The Black Dagger Brotherhood Novels 5-8

by J. R. Ward

  Naturally, the druggies didn’t care that someone had been added to the mix, but the other ones sized him up like he was a lamb shank at a deli counter.

  He thought of the number of lessers who had been lost tonight.

  “Hey, asshole,” Lash said to the sw’old-up one, “your boyfriend give you those p-tats? Or was he too busy fucking you in the ass?”

  The guy’s eyes narrowed. “What’d you say to me?”

  The gangbanger shook his head. “Gotta be out ya damn mind, white boy.”

  Skinhead laughed like a blender, high and fast.

  Who knew recruiting would be this easy, Lash thought.

  Phury did not dematerialize to ZeroSum. He went to Screamer’s instead.

  As it was nearly the end of the night, there was no wait line outside the club, so he just walked right in the front door and went back to the bar. While hard-core rap thumped, the dregs of the party set were hanging on to their buzzes with death grips, drooping over each other in the dark corners, too blitzed even to have sex.

  As the bartender approached, the guy said, “We’re last-calling it.”

  “Sapphire martini.”

  The guy came back with the drink and flipped a cocktail napkin out flat before putting the triangle glass down. “That’ll be twelve dollars.”

  Phury slid a fifty across the black bar and kept his hand on the bill. “I’m looking for something. And it’s not change.”

  The bartender looked down at the green. “Whatchu after?”

  “I like to ride horses.”

  The guy’s eyes started cruising the room. “Do you. Well, this is a club, not a stable.”

  “I don’t wear blue. Ever.”

  The bartender’s eyes drifted back, and he gave Phury the once-over. “Clothes as expensive as the ones you’ve got on . . . you could wear any color you like.”

  “I don’t like blue.”

  “You from out of town?”

  “You could say that.”

  “Your face is a mess.”

  “Is it. I hadn’t noticed.”

  There was a pause. “You see that guy in the back? With the eagle on his jacket? He might be able to help you. Might be able. I don’t know him.”

  “Of course you don’t.”

  Phury left the fifty and the drink and walked through the thinned-out, spaced-out crowd with a single-minded focus.

  Just before he got within range, the guy in question sauntered off, leaving out of the side door.

  Phury followed him into the alley, and as they stepped outside, something fired off in his mind, but he ignored it. He was interested in one and only one thing . . . was so locked in that even the wizard’s voice was gone.

  “ ’Scuse me,” he said.

  The dealer turned on his heel and gave Phury the same kind of head-to-toe the bartender had. “I don’t know you.”

  “No, you don’t. But you know my friends.”

  “Do I.” When Phury flashed a couple hundred dollars, the guy smiled. “Ah, yeah. What you looking for?”

  “H.”

  “Perfect timing. I’m almost out.” The guy’s class ring flashed blue as he put a hand into his coat.

  For a split second, Phury had an image of that dealer and the druggie in that alley, the ones he and the lesser had walked up on all those nights ago. Funny, that encounter had started the great slide, hadn’t it, the slope taking him here, to this moment, in this alley . . .where a little envelope full of heroin landed in his hand.

  “I’m here”—the dealer nodded in the direction of the club’s door—“pretty much every night—”

  Lights hit them from every direction—courtesy of the unmarked police cars parked at the foot and the head of the alley.

  “Hands up!” someone yelled.

  Phury stared into the dealer’s panicked eyes and felt no sympathy and no complicity. “I gotta go. Later.”

  Phury wiped the memory of himself from the four cops with the guns and the dealer with the aw-fuck-me expression and dematerialized with his buy.

  Chapter Forty-two

  Qhuinn led the way through the tunnel that ran underground from the Brotherhood’s mansion to the training center’s office. Blay stayed behind him, and the only sound was their boots. The meal they’d shared had been the same, only silverware on silverware and an occasional, Could you please pass the salt?

  Dinner’s great conversational drought had been broken only by a rainstorm of some kind of drama upstairs. When they’d heard shouting, they’d both put their forks down and run into the foyer, but Rhage had looked over the balcony and shaken his head, telling them to stay out of it.

  Which was cool. The two of them had plenty of their own shit to deal with.

  When they got to the door that led into the office closet, Qhuinn punched 1914 into the security pad so Blay could see the numbers.

  “Year the house was built, evidently.” As they stepped through the closet and came out next to the desk, he shook his head. “I always wondered how they got here.”

  Blay made a noise that could have been anything from “Me, too,” to “Fuck you with a chain saw, you rat bastard.”

  The route to the PT suite didn’t require a leader, and once they got into the gym, it was hard not to count the yards Blay put between them as soon as he could.

  “You can go now,” Blay said as they came up to the door marked EQUIPMENT ROOM/PT. “I’ll manage the cut on my back.”

  “It’s between your shoulder blades.”

  Blay gripped the knob and went again with the noise in the back of his throat. And this time it was definitely not a me-too kind of thing.

  “Be reasonable,” Qhuinn said.

  Blay’s eyes stared straight ahead. After a moment, he opened the door. “Wash your hands first. Before you touch me, I want you to wash your hands.”

  As they went in, the guy made a beeline for the gurney that Qhuinn had been operated on the night before last.

  “We should get a time-share on this bitch,” Qhuinn said as he glanced around the tiled room with its stainless-steel cabinets and medical equipment.

  Blay popped himself up on the table, shrugged out of his shirt, and winced as he looked down at the barely closed bleeders on his chest. “Shit.”

  Qhuinn let out all the breath in his lungs and just stared at his friend. The guy’s head hung off his neck as he examined where he’d been cut, and he was beautiful like that, his shoulders wide, the pads of his pecs thick, his arms corded with muscle. What made him all the more appealing, though, was his self-contained reserve.

  Hard not to wonder what was underneath all that modesty. Qhuinn got on with the nurse shit, grabbing some gauze, tape, and antiseptic wash from the cabinets, then putting it all on a push tray and scooting the lot over to the gurney.

  With the supplies gathered, he went over to the stainless-steel sink and pressed the foot pedal to get the water running.

  While he washed his hands, he said quietly, “If I could, I would.”

  “Excuse me?”

  Qhuinn pumped some suds into his palms and scrubbed all the way up his forearms. Which was overkill, but if Blay wanted him superclean, then that was what he was going to be. “If I could love a guy like that, it would be you.”

  “Yeah, on second thought, I’ll work on myself and to hell with my back—”

  “I’m serious.” He released the pedal to stop the water running, and shook his hands over the sink. “You think I haven’t thought about it? Being with you, that is. And not just for the sex shit.”

  “You have?” Blay whispered above the dripping.

  Qhuinn dried his hands on a stack of blue surgical towels to the left and took one with him as he went over to Blay. “Yeah, I have. Hold this under the wounds, would you?”

  Blay did as he was told, and Qhuinn squeezed some wash over the gash on the guy’s sternum.

  “I didn’t know— Motherfucker!”

  “Stings, huh.” Qhuinn went around the table, to
his buddy ’s back. “I’m going to do this one now, and I think you’d better brace yourself. It’s even deeper.”

  Qhuinn put another towel under the wound and hit it with shit that smelled like Lysol. As Blay hissed, he winced. “It’ll be over in a second.”

  “Bet you say that to all the—” Blay stopped right there.

  “Nah. I don’t say that to anyone. They take me as I come. They can’t handle it, it’s their problem.”

  Picking up a sterile pack of gauze, Qhuinn tore the thing open and pressed the white weave against the wound between Blay’s shoulder blades. “I’ve absolutely thought about us . . . but I see myself with a female long-term. I can’t explain it. It’s just the way it’s going to be.”

  Blay’s rib cage expanded and compressed. “Maybe because you don’t want another defect?”

  Qhuinn frowned. “No.”

  “You sure about that.”

  “Look, if I cared what people thought, do you think I’d do what I do already?” He went around and blotted the slice on Blay’s chest, then tended to the wound on his shoulder. “Besides, my family’s dead. Who’ve I got to impress anymore?”

  “Why were you so cruel?” Blay asked in a dignified voice. “Back in the tunnel at my place.”

  Qhuinn picked up a tube of neomycin and went around to his buddy’s back again. “I was pretty sure I wasn’t coming back, and I didn’t want you ruining your life over me. Figured it was better for you to hate me than miss me.”

  Blay laughed for real, and the sound was nice. “You are so arrogant.”

  “Duh. But it’s true, isn’t it.” Qhuinn smoothed the milky ointment onto the break in Blay’s skin. “You would have.”

  As he came back around in front, Blay lifted his head and his eyes. Their stares met, and Qhuinn reached out and put his palm on his friend’s cheek.

  Rubbing his thumb gently back and forth, he whispered, “I want you with someone who’s going to be worthy of you.

  Treat you right. Be only with you. I’m not that guy. Even if I settled with a female . . . shit, I tell myself I could be with just her, but in my heart of hearts, I don’t really believe that.”

  The yearning in the blue eyes staring up at him broke his heart. It totally did. And he couldn’t imagine what it was that Blay saw in him that made him so special.

  “What is wrong with you,” he whispered, “that you care so much about me?”

  Blay’s sad smile added about a million years to his age, lining his face with the kind of knowledge that came only after life kicked you in the nuts a number of times. “What is wrong with you that you can’t see why I would?”

  “We’re going to have to agree to disagree on that.”

  “Promise me something?”

  “Anything.”

  “Leave me if you want, but don’t do it for my own good. I’m not a child, and I don’t break easily, and what I feel is none of your goddamned business.”

  “I thought I was doing the right thing.”

  “You weren’t. So promise me?”

  Qhuinn exhaled hard. “Fine, I promise. As long as you swear you’ll look for someone real, okay?”

  “You’re real to me.”

  “Swear to it. Or I’m going to do that I-am-an-island bit again. I want you open to meeting someone you can really have.”

  Blay’s hand crept up Qhuinn’s forearm and squeezed his wrist, the pact becoming solid on both sides. “Okay . . . all right. But it’s going to be a guy. I’ve tried females, and it just doesn’t feel right.”

  “As long as you’re happy. Whatever makes you happy.”

  As the tension eased between them, Qhuinn wrapped his arms around his friend and held him close, trying to absorb the male’s sadness, wishing there were another way for them.

  “I suppose this is for the best,” Blay said into his shoulder. “You can’t cook.”

  “See? I’m so not Prince Charming.”

  Qhuinn could have sworn Blay whispered, “Yes, you are,” but he wasn’t sure.

  They pulled apart, looked into each other’s eyes . . . and something shifted. In the silence of the whole training center, in the vast privacy of the moment, something changed.

  “Just once,” Blay said softly. “Do it just once. So I’ll know what it’s like.”

  Qhuinn started to shake his head. “No . . . I don’t think—”

  “Yes.”

  After a moment, Qhuinn slid both his hands up Blay’s thick neck and captured the male’s sturdy jaw in his palms. “You sure?”

  When Blay nodded, Qhuinn tilted his friend’s head back and to the side and held it in place as he slowly closed the distance. Just before their mouths touched, Blay’s eyelashes fluttered down and he trembled and—

  Oh, it was sweet. Blay’s lips were incredibly sweet and soft.

  The tongue probably wasn’t supposed to be part of it, but there was no helping that. Qhuinn licked inside and then sank deep as his arms slipped around Blay and held him hard. When he finally lifted his head, the look in Blay’s eyes said he would let anything happen between them. Let it all happen.

  They could take this spark between them all the way home until they were both naked and Qhuinn was doing what he did best to his buddy.

  But things would never be the same after that, and that was what stopped him, in spite of the fact that he suddenly wanted exactly what Blay did. “You’re too important to me,” he said roughly. “You’re too good for the kind of sex I have.”

  Blay’s eyes lingered on Qhuinn’s mouth. “At this moment, I would so disagree with that.”

  As Qhuinn let go of the guy and stepped back, he realized it was the first and only time he’d ever turned someone down. “No, I’m right. I’m so fucking right about this.”

  Blay took a deep breath, then braced his arms against the gurney and seemed to try to collect himself. He laughed a little. “I can’t feel my feet or my hands.”

  “I’d offer to rub them, but . . .”

  Blay’s glance under his lashes was damned sexy. “You’d be tempted to rub something else of mine?”

  Qhuinn grinned. “Fucker.”

  “Fine, fine. Be that way.” Blay reached over for the antiseptic, put some on his chest, then covered the wound with gauze, which he taped in place. “Will you take care of covering up the one in back?”

  “Yeah.”

  As he hit the raw patch with some gauze, Qhuinn imagined someone touching Blay’s skin . . . running their hands over him, easing the kind of ache a male got between his thighs.

  “One thing, though,” Qhuinn murmured.

  “What?”

  The voice that came out of his throat was unlike anything he’d ever heard from himself before. “If any guy breaks your heart or treats you like shit, I will bust him apart with my bare hands and leave his broken, bloody body for the sun.”

  Blay’s laughter rumbled around the tiled walls. “Of course you will—”

  “I’m dead fucking serious.”

  Blay’s blue eyes shot over his shoulder.

  “If there are any who dare to hurt you,” Qhuinn growled in the Old Language, “I shall see them staked afore me and shall leave their bodies in ruin.”

  At his great camp in the Adirondacks, Rehvenge was desperately trying to get warm. Bundled in a thick terry cloth robe, with a mink blanket over his body, he was stretched out on a couch a mere five feet from the flames of a crackling fire.

  The room was among his favorites in the huge, barny house, its grumpy Victorian décor of garnet and gold and deep blue often suiting his mood. Funny, he’d always thought a dog would look good by the massive stone fireplace. A retriever of some sort. God, maybe he would get a dog. Bella had always liked dogs. Their mother hadn’t, though, so there had never been one in the family house in Caldwell.

  Rehv frowned and thought of his mother, who was staying at another of the family homes about a hundred and fifty miles away. She hadn’t recovered yet from Bella’s abduction. Probably
never would. Even all these months later, she didn’t want to leave the country, although given the state of Caldwell, that wasn’t a bad thing.

  She was going to die in the house she was in now, he thought. Likely within the next couple years. Old age was upon her, her biological clock starting to race to the finish line, her hair already having gone white.

  “Got more wood,” Trez said as he came in with an arm-load of logs. The Moor went over to the fireplace, moved the screen out of the way, and stoked the blaze until it roared even brighter.

  Which was pretty whacked for August.

  Ah, but this was August in the Adirondacks. Plus he was double-loaded on dopamine, so he had about the same sensory perception and core temperature as petrified wood.

  Trez put the screen back in place and looked over his shoulder. “Your lips are blue. You want me to make you some coffee?”

  “You’re a bodyguard, not a butler.”

  “And we’ve got how many people standing around here with silver trays?”

  “I can get it.” Rehv went to sit up, and his stomach lurched. “Fuck.”

  “Lie back down before I knock you out.”

  As the guy left, Rehv resettled against the cushions, hating the aftermath of what he did to the Princess. Hating it. He just wanted to forget the whole thing, at least until next month. Unfortunately, the shit was on an endless play loop in his head. He saw what he’d done in that cabin tonight over and over again, saw himself jerk off to seduce the Princess and then fuck her at that windowsill.

  Variations on that perversion had been his sex life for how long now? Shit . . .

  He wondered briefly what it would be like to have someone he cared about but he shelved that fantasy pretty damn quick. The only way he could have sex was if he was off his meds—so the only person he could be with was a symphath , and there was no way in hell he was going to warm up to one of those females. Sure, he and Xhex had tried it out, but that had been a disaster on a lot of levels.