A Warm Heart in Winter(35)

The damn things freaked him the hell out—not that he’d shared that little slice of pansy with anybody. He always worried Dracula was going to crack open one of those fuckers—which was pretty rich because Qhuinn actually was a vampire.

“What about Bela Lugosi?” Blay asked as he unlocked the door to the back forty.

“Just rambling. Hey, did you think Frank Langella was hot?”

Blay glanced back. “In that Dracula movie from way back? I mean . . .”

“You’re blushing.” Qhuinn laughed. “You so did. You so thought he was hot with those high collars and that widow’s peak.”

“Whatever. You had a crush on Jordan Catalano—”

Qhuinn pulled Blay’s parka forward. “I’ve got a crush on you. Right now. And forever.”

Okay, that giggle was pretty much the high point of Qhuinn’s night. No, wait. The true high point was going to be getting the male naked and bent over in front of him—

“Oh, my God,” Blay said. “You can’t talk like that right now. We’ve got a job to do.”

“Did I say that out loud? For real? Oopsy. You want to spank me for being a naughty boy? Please? Commmmme onnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn.”

Blay was laughing as he stepped out of the garage, and this was the intention. It was always good to hear that sound and know that Qhuinn was the reason for it—especially on a night like tonight, when a strange, paranoid feeling was not only persisting, but being egged on by things like broken windows and moaning wind and electrical failures.

Outside in the back, they didn’t run into any wind at all. The great stone house was a helluva buffer, the front taking the lashing, the rear spared. Overhead in the sky, the snow had finally started to fall, the flakes rushing by up high illuminated by the exterior security fixtures that were back on at half-power, the variegated angles of the roof acting like the aerodynamics of a car, the airflow whipping past the peaks and valleys in a fixed, organized pattern. Not that there weren’t some icy anarchists. Some of what was coming down—or across, as the case was—broke free of the masses and drifted toward the ground, clearly exhausted with all the frantic, conforming congestion.

“Over here,” Blay said.

Qhuinn humped the ladder across to a row of three windows that were only halfway shuttered. “Okay, let’s have a look at this.”

“I’ll hold the ladder base.”

“Perfect.” Qhuinn set the thing up and put a foot on the first step. “And please feel free to ogle my assets. Don’t be shy about it, either.”

Blay laughed, his breath leaving in puffs of white. “You’re ridiculous.”

“You should also feel no obligation to keep your hands to yourself. And this is more than a mere suggestion.”

Down at the other end of the house, at the library, there was another group gathered with a bigger ladder. Because yes, sometimes size did matter. Balz and Z were focusing on the second-story windows of Wrath’s study, and that was a heck of an elevation.

“I wonder how many other shutters failed,” Blay murmured.

“More than we want, for sure.”

Qhuinn went up to the second-to-the-last step and surveyed the shutter’s nonfunctioning landscape. As he came to absolutely no viable conclusion, he tried not to envy Ruhn’s obvious Mr. Fix It confidence—and he sure as shit wasn’t going back down to the ground until he figured things out.

The steel shutters that were mounted over every single piece of window glass around the mansion were not just sunlight blockers. They were windproof, bulletproof, fireproof, vampire-proof, and anti-tamper. Every sash setup had a set custom made for it, and the protective suits were painted the gray color of the stone wallings and set on tracks so the interlocking panels could unroll from their top mounts and click into place. Like little garage doors.

Only these weren’t coming down.

Qhuinn grabbed the lower lip with his gloves and pulled. And pulled again. “Yeah, it’s frozen in place.”

“As in ice frozen or not-moving frozen?”

“I don’t know. Gimme a screwdriver.”

Putting a hand down, he got the slap of the tool’s handle against his glove. “When in doubt, force it, right?”

“Usually, you just shoot things.”

“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.