As Wrath, son of Wrath, sire of Wrath, jacked down and covered his shin with both hands, the protective crap was a day late and a dollar short.
“Motherfucker.”
He took two hobbling steps back, ran into George, his service dog, and even though he was lost in a dark sea of obstacles, he was not about to pancake his golden. He pitched to the side, stomped a foot down, twisted his ankle—
The free-fall face-plant filled him with rage, but at least he landed on the bed and not the hardwood floor. After he bounced a couple of times, he stayed right where he was. Because it was either that or he was going to start kicking things.
George immediately came over, his sweet, snuffling worry the ambulance siren of all dogs, and Wrath put an arm around his boy before rolling over and sitting up. For a minute, his brain tried to create a 3D road map of where the dresser, bed, and side table in the room were, where the doors were, where his bodywas, but the mental diorama was like trying to make fog solid. He just couldn’tseeit.
FFS, he’d been back for a month now, and he was still running into things. Which shouldn’t have been a newsflash. Blindness was a fact of his life, a condition he’d been volunteered for by virtue of his DNA, and after his almost four centuries of existence, he should have been used to the shit that came with it. This was a new world he’d been thrown into, however.
Literally.
He was also an impatient sonofabitch, so he was fucking tired of being lost in space, even while he was back on the fucking planet.
“Wrath? You okay?”
The muffled call from the kitchen brought his head around. “Yes,leelan,” he hollered back.
Given what he’d done to her last week, he took it as a good sign that his Beth still cared whether or not he was hurt.
Getting to his feet, he reviewed the landscape script in his head: Five steps from the end of the new queen-sized bed to the door, and as he counted strides, he put his hand forward. He missed the knob—because, of course, he missed the knob. This new residence, which to Beth wasn’t new at all, was a foreign country full of out-of-the-blue corners, doors that opened the wrong way, and corridors that led to nowhere. And no, he was not fucking talking about his confusion and disorientation to anybody.
He wasfine.
Opening the way out, he followed the scent of bacon down to the kitchen. To keep himself on track, he ran the knuckles of his left hand along the smooth wall, and when he came up to the bump of a doorjamb, he stopped at L.W.’s room.
Not that their son lived there anymore. The male stayed with Shuli, hisahstrux nohtrum, now, and given the heir to thethrone’s bad attitude, that should have been a relief. Instead, Wrath missed the young he had sired and did not know at all.
Another loss he was coming to grips with, he thought as he kept going.
It was all too fucking hard to fathom. Thirty some years ago, he’d been blown apart by a bomb—except he hadn’t been. In the blink of an eye, he’d gone from shoving Fritz out of the way at the old Audience House in town…to being up on the mountain, walking through snow drifts, heading for the front door of the mansion. Except surprise! Nobody was living there anymore.
Reeling from confusion, the Scribe Virgin showed up as his welcome party, and she’d given him yet another complicated gift. She’d let him see the son he’d known as a toddler as the full grown male L.W. had become.
Three decades lost.
During which everyone else, especially his mate and his son, had lived their lives without him, thinking he was dead.
There had been happy reunions, sure. But his door prize to resurrection? Caldwell was the exact same shithole he’d left, the Lessening Society still stalking and slaughtering vampires, theglymerastill making power grabs, the humans still absolutely fucking everywhere.
The only new territory he had managed to cover? Total estrangement from his son backed up with alienating his mate.
The latter had only taken a week, too.
As he arrived at the archway into the kitchen, he flared his nostrils and located his mate in the space. Beth was over by the stove, where the sizzle and smell of bacon was. In his mind, he pictured her in blue jeans that had been washed so many times they were soft as bedclothes and a turtleneck that was loose-hemmed at her hips, tight on her throat. Her long brunette hair would be tucked behind both ears to keep it out of her way while she worked over the pan, and her feet would be stuffed into UGGslippers, the practical, brown colored ones that had the fuzzy on the inside.
God only knew what she was actually wearing.
Reaching down, he stroked George’s boxy head. “Smells good.”
He pictured her looking over her shoulder and edited in the smile, even though he could tell by her scent that there was not a lot of happy going on.
Hadn’t been any, since last Wednesday night.
“You hungry?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he lied as George wandered off to have a lick from his water bowl.
