by J. R. Ward
“You shouldn’t be doing this alone!”
Ending the connection, she jogged down the concrete steps, her pack bouncing like it was doing pushups on her shoulders. As she bottomed out on the lower level, she scanned the empty parking lot—
The stench that speared into her nose was the kind of thing that triggered her gag reflex. Roadkill… and baby powder?
She looked to the source. The maintenance shed by the tree line had a corrugated-metal roof and metal walls that would not survive long in tornado alley. Half the size of a football field, with garage doors locked to the ground, she imagined back in its heyday that it housed paving equipment as well as things like snowplows, blowers, and mowers.
The sole person-sized door was loose, and as a stiff gust from the rainstorm caught it, the creak was straight out of a George Romero movie. And then the panel immediately slammed shut with a clap, as if Mother Nature didn’t like the stink any more than Jo did.
Taking out her phone, she texted Bill: This smell is nasty.
Aware that her heart rate just tripled, she walked across the asphalt, the rain hitting the hood of her windbreaker in a disorganized staccato. Ducking her hand under the loose nylon of the jacket, she felt for her holstered gun and kept her palm on the butt.
The door creaked open and slammed shut again, another puff of that stink releasing out of the interior. Swallowing through throat spasms, she had to fight to keep going and not because there was wind in her face.
When she stopped in front of the door, the opening and closing ceased, as if now that she was on the verge of entering, it didn’t need to catch her attention and draw her in anymore.
So help her God, if Pennywise was on the other side…
Glancing around to check there were no red balloons lolling in the area, she reached out for the door.
I just have to know, she thought as she opened the way in. I need to… know.
Peering around the door, she saw absolutely nothing, and yet was frozen by all that she confronted. Pure evil, the kind of thing that abducted and murdered children, that slaughtered the innocent, that enjoyed the suffering of the just and merciful, pushed at her body and then penetrated it, radiation that was toxic passing through to her bones.
Coughing, she stepped back and covered her mouth and nose with her elbow. After a couple of deep breaths into her sleeve, she fumbled with her phone to call Bill again.
Before he could say anything over the whirring in the background, she bit out, “You need to come—”
“I’m already halfway there.”
“Good.”
“What’s going on—”
Jo ended the call and got out her flashlight, triggering the beam. Stepping forward again, she shouldered the door open and trained the spear of illumination into the space.
The light was consumed.
Sure as if she were shining it into a bolt of thick fabric, the fragile illumination was no match for what was before it.
The threshold she stepped over was nothing more than weather stripping, but the inch-high lip was a barrier that felt like an obstacle course she could barely surmount—and then there was the stickiness on the floor. Pointing the flashlight to the ground, she picked up one of her feet. Something like old motor oil dripped off her running shoe, the sound of it finding home echoing in the empty space.
She found the first of the buckets on the left. Home Depot, orange and white—and the logo was smudged with a rusty, translucent substance that turned her stomach.
The beam wobbled as she went over and looked into the cylinder, her hand shaking. Inside, there was a gallon of glossy, gleaming… red… liquid. And in the back of her throat, she tasted copper—
Jo wheeled around with the flashlight.
The two men who had entered the facility and come up behind her without a sound loomed as if they had been born of the darkness itself, wraiths conjured from her nightmares, fed by the cold spring rain, clothed in the night. One of them had a goatee and tattoos at one of his temples, a cigarette between his lips, a downright nasty expression on his hard face. The other wore a Boston Red Sox hat and a long coat, the tails of which blew in slow motion even though the wind coming in from the open door was choppy. Both had long black blades holstered handles down on their chest, and she knew there were more weapons where she couldn’t see them.
They had come to kill her. Tracked her as she’d moved away from her car. Seen her as she had not seen them.
Jo stumbled back and tried to get out her gun, but her sweaty palms had her dropping her phone and struggling to keep the flashlight—
And then she couldn’t move.
Even as her brain ordered her feet to run, her legs to run, her body to run, nothing obeyed the panic commands, her muscles twitching under the lockdown of some invisible, external force of will, her bones aching, her breath turning into a pant. Pain firework’d her brain, a headache sizzling through her skull.
Opening her mouth, she tried to scream—
* * *
As Butch O’Neal stared at the woman’s vacant, frozen fear, he had a wicked-odd thought. For some reason, he recalled that his given name was Brian. Why this was relevant in any way was unclear, and he chalked up the cognitive drive-by to the fact that she kind of reminded him of his first cousin on his mother’s side. That connection wasn’t particularly relevant, either, however, because in Southie, where he had been born and raised, there were only about a thousand red-haired women.
Well, and there was also the fact that he hadn’t seen any member of his family, extended or otherwise, for what, two years now? Three? He’d lost count, although not because he didn’t care.
Actually, that was a lie. He did not care.
And besides, the reality that this woman was a half-breed on the verge of going through the change was probably more to the point of the connection thing. Not exactly his own experience coming into the species, but close enough.
“Am I scenting this right?” He looked over at his roommate. His best friend. His true brother, in comparison to the biological ones he’d left in the human world. “Or am I nuts.”
“Nah.” Vishous, son of the Bloodletter, exhaled a cloud of Turkish smoke, his hard features and goatee briefly obscured by the haze. “You ain’t nuts, cop. And I am getting really sick and tired of scrubbing this woman, true?”
“To be fair, you get sick and tired if you have to do anything more than once.”
“Feeling a little judgey tonight, are we.” V waved at the woman to send her off. “Buh-bye—”
“Hold on, she dropped her phone.”
Butch went further into the induction zone and gagged as he shined his light around. Fucking lessers. He’d rather have sweat socks shoved up his nose. But at least he didn’t have to wade around long to find her cell. The thing had landed face-up in the oily mess, and he took a handkerchief out and wiped it off as best he could.
Going over to the woman, he put the thing in the pocket of her windbreaker and stepped back. “Okay, she’s good to go.”
Are you certain about that, some quiet part of him wondered.
“Whatever, I’m sure I’ll see her again,” V said dryly. “Bad penny this human is.”
As she exited and walked off, Butch watched her cross the asphalt and disappear up the concrete stairs. “Is she the one you’ve been monitoring?”
“She just won’t leave it the fuck alone.”
“The one with the website about vampires.”
“Damn Stoker. Real original. Remind me to ask her when I need help with puns.”
Butch looked back at his roommate. “She’s searching for herself. You can’t turn that kind of thing off.”
“Well, her change needs to shit or get off the pot. I got better things to do than check on her hormones like I’m waiting for a goddamn egg to hard-boil.”
“You have such a way with languages.”
“Seventeen, now that I’ve added ‘vampire conspiracist.’ ” V dropped his
butt and crushed it with his shitkicker. “You should read some of the shit they post. There’s a whole community of the crackpots out there.”
Butch held up his forefinger. “ ’Scuse me, Professor Xavier, given that we do actually exist, how can you call them crazy?”
“You ready to do this, or do you just want to stand there in that wet cashmere coat of yours.”
Butch brushed at the shoulders of his Tom Ford. “It is so unfair that you know my triggers.”
“You could have just put on leathers. Or stayed home.”
“Style is important. And I didn’t want you to come alone. That’s what she said.”
“Nice joke, Lassiter. Besides, I can handle this by my little lonesome. You know I come with my own special kind of backup.”
V lifted his lead-lined glove to his mouth and took the tip of the middle finger between his sharp, white teeth. Tugging the protective shield off what was underneath, he revealed a glowing hand that was marked on both sides with tattooed warnings in the Old Language.
Holding his curse out, the interior of the storage building lit up bright as noontime, the blood on the floor black, the blood in the six buckets red. As Butch walked around, his footsteps left patterns that were eaten up quick, that which covered the concrete consuming the prints, reclaiming dominance.
Lowering down onto his haunches, Butch dragged his fingers through the shit and rubbed the black stink, testing for viscosity. “Nope.”
V’s icy eyes shifted over. “What?”
“This is wrong.” Butch hit his handkerchief again for cleanup. “It’s too thin. It’s not like it was.”
“Do you think…” V, who never lost track of a thought, lost track of his thought. “Is it happening? Do you think?”
Butch straightened and walked over to one of the buckets. It was a bog-standard drywall container that still had the brand name on it. Inside, the blood that had been drained from the veins of what had been a human was congealing from the cold. And there was something else in there.
Huh. The inductees took their hearts home in a jar. Or used to.
Clearly the Omega wasn’t doing that anymore to his boys. Then again, none of the new slayers lasted long enough to establish a residence to keep their jar safe. And back in the good old days, if they lost their heart, they got into trouble—which was why the Brotherhood had a tradition of taking those containers whenever they could. Plus, hello, trophy.
It was so weird. The slayers could lose their humanity. Their souls. Their free-agency. Just not that cardiac muscle they didn’t need anymore to exist.
Although the rules had changed, apparently.
“Cop?”
Butch pivoted back around to his roommate and did not like the expression on the brother’s face. “Don’t look at me like that.”
“Like what.”
“Like I got answers. Like I’m the solution to it all.”
There was a long moment of silence between them, nothing but the pitter-pat of rain on the metal roof marking the stillness, the quiet.
“But you are, Butch. And you know it.”
Butch walked over and stood chest-to-chest with the male. “What if we’re wrong?”
In the Old Language, V said, “The Prophecy is not ours to claim. It is the property of history. As it was foretold, so it shall be. First as the future, then as the present when the time is nigh. After which, with recording, it shall be the sacred past, the saving of the species, the end of the war with the Lessening Society.”
Butch thought of his dreams, the ones that had been waking him up during the day. The ones that he refused to speak to his Marissa about. “What if I don’t believe any of that.”
What if I can’t believe it, he amended.
“You assume destiny requires your belief.”
Unease scurried through his veins like rats in a sewer, finding all kinds of familiar paths. And meanwhile, as freely as it roamed, he became trapped. “What if I’m not enough?”
“You are. You have to be.”
“I can’t do any of it without you.”
V’s familiar eyes, diamond with navy-blue rims, softened, proving that even the hardest substance on earth could yield if it chose to. “You have me, forever. And if you need it, you can take my faith in you for as long as you need it.”
“I didn’t ask for this.”
“We never do,” V said roughly. “And it doesn’t matter even if we did.”
Vishous shook his head sadly, as if he were remembering parts of his own life, routes taken by force or coercion, dubious gifts pressed into his unwilling hands, mantles tossed over his shoulders, heavy with the manipulations and desires of others. Given that Butch knew his roommate’s past as well as he knew his own, he wondered about the nature of the so-called destiny theory V spoke of.
Maybe the intellectual construct of fate, of destiny, was just a way to distance a person from all the shitty fucking things other people did to them, all the proverbial bad luck that rained down on the head of an essentially good guy, all that Murphy’s Law, which was actually not luck at all, just the impersonal nature of chaos at work. And then there was the disappointment and injury, the loss and alienation, the chips off the soul and the heart that were inevitable during any mortal’s tenure upon the ashes and the dust to which they were doomed to return.
Butch pushed damp cashmere aside to grip his heavy gold cross through the thin silk of his shirt. There was a balance, though, he reminded himself. Love, in all its forms, was the balance.
Putting his hand on V’s shoulder, he moved down that heavily muscled arm until he clasped the thick wrist above the curse. Then he stepped in beside his brother and lifted the glowing, deadly palm, the leather of V’s jacket sleeve creaking at the repositioning.
“Time for cleanup,” Butch said hoarsely.
“Yes,” V agreed. “It is.”
As Butch held up the arm, energy unleashed from that deadly palm in a great burst of light, the illumination blinding Butch, his eyes stinging, though he refused to look away from the power, the terrible grace, the universe’s mystery of origin that was housed within the otherwise unremarkable flesh of his best friend.
Under the onslaught, all traces of the Omega’s evil work disappeared, the structure of the shed, those comparably fragile walls and rafters of the roof, remaining untouched by the fearsome glory that reclaimed the humble space that had been horribly used for as evil a purpose as ever there was.
What if the prophecy itself is not enough, he thought to himself.
After all, mortals weren’t the only things that had a shelf life. History likewise decayed and was lost, over time. Lessons forgotten… rules mislaid… heroes dead and gone…
Prophecies dismissed when another future came along to claim the present as its victim, proving that that which had been taken as an absolute was in fact only partially true.
Everyone is talking about the end of the war, but is there ever really an end to evil? Butch wondered. Even if he succeeded, even if he was, in fact, the Dhestroyer, what then. Sweetness and light forever?
No, he thought with a conviction that made his spine tingle with warning. There would be another.
And it would be the same as what had been defeated.
Only worse.
Continue Reading…
The Sinner
J.R. Ward
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The Sinner
Blood Truth
The Wedding from Hell…
The Savior
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
© JAN COBB
J. R. WARD is the author of more than thirty novels, including those in her #1 New York Times bestselling Black Dagger Brotherhood series. There are more than fifteen million copies of her novels in print worldwide, and they have been published in twenty-six different countries. She lives in the South with her family.
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BY J. R. Ward
THE BLACK DAGGER BROTHERHOOD SERIES
Dark Lover
Lover Eternal
Lover Awakened
Lover Revealed
Lover Unbound
Lover Enshrined
The Black Dagger Brotherhood: An Insider’s Guide
Lover Avenged
Lover Mine
Lover Unleashed
Lover Reborn
Lover at Last
The King
The Shadows
The Beast
The Chosen
The Thief
The Savior
THE BLACK DAGGER LEGACY SERIES
Blood Kiss
Blood Vow
Blood Fury
Blood Truth
THE BLACK DAGGER BROTHERHOOD WORLD
Prisoner of Night
Where Winter Finds You
FIREFIGHTERS SERIES
Consumed
NOVELS OF THE FALLEN ANGELS
Covet
Crave
Envy
Rapture
Possession
Immortal
THE BOURBON KINGS SERIES
The Bourbon Kings
The Angels’ Share
Devil’s Cut
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