"What?"

"The lions. Those are their names�Patience and Fortitude."

Sasha finally smiled. "You�re a nut. Hey, an empty cab! Come on."

In a flash Sasha bolted to the street, hailing the cab as Charley ran to catch up.

"Have fun with Uncle Boss," Sasha said, opening the door for her. "Later, we�re working on your r�sum�."

Charley climbed into the cab and blew a kiss goodbye, telling herself for the millionth time that she�d find a way out of this life eventually.

It just wasn�t going to be tonight.

"Fulton and Water Street," she told the driver. "Fast as you can."

A vampire, upon the rare occurrence of his death, swiftly turned to ash. As such, he required neither a coffin nor a crypt; the four winds would simply scatter him where he fell.

Yet Ravenswood was an exact replica of the West Sussex estate, with no detail left to chance. Not the stately manor itself. Not the lush, verdant gardens. And not the crypts that stretched out beneath the property in an endless network of stone arteries. In England, when the original home was occupied by humans, such crypts held the bones of generations of Redthornes, an honorable resting place for members of the bloodline whose prominence was rivaled only by its longevity.

Until it wasn�t.

Here at Ravenswood, the crypts held no bones, no honorable men, for none were left in the Redthorne line. Instead, they housed only the ashes of Augustus Redthorne, still lying where he�d fallen, no winds to scatter him.

Across from the vampire king�s eternal resting place was a hollow tomb, a cavernous chamber for which he had�in the final months of a life that should�ve been immortal�found another use.

"It was his research laboratory," Dorian said now, watching his youngest brother flip through one of their father�s journals.

Dorian had come down to the crypts to do the same, though he wasn�t expecting company. He suspected he and his brother had very different motives.

"He never stopped." Gabriel set the book on the stone slab at the center of the tomb, then picked up another, running his fingers along the cracked spine. "So many bloody experiments, so many theories."

And no time for his children, Dorian thought. It was an old refrain; one they�d stopped speaking aloud in adolescence, but one that still rang in Dorian�s ears whenever he thought of his father. Though the man had been born a noble who wouldn�t have had to work a day in his life, curiosity drove him to medicine, and he�d spent the majority of his human years bent over such work.

When he wasn�t treating patients in London, he was writing about them in West Sussex, candle burning low on the desk, quill scratching across the page, each illness a puzzle to be solved.

But here at Ravenswood, hundreds of years and thousands of miles away from his old life as a human doctor, he became those patients. An ailment with no cure. A mystery. A complex puzzle only he could solve.

And maybe he would have, if he�d had more time.

"It wasn�t a demon attack, was it?" Gabriel asked.

"Father had many enemies."

"As do you. Answer the question."

Answer the question. Dorian wished he could. It was a simple word�no. But that one simple word would unleash much more complicated questions�questions Dorian had neither the knowledge nor the heart to field tonight.

He closed his eyes and leaned back against the stone wall, letting the cold seep into his bones, wondering�yet again�how the fuck it had come to this. JrNovels.com