A Warm Heart in Winter(19)

“I’ma do it again,” he murmured to her. “Watch me. Here it comes . . . gotcha.”

The onesie was, naturally, a gift from Uncle V and Uncle Butch, who had made it a personal crusade to outfit every kid in the mansion with bureaus full of Red Sox merch: Bitty. The twins. Nalla. Even George, Wrath’s dog, was decked out with a collar and a cold-weather sweater with the red B on it.

You might have been tempted to tell the guys they’d have even better luck brainwashing the next generation into hating the Yankees if they put flashing neon signs in the front foyer with pictures of Big Papi and bowls of candy in front of ’em. But then you’d run the risk they might actually do it.

“Who’s my smart girl?” he said as he booped Lyric again. “Who’s daddy’s smart girl?”

As she smiled even wider, her eyes, her big green eyes, shone up at him.

Staring into them, he went back into the past. To that moment when he had died and gone unto the Fade.

To that moment when he had seen her face in that shadowy door.

Maybe it was the fact that he had collapsed out on the street in the snow only an hour or two ago . . . maybe it was because life felt extra special when you woke up out of surgery . . . maybe it was a brain fart caused by the lingering anesthesia . . . but for whatever reason, he returned to that night the Honor Guard had been sent after him.

His parents had finally kicked him out of the house. No news flash there. The see-ya-later had been long in coming, and given that Luchas had survived his transition, the social stakes had been even higher. Who the hell was going to mate the guy, considering what his brother was? What well-bred female was going to volunteer to throw her DNA into a gene pool that had already coughed up a corker with mismatched irises?

So Qhuinn had been removed from the family tree, given the boot from the family house, and left to walk off into the night with nowhere to go.

Except his best friend’s house, of course.

He hadn’t made it to Blay’s, though. Four males in hooded black robes had intersected his path, and he could still picture them clear as day, their faces hidden, their role clear: an Honor Guard sent to punish him and avenge his family’s name. And the purpose of the concealment of identity had not been because the males were behaving unlawfully and didn’t want anyone to know who they were. On the contrary, they had been sanctioned in their brutality, and the purpose of the masking was that they represented all of the glymera. They were the generalized shaming and shunning of the entire aristocracy, not a mere quartet of it, but a hundred of the species, not just Qhuinn’s own bloodline, but all of them.

As the attack had commenced, he had put up a fight, as was his nature. But the numbers game had not been in his favor, and once he went down to the asphalt, the beating had really taken off with those clubs.

And then a voice, in the midst of the raining blows.

We aren’t supposed to kill him!

His brother, Luchas. Naturally, the firstborn son had had to be involved in it as the representation of the bloodline. It was the way of things, and Qhuinn had never held the participation against his brother. In their family of origin, neither of them had had any freedom of choice. No one in the aristocracy did, and maybe that was why as a group they were all such fucking assholes.

Not that there were many left after the raids.

As a shiver of unease teased the nape of Qhuinn’s neck, he stroked his daughter’s blond hair . . . and the sense of warning got worse instead of better.

Back when he had been lying on that stretch of pavement, after the beating had stopped, his weak breath rattling up and down the collapsed trail of his esophagus, he had seen the door unto the Fade. It had come to him, as he had heard it would when the time for death arrived—and he had reached out for the knob because legend held that if you opened the door and stepped through, all your suffering ended and you enjoyed an eternity with those you loved.

Frankly, he’d been shocked that his defect hadn’t relegated him to Dhunhd.

Except he hadn’t turned that knob.

On the flat plane of the white portal, he had seen the face of a young. Lyric. Who at the time had not only been unborn, but was no possibility at all as far as he was concerned. Yet his beloved daughter had appeared before him, her pale-green eyes looking out at him and sending a clear and certain message that as much as he thought it was his moment to transition unto eternity, in fact, it was not his time.

There had been many consequences to the vision, not the least of which was, hello, he was still alive. But an unintended corollary was the fact that until Lyric was born, he’d relied on that vision as a safety vest, a talisman in his reckless engagement and risk-taking in the field: Because until she was safely delivered upon the birthing bed, he was guaranteed life. After all, if he kicked it? She couldn’t exist.

Now, though, it dawned on him that his purpose in creating her had been fulfilled.

No more grace period for danger and death. Sure, in the vision, he had seen her green eyes change to reflect his own mismatched gaze, but that didn’t mean he could guarantee he’d be around to see the shift happen. And as for what happened tonight? He’d been chilling in that tow truck, not expecting any complications from humans, frustrated that he wasn’t on the front lines.

One stab wound later, he was in the OR.

“—okay? Qhuinn?”

Qhuinn looked up. The other two adults in the room were silent in that way that people got when they were expecting the guy in the hospital bed in front of them to throw a clot and expire on the spot with a round of seizures. He wasn’t even sure which one was asking him if he was all right.