The Chosen

by J. R. Ward

  "I will love you anyway."

  Xcor stiffened, and then slowly turned to her. His face was marked by harsh shadows--that were nothing compared to the ones in his eyes. "You know not what you say."

  "I love you." She put her hand on his arm and held his stare steadily, challenging him to deny what she felt. "Do you hear me? I love you."

  He shook his head and looked away. "You do not know me."

  "So help me to do that."

  "And run the risk of you throwing me out? You say you want to spend the time we have together. I will guarantee that won't happen if you know me any better than you do the now."

  "I would never throw you out."

  "My mahmen already did. Why would you be any different?" He shook his head again. "Mayhap she knew what course I would take. Mayhap...it wasn't because of the lip."

  Layla was well aware that she had to tread carefully. "Your mother eschewed you?"

  "I was placed with a nursemaid...someone...until she left me, too."

  "What of your father?" she asked tightly. Even though she knew some of that.

  "I thought he was the Bloodletter. That male told me he was my sire, but later I learned that was not the case."

  "Have you never...attempted to discover who your father is?"

  Xcor flexed his hands then curled them tight. "I have come to believe that biology is less indicative of family than choice. My males, my soldiers, they chose me. They chose to follow me. They are my family. Two individuals who brought about my conception and birth and then deserted me when I was incapable of surviving on my own? I need not learn of their identities nor their whereabouts."

  Pure fear sliced through Layla's heart as she imagined him first as a young newly born, and then as a little boy incapable of defending himself, and finally a pretrans going through the change unattended.

  "However did you survive?" she breathed.

  "I did what I had to. And I fought. I have always been good at fighting. That is the only legacy my parents gave me that has been of value."

  "How did your transition...how did you make it through the change?" This was an honest question, as it had not been included in his scribed volume.

  "I gave the whore who serviced me the cottage I stayed in. I had to pay her or she would not have allowed me to take her vein. It seemed like a fair trade, my life for my shelter. I figured I could find another place to live, and I did."

  Layla sat up and pulled the sheets to her chin. "I couldn't do that to a young. I just couldn't."

  "And that is why you are a female of worth." He shrugged. "Besides, I was a failed conception. I'm quite sure that both of them would have rather I had died in the womb or the birthing canal--probably even if it killed my mahmen. Better to have a young passed on than to bring the likes of me into existence."

  "That is wrong."

  "That is life, and well you know it."

  "And then you went into the war camp."

  Xcor glanced over at her, his expression hard. "You are determined to get this out of me, aren't you."

  "You do not have to hide with me."

  "Do you want to know how I lost my virginity, then?" he snapped. "Do you?"

  She closed her eyes briefly. "Yes."

  "Oh, wait. Perhaps I should be more specific. Would you like to know when I fucked a female for the first time--or is it when I had sex for the first time? Because they are not one in the same. The former cost me ten times the going rate with a prostitute in the Old Country, and the first thing she did afterward was run for the river and bathe me off of her. I actually wondered whether she was going to drown herself, she hit that water so hard."

  Layla blinked back tears. "And...the other."

  His face grew dark with rage. "I was fucked by a solider. In front of the war camp. Because I lost to him in a fight. I bled for hours afterward."

  Closing her eyes, she found herself mouthing a prayer.

  "Still want me now?" he drawled.

  "Yes." She opened her lids and looked at him. "You are not unclean to me. And you are not any less of a male."

  The smile on his face scared her, for it was so cold and distant. "I did it to others, by the way. When I beat them."

  The sorrow she felt was so deep and abiding, it was beyond tears.

  And she knew exactly what he was doing. He was pushing her away again, challenging her to leave so she wouldn't tell him to go. He had done it before, and what else could you expect from a male who had been shunned his entire life.

  "Still want this? Still think you love this?" When she didn't respond, he indicated his face and then his body as if they belonged to someone else. "Well, female, what do you say?"

  FORTY-NINE

  Vishous left the Brotherhood mansion alone and told nobody where he was going. It wasn't that he was hiding anything, it was just that Butch was out in the field with Rhage, John Matthew and Tohr, Wrath was at the Audience House with Phury and Z, and yada, yada, yada.

  Oh, and Jane was down in the clinic.

  Which was fine.

  So yeah, he had no one to tell and nobody whose radar was trained on his whereabouts. S'all good.

  The snowstorm of the night before had left a cleanup problem in its wake, and as V dematerialized to the outer rim of Caldwell's urban downtown, he saw all kinds of what he expected: some removal progress, but really, still a shitload of white stuff covering all manner of parked cars and apartment buildings, the main roads down to two lanes, the alleyways impassible, the sidewalks uncleared.

  The address he re-formed in front of was a three-story Victorian that had been cut up into a trio of flats. Lights were on in each of the levels, and the humans inside were chilling, winding down from work.

  Or...in the case of the apartment he was interested in, getting stoned.

  Shifting his position up to the roof of the building across the street, he lit a hand-rolled and watched. And waited. The particular human he was waiting for was not yet home, and he knew this because he'd done some research on good ol' Damn Stoker.

  Turned out "he" was a woman. A Ms. Jo Early, who happened to work at the Caldwell Courier Journal.

  The fact that she was female had kind of impressed him, actually. He'd assumed the clarity of voice and non-emotional presentation of facts in that blog meant a male set of fingers were doing the walking, but come on. As if his shellan wasn't the same?

  Jane was as tough as they came, and more clear thinking than he was.

  Like, for example, he was quite sure Jane wasn't in a funk over the status of their mating. No, she was working at her job saving lives. He was the one doing the Dr. Phil bullshit--

  Okaaaaaaaaaay, let's try and not make everything about ourselves, shall we, he thought.

  As he smoked and tried to get his brain off his relationship, his gray matter did indeed take him in another direction. Too bad it wasn't much of an improvement. Assuming he wanted a little peace.

  As he had been sitting at his desk during the day and checking YouTube videos and Facebook pages and Insta accounts for vampire sightings by humans, he had been tempted by an old email addy of his, one that he'd abandoned as soon as Doc Jane had come into his life.

  Well, actually, he'd stopped using it pretty much after he'd met Butch.

  The handle, which was a pseudonym, and its associated Gmail account, was one he had registered on websites where subs went begging for Doms, both inside the species and out.

  There had always been volunteers for him, back in the day. Females and males, men and women, all of whom were looking for a certain kind of experience--and V had had a routine that he followed with them. First, he'd meet them out at clubs or through references and screen them, picking and choosing the most attractive ones--or the ones who he thought would put on a good show. Then he'd take them to his penthouse at the top of the Commodore and play around with them until he got bored. Whenever he was done, he'd kick them out.

  A few he saw more than once. The vast majority had been one and don
es.

  There had been only three regulars.

  Back then, it had been all about burning off his edge, tempering his dark side, turning the dimmer switch down on his drives.

  He signed into the account today.

  Around noon.

  Right after he'd gotten a text from Jane telling him that Blay's mom had come through the operation just fine, but wanted to go home--so Jane had to stay at the clinic and try to talk the female out of leaving. The quick missive had come through about two hours after she'd told him she was done in the OR and on her way to the Pit--all she had to do was make sure the older Lyric came out of anesthesia. Which had been preceded two hours prior to that with a text talking about Assail.

  There had been almost two hundred emails in the account.

  And he had read through every single one of them. Some were short, nothing but vital stats with maybe a picture as an attachment. Others were long and rambling, streams of consciousness about what they wanted to have done to them. There were also two-paragraphers that begged for him to reconsider, reconnect, resume. And introductory sentences with phone numbers. And angry tirades that he couldn't just forget them, no, no he could not, they weren't going to have it, they were going to find him and make him realize how they were the right one for him...

  It was like an archaeological dig in the relics of a city he had once constructed, assumed residence in, and lorded over.

  Down below, on the cramped, snow-choked street, a Honda pulled up to the apartment building. Whoever was in it talked for a minute, and then the passenger-side door opened and a slender, red-haired human female got out.

  "We'll talk tomorrow, then?" she said into the car. "Okay. Yup, I'm on it--yeah, I'll get it posted on the CCJ website tomorrow first thing. Dick can go pound sand."

  With a final wave, she shut the door and scooted around the blunt hood of the car. Putting her arms out to balance, she stepped through a snowbank in the predetermined footprints many people had used, then she skated up the walkway and checked the mailbox beside the right of the two doors.

  A few moments later, he saw her walk through the second story's front room and talk to the guys who were passing a bong back and forth as they sat on the sofa in front of the TV.

  She looked pissed, V thought, as she put one hand on her hip and shook a stack of what looked like bills in their direction.

  Then she marched off into the front bedroom and closed the door.

  He looked away when she started to undress, but he didn't need to bother. As it turned out, she just took off her outer coat and finished the rest in a bathroom that had a frosted window.

  She ended up at her desk, in front of her POS Apple product, hitting the Internet.

  As V lit another hand-rolled, he debated just putting a bullet in her head, but then decided he was only being cranky. Apart from the videos and shit that she posted, a cursory check of her background hadn't yielded any red flags. She was the adopted kid of some rich folks. Meh job working at the CCJ on Internet content. Previously had been a receptionist at a real estate company. Pretty fancy school resume, but like a lot of young kids, hadn't done shit with that.

  Unless you counted using proper grammar while talking about vampires.

  So yeah, all he needed to do was erase her and he could go back to the Pit.

  Taking a drag, he released the smoke and watched it float away on the mostly still air.

  Off in the distance, he heard a siren.

  Ambulance, he thought. That was an ambulance.

  Overhead, in the crystal clear, velvet blue sky, only the brightest stars twinkled because of downtown's sweating of illumination, but the planes showed up well enough, their flight patterns around the Caldwell International Airport concentric, invisible rings.

  Like maybe God was using a highlighter to circle the city for some kind of follow-up.

  After a while of staring at the human female, he wondered again why he wasn't getting on with what he'd come out here to do. Hacking into her site and taking control of it, and then erasing content off YouTube, he could do back home.

  Had to do, that was.

  The Internet, after all, was kind of like a petri dish in a lab. If you wanted to a grow a certain culture, you just created the right conditions and let time do its thing: Enough chatter and talk about vampires, backed up by enough footage, and sooner or later it was going to catch on, because humans loved spooky shit, particularly if they thought it was sexy.

  Yawn.

  Conversely, if you had to kill an idea? You just made it disappear, and soon enough, the white noise of human drama replaced it with something else.

  Humans' ability to be distracted was, aside from their relatively easily extinguished mortality, their best feature.

  'Cuz, really, when it came to vampires, who the fuck needed Ellen interviewing the Omega about his favorite holiday traditions or a posthumous book on Lash hitting the New York Times bestseller list, true?

  Or worse, and all jests aside, the motherfuckers going on a hunt for the race.

  Those rats without tails couldn't get along with each other. They suddenly find themselves coexisting with another species on the level that vampires were shoulder-to-shoulder'ing them?

  You could wipe the co- and -exist thing right outta your vocab.

  So yeah, he was going to have to tidy up this little mess out on the Net, as well as have a "talk" with Ms. Jo Early, too: Assuming she'd been a vampire lover all her life, that kind of cognition was not going to be reversible, but he could certainly tinker around in her gray matter and redirect her from her blog.

  Yup, he thought. It was time to ghost into her bedroom, find out what was doing in that skull of hers, and then head back to get his virtual Swiffer rocking on the Internet.

  Uh-huh.

  Yeaaaaah.

  And yet V stayed where he was, ashing on the snow-covered roof, shifting his weight back and forth whenever his legs got tired, stretching his back from time to time.

  The reason he didn't leave had nothing to do with that woman.

  No, he stayed for the same reason he had gone out.

  When you were contemplating cheating on your mate, it was not easy on the conscience. And not something you wanted to do in the home you shared with her.

  FIFTY

  As Xcor waited for Layla to tell him that she wanted him to leave, his blood was raging in his veins and his head was frothing with memories. He had never talked to anyone about what had been done to him or what he had done in the war camp. For one, nobody had ever asked. His fighters had all either done that themselves or had it done to them, and it was hardly a topic of conversation among the group, something one reminisced about because it elicited warm and happy feelings. And outside of his fighters, Xcor had never run into anyone who had wanted to get to know him.

  "Well," he demanded. "What say you, female."

  It was not a question. For he knew what she was going to--

  Layla looked him straight in the eye, and as she spoke, her voice was utterly level. "I say that survival is a gruesome, sometimes tragic, endeavor. And if you expect me to feel anything but sadness and regret on your behalf, you've got a long wait coming."

  Xcor was the one who broke eye contact. And as silence stretched out between them, he had no idea what he was feeling.

  It seemed, however, as he regarded his hands from a great distance, that he was shaking.

  "Have you never wondered what became of your parents?" she asked. "Wanted to find a brother or a sister, perhaps?"

  At least, that was what he thought she said. His mind wasn't processing things all that well.

  "I'm sorry," he muffled, "what?"

  The bed moved as she shuffled over and sat beside him, her feet dangling, whereas his reached the floor because his legs were longer than hers. After a moment, he felt something drape over his bare shoulders. A blanket. She had covered him with the blanket that had been folded at the base of the duvet.

  It smelled like h
er.

  It was warm, like her.

  "Xcor?"

  When he didn't respond, she turned his face to hers. As he looked at her, he wanted to shut his eyes. She was too lovely for him and his past. She was all that was good, and he had already cost her so much: her home, her peace with her young, her--

  "Love is a matter between souls," she said as she put her hand on the center of his chest. "Our love is between my soul and yours. Nothing is going to change that, not your past, our present...or whatever futures we may find apart. At least not on my side."

  He took a deep breath. "I want to believe you."

  "I'm not the one to believe or disbelieve. It is a law of the universe. Debate such at your leisure--or you could just accept the blessing for what it is."

  "What if she was right, though?"

  "Who? What if who was right?"

  Xcor looked away, focusing on their bare feet. "My nursemaid always told me I was cursed. I was evil. When she would--" He stopped there, not wanting to go into the beatings. "She told me I was rotten. That my face was only what showed of the rot inside of me. That the real festering was within."

  Layla shook her head. "She was talking about herself, then. She was revealing the truth of herself. To say those things to an innocent young? To warp his mind and terrorize him like that? If there is another definition of evil and rottenness, I don't know what it is."

  "You see too much of the good in me."

  "That's what you've shown me, though. You've always been good to me."

  Her hand took his from where he had clamped it on his knee, and as she squeezed his palm with her own, he struggled to process her loyalty and kindness. Indeed, she would never understand the extent of his atrocities, and perhaps that was just as well. It would save her from feeling bad at her misjudgment of him.

  "I need to tell you something."

  As he heard the tension in her voice, he glanced over. "What."

  Now, he thought, now she would tell him to go.

  "I owe you an apology." Releasing the hold she had taken on him, she locked her own hands and seemed to have difficulty finding words. "I did something that maybe I shouldn't have done--and that I definitely should have told you about before now. And my conscience is killing me."

  "Whate'er is it?"

  When her distress appeared to intensify, it was both easy and a relief to switch gears and focus on whate'er bothered her.