Not exactly a redecorating job that went with all the priceless books and the wonderful old rug.
“Well,” Qhuinn hedged, “at least we won’t have to cut down something to drape the garland and lights on.”
“So that’s what was chasing Rhage and Butch—”
The shout outside was muffled, but distinct enough.
Blay rushed forward, but not to the tree, to the other banks of French doors, which were still shut and locked. As he yanked open one set, more of the cold rushed in, but he didn’t pay attention to the deep freeze.
In the security lights, he saw the two figures, one back-flatted in the snow, the other crouched down and pumping at a chest.
Blay pivoted and shouted, “Medic! We need a medic!”
Then he and Qhuinn were out in the storm. Z was the one doing the compressions, Balthazar the person in cardiac arrest.
“Do you need me to take over?” Blay asked as he fell to his knees.
“You breathe for him when I say so. Three . . . two . . . one . . . breathe.”
Blay pinched Balz’s nose, sealed the male’s lips, and pushed oxygen into those lungs. When he backed off and took another deep inhale, he smelled the burn. Skin . . . and something metallic.
He’s not dead, Blay told himself. He can’t be dead.
“Breathe!” Z commanded.
Blay went back down again, forcing air out of his own lungs and into the other male’s. Beside him, Qhuinn had taken Balz’s hand and was rubbing it. Or maybe praying over it.
“Where are they?” Blay said as he wrenched around. “Medic!”
Jesus Christ, the fighter was dead—
Without warning—because hey, nothing was coming with any warning tonight—Balz arched back and hauled in a breath so big, it was as if he had been animated by an outside force, some dark magic rushing through him and bringing him back to life.
The male’s eyes popped wide, and the dilated pupils focused upward. Then the head swiveled toward Z.
In a voice that sounded all wrong, Balz said in the Old Language, “She is here. The demon is back.”
An hour later, Z was down in the training center. Instead of crowding the clinic, where everybody else was, he was over by the gym.
Every time he blinked, he saw Balthazar in the snow, white face turning to him, eyes rapt and yet unfocused, that haunted voice like something from the other side.
The demon is back.
Z rubbed his eyes and turned away, walking farther down to the pool. Those four words that had been uttered across that cold air had been unconsciously spoken. Z knew this because when Doc Jane and V had come out, assessed Balz, and cleared him to be moved back inside, the real Bastard had returned.
What had spoken those words had been someone halfway back, a ghost with a corporeal shell, the message eerie because it emanated from a place other than mortal consciousness.
When they’d gotten him into the library, he’d jerked again and then glanced at the tree that had broken through one of the sets of doors.
“Who put that in here?” he’d mumbled. “It doesn’t fit.”
There had been such relief at that point, a bubbling happiness for everybody as the stabilization and recovery had presented itself. Balz had still been taken down here, of course. And his fellow Bastards were inside the exam room with him. He was going to be fine, though—no lingering aftereffects anticipated, according to the doctors.
Except they were wrong about that. Although not with respect to Balz.
Z stopped at the glass entrance of the pool area. Those four words were causing a rift in reality for the male they’d been spoken to.
But Z’s demon was not back. He’d been through this before. His rational side knew this.
And yet . . .
The decision was made before he was aware of coming to any kind of crossroads of choice. His feet were clearly committed to a new course of action, however, turning his body away from the pool’s enclosure and taking him to the office, through the office, into the supply closet.
He fought the direction he was headed. He didn’t want to go into the mansion’s cellar, to that corner far, far in the back, to the cardboard box that he had brought down there—
As Z stepped out into the tunnel, he happened to take a deep breath, and that was when he smelled something that made no damned sense.
Looking to the right, to the darkened void at the far end, he frowned and took another deep inhale.