A Warm Heart in Winter

by J. R. Ward

  “And you were worried I wouldn’t mellow with age.”

  The flat head went right into a ridge on the lower lip like the shutter had been designed for just this kind of hard-muscled persuasion. After a test lean, Qhuinn put his shoulder into it. And then his whole upper body. And nothing happened—

  All at once, the stuck became unstuck and Qhuinn pitched forward. But not to worry, his face caught his body weight—with a ringing bang followed by an old school washboard scrub as the shutter continued down its track.

  “—don’t fall!” Blay reached up. “Oh, God!”

  Qhuinn shoved himself off the house and mostly kept the wince to himself. “It’s okay. I needed to shave anyway.”

  And hey, the frigid temperature had created a nice numbness. Plus, bonus, his nose was still attached: He knew this because he could poke at it with his puffy glove.

  Secure in the knowledge that no aesthetic damage had been done—in spite of the fact that his schnoz now had its own heart rate—he clomped down and moved the ladder over to the next window in the lineup of three. The process was repeated, with the absence of the face-plant because now he was ready for it.

  “One more to go—”

  Just as he was about to step down again, a sensation like he’d been tapped on the shoulder startled him. With a wrench-around, he glanced over the back gardens and the forest rim beyond them.

  “What is it?”

  Qhuinn’s eyes searched the darkness outside the reach of the dimmed security lights. Familiarity with the estate filled in the winter details he couldn’t visualize fully: the pool, which was drained and covered for the season; the flower beds and blooming fruit trees, which were likewise on lockdown and draped with burlap; the snow-covered sloping lawn on the far side of the brick walkways. And after all that, the tree line’s boundary of coniferous sentries.

  “What’s wrong, Qhuinn?”

  Shaking himself, he intended to look down at his mate. But his eyes would not leave the back forty.

  “Nothing,” he lied. “It’s… nothing.”

  * * *

  Over at the other end of the house, by the library, Z was coiling up a rope that was locked on Balthazar’s waist. The Bastard was not paying attention to any of the safety shit, and not surprisingly, he was already starting up the side of the house.

  Oh, and not using the ladder that had been leaned into place.

  Because why the fuck would you use the ladder.

  No, no, the twenty-footer, which had been properly tilted and footed for safety, had been eschewed with the dismissal of a race car driver being offered a tricycle. Instead, Balz was somehow managing to tiptoe his way up the stone, his fingertips and toes cruising along the mortar joints.

  “How the hell is he doing that?” Rhage muttered as he came around the corner.

  “Bubblegum on his shoes,” somebody with the brother answered.

  “Is he even wearing shoes?”

  “He better be or those little piggies of his are going to be frozen bacon in the next minute and a half.”

  Z let out a little more lead, and then a little more. After which he felt compelled to call out, “You need to set some hooks now and loop yourself in.”

  “I will,” Balz said. “Just a bit farther.”

  “You got this, Z?” Rhage asked.

  “Yeah. I’ll scrape him off the snowpack when he falls off.”

  “Call us for backup if you need us. We’ve got those ground-level shutters out in front to deal with.”

  Z nodded, and stayed focused on the Bastard. And of course, there was no setting hooks and loops going on. Balz just kept crabbing his way up the stone wall, finding fingerholds, toeholds, in the seams of mortar. When he got to the problem window, some twenty feet up, he reached over with his left hand, grabbed on to the track of the shutter, and pulled himself across so he was in the center of the no-go issue.

  “Now you tie yourself,” Z yelled up. “Before you do anything. Or I’ll pull you down myself.”

  Balthazar smiled under his arm. “You can’t do that.”

  Z yanked the rope to answer that one.

  “But I’ll shatter into a thousand pieces,” the Bastard said. “That’s what you’re worried about, right? Seems silly to prove the danger by creating it—and then who will fix this shutter?”

  “There’s a bush under you. FYI.”

  “Oh! Well, then it’s not that dangerous to begin with, and messing about with hooks will not only ruin the structural integrity of this house, but it’ll slow me down and accomplish nothing. Kind of like this conversation.”

  “Has anyone told you you make no damned sense?”

  Balz turned back to the faulty shutter. “It’s come up once or twice. Fortunately, I can get very hard of hearing when I want to.”

  Z closed his eyes. When he reopened them—prepared to tell the fucker to go ahead, it was his goddamn life to wager on the asshat wheel of craps—Balz was already in a yank with the bottom of the half-shut shutter, gloved hands locked on like loaves of bread, body arching back. If that thing decided to get with the program, the Bastard was going to free-fall into—

  “Not going to budge,” Balz puffed. “Shit. Let me try the next one.”

  “What do you think is wrong with them?” Z said.

  Distantly, the wind let out a roar, the sound like that of a train on the approach. Good thing the mansion weighed as much as the mountain or it might get blown off.

  “I think the motors have burned out,” Balz yelled down. “You can smell the electric fire up here.”

  The Bastard crab-walked over to the next fixed sash. Pull. Tug. Nowhere.

  “Wait, I have an idea.” The male took the rope off his waist and tied it onto the bottom of the shutter. “You have better leverage than I do.”

  “Get out of the way.” Before the Bastard could do what he inevitably would with the arguing, Z cut in with, “You’re wrong. So shut the fuck up.”

  “How do you know what I was going to say?”

  “History.”

  But the Bastard still put his gloved hands back on the shutter.

  “You’re going to fall off the damn house if this lets go.” Z shook his head. “Just be reasonable. Please?”

  Well. What do you know. The magic word.

  Balz backed off with all kinds of muttering. And then Z wound the nylon rope around his hands a couple of times and gave it a try all on his lonesome, easing into the full power of his body like a tow truck trying to get a car out of mud. Finally, he sank down into his glutes, his arms and shoulders straining, his lips pulling away from his fangs.

  There was a tremendous screech, and then the shutter came down on a oner.

  “Oh, shit!”

  Z fell back on his ass, the snow catching his body like a baseball mitt, all support, no cushioning. As the rope went lax and flapped onto his legs, Balz swung loose up at the window, one foot fixed, the other free, one hand locked on the track of the next shutter, the other up and out. He recovered quick, velcroing once again.

  “You okay?” the Bastard called down.

  Z upped to his feet and brushed the snow off his backside. “I told you so.”

  “Let’s do the same thing on the next one.”

  Zsadist glanced to the other end of the house. Qhuinn and Blay were working on their set of shutters on the lower level, or should have been. The former seemed frozen as he focused on something off toward the tree line.

  Z put his fingers between his front teeth and whistled. As the sound traveled, Qhuinn’s focus shifted around.

  After a moment, the brother whistled back two short bursts.

  “Do they need help?” Balz asked from above.

  “All clear.” Z nodded to the next failed shutter. “Okay, Spidey, rope me up with that one. Let’s get this done and see what else is wrong with this old ark.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  It was all going to be fine.

  That’s what was going through Blay’s
mind as he and Qhuinn reentered the garage with the ladder. The busted shutters were down where they should be and locked into place, the motor lines cut so that there was no malfunction risk when the full electricity came back on. After the storm, there were going to be a lot of repairs, and there would be time to rewire things then. What couldn’t be risked was a daylight retraction.

  Just as they were heading back into the house, a muffled roar sounded out somewhere in the distance. And a second. A third.

  At which point the lights came back on fully, the generators settling in to a dim, pervasive purr.

  “Ruhn is the fucking master,” Qhuinn said as they tilted the ladder against the wall in the mudroom and stomped the snow off the treads of their shitkickers.

  The cheer of the doggen in the kitchen was like that of a group being rescued off a deserted island. By a Carnival cruise ship. With a stocked bar and the buffet already set out. And Charo performing on the Lido Deck.

  “Such the man,” Blay agreed.

  As they walked into the kitchen and were applauded unnecessarily by the staff, Blay unzipped his parka, but kept the puff where it was in case this was just a pause and they would be going out again. In the foyer, people were gathering once more, the check-in happening organically, as if the electricity coming back on required a reckoning—

  The crash was loud as a bomb.

  And succeeded by shattering glass, a blast of cold air, and a resonant pine smell.

  Before anyone could react, Rhage and Butch came running out of the library. The pair of them looked like they’d been in a slap fight, their faces red, noses runny, eyes blinking like they couldn’t see. Snow covered their hair, their shoulders, their shitkickers.

  “Tree,” Rhage panted.

  Butch grabbed the front of his own parka like he was having a coronary. “Big tree—”

  “Coming after us!”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” someone demanded.

  “And what just hit the house?” somebody else shouted.

  “Fucking tree!” Rhage ground out as he braced his hands on his knees and bent over to breathe better. “And it’s in the house.”

  At that moment, up at the head of the grand staircase, Wrath and Beth appeared with their son. The Queen was carrying L.W., the young was carrying his golden retriever stuffed animal—the one that was bigger than he was—and Wrath had his hand locked on George’s lead.

  “Is everyone okay?” Beth called down. “We heard a crash.”

  “And smell a whole lot of pretty-much-Pine-Sol,” the King said as they started their descent. “What’s going on in the library?”

  Blay shook his head and glanced at Qhuinn, ready to raise a question about what was going to go wrong next—

  When the lights went off unexpectedly.

  Where there had been illumination, there was a sudden and pervasive return of the pitch black, no security lights on, no fireplaces lit to glow, the candles canned because of all the Thomas Edison.

  Later, Blay would remember wheeling around in space and throwing his arms out toward the grand staircase. It was as if he knew what was going to happen, what misstep was going to occur, what off-kilter was going to result in a tragic fall.

  Wrath would be fine on the descent. As a blind male, whether or not there was light did not matter to him. For Beth, however, the abrupt loss of her sight would be a shock—and Blay didn’t know exactly what occurred, but he, and everyone else, heard her shout of alarm.

  After which came the fall.

  L.W. began to wail at the same time a sickening series of bumps and thumps came down the stairs, bruises or worse occurring—and there was nothing to be done. The momentum worked with gravity’s inexorable pull to a terrible result, and in the darkness, no matter how far Blay reached forward, no matter how much he strained, there was nothing he could do to stop the inevitable.

  It was a hole in one. Nothing planned, certainly not the horrible result.

  And all the while, the child screamed.

  * * *

  “There’s another one,” Balz called down from the now-shuttered bank of windows. “There.”

  Zsadist stood up again from the snowpack and brushed his leathers off. You’d think he’d have developed a core competency in catching his weight on the free fall, but nope. His butt had taken the brunt of things. Three times now.

  As he looked in the direction Balz was pointing toward, he got a snowflake right in the eyeball. Rubbing the sting away, he said, “Yeah, we need that closed, too. Take the rope up?”

  “Will do.”

  There was no reason to raise the whole setting-hooks thing again. Balz was right about his climbing expertise. The Bastard’s scaling and staying put was totally impressive, and it made a male wonder exactly what the guy had gotten into over the years.

  Then again, that wasn’t a question Z really wanted answered.

  Stepping back, he reviewed the expanse of the house, you know, just in case any shutters had decided to magically retract. Which they hadn’t. But a male got paranoid when he thought of his shellan and his young. What if one of those things decided to pop loose in the middle of the day? What if the electricity came back on or had a surge or… something… and suddenly the mansion went wide-open glass at noontime?

  Jesus, why hadn’t he worried about this before.

  As a hot flash of terror went through him, at least his toes warmed up a little in his shitkickers. Meanwhile, the Bastard was already over at the other window, the rope hanging off his ass like a tail, his thin-gloved hands working the upper left-hand corner of the shutter where the motor was, his lower body flush with the exterior wall while his upper torso curved away to give him space to work.

  “Almost done,” he called out. “Then I’m going to—”

  All at once, the window he was at lit up like the sun had risen inside the room on the far side, yellow light cascading out into the night, into the storm.

  Unfortunately, that wasn’t all.

  Sparks exploded from the motor Balz was disconnecting, the electrical charge transferring from the metal to the male, the blue arc of the lightning-like flash going right into one of the Bastard’s hands.

  And through his body.

  As a brownout registered the transfer of voltage, Balz was thrown back into thin air, his body stiff as a board, arms and legs fully extended.

  Z reacted without conscious thought. He triangulated the fall and got under the male, bracing himself for the impact, arms cupped like he was going to catch a hay bale. At the last moment, as Balz dead weighted down toward the ground, Z pivoted, realizing he needed to be sideways to the load he was going to try to cradle.

  Talk about electrical burns.

  As he captured the heavy load, a whiff of burned flesh along with a metal tang hit his nose, and then he wasn’t thinking about smells at all. Lying the male out in the snow, he checked for breath and found none. Reaching for his own shoulder—

  Fuck, no communicator. ’Cuz they were at home, not in the field.

  Z whistled loud and long as he ripped off his gloves and felt for a pulse at the jugular. Faint. Or… maybe there wasn’t one? Yanking open the Bastard’s parka, he dropped his head down to make sure there was no breathing still. Then he put one of his palms on top of the other in the center of that big-ass chest, interlocked his fingers, and started straight-arming CPR.

  “Stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive,” he said under his breath as he compressed with his doubled-up hands. “Ah, ah, ah… ah… stayin’ alive…”

  He paused to give the male two breaths. Which, yes, he was aware was not what the American Heart Association recommended anymore, but he was hardly a casual bystander and rescue breaths were fine with him.

  As he resumed chest compressions, he called out with various “Hey!” “My brothers!” “Fritz!”

  He didn’t yell Help. He never had, and he wasn’t starting now.

  Time to breathe for the Bastard again.

  Inhal
e. Forced puff into that lax mouth. Inhale. Forced puff. And then more with chest compressions and the yelling.

  Jesus Christ, what did he need to do to get someone’s attention around here?

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  In the mansion’s foyer, the security lights came back on with the same lack of warning that they went out, and Blay braced himself for a paralyzed mahmen and a young with horrible injuries, for Wrath to be crazed with grief, for—

  Halfway down the grand staircase, there was a tableau of off-kilter, and the great Blind King was in the center of it. L.W. was hanging from the back of his onesie in Wrath’s fist, the young screaming and red-faced—but safe from a fall that would have killed him for sure. And on the other side of the King, Beth had been caught by the arm, her whole body leaning out over the rest of the red-carpeted steps, only one foot planted, the other on a high kick to nowhere.

  As for the fall? Down at the bottom of the steps… L.W.’s favorite toy, the nearly life-sized golden, with its beanbag paws and loosely stuffed legs, was lying in a tangled heap on the hard mosaic floor.

  Wrath had saved his Queen and his son.

  And beside him, George, the real-life dog, was frozen and panting in a panic, as if the animal knew that things had almost been a tragedy.

  As everyone standing around exhaled in relief, the King pulled his loved ones into him, cradling both his shellan and his young close, L.W. settling down as soon as his mahmen was back in range and all was okay.

  “Shit,” Qhuinn breathed. “I mean… just shit—”

  There was a hiccup in the electricity, things faltering before surging again—and then the sconces on the walls flared back fully to life, the chandelier in the dining room reigniting and all kinds of illumination streaming from sources you only noticed when they weren’t working.

  “I got you,” Wrath was saying in a soft voice. “I got both of you.”

  Beth trembled as she hung on to the King’s enormous upper arm. “How did you catch us?”

  “Eyes aren’t everything, leelan.” Wrath tucked her head under his chin and stared out into space, his wraparounds hiding his expression. “And I’ve got a knack for knowing where things are. It’s what keeps me on my feet.”