flourishes made of gold-leafed plaster, and enough crystal to twinkle like the galaxy, John could remember stopping in his tracks when he first walked in. For a kid who had been raised in an orphanage—and then followed all that luxury up with living in a shithole apartment while working as a dishwasher and contemplating suicide—it had been a Daddy Warbucks situation.
Little Orphan Johnny.
Below, on the gorgeous mosaic floor, the Brothers were churning around Wrath, those huge bodies charged with aggression. Everyone hated when the King was exposed to risk, and the pull that John felt to be with them, to protect the last purebred vampire on the planet, to serve a male he respected with all his being, was so strong that his eyes prickled with tears of frustration.
He refused to let the emotion show.
That was a pussy move. Besides, who the hell was he to demand he be nominated to become a Brother? They had chosen Qhuinn for that honor, and it wasn’t like Blay was bitching about being shut out.
John reached up to the left side of his chest. Through the skintight muscle shirt, he could feel the ridges of scars that formed the circle on his pec.
The Brothers all had the same marking in the same place. He’d always assumed his was a birthmark, and it was because of the strange pattern in his skin that he’d been brought into the training center. Everyone had wanted to know why a pretrans had one.
Later, he had learned that the inductees received them as part of a secret ceremony.
As his heart ached, he rubbed the uneven scars and wished he was not an outsider.
Thank God for his Xhex, he thought. At least he knew he could talk to her about all this and she would listen and not judge.
After all, there were no secrets between them.
As Murhder rematerialized within the Caldwell city limits for the first time in twenty years, he was across the street from a Federal mansion in the wealthy part of town. He knew the house well, and had not been surprised to be directed to its address.
Darius owned the place and lived in it. The Brother had always liked the finer things, and Murhder had stayed in its basement bedrooms a number of times. Dearest Virgin Scribe, it seemed like both less than a week and more than a lifetime since he had last walked through its door, and shared a meal with D, and crashed either underground, or upstairs in that room with the twin beds.
Knowing who was waiting for him inside made him feel like he had lost more than just his mind. He’d lost his family.
It was going to be hard to look into Darius’s eyes again. One good thing about insanity was that you didn’t mourn all you no longer had. You were too busy trying to figure out what was real and what was not.
Murhder told himself to step off the curb. Walk across the snow-packed street to the front door. Knock to announce his presence—although surely the Brothers were staring at him even now. There were no lights on inside, which meant those fighters could be stacked ten deep in front of any piece of glass and no one could see them, know their numbers, assess their weaponry. He had to wonder if some were not outside, too. They would be careful to stay downwind so he couldn’t scent them, and they would be silent as snow falling on a pine bough if they shifted their positions.
Murhder had not brought an overcoat. A jacket. Even a pullover. The oversight, coupled with the fact that he didn’t even own a parka, seemed a revealing symptom of his mental disease.
But he hadn’t forgotten everything. The three letters were in the back pocket of his slacks and the FedEx envelope with the documents was tucked under one arm. The former had been his priority as he’d departed. The latter he had left without and nearly hadn’t gone back. Wrath’s solicitor was expecting the papers, however, and knowing the King, there would be no letting that one go.
No coming back, either. Murhder fully intended to get what he needed and never see any of them again.
Bracing himself to step off the curb, he—
The biomedical facility was about the horizontal, rather than the vertical, and from Murhder’s hillside cover, he memorized the layout of interconnected, single-storied buildings, all central core with radiating spokes. No windows, except for at the entrance, and even there the