“So I can knee you in the nuts. I’d close the distance myself, but your church bells aren’t worth my two steps to the left—”
“Will you guys quit it,” Butch hissed. “This is a solemn occasion. I need you both to pull your shit together and pretend you can be appropriate for ten minutes.”
V rolled his eyes. “This coming from a male who has a potato gun.”
Rhage put his arm around Butch’s shoulders and leaned in. “Please tell me you’re not trying to reason with the Hunchback of I-don’t-givea-damn over there?”
As Butch considered doing a gonad workout of his own on Frick and Frack, the Smack-It Brothers, Tohr rematerialized and changed the vibe with his presence. With the levity draining out of the group, the bunch of them walked around to the front of the house. Up at the entrance, they stomped snow off their treads on the woven mat and put the brass knocker to good use. A properly dressed doggen in all black—per protocol, natch—answered and then they were inside and checking things out away from the cold.
In a predictably fancy foyer, a good fifty or sixty people were milling about, and as Butch glanced through the crowd, he caught sight of Phury and Z with John Matthew, Qhuinn, and Blay. The group of home-teamers were hanging together just outside the parlor and dagger palms were raised in greeting.
Rhage took out a cherry Tootsie Pop and unwrapped it. “Where’s our boy?”
Butch nodded past the parlor’s archway. Boone was over by the fireplace, looking like he was on autopilot as he talked to a well-heeled couple standing with him. When he glanced across the coiffed heads, he did a double take as he saw members of the Brotherhood, and he excused himself, weeding through the aristocratic females and males.
“You all are here,” he said softly.
Butch pulled the kid into a hard hug. “Wrath wanted to come as well, but it’s too much of a security risk. And the Band of Bastards also wish they could attend, but they’re guarding the King at home.”
Talk about your knock-down, drag-out fights. With Wrath, that was. The stay-home-sonny discussion had not gone well. After reasonable arguments to the King about being safe from assassination attempts failed, Vishous had threatened to duct-tape the last pure-bred vampire to his throne. Wrath had really lost his shit then—at which point V had mentioned that the sticky stuff worked really well on pieholes, too.
KA-BOOM.
Beth, a.k.a. the Big Gun, had eventually talked some sense into her hellren. Thank God.
“But Wrath’s here in spirit,” Rhage said as more hugs were exchanged.
Besides, apart from the security issues, Wrath’s presence would have been too much of a distraction. Instantly, the gathering would have become all about the King—and given what had happened at Throe’s party with that shadow attack? The last thing anybody needed was a bunch of aristocrats demanding to know what was being done to protect the species against this new enemy.
Especially because no one on the Brotherhood side knew much.
Across the way, the front door opened again, and as the trainees came in with their SOs, Boone took his leave and went to get some support from his contemporaries.
“They’re a good group of kids,” Tohr commented.
“The best,” Butch agreed.
Paradise, Craeg, Axe, Novo, and Peyton—along with Boone—had proven to be so much more than anybody could have hoped for. They were a tough lot, smart and resourceful, too, and they had been really handy as the war with the Lessening Society wound down, and this fresh crop of bad news appeared.
Butch shook his head as he made his way over to where the other brothers were. They had to find out more about those shadow entities—as well as what exactly had gone down at Throe’s house. Altamere’s death had been a line in the sand, a very visible, very widely reported event that had raised the profile of the shadow threat. Previously, the attacks had been one-offs. Boone’s sire’s slaying, on the other hand, had been in front of twenty-three other aristocrats in a private home. And then there had been the secondary death of Altamere’s shellan.
Talk about pieholes getting to work. Undoubtedly, phone lines had been burning up, and sooner or later, Wrath was going to have to say something about the situation.
But here was not the place and now was not the time.
On that note, Butch catalogued the aristocrats he was surrounded by. The fancy-dancy types were taking notice