A Warm Heart in Winter(33)

This had a silencing effect, and Tohr did the duty on replying. “Still tallying. And fixing them is going to be a bitch. Even the ground-floor windows are ten feet high off the ground, so it’s not an easy reach, and so far, the failures are on banks of windows we can’t open—so it’s not like we can lean out to see what’s wrong.”

“I’ll take care of everything,” Rhage announced. “I can get a ladder—”

“No, I’ll do it.” V stepped forward. “I’ll get a ladder and—”

Tohr interrupted the pair. “That wind is really dangerous, even if some are on the back side of the house—”

“You guys are so cute.”

As the male voice spoke up, everybody turned to the laconic commentary. Balthazar, one of the Band of Bastards, was leaning against the sitting room’s doorjamb, his long body at ease, a Yoplait strawberry yogurt in one hand, a spoonful of the sweet stuff on the way to his mouth in the other. He’d been letting his brown hair grow out, and the waves were down to his thick shoulders now, a feminine-ish fall that did absolutely nothing to maternalize his muscle-heavy body, his half-lidded, slightly sneaky eyes, or his sly attitude.

The fighter was a snake in the grass, something that moved quietly and dangerously, always tracking everyone and everybody in any room. But Z actually liked the fucker. Balz never apologized for or tried to hide what he was, and he had the one virtue that mattered: He was willing to die for the people under the mansion’s roof.

So a snake with a moral compass.

“I mean, really,” Balz murmured before disappearing the spoon between his smackers. “So cute.”

Vishous went hands on hips, proving, once again, that he had the warm-and-fuzzies of an Uzi. “You want to explain that compliment?”

The motherfucker was implied.

Balz shrugged. “Don’t get me wrong, you bunch of chest-thumping, I’ll-handle-it’s are great. But if you want someone to scale a building, especially in conditions like this, you should use somebody who’s done it before.”

“Well, ain’t you Spider-Man.”

“No, I’m a thief.” Balz made a ring around the inside of the little container, turned the spoon to his tongue, and licked things clean. “I’ve climbed more shit than you all have stabbed—and in weather as bad as this. Besides, if I slip off and break my head, who cares? Oh, and don’t give me that I’ll-justdematerialize-out-of-the-fall bullshit. You get twenty or thirty feet up, freezing cold in a storm, trying to fight with exterior shutters on tracks that were mounted in, what, the seventies? Eighties, in a best case? Good luck going into a free fall and getting ghost in a split second. You will hit hard, even with the snowpack, and hurt something that can’t grow back. And need I remind you that most of you—oh, wait, all of you—have shellans to worry about? Let a dummy like me do this, will ya?”

“You know”—Rhage crossed his arms over his chest like the blond Adonis he was—“he’s not talking stupid.”

Balz pointed across the sitting room with his spoon. “You, sir, are smarter than you look and you’ve never looked stupid.”

“You’re willing to go up on the house then?” V asked.

“Yup. I’ll figure out what’s wrong and we can fix it together—”

“I’ll spot you,” Z cut in. “We’ll use ropes and I’ll be your ground. And fuck off with the you-can-handle-it. Death bores me after all these years. I’m way too familiar with it.”

Balz shook his head. “You’re going to stand out there in a blizzard for nothing.”

Z’s eyes flashed black. “You think I can’t handle the cold.”

Instantly, the Bastard ducked his stare. “Actually, I’m very sure you can—”

Without any brownout or blink warning, the mansion was plunged into absolute darkness, the electricity cut.

“Shit on a shingle,” someone muttered. “Does anyone else think this is going to be a really long night?”



Qhuinn was just stepping out of the cold garage and into the warm back hall when everything went dark. Immediately, he reached back and took Blay’s arm—and worried his fantasy about the tarp and the flamethrower was about to get derailed.

“You okay?” he demanded.

“Really.” Blay chuckled. “If a piano had fallen on my head, you’d have heard it even in the dark.”

The door slammed shut behind them, and Qhuinn stayed where they were, waiting for the emergency generator to kick on. When nothing happened, he looked around. But like that was going to help? He felt like someone had thrown a black felt bag over his head—

Light flared, emanating from Blay’s phone, a pinpoint of here-ya-go that diffused into a shallow, blue-bright illumination that pulled the tile floor out of the void. The beam moved around, illuminating the closed doors of the mudroom, the snow boots of the doggen lined up by an Orvis mat, the outerwear hanging on pegs.

“Twins are safe and sound up in the bedroom,” Blay said. “Xcor just had Syphon text us both. He’s lit candles, so they’re not scared.”

Qhuinn’s worry deflated instantly. “I love that Bastard.”

Down the hall, voices from the kitchen rose in volume and velocity, the doggen cooking staff clearly nervous—although knowing the way they thought, they were more worried about Last Meal being late eight hours from now rather than any kind of home invasion.