A Warm Heart in Winter (Black Dagger Brotherhood 18.50)

“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.