“A Samsung.” She came over and looked down at the various rolled black cords, all ready to use, the packaging removed. “Galaxy. But not the super-new one.”

“Thank God it isn’t an iAnything.”

“Why?”

“Vishous doesn’t like them. And given that he did the security system in this house, he would never have left anything like that behind in any drawer. He would have checked to make sure.”

“Is that a Brother?” she asked. “Vishous, I mean?”

“You remember him,” he said with distraction as he started to try various options in the butt of her phone.

“Oh, was he at the club the night before last?”

“I got it. This fits.” Stretching the AC/DC plug to the wall, he went to—

“Wait,” she said as she stopped him.

* * *

As Therese put her hand on Trez’s arm, her heart was pounding. But come on, she told herself. It was crazy not to use her old phone. If she was trying to save money to move out of that rooming house, then getting another one was a waste if this was perfectly usable.

“Sorry,” she said. “I’m just being weird.”

“Are you afraid they’ve called?” His voice was low. “Your parents, I mean.”

“No.” Yes. “I mean, if they did, it’s fine.”

The initial charging took quickly, and as she waited, she found herself wishing she weren’t so cheap. She also tried to decide what would be harder. If they had phoned… or if they hadn’t.

“Turn-on time,” she muttered.

Initialing the unit, she waited for it to fire up, and then—

There was no reason to enter her password. Her notifications flashed on the screen immediately.

And all she could do was stare at them.

“My brother,” she heard herself say. “He’s, ah, he’s called.”

“Recently?”

“Seven times. And yes… three nights ago was the last one.”

“Are you going to call him back?”

Therese shook her head, but not in response to the question. She was trying to focus through her emotions to remember what the hell her password was. Her birth date—yes, she’d used that as her password because she got so sick and tired of remembering word-and-number combinations. Entering it, she got into the phone proper.

Her eyes watered as she looked through everything. There were texts, missed phone calls, other voice mail messages—not just from her brother.

It was all tangible evidence that her old life had continued without her. And the fact that none of the communications except for Gareth’s calls were recent made her feel like she’d died and was witnessing people move on. Cousins, friends, professional contacts. Those had all stopped reaching out after a short while. Her brother had persisted, however.

Not texts, either. Calls.

He was a texter. Or had been. The only time he ever called her was for emergencies: Accidents, car or person. Sicknesses, although with vampires that was rare. House problems that were messy, like burst pipes or blown electrical fuses that were smoking.

Or deaths.

Funny, Therese had heard people talk about seminal moments before, and she had always pictured them in the context of history. History was important, and involved many people—and sometimes the entire race: Like the raids of a couple of summers ago. The democratic election of Wrath, son of Wrath. The birth of Wrath’s son, Wrath. All of those events were seminal in that they were origins of great change and the kinds of things that defined a given generation.

The lives of most individuals, on the other hand, were anecdotal rather than historic. The ins and outs of a person’s life mattered solely to them, with minor extensions into families and friends. Rarely was there a span or sprawl that enveloped huge numbers. Rarely did things go so deep that breath was taken from you and you remembered exactly where you were standing when something happened or was told to you.

Rarely did you remember the shift, and not in terms of a left or a right.

Rather, like a glacier.

As Therese held her old phone in her hand and stared at the number of voice mails her brother had left her, she felt her heart move. Or maybe it was more… reopen.

Until she played the messages, she wouldn’t even know if there was a problem. But the fact that there could be? Or might have been? And she didn’t know? And she wasn’t… there?

It was just wrong. And the whole who-birthed-who issue didn’t matter in the slightest.

The next thing Therese knew, she was walking over to the table because sitting down suddenly seemed like a good idea. Except she didn’t make it. The phone cord didn’t reach that far from the wall.

“Here, I’ll follow you,” Trez said as he unplugged the charger.

There was little reserve battery, so she wondered, as she went and sat down, if the cell wasn’t going to crash. But it didn’t. Trez was quick to get another socket.

Holding the unit in her hands, she stared at the screen some more. “I hope they’re okay.”

Of course, she could find out if they were or weren’t by playing the frickin’ message(s). Hello. Except she was still grappling with the shift in the center of her chest. She was supposed to feel anger and resentment, hurt and betrayal—as she had since the moment she had left them all. She had had her reasons for all those negative emotions, and she had a right to be in that space. She had been lied to, the three of them conspiring to a fraud that they apparently had taken for granted would never be exposed.

Being mad was okay.

Now, though, instead of dwelling on the righteous indignation that had sustained her, all she could think of was that female’s eyes, that female who had called herself mahmen: They had been as heartbroken as Therese had been feeling underneath her fury.

“Okay, enough of neutral,” she muttered.

She called up the most recent message and prayed—prayed—that it was her brother chewing her out again for leaving.

His voice, coming out of her phone, was a shock, by turns foreign and familiar:

Well, it looks like you’re not going to do the common courtesy of returning any of my phone calls. That’s your decision. I hope you can live with it. We’re taking her to Caldwell to be treated at the clinic. They say she has some time left, but it’s limited, so if we’re going to move her, it has to be now while she has the strength for the drive. Hope you’re proud of this bullshit you’re pulling. It’s the only thing of your family you have left.

As the voice mail ran out, Therese’s heart pounded so hard she couldn’t hear anything and panic flooded her veins with the sting and the combustion of gasoline.

“I have to go,” she said. “I have to go… see my mahmen.”

Leaping to her feet, she—

She immediately realized she didn’t know where the Caldwell clinic was. And given how dizzy she was, dematerializing wasn’t going to happen even if she had an address.

“Sit down.” Trez urged her back into the seat. “You’re very pale.”

Therese’s breath pumped in and out of her, fast but not far enough into her lungs. “This is my fault. This is all my fault—”

“Hold on. He doesn’t say why she—”

She looked Trez square in the face. “She’s always had a heart problem. That was why they were moving. The cold of the winters was getting too much for her. But what has always been even more dangerous? Stress.” She grabbed onto his forearm. “Dearest Virgin Scribe, I’ve killed her.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Trez drove his female across the Hudson River, to the other side of Caldwell. Havers, the race’s physician, had relocated his treatment facility to a forest over there after the raids, and although Trez hadn’t been to the clinic since it had opened, he did know where it was. And he was able to make good time. The night was clear and very cold, so there was no falling snow to worry about, and the streets and highways had been plowed and salted well.

One good thing about having to deal with a hard winter every twelve months was that the city was very efficient about storm cleanup and road maintenance. They had to be. Businesses had to run. Schools had to teach their students. Hospitals needed to treat their patients.

If everything ground to a halt and stayed that way each time there was some serious accumulation? People in these parts would be indoors from mid-December to March.

He glanced across the BMW’s cockpit. His female was staring out the window, but he doubted she was seeing anything. She was also unable to sit still, twitching in the seat, tapping her foot, moving around the safety belt that crossed her chest.

Refocusing on the road, he wanted to go back to having a conversation about the weather with himself. But maybe he could mix it up and think about sports. The club.

Particle-fucking-physics.

What he absolutely did not want to think about was the fact that his female was going to Havers’s to deal with a family emergency.

A family emergency. As in… a group of people who, although she evidently was not related to them by blood, nonetheless counted as such as the result of her having been raised by and with them.

There was no reconciling this with her being Selena. Nope. And the fact that he couldn’t shoehorn this fact pattern into the construct of her reincarnation was shining a really fucking bright light on the number of things he had wedged and bent and twisted into vacancies in the puzzle.

And what do you know. There were more forced pieces than ones that fit—and he found himself desperately grasping at the story he had constructed for himself. For them. It was impossible to ignore the sense that it was all about to be blown to shit, and the only thing he could think of was how much he wished she hadn’t lost her purse in the chaos the night before last. If she’d just kept it with her, she would have had Rhage’s tip money. And that burner phone.

So they wouldn’t be doing this right now.

Instead, they would be driving to get her stuff at the rooming house, and then, while she got settled at the nice little Cape Cod, he would go to the club and shuffle some papers. In a couple of hours, he would come home to her and they would cook those steaks and watch a movie. And do other stuff in the dark.