder were now here, standing far behind her mate, John’s preoccupations so great, her presence did not register on him.

“Xhex? You going to go to him?”

She shook her head. “He needs some space.”

It killed her to say that. But if she crossed the distance between them, John was going to view it as an intrusion, not as support.

Sometimes you had to sit on the sidelines while the one you loved worked their shit out. And she reminded herself that he knew she was there for him, always.

“This isn’t about me, is it?” Murhder said.

“No. It’s about him.”

“Shit. The injury.”

“Yeah.” She shook her head. “I think I better just go to work. But I’ll take you back first. You won’t be able to get through the mhis otherwise.”

When Murhder didn’t respond, she glanced over at him. He wasn’t looking at John. He was staring at the tall buildings of the city.

“I don’t want to head back yet,” he murmured.

Well, there was no reason he couldn’t stay out and about. He might not be welcome in the mansion, but that didn’t mean he was being held in an official capacity. Or even an unofficial one.

“I’m at shAdoWs.” She gave him the club’s address. “Find me there when you’re ready to head back. I’ll let my bouncers know to expect you.”

“Thanks. I won’t be long. It’s just been a while since I’ve seen Caldwell at night.”

“Don’t engage.” As his hard stare shifted over at her, she rolled her eyes. “And don’t give me that look. It is perfectly reasonable to assume you’d want to fight. You’re a Brother, remember.”

“Used to be,” he muttered as he went to dematerialize. “I used to be.”

His words lingered as his form disappeared, like a ghost had spoken.

Xhex crossed her arms and wondered whether she was doing the right thing—or if she should interrupt. When John did not turn around because he sensed her, she got out her phone and texted him.

As the message showed that it was delivered, he didn’t make a move to check his phone. Maybe his cell was on mute. Maybe he hadn’t brought it.

Maybe he just needed to be left alone.

In the end, Xhex put her phone away and closed her eyes. It was a while before she could dematerialize.

He knew where she was; she had texted him that she was going to work. And she had faith he would come and find her.

Fate was not going to have it any other way.

At least … that was what she told herself.

Shortly after Murhder dematerialized away from the park, he reformed at the base of a forty-story skyscraper that had a glass-fronted lobby the size of a small country and the name of a bank spelled out in glowing letters over sets of revolving doors. Inside, behind a granite desk, there was a guard on duty even though things were clearly not open for business.

The building was new to him. So was the name of the bank.

So were a lot of things downtown.

Picking a random direction, he started strolling down the plowed sidewalk, looking around, seeing the night sky above all the towers full of windows. There were so many new constructions, and there were new names on the eateries. Starbucks. Bruegger’s Bagels. Spaghetti Factory.

Nothing like it had been when he’d lived here twenty years ago.

As he went along, he imagined the streets busy in the daylight with men and women in business clothes, all of them hurrying to and from meetings after they dumped their cars in parking garages that were two or three times the size he remembered.

What was the same? Not many humans out and about now on a cold night like this. Sure, from time to time, a random SUV would go by. A sedan. A Caldwell municipal truck. But other than that, there was no one around as he walked in the cold.

Still, even though he was alone, he had a sense of a great many lives being lived in these tall, thin constructions, boxes of day-dwelling humans layered upward, stacked one upon the other. It was an incalculable crowd, especially when he considered how there were city centers like this all over the nation. Over the world.

He thought of John standing in that barren field alone.

He had walked that particular stretch of loneliness himself these past two decades.

But in the last twenty-four hours, he’d gotten a glimpse of another way. Shit, Sarah had to be able to stay in their world. For godsakes, there were humans all over the place now—or at least inside the Brotherhood’s facility.

Surely she could stay. If she wanted to.

On that note … surely he could talk her into staying? She’d said she had no one who was waiting to hear from her. If that was the case, what did she have to go back to …?

Crap. The instant he thought that, he felt like an arrogant ass. As if he were offering her some great existence down in South Carolina? At a B&B? She was a scientist. The last kind of forever after she needed was staring at him over that table in the third-floor attic of the Rathboone House—