"Tell me what has happened to my son."
Kade had never heard his father's voice shake, not even at Kir's worst. The tremor in that deep baritone now was like a knife to Kade's gut.
"Father ... I am sorry."
Kir thundered down the steps and into the snow. He stopped in front of Kade and Alex, reached out with a shaking hand to lift the blanket that covered Seth's face.
"Ah, Christ. No." The words choked in the back of his throat, raw with anguish. He looked once more, longer now, as though forcing himself to take full measure of the Rogue's face that had been hidden beneath the shroud. "I prayed this wouldn't happen again. Goddamn it, not to one of my sons."
"Kir!" Kade glanced up as his pregnant mother strayed out to the porch, her silk nightgown engulfed by the large parka she'd apparently grabbed and thrown on inside the house. Her steps faltered as she saw Kade standing there in the snow, his arms filled with an unmistakable bulk. "Oh, my God. Oh, no. Oh, dear lord, no! Please tell me that's not--"
"Stay back," Kade's father barked. Then he gentled his voice to a heartbreaking softness. "Victoria, I beg you ... don't come any closer. Please, my love, go back inside. Do as I say. You don't need to see this." With a sob, she inched back toward the door, aided by Maksim, who'd just come outside in that moment, as well. Max took her arm to steady her as he brought his brother's mate back into the Darkhaven.
"Give him to me," Kade's father said once the doors had closed and both Max and Victoria were back inside. "Let me have my dead son."
Kade released Seth to him, and watched as his father carried the body, barefoot through the ankledeep snow, toward the Darkhaven's chapel that stood near the center of the compound. There, as was custom, Seth's corpse would be prepared for the funeral rites to be carried out at the next sunrise. Kade felt Alex's arms come around him in a warm embrace, but it did little to ease the cold regret that gnawed at him like a vulture on carrion.
In just a couple more hours, nothing but a pile of sun-scorched ash would remain of his brother--or of Kade's place among his kin.
Back in Harmony, the warriors were hauling ass to clean up the situation with the locals, which had begun some time ago with the task of disappearing several dead bodies from cold storage at the airstrip and at the town's tiny clinic.
"One nice thing about all this snow and wilderness out here is there's a lot of goddamn snow and wilderness out here," Tegan remarked dryly as Chase and Hunter met up with him at their waiting snowmachines on a game trail several long miles into the bush.
They'd sledded out of Harmony with the Toms family, Big Dave, and Lanny Ham in tow, carrying all of the Ancient's recent victims to a cavern in the area mountains. A few strategically fired gunshots had collapsed the ice and rock at the cavern's mouth, sealing it off and ensuring that the dead would not be found until sometime well into the next ice age.
"Any word from Gideon about Phase Two of this operation?" Tegan asked Chase, who'd been charged with coordinating the in-town portion of their task list for the day
"Everything's in place," Chase said. "Gideon has spoken with one Sidney Charles, Harmony's acting mayor, informing Mr. Charles that the unit dispatched from the Alaska State Trooper pision in Fairbanks should be arriving within the hour to address the townspeople as a group and collect statements."
"And I take it the good mayor was agreeable to that?"
Chase nodded. "He told Gideon he would personally see to it that every citizen was in attendance. They're gathering at Harmony's church to wait for us as we speak."
Tegan chuckled low under his breath. "So, where does that leave things? Breaking and entering, evidence tampering, compromising a crime scene, impersonating police officers, scrubbing roughly a hundred human minds in one fell swoop and getting it done before first light ..." Chase grinned. "All in a day's work."
Kade wasn't sure he would be welcomed in the Darkhaven chapel where all of the compound's residents had gathered to say their good-byes to Seth in the remaining minutes before daybreak. He had intended to sit the damned ritual out completely, pacing his quarters in front of Alex like a caged animal as the hour crept closer and closer to noon, when the winter sun would finally make its brief appearance. Finally, he couldn't stand it anymore.
"I have to be there," he blurted, stopping in front of Alex where she sat on the sofa in his cabin's living room. "Whether they think I belong with them now or not, I need to be there. For Seth. And for myself, too. Goddamn it, they all need to hear what I have to say."
He stormed out of the cabin and headed across the frozen grounds. The faintly blue-tinged snow, lighted by the approaching sunrise, crunched under his boots with each long stride that carried him toward the chapel.
The windows of the small log building were already shuttered tight in anticipation of daybreak. As Kade drew nearer, he heard the soft murmur of voices lowered in private prayer, mingled with the intermittent sounds of the grieving inside.
Even before he reached for the latch of the door, he could smell the paraffin odor of the eight candles that would be burning at the altar, and the fragrant scent of the perfumed oil that anointed Seth's body in preparation for the infinity rites about to take place.
Eight ounces of oil to bless and cleanse him. Eight layers of pristine white silk to shroud him until his body would be surrendered to the sun. Eight minutes of scorching ultraviolet exposure for the one who would be chosen from among the living to attend Seth in private for the final moments of the funeral ceremony.
"Fuck," Kade whispered, paused at the chapel doors as the reality of it all settled on him. His brother was dead.