The Black Dagger Brotherhood Novels 5-8

by J. R. Ward

  As she looked down at him, his eyes were the most amazing thing she’d ever seen, hypnotic, the color of citrines in firelight. “Yes?”

  “I love you.”

  Her heart clenched. “What?”

  “I love you.” He shook his head and eased back so he was sitting cross-legged. “Oh, Christ . . . I’ve made such a mess out of everything. But I love you. I wanted you to know it because . . . well, shit, because it matters, and because it means I can’t be with the other Chosen. I can’t be with them, Cormia. It’s you or it’s nobody.”

  Her heart sang. For a split second, her heart was flying in her chest, soaring on gusts of joy. This was what she had wanted, this pledge, this reality—

  Her brilliant happiness dimmed as quickly as it flared.

  She thought of the images of the fallen, of the tortured, of the cruelly killed. And the fact that there were now how many fighting Brothers left? Four. Just four.

  Centuries ago their numbers had been in the twenties and thirties.

  Cormia glanced at the bowl in front of her and then at the quill she’d used. There was a very real possibility that at some point in the not-too-distant future there would be no more history to write.

  “You need to go to her, to Layla,” she said in a voice that was flat as the parchment she was going to write on. “And you need to go to them.”

  “Didn’t you hear what I said?”

  “Yes. I did. But this is bigger than you and me.” She stood up, because if she didn’t move around she was going to go mad. “I’m not a Chosen anymore, not in my heart. But I’ve seen what’s happening. The race is not going to survive like this.”

  The Primale rubbed his eyes with a grimace. “I want you.”

  “I know.”

  “If I’m with the others, can you handle that? I’m not sure I can.”

  “I’m afraid . . . I can’t. That’s why I chose this.” She swept her hand around the room. “Here I can have peace.”

  “I can come see you, though. Can’t I?”

  “You’re the Primale. You can do anything.” She paused by one of the candles. Staring into the flame, she asked, “Why did you do what you did?”

  “About becoming the Primale? I—”

  “No. The drug. In the bathroom. You almost died.” When there was no response, she looked over at him. “I want to know why.”

  There was a long silence. And then he said, “I’m an addict.”

  “An addict?”

  “Yeah. I’m proof positive you can come from the aristocracy and have money and position and you can still be a junkie.” His yellow eyes were brutally clear. “And the truth is, I want to be a male of worth and tell you I can stop, but I just don’t know. I’ve made promises to myself and to others before. My words . . . they don’t hold water any longer with anyone, including myself.”

  His word . . .

  She thought of Layla waiting, the Chosen waiting, the whole of the race waiting. Waiting for him.

  “Phury . . . my dearest beloved Phury, live up to one of your promises now. Go and take Layla and bind yourself to us. Give us history to write and to live and to prosper in. Be the strength of the race, as you should be.” As he opened his mouth, she held up her hand to stop him. “You know this is right. You know I am right.”

  After a tense moment, Phury got to his feet. He was pale and unsteady as he straightened his robe. “I want you to know . . . if I’m with anyone else, it’s you in my heart.”

  She closed her eyes. She had been taught all her life to share, but letting him go to another female was like throwing something precious on the ground and stomping it to dust.

  “Go in peace,” she said softly. “And come back with the same. Even if I cannot be with you, I will never deny your company.”

  Phury walked up the knoll to the Primale’s Temple with a foot that felt like it was wrapped in chains. Chains and barbed wire.

  God, along with feeling weighed down, his real foot and ankle were burning like he’d stepped into a bucket of battery acid. He’d never thought he’d be glad he was missing half a leg, but at least he didn’t have to feel that shit in stereo.

  The double doors to the Primale Temple were closed, and as he opened one side, he caught the scent of herbs and flowers. Stepping inside, he stood in the vestibule, sensing Layla in the main room beyond. He knew she would be as Cormia had been: lying on the bed with bolts of white cloth falling from the ceiling and pooling at her throat so that only her body was visible.

  He stared at the white marble steps that led up to the great swath of drapery he would push aside to get at Layla. There were three steps. Three steps up, and then he would be in the open room.

  Phury turned around and sat down on the shallow stairs.

  His head felt odd, probably because he hadn’t had a blunt in like twelve hours. Odd . . . as in strangely clear. Christ, he was actually lucid. And the byproduct of the clarity was a new voice in his mind talking to him. A new and different one that wasn’t the wizard’s.

  It was . . . his own voice. For the first time in so long, he almost didn’t know what it was.

  This is wrong.

  He winced and rubbed the calf he still had. The burn seemed to be traveling upward from his ankle, but at least when he massaged his muscle it seemed a little better.

  This is wrong.

  It was hard to disagree with himself. All his life he had lived for others. His twin. The Brotherhood. The race. And the whole Primale thing was right out of that playbook. He’d spent his whole life trying to be a hero, and now not only was he sacrificing himself, he was sacrificing Cormia as well.

  He thought of her in that room, alone with those bowls and the quills and all that the parchment. Then he saw her up against his body, warm and alive.

  Nope, his inner voice said. I’m not doing this.

  “I’m not going to do this,” he said, rubbing at both his thighs.

  “Your grace?” Layla’s voice came from the other side of the drapery.

  He was about to answer her, when in a rush, the burning sensation swept thoughout his body, taking him over, eating him alive, consuming every inch of him. With shaking arms, he reached out to keep himself from falling backward as his stomach knotted.

  A strangled sound bubbled up his throat, and then he had to work to draw his breath in.

  “Your grace?” Layla’s voice was worried—and closer.

  But there was no replying to her. Abruptly, his whole body turned into a snow globe, the inside of him shaking and sparking with pain.

  What the . . .

  DTs, he thought. It was the fucking DTs, because for the first time in, like, two hundred years his system was without red smoke.

  He knew he had two choices: Poof it back to the other side, find a dealer other than Rehvenge, and keep the addict cord plugged into its current socket. Or bite the fucking bullet.

  And stop.

  The wizard blinked into his mind’s eye, the wraith standing at the forefront of the wasteland. Ah, mate, you can’t do it. You know you can’t. Why even try?

  Phury took a moment to retch. Shit, he felt like he was going to die. He truly did.

  All you have to do is go back to the world and get what you need. You can feel better with the strike of a lighter. That’s all. You can make this go away.

  The shaking was so bad, Phury’s teeth started to knock together like ice cubes in a glass.

  You can stop this. All you need to do is light up.

  “You lied to me once already. You said I could get rid of you, and you are so not gone.”

  Ah, mate, what’s a wee fib between friends?

  Phury thought about the bathroom of that lavender bedroom and what he’d done there. “It’s everything.”

  As the wizard started to get pissed and Phury’s body milk-shaked it something fierce, he stretched out his legs, lay down on the vestibule’s cool marble floor, and got ready for a whole lot of going-nowhere.

  “Shit,” h
e said as he gave himself over to the withdrawal. “This is going to suck.”

  Chapter Forty-six

  John and qhuinn were a couple of yards behind Zsadist as the three of them approached a low-slung modern house. The place was number six on the list of yet-to -be-hit properties, and they stopped in the shadows of a couple of trees at the edge of the lawn.

  Standing there, John had a serious case of the creeps. With its sprawling elegance, it was too much like the home he’d had for such a short time with Tohr and Wellsie.

  Zsadist looked over his shoulder. “You want to stay here, John?”

  When John nodded, the Brother said, “Figured. Creeping me out as well. Qhuinn, you hang with him.”

  Zsadist strode through the darkness, checking windows and doors. As he disappeared around the back of the house, Qhuinn glanced over.

  “Why is this creeping you out?”

  John shrugged. I used to live in something like it.

  “Wow, you had it good as a human.”

  It was after that.

  “Oh, you mean with . . . Right.”

  God, the house must have been built by the same builder, because the facade and the arrangement of rooms was basically the same. Looking at all the windows, he thought of his bedroom. It had been navy blue with modern lines and a sliding glass door. The closet had been barren when he’d arrived, but it had gotten filled with the first new clothes he’d ever had.

  Memories came back, memories of the meal he’d had the night Tohr and Wellsie had taken him in. Mexican food. She’d cooked Mexican food and put it all out on the table, big platters of enchiladas and quesadillas. Back then, when he’d been a pretrans, his stomach had been very delicate, and he could remember feeling mortified that he’d only be able to push the food around his plate.

  Except then Wellsie had put a bowl of white rice with ginger sauce in front of him.

  As she’d taken her chair, he’d wept, just curled his fragile little body into itself and cried for the kindness. After having spent all his life feeling as if he were different, from out of nowhere he’d found someone who knew what he needed and cared enough to give it to him.

  That was a parent, wasn’t it. They knew you better than you knew yourself, and they took care of you when you couldn’t care for yourself.

  Zsadist came back up to them. “Empty and unsacked. Next house?”

  Qhuinn looked at the list. “Four Twenty-five Easterly Court—”

  Z’s phone went off with a soft chime. He frowned as he checked the number, then put the thing up to his ear. “What’s up, Rehv?”

  John’s eyes shifted back to the house, but then returned to Z as the Brother said, “What? Are you kidding me? He showed up where?” Long pause. “You are fucking serious? You’re sure, you’re one hundred percent sure?” When the Brother hung up, Z stared at the phone. “I have to go home. Right now. Shit.”

  What is it? John signed.

  “Can you guys cover the next three addys?” As John nodded, the Brother looked at him strangely. “Keep your phone close, son. You hear me?”

  When John nodded, Z disappeared.

  “Okay, clearly whatever that is, it’s not our biz.” Qhuinn folded up the list and put it in his jeans pocket. “Shall we outtie?”

  John glanced back at the house. After a moment, he signed, I’m sorry about your parents.

  Qhuinn’s reply was a while in coming. “Thanks.”

  I miss mine.

  “I thought you were an orphan?”

  For a while I wasn’t.

  There was a long silence. Then Qhuinn said, “Come on, John, let’s get out of here. We need to hit Easterly.”

  John thought for a minute. You mind if we stop somewhere else first? It’s not far.

  “Sure. Where?”

  I want to go to Lash’s house.

  “Why?”

  I don’t know. I guess I want to see where this all started. And I want to look in his room.

  “How’re we going to get inside, though?”

  If the shutters are still on autotimer, they’ll be up, and we can dematerialize through the glass.

  “Well . . . hell, if that’s where you want to go, okay.”

  The two of them dematerialized to the side yard of the Tudor. The shutters were up for the night, and in a blink they were standing inside the sitting room.

  The smell was so bad, John felt like someone had taken steel wool to the inside of his nose and used the shit like a Q-tip ... all the way to his frontal lobe.

  Covering his mouth and nose, he coughed.

  “Fuck,” Qhuinn said, doing the same.

  The two of them looked down. There was blood all over the carpet and the sofa, the stains brown from having dried.

  They followed the streaks out into the foyer.

  “Oh, Jesus . . .”

  John lifted his head. Through the lovely archway of the dining room was a scene right out of a Rob Zombie movie. The bodies of Lash’s mother and father, seated in what were no doubt their regular chairs, were facing a beautifully set table. Their pallor was that of sidewalk pavement, a pale matte gray, and their fine clothes were like the rugs, streaked in brown.

  There were flies.

  “Man, those lessers are sick, for real.”

  John swallowed down the bile in his throat and walked over.

  “Shit, do you really need a close-up there, buddy?”

  Peering into the room, John forced himself to ignore the horror and note the details. The platter that the roasted chicken was on had blood marks on the edges.

  The killer had put it on the table. After he’d arranged the bodies, most likely.

  Let’s go up to Lash’s room.

  Walking upstairs was totally freaky, because they were alone in the house—but not really. Somehow, the dead downstairs filled the air with something close to sound. Certainly the smell followed John and Qhuinn up the stairwell.

  “His crib’s on the third floor,” Qhuinn said when they got to the second-floor landing.

  They walked into Lash’s bedroom, and it was such a non-event compared to the shock of the living room. Bed. Desk. Stereo. Computer. TV.

  Bureau.

  John went over and saw the drawer with the bloody prints. These were too smudged to tell whether or not a swirl pattern had been left. He picked up a random shirt and used it to open the thing, because that was what they did on the TV shows. Inside, more bloody marks, too smudged to read.

  His heart stopped beating and he bent down closer. There was one print that was especially clear, on the corner of a Jacob & Co. watch box.

  He whistled to bring Qhuinn’s head around. Do lessers leave fingerprints?

  “If they come into contact with something, sure.”

  I mean, do they leave prints, prints. Not just blanks, but, like, stuff with lines.

  “Yeah, they do.” Qhuinn came over. “What are you looking at?”

  John pointed to the box. On the corner was a perfect reproduction of a thumb . . . that had no discernible ridges. Like a vampire’s would.

  You don’t suppose—

  “No. No way. They’ve never turned a vampire.”

  John took out his phone and snapped a picture. Then, on second thought, he took the box itself and put it inside his jacket.

  “We done?” Qhuinn asked. “Make my night and say yes.”

  I just . . . John hesitated. I need a little longer up here.

  “Okay, but I’m going to go through those second-floor bedrooms, then. I can’t . . . I can’t be in here like this.”

  John nodded as Qhuinn left, and felt bad. Jesus, maybe it had been cruel even to ask the guy to come here.

  Yeah . . . because this was fucked-up. Standing around all this shit of Lash’s, it was like he was still alive.

  Across town, behind the wheel of the Focus, Lash was not a happy camper. The car was a piece of shit, for real. Even though they were in residential traffic, the beater still had no pickup. For chrissakes, it was
zero to thirty in three days.

  “We need to upgrade.”

  In the passenger seat, Mr. D was checking his gun, his slim fingers flying over the weapon. “Yeah . . . um, ’bout that.”

  “What.”

  “I think we gonna need to wait ’til the money comes in from the looting.”

  “What the fuck?”

  “I gots me the bank statements, you know, from the last Fore-lesser? That Mr. X? They was in his cabin. And there’s not a ton in there.”

  “Define ‘not a ton.’ ”

  “Well, it’s all gone, basically. I don’t know where and I don’t know who. But there’s about five thousand left.”

  “Five? Are you fucking kidding me?” Lash let the car decelerate. Which was like taking a vegetable off life support.

  Out of money? What the hell? He was like the Prince of Darkness or some shit. And his army’s net worth was five grand?

  Sure, he had his dead family’s money, but as much as that was, he couldn’t wage an entire war with it.

  “Man, fuck this . . . and I’m going back to my old house. I’m not driving this tin-can piss box anymore.” Yeah, he was so over the whole mommy/daddy thing all of a sudden. He needed a new car ASAP, and there was a spank Mercedes parked in that Tudor’s garage. He was going to get in the damn thing and drive it around, and he wasn’t going to feel guilty.

  Fuck the whole vampire thing.

  As he hung a rightie and shot over toward his neighborhood, though, he started to feel sick to his stomach. Except he wasn’t going inside the house, so he wouldn’t have to see the bodies, assuming they were still where he’d left them—

  Shit, he was going to have to go in for the keys.

  Whatever. He needed to grow the fuck up.

  Ten minutes later, Lash pulled up by the garages in back and got out of the car. “Take this to the farmhouse. I’ll meet you there.”

  “You sure I shouldn’t wait?”

  Lash frowned and looked down at his hand. The ring the Omega had given him the night before was warming up on his finger and starting to glow.

  “Looks like your sire done wants ya,” Mr. D said, getting out of the passenger seat.

  “Yeah.” Shit. “How does this work?”

  “You need somewheres private. You gets quiet and he will come to you or take you to him.”