As a cutting wind came up against them, Murhder put his gloved hands into the borrowed parka’s pockets and thought about Fritz providing the insulated clothes. The butler had not been surprised to see him and had offered the same wrinkled smile he always had. In his eyes, though, the doggen’s sadness had been evident and Murhder got it. Back in his old life, he’d crashed so many times at Darius’s, he’d been a member of the household. Now? Being an outcast meant he was worse than a stranger.
He was family with bad baggage.
And on top of that? Darius, the Brother who had brought that butler and Murhder together, was now dead, the conduit between them gone, one more emptiness to register on the long list of people who were no longer there.
Speaking of which … they were about twenty yards away when the dark windows of the shack made him worry. He’d expect any exterior glass to be shuttered during the daylight hours, but the sun wasn’t a problem now. Why no interior lights? Eyeing the anemic wires that came out of the forest and attached to a corner of the roof, he worried that she’d lost power.
Or what if she’d moved from where she’d received Havers’s surgical aftercare, but stayed in the same town? The fact that the female hadn’t included her home’s location or a phone number had made sense to him because she hadn’t been any surer of where he was than he had been of her identity. And as vampires living in a world dominated by humans, everyone was careful.
Especially someone like her who had been tortured by the other species.
But now, he wondered. Was this all a ruse? Except then how had she known what had happened as he’d broken into the lab?
These questions burned up the short distance to the front door, and out of the corner of his eye, he noted that Xhex had discreetly taken out a handgun.
Curling up a fist, he knocked to announce their presence—and did not like the way the panels rattled in the frame. When there was no answer, he knocked again.
The door had an old-fashioned iron latch instead of a modern knob, and as he lifted the weight, he expected the metal to fall right off its mounting. Instead, he got resistance as he tried to push and then pull things open.
He knocked a third time. And then his training and experience as a Brother took over. This position at the door was too much exposure, sentries in the woods notwithstanding.
Murhder turned his shoulder to the flimsy barrier and busted through it, his momentum carrying him into an ice-cold center room.
Silence.
Taking out a penlight, he moved the thin beam around, fine dust turning what was a spotlight into a flood. There was a threadbare sofa. A TV, which surprised him until he recognized it as being from the nineties. A desk with …
Walking across the floorboards, he trained the light on a letter that was partially written on paper that was the same as the missives that had been sent to him. And sure enough, in the same hand, the salutation was to Eliahu Rathboone.
He didn’t bother reading the two and a half paragraphs.
“She’s here. Or she was—”
The moan was so soft, a creak of the floor beneath his feet nearly drowned it out. Hurrying toward the sound, he went into what looked like a cold-water kitchen, everything painfully neat on the pitted counters, the old seventies-era refrigerator making a rhythmic choking noise.
The bedroom was in the back on the right, and now he could scent a female. But she had a terrible visitor with her.
Death.
The acrid and achingly sad scent of the dying was heavy in the still, frigid air, and as Murhder breached a narrow doorway, he clasped the shard of seeing glass once more.
“You found me,” a weak voice said.
In the glow of the penlight, a bed was revealed, and upon it, under layers of handmade quilts, a female was on her side facing him, her skeletal visage on a thin pillow. Wisps of hair, gray and curled, formed a halo around the stark bones of her features, and her skin was the color of fog.
Murhder went to her, dropping to his knees.
As her sunken eyes sought his, a tear escaped and dropped off the bridge of her nose. “You came.”
“I did.”
Strangers they were. And yet as he reached for her hand, it was a family connection.