autocratic leader of the species. And it wasn’t that Murhder was in the house of his old friend, Darius, and nervous about seeing the male again. And it wasn’t even that this could be a foolish rabbit hole he was going down.
There was a ring on Wrath’s forefinger.
Ancient, and fitted with an enormous black diamond, there was only one that had ever been like it.
The male had never worn the thing before. Had refused to bear the mantle of his birthright. Had shunned all manner of what his father and his father’s father, and his father’s father’s father, had done with such great humility and effect.
Wrath, son of Wrath, truly was the King.
And for the first time, Murhder got a sense of all he had missed. Years had had no meaning to him as he had stalked that old attic down in South Carolina: Nights had run into nights that had become weeks and months and years … and decades … and none of that had mattered. He had had absolutely no cause to mark any passage of time as significant, so great had been the depths to which he had fallen.
Now, staring at that ring, the inexorable march of mortality had a bright light upon it, although it was not his own loss that devastated him.
Murhder took the letters out, and spoke before formally addressed. “I need you to help me find this female.”
John Matthew proceeded down the sidewalk, his shitkickers crunching through that which had been slush at some point during the day, but was now refrozen ice-fossils of boot prints. On either side of the one-way street, there were apartment buildings that had been new seventy or eighty years ago, the five- and six-story brick walkups showing every scratch and dent of wear and tear, their shutters half-missing and off-kilter, their slate roofs gaping with vacancies, their concrete stairs to dingy front doors un-railing’d and uneven as mountain passes.
He had patrolled this area many times in the last couple of years, and he thought of the summer months when the trash rot threw off gaseous clouds of nasty and the humans were out in greater numbers. It was a toss-up what was worse, the cold with the bad footing of the Decembers and Januarys or the complications and the stench of the hot months.
“Two more blocks,” Blay said next to him.
Then we go west, John Matthew signed.
“Yup, west.”
This was the “bad” part of town, where the drug dealers were plentiful and the good people stayed inside unless they really had to go somewhere. And he supposed their precise location within the twenty-block zone of narcotics violations should have registered before now. He wasn’t even sure why it hadn’t, although he was feeling off-kilter, some premonition dogging him and making him tense, the existential equivalent of oysters that gave you nightmares.
He stopped abruptly in front of one of the buildings, and stared up at its decaying exterior, counting the windows so he got the floors right.
“What is it?” Blay asked. “You see something?”
Not officially, no. Just where he had stayed when he’d been working as a dishwasher. In fact …
He walked forward a couple of feet. Yes, here. Here was the curb where Tohr had picked him up, where his few belongings had gone into the Brother’s black Range Rover and they had driven off, to a new world, a new home … a new family.
Where Wellsie had known that his touchy, pretrans stomach could only handle ginger and rice. Where he had slept feeling safe for the first time in his life. Where he had found others like himself.
Even though he had previously assumed that if he were among humans, that was true enough.
“John?”
He jumped as Blay said his name, and he meant to respond. His brain was jammed. Something was tapping on his foundation, testing the strength of his concrete, and he could not figure out why—
The vibration that went off at chest level was the reality check he needed, and he went for his phone. The text was from the newly instituted emergency alert system, where calls from civilians were routed through a team of volunteers manning a central number 24/7.
911 for the species.
“Shit,” Blay said as he looked at his own screen. “We got another one.”
And it was right by shAdoWs, where Xhex was.
With the Brotherhood otherwise occupied on the Murhder thing, he and Blay were the only buck-stops-here available, and they dematerialized to the cluster of clubs in the old warehouse part of