A Warm Heart in Winter(52)

And in fact, he had not come back.

Twenty-four hours in the freezing cold? Much less that storm?

As they came to the end of the tunnel, Qhuinn stopped in front of the escape hatch. Putting his hands on his hips, he looked down at his feet.

“Let’s put these on.” Blay took two parkas off the hooks. “Come on.”

He expected an argument. He didn’t get one—which was a bad sign. Instead, he was allowed to dress Qhuinn like he would one of the young, helping arms into sleeves, pulling the body of the jacket into place. He even zipped it up the front.

He did not make the move to put the passcode into the reader. He just drew his own jacket on and waited.

Qhuinn opening the portal and following in his blooded brother’s footsteps was inevitable. But there was no avoiding the outcome as soon as they did so. Frankly, there was no avoiding it now.

Yet there was comfort in the in between. A sliver of illogical hope.

When Qhuinn finally reached forward, the keypad let out a series of tones as the proper sequence of numbers was entered, the little tune culminating in a hollow clank, the dead bolt on the hatch retracting. Or maybe there were more than one. Who knew how V had fortified this exit—but Luchas had clearly known the code.

Then again, he hadn’t been a prisoner.

As Qhuinn pulled the heavy steel free of its jambs, there was a breath of subzero, outside air. When the male looked back, Blay put his palms up.

“Whatever you want,” he said. “I don’t have to join you if you’d rather—”

“I need you. But only you.”

“Then we go together.”

Qhuinn walked through first, and Blay took a second to put his palms out to the Brotherhood, to make sure they didn’t follow. The lineup of males nodded and stayed frozen where they were. Except for V. He took out his cell phone and no doubt called up the exterior camera feed so he could monitor the search.

It was the same feed that had shown, in footage recorded twenty-four hours before, a lone black-robed figure weaving out into the storm and disappearing into the blizzard.

Blay took a deep breath . . . and went out as well.

On the far side of the hatch, there was a shallow parking area that had a high-riding Chevy Tahoe and a couple of snowmobiles. A camouflage drape covered up the forest entrance to the cave, and pulling it aside, he entered the night.

In the security footage, Luchas had drifted in a westerly direction, but he’d only stayed visible for ten or fifteen yards. After that?

Well, two things had to be true.

One, he couldn’t have gone far. He’d struggled to walk distances on level flooring with his cane. In the storm? Out in the snow?

And the second piece of reality had to be—

“Which way?” Qhuinn said as he looked around at the pines and the birches, the snow-covered landscape, the undulations of the ground.

“Do you want to call the others? To help search?” Blay asked

“No, he is mine to find.”

Qhuinn started off, and it was all random, the lefts, the rights. There was no logic to it, no grid system that was the gold standard for recovery missions. Maybe they should have brought George? But even as the thought occurred to Blay, he knew that would have been a waste of a good nose.

There was going to be nothing left. The sun had been out all day long. He’d seen it on the evening news, all that sunshine in the storm’s wake.

That was the second tragic truth to all of this. Vampires went up in smoke when exposed to sunlight.

So there were going to be no remains, really. Well . . . except for the prosthesis and the cane. The flesh would burn away, but the metal and plastic would not.

Helluva thing to bury, the remnants of all that suffering.

As Qhuinn continued along through the snow, Blay stayed on his mate’s heels. There was the temptation to branch out so they could cover more area, but when they found Luchas’s ashes, he wanted to be there to catch his mate.

Why did you have to do it, Blay wondered to himself. Oh, Luchas . . . why—

From out of nowhere, an image came to Blay’s mind and persisted, even as he looked from left to right, searching the powdery, white ground for a scorch mark the size of a fragile body: It was the memory of Luchas in the corridor outside of the OR—when Blay had told him that his brother had been elevated to the King’s personal guard, the highest honor within the Brotherhood.

As a cold sweat bloomed across Blay’s chest and rode his throat up into his face, he had to unzip the parka and let a little cold air in.

The intention had been to provide Luchas with an example of how things got better, to give some hope and optimism to him in favor of positive change, personal growth, new horizons. But the expression on Luchas’s face had suggested the announcement had been taken in a very different way.

Like maybe it had been one more burden on top of all the others, one more accolade that illuminated the male’s spiraling fall from grace, position, and health.

What if . . . what if Blay’s throwaway comment had been the reason for this?

What if this was all his fault?





On some level, Qhuinn realized that this “search” of his was just an aimless wander. As he trudged through the snow, he was rational enough to recognize that he should form a proper team of people, and draw on the expertise of the folks in the household for procedures and best practices. But he was locked into this directionless walking, his footfalls crunching through the drifts, his body going in whatever direction it wanted, his eyes ceaselessly roaming the ground.