A Warm Heart in Winter

by J. R. Ward

  Yet his parents and Solange were buried in the yard off to the side.

  But none of that made him want to do a revisit. He had his memories, and they were more than enough.

  With a frown, he looked at the terrace. For all the renovations, he guessed that the bones of the bodies hadn’t been found. As long as the remains had not been exposed to sunlight, they would have survived, and Blay would have put in the effort to make sure things had been properly buried.

  Maybe he should have asked Ron. Too late now, and besides, that kind of information changed nothing about anything.

  Just before he departed, movement in one of the windows on the second floor got his attention. A small figure that barely came up to the first row of glass panes had stepped into view.

  Mouse.

  Qhuinn lifted his hand. The little girl lifted her hand back.

  And then he dematerialized from the yard he had once known so well.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Three sealed envelopes that were a little bigger than index cards. A cheap sheet of copier paper that was folded in half. A ball of tissue that had been scotch-taped into something hard as a marble.

  Qhuinn gave a double-check shake to the manila envelope, even though he knew there was nothing else inside of it. Then he looked at Blay. The two of them were sitting on their bed, Z having been called for a non-emergent assist at the Audience House.

  Picking up the piece of paper, Qhuinn unfolded it—and the first thing he noticed was the brown stain across the bottom.

  “I think that’s blood,” he said sadly as he rubbed his thumb over it.

  Lifting the paper to his nose, he inhaled. Over three years old and dried, yet he still caught the unmistakable scent.

  “Yeah, it’s blood.” As he lowered the note, he said, “I never asked you where you found him. And he never volunteered.”

  “It was by his bureau,” Blay replied quietly. “As I told Z, I think he was stashing all of this just before he was…”

  When his mate let the sentence drift, Qhuinn closed his eyes and nodded. Opening them again, he focused on what had been written by a trembling hand:

  Anna Sophia Laval

  746 Greene Court

  Caldwell

  No zip code, but it wasn’t needed. Not for hand delivery.

  Each of the envelopes had “A. S.” in the center of the front in beautifully executed handwriting, like the initials had been drawn. No trembling when they’d been written.

  “Are these love letters?” Qhuinn murmured. “This is a human name.”

  “Definitely human.”

  “But my brother had no contact with humans. This makes no sense.”

  Blay took off his leather jacket, and palmed his cell phone. “How do you spell the last name again? I’m going to check social media.”

  “L-A-V-A-L.” Qhuinn tilted the page so his mate could see. “Maybe it’s a fake name, but if he really wanted these to get to her and she was one of our kind? He would have provided her real name.”

  “Unless he’s trying to hide her identity.” Blay frowned as he typed things into Facebook. Then Insta. Twitter. “I can’t find anything. Let me see about Google.” A moment later, he shrugged and flashed the front of his phone. “I’m not coming up with a thing.”

  “So maybe she is one of us and that’s a false name to protect her. I mean, most humans just have to have a presence on the Internet. It’s like breathing to them.”

  “We know who we could ask.” Blay held up his phone. “If you want to.”

  Qhuinn nodded. “I need to find this female. Or woman, if that’s the case.”

  Blay drafted a text and sent it to V. Then put his phone down. “You know, I have to be honest. If she was human—”

  “Right? If he had had any relationship outside of the species? He would have kept that shit on the DL like you read about. Holy fuck. Our parents would have thrown a fit.”

  There was a bing! and Blay checked his phone. “V says to come to the Pit. He’s happy to help.”

  “Let’s do it.” Qhuinn put the letters back into the larger envelope and then frowned. “Actually, can you take a picture of this? I don’t want to take this stuff out of our room.”

  As he held the piece of paper up, Blay snapped an image on his phone, and then Qhuinn put everything in the second drawer of their bedside table. As the two of them headed for the door, he pulled Blay in and kissed his mate.

  “I’m glad you came out to the house. I was so happy to see you.”

  Blay’s brows worried up. “I was concerned you’d think we were stalking you.”

  “Not at all. I wanted to go in there alone, but it was a relief to see you out on the lawn. You make me feel safe.”

  The flush that hit Blay’s face was pretty much the best thing Qhuinn had seen all night, and he squeezed his mate’s hand—then kept ahold of it, especially as they walked down the grand staircase. As much as he loved everyone in the household, he hoped they didn’t run into anybody else. There was too much on his mind, too much sapping his energy.

  But meeting with V was different.

  Figure out how to cope.

  As he and Blay went out through the vestibule, the cold was a slap, and he liked it. It seemed easier for him to breathe.

  Glancing over at Blay, he frowned. “Do you want my coat?”

  He was in the process of taking his jacket off when Blay put his hand on his arm. “No. I’m good.”

  Qhuinn put an arm around the male and pulled him close. “I’ll keep you warm.”

  “You always do.”

  Together, they descended the stone steps and went around the fountain—and he noted that a replacement tarp had been secured across the sculpture and its basin. On that note, he glanced back at the mansion over his shoulder. The glass that had been broken on the second floor had already been replaced.

  Healing. In the bricks-and-mortar sense.

  As they came up to the Pit, they didn’t have to knock. Vishous opened things and seemed prepared to go to work: He not only had his muscle-shirt-and-leathers uniform on, he was sporting a lit hand-rolled in one hand and a rocks glass of what had to be Goose in the other.

  So yeah, Qhuinn thought, the brother was ready for anything.

  “How we doing? What do you need?”

  They stepped into the Pit’s warm interior, and Qhuinn was aware of a nervousness clutching the front of his throat. Stripping off his jacket, he worried about things he couldn’t control: Names, addresses, people who had moved, people who lied about their identities.

  You know, the social equivalent of new owners doing the floors over.

  He took yet another deep breath. “We need to search for a woman or female my brother might have had contact with before the raids.”

  V went totally still. But only for a split second.

  Then he nodded once and went over to his Four Toys. Sitting down in front of his computers, he put his drink aside and his hand-rolled between his teeth. “Name.”

  Blay held out his phone and Qhuinn took the thing and put it in front of the brother. He should have said the name. But it felt… sacred, somehow.

  “There’s an address there, too,” he mumbled. Like the brother couldn’t frickin’ read?

  V set to typing, his fingers, both the ones in the lead-lined glove and the ones that were not, flying over a keyboard. “Have a seat. This’ll take a minute.”

  Qhuinn and Blay parked it on the sofa, the two of them side by side, their knees together, their backs straight. Like they were a couple of schoolkids trying to make a good impression on the teacher.

  Like maybe if they behaved themselves, V would find what they needed—

  “Got her.”

  Qhuinn burst up and tripped over the coffee table on the way back to the desk. And even before he got in range, V leaned to the side in his office chair so there was plenty of room to get close to the monitors.

  The central screen was showing the front and back of
a current New York State driver’s license. The image was of… a dark-haired woman staring into the camera with dark eyes. Her height was listed as five six, she had corrective lenses, and she was an organ donor. The name was definitely Anna Sophia Laval.

  “The address is different,” Blay murmured.

  V tapped his hand-rolled over his ashtray. “This is her current address. I found the one on the note as her previous residence.”

  “So this really is her,” Qhuinn said as he moved even closer to the image. Not that it got him any more information about her or any further acuity on her features. “But we don’t know if she’s one of us—or do we?”

  “I’ve initiated a deep search into the species database from the Audience House. In about an hour, I’ll know more.”

  Qhuinn continued to stare at that face. The photograph was not all that distinct, but even if it were in hard focus, it wasn’t going to tell him what he wanted to know.

  For those questions, he was going to need to speak to the woman.

  Or vampire.

  Herself.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  The Brotherhood House was typically at its most quiet between one and four p.m. in the afternoons. Those three hours were not only the dead zone between Last Meal cleanup and First Meal prep, they were when the doggen themselves retired to their quarters for a brief rest from all their other duties like housework, supply acquisition, and planning. So, yup, as Qhuinn sat propped up against the headboard in his and his mate’s bedroom, he just listened to all the silence. Beside him, sleeping on his stomach under a heavy load of covers, Blay was twitching like a Labrador chasing bunnies in his dreams.

  “Shh,” Qhuinn said as he stroked his male’s bare shoulder. “Be easy.”

  Instantly, his mate stilled. Then there was a turn of the head, Blay’s face now in his direction. A big inhale followed, and, finally, a slow exhale.

  Qhuinn smiled to himself. “You just rest. I’ve got you.”

  As Blay fell back into REM land, Qhuinn repositioned himself against the stack of pillows he’d punched up an hour ago, crossing his arms and staring across the dim room.

  So odd.

  V could find nothing on Anna Sophia Laval in any of the species databases or social media groups.

  Therefore, it was either a code name that she and Luchas had used when together… or she was a human. But how was the latter possible? His brother hadn’t been raised like that. Not that Qhuinn cared one way or the other—but the family’s golden son? Falling in with one of those rats without tails?

  He rubbed his face as the whens, wheres, and hows jogged around the inside of his skull like they’d had cocktails made of Adderall and Pepsi.

  Insomnia sucked. And he had a feeling he’d better get used to it.

  On that note, he leaned to the side, reached into the bedside table, and got his contraband iPad. Before turning the thing on, he compulsively opened the second drawer and made sure that the letters were where he’d left them. Maybe he should discreetly cut the flaps and take images of the contents? You know, on a just-in-case—except that seemed like an inappropriate violation of privacy.

  Yup. Still there.

  But really, like they weren’t going to be?

  Shaking his head at himself, he fired up the iPad and wasn’t sure what he was going to do with it—except then he remembered his previous request of Vishous. Not the one about Anna Sophia Laval earlier in the night, but the other one from the evening before. Going into his email, he scrolled down the listing of spam and Amazon order confirmations. There was only one personal missive in the bunch—it was from V and he opened the thing:

  Again, I’m really sorry about your brother, son. Let me know if there’s anything else I can do.

  When he checked the time stamp—because he was afraid of the attachments—he saw that the brother had sent what he’d requested a mere eight minutes after he’d asked for it.

  V was a good guy. No matter what he tried to portray to the contrary.

  There were four attachments, marked sequentially, and Qhuinn stared at them. It was a while before he could open the first of the videos, and when he did, a sense of not being able to breathe returned.

  As the screen blacked out and then flared a gray and white, he propped the iPad on his knees and felt his eyes burn. The image was of the training center’s corridor, right outside Luchas’s patient room. When things got blurry—on his end, not the security feed’s—he wiped his face. Then he pressed play with a sinking sensation in the center of his chest.

  Nothing moved. Duh, because the camera was static.

  No, wait, that wasn’t true; there was a counter in the lower right-hand corner with the date and time: The seconds flipped by quickly, the minutes moved slow, the hours were frozen solid. But he didn’t have to wait long. V had been efficient about editing the security camera’s recording, and in the back of Qhuinn’s mind, he had a thought that the brother had deliberately given him a little time to collect himself—

  Before his brother walked out of his room.

  The sight of that slight frame in the long black robe was a shock even though he’d thought he’d been prepared for it. Putting his hand over his mouth, he tucked an arm across his aching chest and just watched.

  God, that rough gait. The cane.

  “Oh, Luchas,” he whispered.

  Reaching out, he ran his forefinger over the figure—except doing that stopped the footage. It was okay, though. For a while, he just stared at his brother’s contours. It had to be among the last moments of the male’s life.

  Qhuinn thought of pulling back that hood and exposing… what had frozen beneath it.

  To clear that memory, he continued with the file. When Luchas left the camera’s field, there was a cut to another feed. And another. And another, as his brother went down the corridor of the training center. And then the file ended.

  The next attachment was from the subterranean tunnel, and Qhuinn witnessed his brother limp along to the right, heading for the hatch. When Luchas came up to it, he hesitated.

  And glanced back over his shoulder.

  That was when Qhuinn finally got to see his brother’s face from under the hood. He froze the feed. There was no fear. No anxiety. Luchas’s expression was simply… grave. “Resolved” was maybe the better word for it.

  With a pounding heart, Qhuinn tried to memorize exactly what it all looked like, the turn of that ruined body, the angle of the cane, the line of the mouth, the cast of the eyes. But that was stupid, right? He could play this file anytime—and if he lost it or deleted it by mistake, not that he would, he could always ask V for another copy.

  “I miss you,” he whispered. “I wish you were here…”

  Yet the file had reminded him of how much pain Luchas had been in. How pervasive the agony and untenable the hours must have been. When he considered his brother’s suffering, he supposed… that it was a blessing of some kind that he could at least understand why his brother might have reached the end of his journey. But that was a sad tally of fortune, wasn’t it.

  As a groundswell of regret made Qhuinn’s heart skip beats, he didn’t know how he was going to make it to the end of the files.

  He hit play again. It was nearly impossible to watch Luchas turn away, and there might have been some more rubbing of the eyes. And then after Luchas entered the code to the hatch and stepped through, the feed ended. So Qhuinn teed up the next one. This recording was of the parking area in the cave, and it showed his brother walking past the Tahoe and the snowmobiles. Luchas paused again, but he didn’t look back once more. He just pulled the camo drape to the side… and then with a swirl of snow from the storm, he stepped out of sight.

  At that point, the feed switched to an exterior camera mounted somewhere on the lip of the cave. It showed Luchas struggling through the freezing cold onslaught, the winds lashing at him, his body weaving. And then there was nothing but white, the black robes eaten up by the blizzard.

  V
left no extra time on that one. He just cut it where it was.

  One last file. But wasn’t this the end of the story?

  In danger of losing it, Qhuinn fired up the final attachment, and it took a moment for his eyes to resume proper functioning—at which point, he frowned. The footage was from a camera inside the subterranean tunnel again. There was about thirty seconds of lead time… and then someone entered the frame.

  “What the fuck?” he said.

  As Blay stirred next to him, he absently reached out and soothed his mate. Then he held the iPad closer. Like that was going to make a difference?

  Maybe V had made a mistake.

  The figure strode along, and when it got to the hatch, it entered the code and stepped out. Then there was footage tacked on from the area inside the cave and then outside, in the storm. Which was still raging.

  Even though the time stamp was about five hours later.

  Close to dawn. Very close.

  When the image stream ended, Qhuinn rubbed his eyes and prayed he was not going to have to kill someone who lived among them all—

  He sat straight up.

  As a chill of realization came over him, he nearly threw the iPad aside. Instead, so he didn’t disturb his mate, he moved slower than he wanted to, peeling the covers back, slipping one foot and then the other out from the warmth. Making sure that Blay was tucked in, Qhuinn padded over to the walk-in closet and willed the light to stay off. Thanks to the illumination from the bathroom, he threw on whatever clothes he came to.

  And then he left as quickly as he could, making sure that he closed the door softly behind himself.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  The mansion had never felt so enormous as when Qhuinn jogged down the red-carpeted stairs, his bare feet soundless, his heart pounding like he was on a flat-out run for his life. When he hit the foyer’s mosaic floor, the cold registered on his soles, but that was not the reason for the goosebumps that rode up his arms and across his chest.