There were so many new constructions, and there were new names on the eateries. Starbucks. Bruegger’s Bagels. Spaghetti Factory.
Nothing like it had been when he’d lived here twenty years ago.
As he went along, he imagined the streets busy in the daylight with men and women in business clothes, all of them hurrying to and from meetings after they dumped their cars in parking garages that were two or three times the size he remembered.
What was the same? Not many humans out and about now on a cold night like this. Sure, from time to time, a random SUV would go by. A sedan. A Caldwell municipal truck. But other than that, there was no one around as he walked in the cold.
Still, even though he was alone, he had a sense of a great many lives being lived in these tall, thin constructions, boxes of day-dwelling humans layered upward, stacked one upon the other. It was an incalculable crowd, especially when he considered how there were city centers like this all over the nation. Over the world.
He thought of John standing in that barren field alone.
He had walked that particular stretch of loneliness himself these past two decades.
But in the last twenty-four hours, he’d gotten a glimpse of another way. Shit, Sarah had to be able to stay in their world. For godsakes, there were humans all over the place now—or at least inside the Brotherhood’s facility.
Surely she could stay. If she wanted to.
On that note … surely he could talk her into staying? She’d said she had no one who was waiting to hear from her. If that was the case, what did she have to go back to …?
Crap. The instant he thought that, he felt like an arrogant ass. As if he were offering her some great existence down in South Carolina? At a B&B? She was a scientist. The last kind of forever after she needed was staring at him over that table in the third-floor attic of the Rathboone House—
Murhder stopped dead. Turned his head to the left. And breathed so hard in through his nose that his nostrils hurt.
Instinctually, his body turned of its own volition, and he scented the cold air again. Just in case he’d gotten it wrong.
As a set of headlights swung around and spotlit him, he was dimly aware that he’d once against halted in the middle of a street. This time, he moved away before there was any horn, any impact.
But not because he was avoiding the nuisance of another hit-andrun. Nope, as his feet found a jogging pace, and his body lithely carried itself down an alleyway, he was going after prey. And the sickly sweet stench he tracked was more than a guide. It was a thickening agent for his blood, a source of heat for his aggression, a jolt of awareness that made his brain come alive.
The enemy was not far. A member of the Lessening Society … was not far at all.
In the back of his mind, he was aware that he hadn’t fought in a very long time. That he was unarmed. That no one knew he was out here by himself and he had no phone to call somebody for backup.
Hell, he had no idea what number he could call, even if he had something to dial.
None of that mattered.
As with all members of the Brotherhood, he had been part of the Scribe Virgin’s breeding plan, designed even before the womb to hunt and kill, manufactured like a product to render death to those who threatened the species.
And however rusty and out of practice he was, the siren call of the purpose for which he had been bred was not going to be denied.
Even if it killed him.
Far from downtown’s alleys, in the enclave of Caldwell’s private mansions, Throe unlocked his bedroom door and leaned out into the hall. After looking both ways, he slipped out and relocked things with an old-fashioned brass key.
As he started for the first floor, he had the Book pressed to his chest like a bulletproof shield—and he told himself he had become paranoid.
Then stopped to look over his shoulder.
Nothing was in the corridor behind him … except for the console tables with their silk floral displays. The brocade drapes pulled closed over windows. The portraits that hung in the centers of the molding pattern between the entrances to the bedroom suites.
Resuming his stride, he found it ironic that after he had ordered the deaths of all the