by J. R. Ward
The cop shook his head. “Not a one. He kept that part of his life very private.”
“So we can’t track him that way. More good news. Is there any reason to think he’d go to that penthouse of his?”
“I stopped there on my way back,” Butch said. “He wasn’t in and I honestly don’t think he’d land there. Not considering what he used the place for.”
“And there’s only two hours of nighttime left.” Wrath sat behind his Louis XVI desk, but braced his arms against the flimsy chair, like he was going to bolt upright at any moment.
Butch’s phone went off, and he scrambled to answer the thing. “V? Oh…hey, baby. No…nothing yet. I will. I promise. Love you.”
As the cop hung up, Wrath turned toward the fire in the fireplace and was quiet for a while, no doubt reviewing, as they all were, what kind of options they had. Which were, like…none. Vishous could be anywhere at this point, so if the brothers scattered to the four arms of the compass, they’d be doing the needle-in-the-haystack routine. Besides, it was pretty obvious V had killed the GPS chip. He did not want to be found.
Eventually Wrath said, “The pin’s out of the grenade, gentlemen. Now it’s just a question of what gets blown.”
V picked the place for the car accident with care. He wanted to be close to their destination, but still far enough for discretion, and just when he got within range, a curve in the road offered itself up for use. Perfect. Putting his seat belt on, he stomped on the gas and braced himself. The Audi’s engine roared, and its wheels spun faster and faster on the slick road. Pretty damn quick it ceased being a car, morphing into nothing but a fuckload of kinetic energy.
Instead of going with Route 22’s sharp turn to the left, V headed straight for the tree line. Like a well-behaved child with no survival instincts, the car flew off the shoulder and held air for a split second.
The landing bounced V right off the driver’s seat, knocking his head into the car’s sunroof, then slamming him forward. Air bags exploded from the steering wheel and the dashboard and doors as the sedan pummeled through brush and saplings and…
The oak tree was immense. Big as a house. Just as sturdy.
The Audi’s crash cage was all that saved V from annihilation as the front of the car crumpled into an accordion of metal and engine. The shock of impact snapped V’s head on his neck, banging his face into his air bag again as a branch pierced through the windshield.
In the aftermath his ears rang like they had fire alarms going off in them, and his body did a self-scan for broken bits and pieces. Dazed, bleeding from cuts left by the branch, he undid his seat belt, forced his door open, and stumbled out of the car. As he took some deep breaths, he heard the hiss of the engine and the wheezing deflation of the air bags. Rain fell with steady, graceful disinterest, dripping off the trees into shallow puddles on the forest floor.
As soon as he could he went around the car to Jane. The impact had thrown her forward, and her blood now marked the windshield and the dash and the seat. Which was what he’d wanted. He leaned in and released her belt, then picked her up as carefully as if she still lived, arranging her in his arms so she would have been comfortable. Before he started through the woods, he got his leather jacket and draped it over her to protect her from the cold weather.
Vishous began the walk as all walks began. He put one foot in front of another. Then repeated. Then repeated.
He tromped through the forest, getting wetter and wetter until he became as the trees were, just another object for water to fall off of. He took a roundabout way to their destination, until his arms and his back ached from carrying her.
Finally he came up to the entrance of a cave. He didn’t bother checking to make sure he wasn’t followed. He knew he was alone.
He walked into the earthy well, the sound of the rain receding as he continued farther over the dirt floor. He located from memory the catch in the rock wall and triggered the release. As a nine-foot slab of granite shifted over, he entered the hall that was revealed and approached a set of iron gates. He released the locking mechanism with his mind, and the barrier parted without a sound as the rock behind him replaced itself.
Inside, it was beyond pitch-black, the air denser in this underground place, as if it were crowded into the space. With a quick thought he flamed up some of the wall torches with his mind, then started down toward the Tomb’s place of worship and ritual. On either side of the hall, on shelves that reached up some twenty feet, there were thousands of ceramic jars containing the hearts of lessers killed by the Brotherhood. He did not look up at them, as he usually did. He stared straight ahead as he carried his beloved forward, his wet boots leaving tracks on the glossy black marble floor.
Not long thereafter he stepped into the Tomb’s belly, the vast, subterranean cave opening up a great hole in the earth. At his will, thick black candles on stanchions lit up, illuminating the daggerlike stalactites that hung down as well as the massive black marble slabs that formed the wall behind the altar.
The slabs were what he had seen in his vision. When he’d stared down Route 22 and looked at the trees, he had pictured this memorial wall: As with the trees’ interlocking branches, the inscriptions on the marble, all those names of warriors who had served in the Brotherhood for generations, formed a subtle, gentle pattern, looking like lace from afar.
In front of the wall the altar was crude, but powerful: an enormous block of stone set on two stout lintels. In the center was the ancient skull of the first member of the Black Dagger Brotherhood, the most sacred relic the brothers had.
He pushed it aside and laid Jane down. She had lost her color, and her limp white hand as it fell off to the side made him shake all over. He carefully returned it to her, putting it on her chest.
He stepped away until his back hit the etched wall. In the candlelight, and with his jacket over her upper torso, he could almost imagine she was sleeping.
Almost.
Surrounded by the subterranean vista, he thought of the cave of the warrior camp. Then he saw himself using his hand on the pretrans who had threatened him, and on his father.
He undid his glove and slid it off his glowing palm.
What he contemplated now went against the laws of both nature and his species.
Reanimation of the dead was not an appropriate or allowable course of action under any circumstances. And not just because it was the Omega’s realm. The Chronicles of the race, those volumes and volumes of history, provided only two examples, and neither had resulted in anything but tragedy.
But he was different. This was different. Jane was different. He was doing this out of love, whereas the examples he read about had been done out of hatred: There had been a murderer that someone had brought back to use as a weapon, and a female returned to life as an act of revenge.
And there was more in his favor. He healed Butch on a regular basis, drawing the evil out of the cop when he did his business with the lessers. He could do the same for Jane. He absolutely could.
With iron resolve, he pushed from his mind the outcomes of those other forays into the Omega’s realm of dark arts. And focused on his love for his female.
The fact that Jane was a human was not an issue, as reanimation was the act of bringing that which was dead back to life, and the dividing line was the same no matter the species. And he had what he needed. The ritual required three things: something of the Omega’s, some fresh blood, and a source of electrical energy such as a harnessed lightning bolt.
Or in his case, his fucking curse.
V walked back out to the hall of jars and didn’t waste time picking. He took one randomly from the shelf, its ceramic marked by fine cracks and its color a murky brown, which meant it was one of the early ones.
When he returned to the altar, he slammed the jar into the stone, shattering the thing, revealing what it had housed. The heart inside was covered with a black, oily sheen, preserved by what flowed in the Omega’s veins. Though the exact nature of the in
duction into the Lessening Society was unknown, it was clear the Omega’s “blood” went in first before the heart was removed.
So Vishous had what he needed from their enemy.
He looked at the skull of the first Brother and didn’t think twice about using the sacred relic for what was an unlawful purpose. He took out one of his daggers, scored his wrist, and bled into the sterling silver cup that was mounted in the top of the skull. Then he palmed the lesser heart and squeezed it with his fist.
Black drops of distilled evil welled and fell, mixing with the red of his blood. The liquid sin had magic to it, the kind that ran against the rules of the righteous, the kind that turned torture into sport, the kind that enjoyed pain inflicted on the innocent…but it had eternity in it, too.
And that was what he needed for Jane.
“No!”
He spun around.
The Scribe Virgin had appeared behind him, her hood down, her transparent face a mask of horror. “You must not do this.”
He turned away and brought the skull up next to Jane’s head. On a fragmentary thought, he found an odd, reassuring parallel that she knew what the inside of his chest looked like and he was about to know the same of her.
“There is no balance in this! No price given!”
V removed his jacket from his female. The bloodstain under it, on his shirt, was like a bull’s-eye right in the middle of her chest, between her breasts.
“She will come back not as you know her,” his mother hissed. “She will come back evil. That shall be your result.”
“I love her. I can take care of her, like I take care of Butch.”
“Your love will not change the outcome, nor will your facility with the Omega’s remnants. This is forbidden!”
He wheeled on his mother, hating her and her stupid fucking yin-and-yang bullshit. “You want balance? A trade? You want to stick it to me before I can do this? Fine! What’s it going to take? You saddled Rhage with his curse for the rest of his fucking life, what are you going to do to me?”
“Parity is not my law!”
“Then whose is it! And how much do I fucking owe!”
The Scribe Virgin seemed to take a moment to collect herself. “This is beyond what I may gift or not. She is gone. There is no return once a body has been left fallow as hers has been.”
“Bullshit.” He leaned back over Jane, prepared to cut open her chest.
“You shall condemn her ever after. There will be nowhere for her to go but to the Omega, and you will have to send her there. She will be evil and you will have to destroy her.”
He looked at Jane’s lifeless face. Remembered her smile. Tried to find it in the pasty skin.
He could not.
“Balance…” he whispered.
He reached out and touched her cold cheek with his good hand and tried to think of all that he could give, all that he could trade.
“This it is not just about balance,” the Scribe Virgin said. “Some things are forbidden.”
As the solution became clear to him, he didn’t hear anything else from his mother.
He lifted up his precious, normal hand, the one he could touch people and things with, the one that was as it should be, not some cursed burden of destruction.
His good hand.
He put it down on the altar, splaying the fingers out and flattening his wrist. Then he took the blade of his dagger and laid it on his skin. As he leaned in, the weapon’s sharp blade cut right through to the bone.
“No!” the Scribe Virgin screamed.
Chapter Fifty
Jane was out of time. And she knew it in the same way she knew when a patient was taking a turn for the worse. Her internal clock went off, her alarm starting to beep.
“I don’t want to let go of him,” she said to no one.
Her voice didn’t travel far, and she noticed that the fog seemed more dense…so dense it was starting to obscure even her feet. And then it dawned on her. They weren’t obscured. With cold dread she realized that unless she did something, she was going to dissolve and take her place within the wall of ambient nothing. She would be forever alone and lonely, pining for the love she’d once felt.
A sad, shifting ghost.
Now she was finally struck by emotion, and it was one that brought tears to her eyes. The only way to save herself was to let the yearning for Vishous go; that was the key to the door. But if she did it, she felt as if she were abandoning him, leaving him alone to face a cold, bitter future. After all, she could imagine how it would be for her if he died.
In a surge the fog grew even thicker and the temperature dropped. She looked down. Her legs were disappearing…first up to her ankles, now to her calves. She was leaching out into the nothingness, dispersing.
Jane began to cry as she found her resolve and wept for the selfishness of what she had to do.
How did she let go of him, though?
As the fog crawled up to her thighs, she panicked. She didn’t know how to do what she must—
The answer, when it came to her, was painful and simple.
Oh…God… Letting go meant you accepted what couldn’t be changed. You didn’t try to hold on to hope in order to coerce a change in fortune…nor did you battle against the superior forces of fate and try to make them capitulate to your will…nor did you beg for salvation because you assumed you knew better. Letting go meant you stared at what was before you with clear eyes, recognizing that unfettered choice was the exception and destiny the rule.
No bargaining. No trying to control. You gave up and saw that the one you loved was in fact not your future, and there was nothing you could do about it.
Tears fell from her eyes into the swirling mist as she released all pretense of strength and let go of her fight to keep her tie to Vishous alive. As she did, she had no faith or optimism, she was empty as the fog around her: An atheist in life, she found in death she was the same. Believing in nothing, now she was nothing.
And that was when the miracle happened.
A light fell from overhead, sheltering her, warming her, suffusing her with something that was just as the love she had felt for Vishous had been: a benediction.
As she was pulled upward like a daisy plucked from the ground by a gentle hand, she realized that she could still love who she loved, even though she wasn’t with him. Indeed, their divergent paths did not dissect and desecrate what she felt. It layered her emotions with a cloak of bittersweet longing, but it didn’t change what was in her heart. She could love him and wait for him on the far side of life. Because love, after all, was eternal and not subject to the whims of death.
Jane was free…as upward she flew.
Phury was about to lose it.
But he had to get in line if he was going to go mad, because all the brothers were on a thin edge. Especially Butch, who was pacing around the study like a prisoner in solitary confinement.
No sign of Vishous. No calls. No nothing. And dawn was coming like a freight train.
Butch stopped. “Where would you do a funeral for a shellan?”
Wrath frowned. “The Tomb.”
“You think maybe he’d take her there?”
“He’s never been too keen on the whole ritual deal, and with his mother having forsaken him…?” Wrath shook his head. “He wouldn’t go there. Besides, he’d have to know that’s one of the places we’d look for him, and he’s so damned private. Assuming he’s putting her down, he wouldn’t want an audience.”
“Yeah.”
Butch started up with the pacing again as the grandfather clock rang in four thirty A.M.
“You know what?” the cop said. “I’m just going to check it out, if that’s cool. I can’t stay in here a second longer.”
Wrath shrugged. “Might as well. We’ve got nothing else to go on.”
Phury stood up, unable to take the waiting any longer either. “I’m going with you. You’ll need someone to show you where the entrance is.”
Because Butch cou
ldn’t dematerialize, the two of them got in the Escalade, and Phury powered the SUV over the lawn and into the forest. With the sun coming up so soon, he didn’t bother with a roundabout way, but gunned right for the Tomb.
The two of them were utterly silent until Phury pulled up to the entrance of the cave and they got out.
“I smell blood,” Butch said. “I think we’ve got them!”
Yeah, there was the barest trace of human blood in the air…no doubt from V having carried Jane inside.
Shit. Jogging into the cave, they headed for the back, slipping through the disguised entrance and going down to the iron gates. One side was open, and there was a trail of wet footsteps down the center of the hall of jars.
“He’s here!” Butch said, relief carrying his words more than his breath did.
Yeah, except why would V, who hated his mother, bury the female he loved according to the Scribe Virgin’s traditions?
He wouldn’t.
As they started down the hall, Phury’s sense of doom was triggered…especially as they got to the end and he saw an empty spot on the shelving, where a lesser’s jar was missing. Oh, no. Oh…God no. They should have brought more weapons. If V had done what Phury feared he had, they were going to need to be armed to the nines.
“Hold up!” He stopped, tore a torch from the wall, and handed it to Butch. After he nabbed one for himself, he grabbed Butch’s arm. “Be prepared to fight.”
“Why? V might be pissed off that we came, but he’s not going to get violent.”
“Jane’s the one you’re going to want to watch for.”
“What the fuck are you talking ab—”
“I think he might have tried to bring her back—”
A brilliant flash of light exploded up ahead, turning everything into noontime.
“Fuck!” the cop barked in the aftermath. “Don’t tell me he would?”
“If Marissa died and you could pull it off, wouldn’t you?”
The two of them took off and burst into the cave. Only to stop dead.