Just as they were heading back into the house, a muffled roar sounded out somewhere in the distance. And a second. A third.
At which point the lights came back on fully, the generators settling in to a dim, pervasive purr.
“Ruhn is the fucking master,” Qhuinn said as they tilted the ladder against the wall in the mudroom and stomped the snow off the treads of their shitkickers.
The cheer of the doggen in the kitchen was like that of a group being rescued off a deserted island. By a Carnival cruise ship. With a stocked bar and the buffet already set out. And Charo performing on the Lido Deck.
“Such the man,” Blay agreed.
As they walked into the kitchen and were applauded unnecessarily by the staff, Blay unzipped his parka, but kept the puff where it was in case this was just a pause and they would be going out again. In the foyer, people were gathering once more, the check-in happening organically, as if the electricity coming back on required a reckoning—
The crash was loud as a bomb.
And succeeded by shattering glass, a blast of cold air, and a resonant pine smell.
Before anyone could react, Rhage and Butch came running out of the library. The pair of them looked like they’d been in a slap fight, their faces red, noses runny, eyes blinking like they couldn’t see. Snow covered their hair, their shoulders, their shitkickers.
“Tree,” Rhage panted.
Butch grabbed the front of his own parka like he was having a coronary. “Big tree—”
“Coming after us!”
“What the hell are you talking about?” someone demanded.
“And what just hit the house?” somebody else shouted.
“Fucking tree!” Rhage ground out as he braced his hands on his knees and bent over to breathe better. “And it’s in the house.”
At that moment, up at the head of the grand staircase, Wrath and Beth appeared with their son. The Queen was carrying L.W., the young was carrying his golden retriever stuffed animal—the one that was bigger than he was—and Wrath had his hand locked on George’s lead.
“Is everyone okay?” Beth called down. “We heard a crash.”
“And smell a whole lot of pretty-much-Pine-Sol,” the King said as they started their descent. “What’s going on in the library?”
Blay shook his head and glanced at Qhuinn, ready to raise a question about what was going to go wrong next—
When the lights went off unexpectedly.
Where there had been illumination, there was a sudden and pervasive return of the pitch black, no security lights on, no fireplaces lit to glow, the candles canned because of all the Thomas Edison.
Later, Blay would remember wheeling around in space and throwing his arms out toward the grand staircase. It was as if he knew what was going to happen, what misstep was going to occur, what off-kilter was going to result in a tragic fall.
Wrath would be fine on the descent. As a blind male, whether or not there was light did not matter to him. For Beth, however, the abrupt loss of her sight would be a shock—and Blay didn’t know exactly what occurred, but he, and everyone else, heard her shout of alarm.
After which came the fall.
L.W. began to wail at the same time a sickening series of bumps and thumps came down the stairs, bruises or worse occurring—and there was nothing to be done. The momentum worked with gravity’s inexorable pull to a terrible result, and in the darkness, no matter how far Blay reached forward, no matter how much he strained, there was nothing he could do to stop the inevitable.
It was a hole in one. Nothing planned, certainly not the horrible result.
And all the while, the child screamed.
“There’s another one,” Balz called down from the now-shuttered bank of windows. “There.”
Zsadist stood up again from the snowpack and brushed his leathers off. You’d think he’d have developed a core competency in catching his weight on the free fall, but nope. His butt had taken the brunt of things. Three times now.
As he looked in the direction Balz was pointing toward, he got a snowflake right in the eyeball. Rubbing the sting away, he said, “Yeah, we need that closed, too. Take the rope up?”
“Will do.”
There was no reason to raise the whole setting-hooks thing again. Balz was right about his climbing expertise. The Bastard’s scaling and staying put was totally impressive, and it made a male wonder exactly what the guy had gotten into over the years.
Then again, that wasn’t a question Z really wanted answered.
Stepping back, he reviewed the expanse of the house, you know, just in case any shutters had decided to magically retract. Which they hadn’t. But a male got paranoid when he thought of his shellan and his young.
What if one of those things decided to pop loose in the middle of the day? What if the electricity came back on or had a surge or . . . something . . . and suddenly the mansion went wide-open glass at noontime?
Jesus, why hadn’t he worried about this before.
As a hot flash of terror went through him, at least his toes warmed up a little in his shitkickers. Meanwhile, the Bastard was already over at the other window, the rope hanging off his ass like a tail, his thin-gloved hands working the upper left-hand corner of the shutter where the motor was, his lower body flush with the exterior wall while his upper torso curved away to give him space to work.
“Almost done,” he called out. “Then I’m going to—”
All at once, the window he was at lit up like the sun had risen inside the room on the far side, yellow light cascading out into the night, into the storm.
Unfortunately, that wasn’t all.
Sparks exploded from the motor Balz was disconnecting, the electrical charge transferring from the metal to the male, the blue arc of the lightning-like flash going right into one of the Bastard’s hands.
And through his body.
As a brownout registered the transfer of voltage, Balz was thrown back into thin air, his body stiff as a board, arms and legs fully extended.
Z reacted without conscious thought. He triangulated the fall and got under the male, bracing himself for the impact, arms cupped like he was going to catch a hay bale. At the last moment, as Balz dead weighted down toward the ground, Z pivoted, realizing he needed to be sideways to the load he was going to try to cradle.
Talk about electrical burns.
As he captured the heavy load, a whiff of burned flesh along with a metal tang hit his nose, and then he wasn’t thinking about smells at all. Lying the male out in the snow, he checked for breath and found none. Reaching for his own shoulder—
Fuck, no communicator. ’Cuz they were at home, not in the field.
Z whistled loud and long as he ripped off his gloves and felt for a pulse at the jugular. Faint. Or . . . maybe there wasn’t one? Yanking open the Bastard’s parka, he dropped his head down to make sure there was no breathing still. Then he put one of his palms on top of the other in the center of that big-ass chest, interlocked his fingers, and started straight-arming CPR.
“Stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive,” he said under his breath as he compressed with his doubled-up hands. “Ah, ah, ah . . . ah . . . stayin’ alive . . .”
He paused to give the male two breaths. Which, yes, he was aware was not what the American Heart Association recommended anymore, but he was hardly a casual bystander and rescue breaths were fine with him.