Blay went over and put a hand on Qhuinn’s shoulder. “You know I’m fine. Come on, a minor scratch is nothing compared to you getting stabbed last night—”
“But you’re who matters. Not me.”
There was the temptation to laugh . . . until Blay realized the male was serious. With a frown, he shook his head. “I don’t understand that statement at all. You are a father, a hellren, a Brother. You are everything—”
“None of it matters without you.”
Blay just stood there and blinked. The bleak tone was not normal at all.
“Qhuinn, you know I’m not going anywhere.” He pulled his male in close. “I’m right here and going nowhere.”
The shudder that went through his beloved was the kind of thing that easily translated from one body to the other. And was another testament to something Blay couldn’t quite understand.
“I wish you could promise me that.”
Blay pulled back at the whispered words. “What are you saying? You don’t trust me?”
“It’s the world I don’t trust.” Qhuinn brought the bandana back up, and dab-dab-dabbed at the cut. “I worry about gunshots and knives and car crashes and—”
“Let’s stop that list. Your point is taken.”
Qhuinn glared over at the tarp. “I didn’t even know I had to be concerned about fucking fountain covers.”
Okay, time for a redirection of all this, Blay decided. “Let’s go inside. See if we can help with that window.”
“Yeah.” Qhuinn put an arm around Blay’s waist as they started walking toward the door into the back hall. “Lean on me if you need to. Like if you feel dizzy or weak.”
“You’re trying to make me laugh.”
“And get you against me.”
“I’m all yours.”
Qhuinn stopped, his affect instantly lightening up. “Now? Here? What a great idea—”
“No, not here.” Blay pulled his lover along with a laugh. “But later.”
“Wherever we are? Assuming the coast is clear?”
“Fine.”
Throwing out his anchor, Qhuinn had calculation in his eyes. “Wherever we are. If the time is right, it’s wherever.”
Dear Lord, what am I agreeing to, Blay thought. But that was the thing, wasn’t it. He loved the edge of his true love.
“Deal?” Qhuinn prompted.
Blay felt a naughty smile hit his face. “Deal.”
They started walking again, and as they hit the shallow steps into the house, Qhuinn narrowed one last, mean look back at the tarp.
“You know,” Blay remarked, “if you’ve really got it in for that thing, I’ll bet Fritz will let you light it on fire.”
Qhuinn halted in mid-step and popped his brows. And then he yanked open the door with an expression of total focus.
“Fritz!” he called out. “Get me the flamethrower!”
They’re not shutting.”
Zsadist paused his hammer-and-nail routine and glanced down from his perch on a stepladder. “What aren’t shutting?”
Payne, who was holding a six-foot-long plywood section to the sitting room’s busted window for him, also looked at Tohr.
“You mean the daylight shutters?” she asked. “Because they’re fine in here.”
The other brother walked across the antique carpet, his shitkickers crunching over broken glass. Bending down, he picked up the sandbag that was next to the silk sofa and then glared around like he was searching for other signs of storm-related vandalism and equipment failure.
And PS. Z thought, if it was true that the shutters were failing? Fuck the snow, they had bigger problems. Of all the human myths around vampires, those rats without tails had gotten one thing right: No sunlight. Ever. So the mansion, like any other house inhabited by the species, had custom-made shutters that got locked into place during the day.
Windows needed to be covered before daybreak.
“I should amend that,” Tohr muttered. “Some of the shutters aren’t working. I just needed to check we were covered in here.”
“How many are bad?” Payne asked.
“We got three sets across the back, so far. But this is a big house, as you know, and that wind is a bastard. We’re definitely going to lose some trees tonight, and that means all the windows should be protected.”
Z pounded in another nail, and then descended the stepladder and moved the thing around Manny’s shellan to the other side of the plywood. Even though he didn’t know a damn thing about decor, you didn’t need an Architectural Digest eye to see that the instafix was a frickin’ eyesore in the elegant room.
But it was better than having three feet of snow on the Aubusson—
As the wind speed surged again, the gusts whined through the gaps around the window’s molding, and he wondered if he should have used screws.
Or maybe bricks and mortar.
Restarting with the hammer, he nailed another twelve four-inchers in a tidy little row down the plywood’s flank. With the last one in place, he disembarked from the ladder and—well, hello peanut gallery. All kinds of people had come in and were on the talk train: Rhage was going on about some fuse box, V was checking the exterior cameras on his phone, and Tohr was talking about emptying the rooms that weren’t protected to prevent further furniture damage.
“How many shutters failed?” Z asked. “Do we have a total.”
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?”