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The clock ticked. Somewhere in the house a girl was laughing, and a boy was shouting at her to keep her voice down. Outside, the sky was beginning to clear.

“Go on,” said Richard Pendleton, roughly. “He is waiting. And Mr. Volkov?”

“Yes?”

“Welcome to the family.”

I rose. I inclined my head. I paid him the small, formal, old-world courtesy of a bow, and it was, I believe, the first time in three hundred years that I had done it without irony.

I opened the door.

And found my mate, standing in the hallway with his ear against the wood, and his hair on end, and his face crumpled in a ridiculous mixture of terror and hope.

Our eyes collided.

I could not help it. I laughed.

He glared at me. Then he glared at the door. Then, slowly, he began to grin, huge and helpless and wet-eyed, and from the room behind me a low voice said, very gruffly, “Alexander. I can hear you. “

“Sorry, Dad!”

“Go and wash your face.”

“Yes, sir!”

He grabbed my hand. He towed me down the hall at a run, past the library, past the kitchen, past a startled maid with a tray of scones, laughing all the way. I let him. I let him pull me up the stairs two at a time, and I thought, as the polished wood flew under our feet, of an old man in an old study, listening to a clock.

I will not tell him, I thought. But I will make sure that he knows.

I have a great deal of time.

PART FIVE

FOREVER, THE HARD WAY

Chapter 35

LEX

Punch Me Instead

It came back on a Tuesday.

I’d been good for nineteen days. I’d counted. I’d woken at seven every morning in the narrow bed in my old room and gone for a run, and eaten breakfast at the long table with my mother and Jenny and a vampire who ate scrambled eggs like a man defusing a bomb. I’d gone to the rink and skated. I’d done my stretches. I’d texted Ozzy an apology and a check, and he’d sent back a photo of himself holding a kitten and the words Not a big deal, kid. Proud of you.

I’d been fine. I’d been so fine it made me nervous.

Then a man cut me off in traffic on the way back from physio, and I sat at a red light with my hands on the wheel, and something rose up the back of my throat like a wave.

I don’t know how to explain it to someone who hasn’t felt it. It isn’t like being angry. Anger’s got a shape; it points at something. This was a pressure, a flood, a weight that came from nowhere and filled every inch of me. My ears rang. My skin felt too tight. My knuckles had gone white and I could hear my own pulse, and beneath it, faintly, a voice, cool and reasonable, saying: hit something.

Hit something. It’ll stop. You know it will.

I didn’t remember driving home.

I remember the front door banging. I remember Jenny’s voice from the kitchen saying “Lex? Are you okay?” and my own voice saying something short and ugly. I remember taking the stairs three at a time, and the sound of my bedroom door slamming so hard the framed photographs jumped on the wall, and the sound I made when I hit the mattress, low and raw and awful.

I lay there with my fists clenched, staring at the ceiling.