“Ordinarily, I’d argue with that.”

“This is not ordinary.”

“Wait, someone needs to pick up that FedEx envelope over there.” Actually, he didn’t give a shit if they left the thing in the street. “It has the papers Wrath wants.”

As somebody did the duty, he and Phury made a slow pace toward a snowbank that would have been a short leap to get over pre-impact, but now presented itself as a Mini-Everest. On the far side of their ascent and descent, Murhder needed to breathe through the pain for a minute before they could continue.

When they resumed their progress, moving toward the elegant house’s shoveled walkway, he was acutely aware that no one was speaking. No one was touching him, other than that which was medically required. No one was too close.

And they all had their hands on a weapon that was discreetly held by the thigh. Some were guns, some were those black daggers that he had once had strapped to his own chest.

Jeez, you go rogue once and slaughter a bunch of humans after they torture your girlfriend, and suddenly you’re a leaper.

Up the front walk that had been cleared and de-iced with rock salt, the wind that whistled through bare branches making him want to cover his ears. The pitch was too close to that scream he heard all the time in his head.

Up steps that had been de-iced as well. Onto a porch that was long as the front of the mansion and bare of fine wicker furniture, no doubt in deference to the inclement weather.

Now they were at the broad front door, which he could recall going in and out of countless times with Darius.

Phury stopped and unhitched his hold. “We have to search you.”

“I got guns, two of them. That’s it—no, I also have a hunting knife in my ass pocket. Do not remove those letters.”

Murhder stared straight ahead at the wood panels as his weapons were taken off him. And then someone patted him down.

He closed his eyes and lowered his head. “I didn’t lie. Christ.”

“Come on.” Phury opened the way in. “We’re going to the right.”

“The dining room.”

“You remember.”

“I practically lived here with you, do you remember?”

Thanks to all the walking, Murhder’s thigh had hit red-hot-poker-pissed-off on a pain scale where one was a splinter, and ten was red-hot-fucking-poker. Sweat broke out across his chest and rode up his throat to his face, and goddamn, he was glad he hadn’t eaten before he’d come or there would have been one hell of a mess to clean up.

Was Fritz still the butler in this house? he wondered.

“Over this way—”

“I know,” he snapped.

The growls that percolated up behind him were easily ignored. If they were going to kill him outright, they never would have let him in the house. They’d have thrown him into the trunk of a sedan to take him to a more remote location.

The double doors to the dining room were closed, but he could sense Wrath’s presence on the far side—and what went through his mind was that this was a return to the Old Ways, to the private guard function of the Black Dagger Brotherhood. Previously, it hadn’t been needed because Wrath had always refused to lead his people.

Something big had changed.

“I’m going to have to ask you to keep your hands visible at all times,” Phury said. “No sudden movements—”

A male voice interjected coldly. “I’ll fucking rip your head off if you go anywhere near him.”

Murhder smiled and glared over his shoulder, meeting a set of diamond eyes that were sharp as blades. “V. Always with the sentimentality.”

The Brother with the icy stare and the tattoos at his temple had added a goatee to his face. Other than that, he was unchanged, his intelligence radiating outward as much as his urge to kill. And oh, look, he still smoked.

“I don’t give two shits about you,” Vishous said on an exhale.

“Same brand of Turkish tobacco. You still get it from that head shop down on Market?”

“Fuck you.”

“You always wanted to—”

Phury jerked Murhder back around. “This is not helping.”

The doors flew open, and there was the King, standing in the center of the dining room, under the chandelier where the long mahogany table should have been.

The wave of sadness that hit Murhder was so unexpected, he weaved on his good foot, and he blinked his eyes quick even though no tears came. It wasn’t that Wrath was different—hell, it would have been a shock if anything had changed about the autocratic leader of the species. And it wasn’t that Murhder was in the house of his old friend, Darius, and nervous about seeing the male again. And it wasn’t even that this could be a foolish rabbit hole he was going down.

There was a ring on Wrath’s forefinger.

Ancient, and fitted with an enormous black diamond, there was only one that had ever been like it.

The male had never worn the thing before. Had refused to bear the mantle of his birthright. Had shunned all manner of what his father and his father’s father, and his father’s father’s father, had done with such great humility and effect.

Wrath, son of Wrath, truly was the King.

And for the first time, Murhder got a sense of all he had missed. Years had had no meaning to him as he had stalked that old attic down in South Carolina: Nights had run into nights that had become weeks and months and years … and decades … and none of that had mattered. He had had absolutely no cause to mark any passage of time as significant, so great had been the depths to which he had fallen.

Now, staring at that ring, the inexorable march of mortality had a bright light upon it, although it was not his own loss that devastated him.

Murhder took the letters out, and spoke before formally addressed. “I need you to help me find this female.”

John Matthew proceeded down the sidewalk, his shitkickers crunching through that which had been slush at some point during the day, but was now refrozen ice-fossils of boot prints. On either side of the one-way street, there were apartment buildings that had been new seventy or eighty years ago, the five- and six-story brick walkups showing every scratch and dent of wear and tear, their shutters half-missing and off-kilter, their slate roofs gaping with vacancies, their concrete stairs to dingy front doors un-railing’d and uneven as mountain passes.

He had patrolled this area many times in the last couple of years, and he thought of the summer months when the trash rot threw off gaseous clouds of nasty and the humans were out in greater numbers. It was a toss-up what was worse, the cold with the bad footing of the Decembers and Januarys or the complications and the stench of the hot months.

“Two more blocks,” Blay said next to him.

Then we go west, John Matthew signed.

“Yup, west.”

This was the “bad” part of town, where the drug dealers were plentiful and the good people stayed inside unless they really had to go somewhere. And he supposed their precise location within the twenty-block zone of narcotics violations should have registered before now. He wasn’t even sure why it hadn’t, although he was feeling off-kilter, some premonition dogging him and making him tense, the existential equivalent of oysters that gave you nightmares.

He stopped abruptly in front of one of the buildings, and stared up at its decaying exterior, counting the windows so he got the floors right.

“What is it?” Blay asked. “You see something?”

Not officially, no. Just where he had stayed when he’d been working as a dishwasher. In fact …

He walked forward a couple of feet. Yes, here. Here was the curb where Tohr had picked him up, where his few belongings had gone into the Brother’s black Range Rover and they had driven off, to a new world, a new home … a new family.

Where Wellsie had known that his touchy, pretrans stomach could only handle ginger and rice. Where he had slept feeling safe for the first time in his life. Where he had found others like himself.

Even though he had previously assumed that if he were among humans, that was true enough.

“John?”

He jumped as Blay said his name, and he meant to respond. His brain was jammed. Something was tapping on his foundation, testing the strength of his concrete, and he could not figure out why—

The vibration that went off at chest level was the reality check he needed, and he went for his phone. The text was from the newly instituted emergency alert system, where calls from civilians were routed through a team of volunteers manning a central number 24/7.

911 for the species.

“Shit,” Blay said as he looked at his own screen. “We got another one.”

And it was right by shAdoWs, where Xhex was.

With the Brotherhood otherwise occupied on the Murhder thing, he and Blay were the only buck-stops-here available, and they dematerialized to the cluster of clubs in the old warehouse part of downtown. As they re-formed one block over from the location that had been given, they got out guns and proceeded in silence to an alleyway that allowed them to visualize the precise address.

In war, you could never be too sure who was calling what in, and the last thing they needed was to get capped by a squad of lessers that had somehow gotten the number and set a trap—

The scent of vampire blood was thick in the air.

Keeping himself tucked against the brick wall, he had his forty up and double-palmed as he let his gun lead the way. Instincts prickling, body tensed for anything, it was a relief to get out of the headspace he’d been in.

Yup, far better to run the risk of being killed by the enemy than to dwell in his existential swamp.

At the intersection of the alley and the street proper, he stopped and used his ears. Something was shifting in the snow, the soft sounds of limbs churning on top of winter’s cold ground cover barely carrying over the distant thump of shAdoWs’s music. The smell of vampire blood was even stronger, but there was no other scent mixed with it, no sickly sweet baby powder of lessers or the cologne/soap/shampoo-infused calling card of humans.

John swung around the hard-cut corner of the brick building, gun pointed at the sound/smell combination.