be a thousand different faces to a thousand different people—with no one ever knowing the real him.
For example, she didn’t believe he found her attractive for one moment. It was just a comment to put her off balance. And it had worked; just not for the reason he’d intended.
God, John…
This shit between them was killing them both, but they were stalled out. Unable to make things work; unable to let things go.
It was a mess.
Flashing back to her bike, she mounted, put her sunglasses on to protect her eyes, and took off. As she headed out of downtown, she blew past a fleet of CPD squad cars with their lights flashing and sirens blaring, going as fast as their tires would take them toward where she had just been.
Have fun, boys, she thought.
Wonder if they had a protocol for multiple suicides by now.
She herself headed north toward the mountains. It would have been more efficient to just dematerialize, but she needed to air her head out, and there was nothing like doing eighty on a rural road to get your skull clean as a whistle. With the cold air shoving her aviators back onto her nose, and her biker’s jacket forming a second skin across her breasts, she gunned the engine even harder, stretching out flat over the bike, becoming one with the machine.
As she closed in on the Brotherhood’s mansion, she wasn’t sure why she’d agreed to this. Maybe it was just surprise at the request. Maybe she wanted to run into John. Maybe she was… looking for something, anything, that was a change from this fog of sadness she was living in.
Then again, maybe the fact that she was meeting with her mother meant shit was only going to get worse.
About fifteen minutes later, she turned off the road and ran smack into the mhis that was always in place. Slowing down, so she didn’t hit a deer or a tree, she gradually ascended the mountain’s rise, stopping at the series of gates that were similar to the ones that led to the training center entrance.
There was barely a delay at each of the security cameras; she was expected.
After she passed through the last barricade, and started on the wide turn that led to the courtyard, her heart relocated to her gut. Dayum, the huge stone house still looked the same. But come on, like it would have changed at all? There could be a nuclear bomb shower along the northeast coast and the place would still be solid.
This fortress, cockroaches, and Twinkies. All that would be left.
She parked the Ducati just beyond the stone steps that went up to the front door, but she didn’t dismount. Looking at the arching jambs, the massive carved panels, the glowering gargoyles that had cameras in their mouths—there was no welcome mat in sight.
Enter at your own risk was the point.
A quick check of her watch told her what she already knew: John would already be out for the night, fighting in the part of town she had just left—
Xhex cranked her head to the left.
Her mother’s grid was out back, in the gardens behind the house.
This was good. She didn’t want to go inside. Didn’t want to walk across the foyer. Didn’t want to remember what she had been wearing, thinking, dreaming of when she’d been mated.
Dumb-ass fantasy of what life was going to be like.
Dematerializing to the far side of the barrier hedge, she had no trouble orienting herself. She and John had wandered out here in the spring, ducking beneath the budding branches of the fruit trees, breathing in the forgotten smell of fresh earth, holding each other against the chill that they knew was not long for the air.
So much possibility back then. And given where they were now, it seemed kind of fitting that all of summer’s warmth was gone, that vital blooming period missed altogether: Now the leaves were on the ground, the branches were bare once again, and everything was about hunkering down.
Well, wasn’t she a Hallmark card tonight.
Zeroing in on her mother’s grid, she went along the side of the house, passing by the French doors of the billiards room and the library.
No’One was down at the pool’s edge, a still figure spotlit by the blue glow of water that was yet to be drained.
Wow… Xhex thought. Something big had changed with the female, and whatever the shift was, it had altered much of her emotional superstructure. Her grid was jumbled up, but