The flap door into the kitchen wing opened and closed as he disappeared through it.
Boone turned to the cold breeze that was funneling into the warm house. Stepping back out over the threshold, he stood on the stoop and stared past the curving drive to the lawn. In the light of the security fixtures that were tacked under the mansion’s roofline, the blanket of snow that covered the grounds of the estate was pristine, its weight buffering the already subtle contours of the property all the way down to the stone pillars by the road. At irregular intervals, mature oaks and stands of birches, currently barren of leaves, filled out vacancies like polite guests at a lawn party, and there were also flower beds that would be filled with pale blooms when the warm weather came.
As the cold wind blew against his fighting gear, he thought of his blood mahmen.
Back when Illumina had gone unto the Fade, he’d never gotten a clear story about what had happened to her. It had been sudden and unexpected, at least from his point of view. She had been young, healthy, and relatively free of bad habits. Nonetheless, one evening, he had come down for First Meal, and his father had informed him, over the scones and the eggs Benedict, that her Fade Ceremony was being conducted on the Thursday following.
That was it.
His sire had then risen from the head of the dining room table, picked up the Wall Street Journal, and departed.
Boone could remember looking down at where his mahmen had always sat. There had been a setting of china and silverware put out for her, as if her presence had been anticipated.
Left to his own devices, he had gone up to his room and set himself down at his desk. He’d had some notion of writing Illumna a letter, putting to page the questions going through his mind. But he hadn’t gotten far with it because he’d never really been able to ask her anything in life—and death, as it turned out, did not cure that.
Next thing he’d known, it was time for Last Meal. He had dressed in a different suit than he’d worn at the start of the night, as was appropriate, and joined his father at the dining table once again. Marquist had served them, as was customary when they had no guests.
There had been no setting for Boone’s mahmen then.
His eyes had lingered on her empty chair while his father had talked to the butler about . . . the same stuff he always did: Social gossip, house issues, staffing issues. Boone had stayed silent. Then again, even when Illumna had been alive, Altamere and his butler had always done all the talking at “family” meals, the normal boundaries between master and servant disappearing in the relative privacy.
At the time, the lack of real conversation around the loss of Boone’s blood mahmen had not struck him as weird. That was the way things were done; the more likely a subject was to upset, the less that was aired on the topic.
Or maybe it had been more a case of the death being unimportant.
Fast-forward two decades. The fact that he was standing here in the winter wind, with a shoulder that was throbbing from its stitches and a headache that was pounding from his empty stomach . . . with no one to talk to . . . was right out of the family playbook. The aristocracy had always been better at appearances, fancy velvet curtains drawn across stages that were ultimately empty—
The first of the shapes materialized out of thin air over on the right, the big body appearing in the shadows of the house’s exterior lights, taking solid form.
Boone’s eyes watered as he recognized who it was. And before he could offer a greeting, there was another directly on the male’s heels, a female this time.
Craeg and Paradise.
In quick succession, three others arrived. Axe. Novo. Peyton.
His trainee class.
As the five of them came up the walkway, Boone felt a loosening in the center of his chest, although what was unleashed was unwelcome. The sadness seemed like a waste of time, not only because it wasn’t going to do anything to fix what had happened at that glymera party, but because it wasn’t like he wanted his father back. Or his stepmahmen.
Craeg took off his Syracuse ball cap. “Hey, my man.”
The hug that followed said more than any words could have: We’re