his leather jacket.
“You’re not bleeding.” The Brother took out his phone and turned the light on. “Let me pull your shirt—”
As strung out as John was, he knew the second when Tohr saw the bite wound through the straps of the muscle shirt. The Brother’s face froze, composure slamming down on his features. He actually seemed to lose concentration for a split second.
When he came back on line, his voice was falsely even. “When did this injury happen and why haven’t you told anyone?”
John just shook his head, the snow underneath his skull creaking from the cold—which made him wonder dimly why he didn’t feel the wintery temperature. Actually … he wasn’t feeling anything all of a sudden, not the weight of his body, not the buzz of his aggression, not even the pain.
At least that last one was good news.
Other voices, now. Deep and quiet. Tohr had called for someone(s), but John didn’t bother trying to see who it was.
Instead, he stared straight up at the gray sky overhead. Funny, back before his transition, he had thought he had good eyesight—or maybe it had been more like he hadn’t had bad eyesight. Near or far, he’d gotten what he needed in terms of visual information.
After the change? It was as if a cloudy film had been removed, his ability to notice minute details about objects and people from a football field’s distance away in near pitch darkness such a shock, he could remember thinking surely it was a superpower.
Now, as he watched the sky, he could see the different shades of gray in the storm’s underbelly, the currents of wind swirling in slow-motion banks of snow-swollen clouds. The effect was quiet, beautiful … calming, like silk billowing in an open doorway.
Xhex and that male felt miles away. Then again, so did his corporeal form, even as his vantage point suggested he wasn’t having an out-of-body experience.
Am I dying, he asked mutely.
When no one answered, he wasn’t surprised. They couldn’t hear him, and even if they could have, he couldn’t connect with whoever was around him.
Sadness washed through him. He didn’t want to leave things with Xhex like this.
Even if he was the only one who knew they were estranged.
Murhder and Xhex stepped back from the embrace at same time, and as he stared down at her, he figured out what his emotion had been when she’d told him that she was mated to someone. It had been a quiet relief. A door closing not with a slam, but with a click.
Not that he’d come back here thinking they had any future together. It was just a resolution he had not expected to find, and yet valued more than he would have guessed.
“If he ever hurts you,” Murhder said, “I’ll skin him alive.”
“John, you mean?” She shook her head. “He’s a prince of a guy. I think you’d like him, actually.”
God, it had been so long since Murhder had thought in terms of liking or not liking another living being. But that was what happened when you were all about survival. And when your brain was an unreliable mess.
“Let’s do this,” he said as he looked across the snow-blanketed meadow.
Xhex nodded and they started off side by side, her boots and his heavy treaded shoes punching through the icy top level and compressing the softer flakes underneath with muffled crunches. Before leaving Darius’s old house, the Brothers had given him a heavy parka and thick snow pants as well as gloves and the shoes. No weapons. Not that he’d asked for his own back.
Looking around, he saw nothing but trees on the periphery. Talk about sitting ducks. As the pair of them crossed this open area, they were completely without cover, but he wasn’t worried. There were no foreign scents on the cold wind, and the Brothers were no doubt on the fringes and playing nursemaid. If anyone rode up on them?
Shit was going to go down.
The closer they got to the farmhouse, the worse the structure looked. Between its swaybacked roof, distorted windows, and loose clapboards, the place looked like it was on its last legs—and he felt a renewed sense of guilt.
Not that regrets over this female had ever needed help getting over his fence and into his backyard.
If only he’d been faster at that lab. Or if that male hadn’t gotten shot. Or if—
“How did she find you?” Xhex asked.
“Eliahu Rathboone.” His breath left his mouth in puffs as he spoke. “My B&B. She said she saw