seriously material to ambulation—and considering that the house he was in front of was crawling with vampires and this was a ritzy human neighborhood where people had security guards on their properties and were themselves iPhone’d up the ass, it was more important to clear the scene.
“Get the fuck of here,” she ordered the boys. “Or I’m calling the police.”
Todd I, II, and III looked at each other like they were either communicating telepathically or so stoned and dumbfounded at her appearance, they’d lost the ability to speak.
“Now!” she barked.
The three slipped and slid in their loafers to get back into the car, and whoever was behind the wheel hit the gas so hard, tire treads of snowpack pelted her lower legs.
As she turned back to Murhder, she had hope he’d be getting to his feet. Nope. He was still lying on his stomach with his face turned to the side—and his eyes were closed, his dark lashes low on his prominent cheekbone.
Dropping herself to her haunches, she swallowed hard as she tried to get a read on his condition. Even though it was dark, there were peach-colored streetlights at regular intervals down the lane, the whole neighborhood glowing sure as if the wealth of its homeowners had been brought out to the curbs in gold bars. And she tracked every nuance of him in the man-made gloaming.
At least he was breathing, and as soon as she saw that, she took note of other things: His black hair was still long and streaked with red. He was still a very big male. And his scent hadn’t changed.
God … so much. She and Murhder had been through so much together, too little of it any good.
“Do you require medical attention?” she said hoarsely.
Like she was addressing a stranger who had been struck. Instead of a male she had been to hell and back with.
Well, actually, that hyperbole wasn’t exactly true. She had rejoined life. He had not.
“Murhder? Are you dead?” As she whispered the words, her breath came out in puffs that were carried away in the cold air.
“Strange question to ask someone,” came a croaking reply.
As her eyes stung with relief, she glanced in the direction the BMW had sped off. “So I take it the answer’s no.”
Murhder popped his lids and looked up at her. A sheen of tears made the peach of his irises shimmer. “You look the same.”
As they made eye contact, the impact of their shared past was so great, she was knocked off her crouch, her ass hitting the cold snow, her brain unable to deny the onslaught of memories: Him breaking into that room up in the symphath colony, thinking he was rescuing her from an abduction. His shock as he realized she had come willingly … to see her blooded family.
Which meant she was not as she had portrayed herself to be.
And then her relations streaming in and realizing that she had lied to them, as well.
Symphaths and vampires did not mix in those days. Still didn’t.
What had happened after the truth had come out had been one nightmare after another. Her relatives had tortured Murhder in the way only symphaths could, getting into his subconscious and making hash out of every part of who he was as a male, as a vampire, as a mortal entity. Then they had cast her out of the colony—and not as in banishment. As in selling her to humans as a lab animal to be experimented on.
And the story hadn’t ended there.
“I shouldn’t have come,” she said roughly.
When John Matthew had texted her that he was going out into the field with Blay because the Brotherhood had a special meeting at the Audience House? She should have just sent back her regular response of “Be safe, love you.” Then she should have put her phone in her back pocket and continued to monitor the crowd at the bar, on the dance floor, in the rear hallways where the bathrooms were. She should have stuck to her own lane because she, like any other person who wasn’t a Brother, had no goddamn reason to be here.
But as a symphath, she had sensed the unrest in the Brotherhood’s household for the last several nights. The anxiety had been the deep kind, the soul kind, and each one of the Brothers’ emotional grids had registered the same upset. There was only one explanation, and even though she had pledged to herself she would not use her species’ toolbox among