it.
Do we all look that goofy and clumsy during the act?
Yeah. Probably. Even when there wasn’t a succubus involved.
I pushed past the vampire and her victim and tried to figure out exactly when I’d started taking the field beside the things that go bump in the night instead of against them.
And then I pushed those thoughts away, grabbed an armload of towels, and went looking for my brother.
27
At the end of the hallway, I found a heavy trapdoor set in the floor.
I froze.
My heart started beating faster.
The door didn’t match the castle’s décor. It wasn’t lined up exactly right with the stones. It was old and made of heavy wood.
And there were scorch marks on it.
Because it was my door.
My door, mine, from my old apartment; the door to my subbasement lab. It still had the ring in it that I used to pull it up. And it had an additional bar on it that hadn’t been there before.
I shook myself out of the freeze and stretched out a shaking hand to slide back the bar and open the door. It came up easily; it even squeaked at the right spot and felt, dammit, exactly like it always had. My chest suddenly hurt and my eyes burned.
Hell’s bells, I wanted to feel like I was home again.
And instead, I was standing in Marcone’s house.
Something stirred in me, down deep. It wasn’t rage. It wasn’t anything as ephemeral and temporary as rage. It wasn’t predicated on my emotional pain. It felt older than that. Primordial. What was mine had been taken away.
It wasn’t right. And no one was going to do anything about it.
Unless it was me.
Something went click somewhere inside.
Ever since the Red Court had taken my daughter, I’d been reeling from one disaster to the next, surviving. This entire situation was just one more entropy barrage hitting my life, forcing me to scramble once again, maybe getting me killed. (Again. Technically.)
Things were different now. I was a part of Maggie’s life. And she might need me to walk her down an aisle one day.
Maybe it was time I started getting ahead of this stuff.
Maybe it was time to get serious.
My brother was lying curled up in a fetal position, naked and shockingly thin, as if he’d lost forty pounds of muscle in the past day. He looked better and worse—the bruises were gone, as was the blood. His hands still looked knotted and horrible, but his face was recognizable again. Being a vampire has its privileges, even if his skin looked like it needed to be a couple of sizes larger, drawn tight against what remained of his formerly muscular frame.
It was his expression that sickened me. He looked up with mercury-colored eyes, dull and glazed with simple animal pain.
“Thomas,” I hissed. “It’s Harry.”
He blinked up at the light without speaking.
“Can you hear me, man?”
He stared and made a small choking sound.
“Hell’s bells,” I said. There was no ladder waiting for me below. So I grimaced, swung my legs over the opening, and then dropped down into it as quietly as I could.
It was a bit of a drop, but I managed not to land on Thomas or fall on my ass.
“Come on,” I said. “We have to go.”
For a long beat, nothing happened. Then he moved, and I felt myself let out a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding. My brother was alive.
But there wasn’t much left of him.
Stars and stones, the svartalves had worked him over badly. They hadn’t put him in irons. They’d just beaten him until there was no possibility of him effecting his own escape. I wanted to be enraged about it, but among the supernatural nations, their actions would be considered effective, not sadistic. Hell, it would have been a simple matter for them to simply kill him out of hand and then announce that an assassin had made an attempt on Etri and been killed before he could do the job. But instead they were holding to the Accords.
He was alive. But his Hunger had evidently cannibalized his own body to keep him that way.
“Thomas, we haven’t got much time,” I said. “Get your lazy ass up. We have to go.”
He looked at me, and his brow furrowed. I wasn’t at all confident that he understood me.
“Of course,” I said. “I have to do all the work myself.”
I lifted my amulet and looked around the room, and my heart hurt. It was my old lab. I’d spent countless hours there, working,