It made John remember another apple that that dagger had been applied to with such paring skill.

They had been on the bus about to leave the training center. John Matthew had been a pretrans smaller than all the other boys in his group, an outsider thrown not only into the program, but into the vampire world, by virtue of a birthmark that was on his left pectoral. Lash, the class bully, had been picking on him.

Something the fucker had been doing since John’s first day of “school.”

This had been before Blay and Qhuinn had become John’s best friends. Before he had gone through the transition and come out on the other side of the change enormous, bigger than all he’d been smaller than before.

It had been before Wellsie, the only mother he had ever known, had been murdered.

He’d had such a hard time in the training program at first. So much weaker than everyone else, so uncoordinated, so shunned and ridiculed by all the trainees except for Blay and Qhuinn.

But an apple had cured all that.

Some nights after his entry into the program, maybe it was only a couple, but it had felt like a lifetime, John Matthew had gotten on the bus, and dreaded the ride home from the training center because of the bullying that was going to come his way. Just before the doors had closed, something huge and threatening had mounted the steps, its weight so great, the load had tilted the vehicle’s suspension.

Zsadist was the Brother all of the trainees had feared the most. That scar that ran from his nose down to distort one side of his mouth was scary, but his black eyes were the true terror. Flat, unemotional, and disarmingly direct, the Brother’s stare didn’t pass right on through you. Instead, it consumed whatever it was trained on, eating you alive, owning you and your future.

It was the stare of a survivor of horrors, of torture, of depravity, for whom there were no unfamiliar cruelties.

The stare of a stone cold killer.

When Zsadist had sat down beside John Matthew on the bus, and had taken out a black dagger, John had figured his nights were over … but all the Brother did was peel the green apple in his hand.

Just as he’d done now.

Back then, Zsadist had offered a piece to John. And taken one for himself. And then again for John. Until there was nothing but the thinnest core left, whittled down to the brown seeds.

A clear message that John was protected by people who could make the lives of asshole trainees a living hell.

“—and for that, it’s going to be just the Brotherhood.”

John Matthew refocused on the King and wondered what he’d missed.

Wrath stroked George’s boxy blond head. “There’s no way of knowing what game Murhder is playing here so no nonessential personnel will be present.”

Nonessential. Okay, ouch. But it was what it was.

When Zsadist cleared his throat, John Matthew looked over. A piece of apple was waiting on the black blade, the tart white flesh tempting.

John Matthew bowed his head in thanks and accepted the share. Then everyone was leaving, which was confusing until he realized that Wrath had no doubt arranged for the meeting with the insane Brother to be done at the Audience House. Made sense. There was no way the King would risk the females, young, and staff in this mansion by inviting that kind of loose cannon here.

No reason to open your front door to Heath Ledger’s version of the Joker.

Zsadist and John funneled out of the study together, consuming the apple as they had the one on the bus, trading off on pieces. At the head of the grand staircase, they finished it off, nothing left but for that surgically pared down core, thin as a twig in the middle between the ends.

Z gave him the last piece.

As John accepted the simple gift, he tried to ignore how hard it was to be different from those around him. No voice. Not a Brother. Here by a stroke of luck that could just as easily have not connected him with Tohr.

Which meant he would have died during the transition without the blood of a female vampire to sustain him through the change.

As Zsadist nodded his head in goodbye, John did the same, but instead of going immediately to his and Xhex’s room for his jacket, he walked over to the balustrade and stared down at the foyer below.

This mansion, full of elegance and grace, had been his father Darius’s dream, or so John had been told. The Brother who had died by a car bomb just before John might have met him had always wanted the King and his elite guards under one roof, and had built this extensive house specifically for that purpose over a century ago. The Field of Dreams setup had been vacant for much longer than it had been currently lived in, however.

Those fallow eons had been a waste of a magnificent palace. The foyer was so lush it was more Imperial Russia than anything American and twenty-first century. With columns that were either malachite or polished claret marble, and flourishes made of gold-leafed plaster, and enough crystal to twinkle like the galaxy, John could remember stopping in his tracks when he first walked in. For a kid who had been raised in an orphanage—and then followed all that luxury up with living in a shithole apartment while working as a dishwasher and contemplating suicide—it had been a Daddy Warbucks situation.

Little Orphan Johnny.

Below, on the gorgeous mosaic floor, the Brothers were churning around Wrath, those huge bodies charged with aggression. Everyone hated when the King was exposed to risk, and the pull that John felt to be with them, to protect the last purebred vampire on the planet, to serve a male he respected with all his being, was so strong that his eyes prickled with tears of frustration.

He refused to let the emotion show.

That was a pussy move. Besides, who the hell was he to demand he be nominated to become a Brother? They had chosen Qhuinn for that honor, and it wasn’t like Blay was bitching about being shut out.

John reached up to the left side of his chest. Through the skintight muscle shirt, he could feel the ridges of scars that formed the circle on his pec.

The Brothers all had the same marking in the same place. He’d always assumed his was a birthmark, and it was because of the strange pattern in his skin that he’d been brought into the training center. Everyone had wanted to know why a pretrans had one.

Later, he had learned that the inductees received them as part of a secret ceremony.

As his heart ached, he rubbed the uneven scars and wished he was not an outsider.

Thank God for his Xhex, he thought. At least he knew he could talk to her about all this and she would listen and not judge.

After all, there were no secrets between them.

As Murhder rematerialized within the Caldwell city limits for the first time in twenty years, he was across the street from a Federal mansion in the wealthy part of town. He knew the house well, and had not been surprised to be directed to its address.

Darius owned the place and lived in it. The Brother had always liked the finer things, and Murhder had stayed in its basement bedrooms a number of times. Dearest Virgin Scribe, it seemed like both less than a week and more than a lifetime since he had last walked through its door, and shared a meal with D, and crashed either underground, or upstairs in that room with the twin beds.

Knowing who was waiting for him inside made him feel like he had lost more than just his mind. He’d lost his family.

It was going to be hard to look into Darius’s eyes again. One good thing about insanity was that you didn’t mourn all you no longer had. You were too busy trying to figure out what was real and what was not.

Murhder told himself to step off the curb. Walk across the snow-packed street to the front door. Knock to announce his presence—although surely the Brothers were staring at him even now. There were no lights on inside, which meant those fighters could be stacked ten deep in front of any piece of glass and no one could see them, know their numbers, assess their weaponry. He had to wonder if some were not outside, too. They would be careful to stay downwind so he couldn’t scent them, and they would be silent as snow falling on a pine bough if they shifted their positions.

Murhder had not brought an overcoat. A jacket. Even a pullover. The oversight, coupled with the fact that he didn’t even own a parka, seemed a revealing symptom of his mental disease.

But he hadn’t forgotten everything. The three letters were in the back pocket of his slacks and the FedEx envelope with the documents was tucked under one arm. The former had been his priority as he’d departed. The latter he had left without and nearly hadn’t gone back. Wrath’s solicitor was expecting the papers, however, and knowing the King, there would be no letting that one go.

No coming back, either. Murhder fully intended to get what he needed and never see any of them again.

Bracing himself to step off the curb, he—

The biomedical facility was about the horizontal, rather than the vertical, and from Murhder’s hillside cover, he memorized the layout of interconnected, single-storied buildings, all central core with radiating spokes. No windows, except for at the entrance, and even there the glass was tinted and kept to a minimum. Parking lot was mostly empty, what cars there were congregating close to the way in.

Finally, he thought. I’ve found you.

There was no one walking around outside.

Nowhere to walk around, really.

The forest surrounding the remote site crowded in tight, another unbroken stretch of wall, the pines bough-to-bough blockers of access. There was a perimeter fence as well, the concrete barrier some twenty feet high with a curl of barbed wire at the top and a single gatehouse that appeared to be fitted with bulletproof panels of glass.

If you were a human, and you didn’t have the right credentials? You weren’t getting on the property much less inside the place.

Fortunately, he had other options.

Closing his eyes, he concentrated on calming himself, his respiration slowing down from the fast-pump of his impending attack to a far more steady, easy rhythm. As soon as he was able, he dematerialized, proceeding forward in a scatter of molecules. His entry point was an HVAC exhaust fan on the flat roof of one of the spokes, and in his invisible, mostly-air-state, he easily penetrated the aluminum mesh that covered the chute and continued through the duct work.

The interior layout was unknown to him, and that made re-forming dangerous. If he chose the wrong environment to materialize into, he could do damage to himself on things that weren’t going to grow back.