Where Winter Finds You

The lives of most individuals, on the other hand, were anecdotal rather than historic. The ins and outs of a person’s life mattered solely to them, with minor extensions into families and friends. Rarely was there a span or sprawl that enveloped huge numbers. Rarely did things go so deep that breath was taken from you and you remembered exactly where you were standing when something happened or was told to you.

Rarely did you remember the shift, and not in terms of a left or a right.

Rather, like a glacier.

As Therese held her old phone in her hand and stared at the number of voice mails her brother had left her, she felt her heart move. Or maybe it was more… reopen.

Until she played the messages, she wouldn’t even know if there was a problem. But the fact that there could be? Or might have been? And she didn’t know? And she wasn’t… there?

It was just wrong. And the whole who-birthed-who issue didn’t matter in the slightest.

The next thing Therese knew, she was walking over to the table because sitting down suddenly seemed like a good idea. Except she didn’t make it. The phone cord didn’t reach that far from the wall.

“Here, I’ll follow you,” Trez said as he unplugged the charger.

There was little reserve battery, so she wondered, as she went and sat down, if the cell wasn’t going to crash. But it didn’t. Trez was quick to get another socket.

Holding the unit in her hands, she stared at the screen some more. “I hope they’re okay.”

Of course, she could find out if they were or weren’t by playing the frickin’ message(s). Hello. Except she was still grappling with the shift in the center of her chest. She was supposed to feel anger and resentment, hurt and betrayal—as she had since the moment she had left them all. She had had her reasons for all those negative emotions, and she had a right to be in that space. She had been lied to, the three of them conspiring to a fraud that they apparently had taken for granted would never be exposed.

Being mad was okay.

Now, though, instead of dwelling on the righteous indignation that had sustained her, all she could think of was that female’s eyes, that female who had called herself mahmen: They had been as heartbroken as Therese had been feeling underneath her fury.

“Okay, enough of neutral,” she muttered.

She called up the most recent message and prayed—prayed—that it was her brother chewing her out again for leaving.

His voice, coming out of her phone, was a shock, by turns foreign and familiar:

Well, it looks like you’re not going to do the common courtesy of returning any of my phone calls. That’s your decision. I hope you can live with it. We’re taking her to Caldwell to be treated at the clinic. They say she has some time left, but it’s limited, so if we’re going to move her, it has to be now while she has the strength for the drive. Hope you’re proud of this bullshit you’re pulling. It’s the only thing of your family you have left.

As the voice mail ran out, Therese’s heart pounded so hard she couldn’t hear anything and panic flooded her veins with the sting and the combustion of gasoline.

“I have to go,” she said. “I have to go… see my mahmen.”

Leaping to her feet, she—

She immediately realized she didn’t know where the Caldwell clinic was. And given how dizzy she was, dematerializing wasn’t going to happen even if she had an address.

“Sit down.” Trez urged her back into the seat. “You’re very pale.”

Therese’s breath pumped in and out of her, fast but not far enough into her lungs. “This is my fault. This is all my fault—”

“Hold on. He doesn’t say why she—”

She looked Trez square in the face. “She’s always had a heart problem. That was why they were moving. The cold of the winters was getting too much for her. But what has always been even more dangerous? Stress.” She grabbed onto his forearm. “Dearest Virgin Scribe, I’ve killed her.”

 

 

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

 



Trez drove his female across the Hudson River, to the other side of Caldwell. Havers, the race’s physician, had relocated his treatment facility to a forest over there after the raids, and although Trez hadn’t been to the clinic since it had opened, he did know where it was. And he was able to make good time. The night was clear and very cold, so there was no falling snow to worry about, and the streets and highways had been plowed and salted well.

One good thing about having to deal with a hard winter every twelve months was that the city was very efficient about storm cleanup and road maintenance. They had to be. Businesses had to run. Schools had to teach their students. Hospitals needed to treat their patients.

If everything ground to a halt and stayed that way each time there was some serious accumulation? People in these parts would be indoors from mid-December to March.

He glanced across the BMW’s cockpit. His female was staring out the window, but he doubted she was seeing anything. She was also unable to sit still, twitching in the seat, tapping her foot, moving around the safety belt that crossed her chest.

Refocusing on the road, he wanted to go back to having a conversation about the weather with himself. But maybe he could mix it up and think about sports. The club.

Particle-fucking-physics.

What he absolutely did not want to think about was the fact that his female was going to Havers’s to deal with a family emergency.

A family emergency. As in… a group of people who, although she evidently was not related to them by blood, nonetheless counted as such as the result of her having been raised by and with them.

There was no reconciling this with her being Selena. Nope. And the fact that he couldn’t shoehorn this fact pattern into the construct of her reincarnation was shining a really fucking bright light on the number of things he had wedged and bent and twisted into vacancies in the puzzle.

And what do you know. There were more forced pieces than ones that fit—and he found himself desperately grasping at the story he had constructed for himself. For them. It was impossible to ignore the sense that it was all about to be blown to shit, and the only thing he could think of was how much he wished she hadn’t lost her purse in the chaos the night before last. If she’d just kept it with her, she would have had Rhage’s tip money. And that burner phone.

So they wouldn’t be doing this right now.

Instead, they would be driving to get her stuff at the rooming house, and then, while she got settled at the nice little Cape Cod, he would go to the club and shuffle some papers. In a couple of hours, he would come home to her and they would cook those steaks and watch a movie. And do other stuff in the dark.

He wanted that to be the plan.

Not this.

And goddamn, how selfish was all of that? Like he wanted her to not know this older female she cared for so deeply was sick?

Another thing for him to be proud of himself for. He had quite a fucking list.

“How much farther?” she asked tightly.

“Not far.”

The subterranean clinic was hidden under acres of pine trees, and accessed through four kiosks, one of which was in a barn out behind the old farmhouse that served as a shell to the human world. The other three entries and their associated elevators were scattered through the forest, and convenient for those who could dematerialize. Needless to say, for them, it was going to have to be a park-and-ride situation, so he was going to bring them in the main road to the main driveway.