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“Bella was the one who first found you?”

John made an equivocal motion with his hand and pointed over to another little house on the lane. As he started to sign and then stopped himself, his frustration over the communication barrier was obvious.

“Someone in that house . . . you knew them and they put you in touch with Bella?”

He nodded as he reached into his jacket and brought out what appeared to be a handmade bracelet. Taking it from him, she saw that symbols in the Old Language had been carved into the hide.

“Tehrror.” When he touched his chest, she said, “Your name? But how did you know?”

He touched his head, then shrugged.

“It came to you.” She focused on the smaller house. There was a pool in the back and she sensed that his memories were sharpest there, because every time his eyes passed over that terrace, his emotional grid fired up, a switchboard with a lot of circuits flaring.

He’d come here at first to protect someone. Bella had not been the reason.

Mary, she thought. Rhage’s shellan, Mary. But how had they met?

Odd . . . that was a blank wall. He was shutting her off from that part.

“Bella got in touch with the Brotherhood and Tohrment came for you.”

When he nodded again, she gave him back the bracelet, and while he fingered the symbols, she marveled at the relativity of time. Since they’d left the mansion, only an hour had passed, but she felt as though they’d spent a year together.

God, he’d given her more than she’d ever expected . . . and now she knew precisely why he’d been so helpful as she’d flipped out in the OR.

He’d endured a hell of a lot, having not so much lived through his early life as been dragged through it.

The question was, How had he gotten lost to the human world in the first place? Where were his parents? The king had been his whard when he’d been a pretrans—that was what his papers had said when she’d first met him in ZeroSum. She’d assumed his mother had died, and the visit to the bus station didn’t disprove that . . . but there were holes in the story. Some of which she got the impression were deliberate, others of which he didn’t seem to be able to fill.

With a frown, she sensed his father was still very much with him, and yet he didn’t appear to have ever known the guy.

“You’re taking me to one last place?” she murmured.

He seemed to take a final look about and then he poofed off and she followed him, thanks to all the blood of his that was in her system.

When they resumed form in front of a stunning modern house, his sadness overwhelmed him to such a degree that his emotional superstructure actually started to cave in on itself. With force of will, however, he managed to stop the disintegration in time, before it couldn’t be righted.

Once your grid collapsed, you were cooked. Lost to your inner demons.

Which made her think of Murhder. On the day that he had learned her truth, she could remember exactly how his emotional construct had appeared to her: The steel girders that were the basis of mental health had been nothing but a crumbled mess.

She had been the only one who hadn’t been surprised when he went insane and took off.

With a nod to her, John walked up to the formal front door, put in a key and opened the way in. As a draft ushered out to meet them, she could smell the dust and the damp, indicating that this was another structure that was empty. But there was nothing rotten inside, unlike John’s former apartment building.

As he turned on the light in the foyer, she nearly gasped. On the wall, to the left of the door, was a scroll proclaiming in the Old Language that this was the home of the Brother Tohrment and his mated shellan, Wellesandra.

Which explained why it pained John so much to be here. Wellesandra’s hellren wasn’t the only one who had saved the pretrans from the projects.

The female had mattered to John. A helluva lot.

John walked down the hall and flicked on more lights as he went, his emotions a combination of bittersweet affection and roaring pain. When they came to a spectacular