The Black Dagger Brotherhood Novels 5-8

by J. R. Ward

  How long would the Brothers let her personal items sit out? she wondered. How long before her few belongings, whether they were at the Brotherhood mansion or her hunting cabin or her basement place, got relegated to nothing but clutter? Two weeks was probably approaching the outside limit—although as no one except John knew about her underground crash pad, that stuff would linger far longer.

  After a couple of weeks, her shit would no doubt be shoved into a closet. Then a small box in the attic.

  Or maybe it would simply be pitched into the trash.

  That was what happened when people died, though. What had been a possession became litter—unless the shit was adopted by someone else.

  And it wasn’t like there was a great demand for cilices.

  Turning off the water, she got out, toweled off, and went back into the bedroom. Just as she sat down by the window, the door opened and the little lesser who ran the kitchen came in with a tray full of food.

  He always seemed confused as he put what he’d prepared down on the bureau and looked around—like after all this time, he still had no clue why in the hell he was leaving hot meals in an empty room. He also inspected the walls, tracing the fresh dings and streaks of black blood. Given how tidy he seemed, no doubt he wanted to pull a DIY: When she’d first come here, the silk paper had been in perfect shape. Now, the stuff looked like it had been put through the wringer.

  As he went over to the bed and straightened the scrambled duvet and scattered pillows, he left the door wide open and she stared out into the hall and down the stairs.

  No reason to make a run for it. And tackling him hadn’t worked, either. Nor had going the symphath route, because she was blocked mentally as well as physically.

  All she could do was watch him and wish she could get at him somehow. God, this impotent drive to kill must be the same for zoo lions when their keepers entered their cage with the brooms and the eats: The other guy could come and go and change your environment, but you were stuck.

  Kind of made you want to bite down on something.

  After he left, she went over to the food. Getting angry at the steak wasn’t going to help her and she needed the calories to fight back, so she ate everything there was. To her tongue, the shit all tasted like cardboard and she wondered whether she would ever again have something because she wanted to and liked the way it was seasoned.

  The whole food-as-fuel thing was logical, but sure as hell didn’t give you anything to look forward to during mealtime.

  When she was finished, she went back to the window, settled in the wing chair, and brought her knees up against her breasts. Staring down into the street, she was not at rest, but merely motionless.

  Even after all these weeks, she was looking for an escape . . . and she would be that way until she drew her last breath.

  Again, like her urge to fight Lash, the drive was not just a function of her circumstance, but who she was as a female, and the realization made her think of John.

  She had been so determined to get away from him.

  She thought of when they’d been together—not the last time, when he’d paid her back for all the rejection, but the other one at her basement place. After the sex, he’d made a move to kiss her . . . clearly, he’d wanted more than just a quick, hard fuck. Her response? She’d pulled away and gone into the bathroom, where she’d washed herself off as if he’d dirtied her. Then she’d hit the door.

  So she didn’t blame him for the way their last good-bye had gone.

  She glanced around her dark green prison. She was probably going to die here. Probably soon, too, as she hadn’t taken a vein in a while and she was under a great deal of physical and emotional stress.

  The reality of her own demise made her think of the many faces she’d stared down into as lives had leached out of bodies and souls went soaring free. As an assassin, death had been her job. As a symphath, it had been a kind of calling.

  The process had always fascinated her. Every one of the people she’d killed had fought the tide, even though they knew, as she’d stood over them with whatever weapon she’d palmed up still in her hand, that if they managed to pull themselves out of the spiral she was just going to strike again. Hadn’t seemed to matter, though. The horror and the pain had acted as an energy source, food for their fight, and she knew what that felt like. How you struggled to breathe even though you couldn’t get air down your throat. How the cold sweat formed on top of your overheated skin. How your muscles became weak, but you still called on them to move, move, move, damn it.

  Her previous captors had taken her to the brink of rigor mortis a number of times.

  Although vampires believed in the Scribe Virgin, symphaths had no conception of an afterlife. To them, death was an exit ramp not to another highway, but to a brick wall that you slammed into. After which there was nothing.

  Personally, she didn’t buy the whole holy-deity bullshit, and whether that was breeding or intellect, the outcome was the same. Death was lights-out, end of story. For fuck’s sake, she’d seen it up close so many times—after the great struggle came . . . nothing. Her victims had just stopped moving, frozen in whatever position they’d been in when their hearts had halted. And maybe some people died with a smile on their face, but in her experience, that was a grimace, not a grin.

  You’d think if they were getting a boatload of bright white light and kingdom-of-heaven crap, they’d be beaming like they’d won the lottery.

  Except maybe the reason they looked so bitched was less about where they were going and more about where they’d been.

  The regrets . . . you did think about your regrets.

  Aside from the fact that she wished she’d been born under different circumstances, there were two transgressions among her many that weighed more than all the others.

  She wished she’d told Murhder, all those years ago, that she was half-symphath . That way, when she’d been taken up to the colony, he wouldn’t have come to rescue her. He’d have known it was inevitable that the other side of her family would come claim her and he wouldn’t then have ended up where he had.

  She also wished she could go back and tell John Matthew she was sorry. She still would have pushed him away, because that was the only construct under which he wouldn’t have repeated the mistakes of her other lover. But she would have let him know it wasn’t him. It was her.

  At least he was going to be okay in all of this. He had the Brothers and the king of the race to look after him, and, courtesy of her shutting him down, he wasn’t going to do anything stupid.

  She was on her own in this and it was going to play out as it would. Having led a violent life, it was entirely unsurprising that she was going to meet a violent end . . . but true to form, she was sure as fuck going to take out a pound or two of flesh with her on the way to the exit.

  SEVEN

  Shit, they were losing the darkness.

  As John glanced at his watch, the time check was a waste of effort. The sting in his eyes was telling him all he needed to know about how little night they had left.

  Even the promise of daylight was enough to make him blink fast.

  Then again, the activity at the Xtreme Park was winding down for the evening anyway, the drugged-out stragglers getting vertical on the benches or ducking into the public bathrooms for a last fix. Unlike Caldwell’s other parks, this one was open twenty-four/seven, with fluorescent lights on tall poles illuminating the expanse of concrete. Hard to tell what the city planners had been thinking with the round-the-clock business—because that was what they had here. Round-the-clock business. With all the drugs changing hands, the place was like a bar away from the bars down on Trade.

  No lessers, though. Just humans dealing to humans who used in the shadows.

  Still, it was promising. If Lash hadn’t infiltrated the zone yet, he was going to. Even with the cops doing their idle-bys in their marked cars, there was plenty of privacy and plenty of notice. The park was laid out like a huge terrace, wit
h sinkholes in the ground alternating with ramps and jumps. Bottom line was, the people could see the CPD coming and duck behind or into all kinds of shelter.

  And, man, they were trained well. From their vantage point behind the work shed, he and his boys had seen it happen over and over again. Kind of made you wonder why the CPD didn’t send unmarkeds over or infiltrate in plain clothes.

  Or maybe they were doing that already. Maybe there were others who, like John, were invisible to the crowd. Well, not exactly like him and Qhuinn and Blay. There was no way even a fully trained and decorated member of the CPD could present himself as nothing—which was what John and his buddies had been doing for the last three hours. Every time someone passed, they wiped out the memory.

  It was kind of odd to be in a place, but not of it . . . sensed, but not seen.

  “We gonna get ghost?” Qhuinn asked.

  John glanced up at the brightening sky and told himself that in approximately thirteen hours that fucking heat lamp of a sun was going back under wraps and they could take up res in their little hidden corner and wait again.

  Goddamn it.

  “John? Let’s go.”

  For a split second, he almost tore his buddy’s head off, his hands coming up and getting ready to fly through all kinds of fuck-you, you’re-not-my-babysitter shit.

  What stopped him was the fact that just as no amount of waiting around here was going to produce Lash, yelling at Qhuinn wasn’t going to get them closer to a sighting, either.

  He nodded once and took a last look around. There was a single dealer type who seemed to run the show and the kid was hanging out to the very end. His main lean was against the center ramp, which was smart—it meant he could see everything in the park, from the far corners to the road where the cops came and went.

  Kid looked to be about seventeen or eighteen and his clothes were loose on his frame, which was part of the skater style, and also probably a function of his using what he sold. He looked like he needed to be scrubbed with a car brush a couple of times, but he was alert and he was savvy. And he seemed to work alone. Which was interesting. To dominate a drug territory, usually the dealer in question had enforcers to back him up—otherwise he got jumped for either his product or his cash. But this young guy . . . he was by himself the whole time.

  Either he had some serious meat in the shadows, or he was about to get taken down.

  John stood up from where he’d braced himself against the side of the outbuilding and nodded at his boys. Let’s go.

  When he took form again, pea gravel crunched under his shitkickers as his weight became real and a brisk breeze hit him square in the face. The courtyard of the Brotherhood’s mansion was demarcated by the front flank of the house and the tall shoulders of the twenty-foot-high retaining wall that ran all around the property. The white marble fountain in the middle had yet to be filled and jump-started for the warmer months and the half dozen cars that were parked in a row were waiting for action as well.

  The whispered sound of well-oiled gears turning brought his head up. In a coordinated descent, the steel shutters were coming down over the windows, the panels unfurling and covering the leaded glass panes like the lids of many eyes closing for sleep.

  He dreaded going inside. Even though there must be upward of fifty rooms to wander through, the fact that he was going to have to stay put until sundown made the mansion feel like a shoe box.

  As Qhuinn and Blay materialized on either side of him, he walked up the steps to the huge double doors and pushed his way into the vestibule.

  Inside, he presented his mug for viewing in the security camera. Instantly, the lock was popped and he walked into a foyer that was right out of czarist Russia. Malachite and claret marble columns supported a three-story-high painted ceiling. Gold-leafed sconces and mirrors generated and reflected buttery light that further enriched the colors. And that staircase . . . the thing was like a carpeted landing strip that stretched up to the heavens, its golden balustrade splitting at the top to form the anchors of the second floor’s open balcony.

  His father had spared no expense and obviously had a flair for the dramatic. All you needed was orchestral backup and you could imagine a king floating down in robes—

  Wrath appeared at the top, his huge body clothed in black leather, his long black hair falling around his tremendous shoulders. His wraparound sunglasses were in place, and although he was at the head of a vast expanse of fall-on-your-ass, he didn’t look down. No reason to. His eyes were now utterly blind.

  But he was not sightless. At his side, George had things covered. The Seeing Eye dog was in control of the king, the two united through the harness that went around the golden retriever’s chest and haunches. They were the ultimate Mutt and Jeff, a canine Good Samaritan with beauty-contestant looks and a brutal warrior who was obviously capable of tearing your throat open on a whim. But they worked well together and Wrath was pretty much in love with his animal: The dog was treated like the royal pet he was—to hell with even Iams; George ate whatever his master did, which meant prime cuts of beef and lamb. And word was that the retriever slept in bed with Beth and Wrath—although that had yet to be independently verified, as no one was allowed in the First Family’s quarters.

  As Wrath started down for the foyer, he walked with a limp, the result of something he did over on the Far Side at the Scribe Virgin’s. No one knew who he saw or why he sported a black eye or a split lip on a regular basis, but everyone, even John, was glad for the sessions. They kept Wrath on an even keel and away from the field.

  With the king descending, and some of the other Brothers coming through the door John had just used, he had to make his escape. If those Shadows had sensed he had fresh ink, the people gathering for last meal would pick up on it in a heartbeat if they got close enough.

  Fortunately, there was a wet bar in the library and John went there and helped himself to a shot of Jack Daniel’s. The first of many.

  While he started to make deposits into his buzz account, he braced himself against the marble slab and wished like hell he had a time machine—although it was hard to know whether he’d choose to go forward or backward with it.

  “You want any food?” Qhuinn said from the doorway.

  John didn’t look in the guy’s direction, just shook his head and poured some more liquid relief into his squat glass.

  “Okay, I’ll bring you a sandwich.”

  With a curse, John pivoted around and signed, I said no.

  “Roast beef? Good. And I’ll hitch you some carrot cake. Tray’ll be left in your room.” Qhuinn turned away. “If you wait about five more minutes in here, everyone will be seated at the table, so you’ll have a clear shot up the stairs.”

  The guy took off, which meant short of braining him with the glass, there was no other way of expressing his I-am-an-island opinion.

  Although really, that would just be a waste of good booze—Qhuinn was so hardheaded, you could have hit his frontal lobe with a crowbar and made no impression on him whatsoever.

  Fortunately, the alcohol began to take effect, its numb blanket settling on John’s shoulders first before sweeping up and down his body. The shit did nothing to quiet his mind, but his bones and muscles did ease out.

  After waiting the suggested five minutes, John took his drink and his bottle and hit the stairs two at a time. As he ascended, the subdued voices from the dining room followed him, but that’s all there was. Lately, there hadn’t been much to laugh about over meals.

  When he got to his room, he opened the door and walked into a jungle. There were clothes draped on every conceivable surface—the dresser, the wing chair, the bed, the plasma-screen TV. Kind of like his closet had thrown up all over everything. Empty bottles of Jack cluttered up the two side tables by the headboard, and the dead soldiers spread out from there, clustering on the floor and nesting in the twisted sheets and duvet.

  Fritz and his cleaning crew hadn’t been let in for two weeks, and at the rate things
were going, they were going to need a backhoe when he finally threw the doors open to them.

  Undressing, he let his leathers and shirt fall where they did, but his jacket he was careful with. At least until he took his weapons out—then he dumped the thing on the corner of the bed. In the bathroom, he double-checked his two blades and then he swiftly cleaned his guns with the kit that he just left out by the second sink.

  Yeah, he’d let his standards slide lower than even frat-boy levels, but his weapons were different. Utility had to be maintained.

  His shower was quick, and as he worked the soap over his chest and abs, he thought back to the time when even the brush of warm water over his cock was enough to make him hard. No more. He hadn’t had an erection . . . since the last time he’d been with Xhex.

  He just didn’t have the interest—even in his dreams, which was a new one. Hell, before his transition, when he wasn’t supposed to have any awareness of his sexuality, his subconscious had kicked up all sorts of hot and heavy. And those sex-fests had been so real, so detailed, it was as if they were memory and not REM-induced fabrications.

  Now? All that played on his internal screen was Blair Witch Project chase scenes where he was running in a jerky panic but didn’t know what was after him . . . or whether he would ever get to safety.

  When he came out of the bathroom, he found a tray with a roast beef sandwich and a big-as-your-head wedge of carrot cake on it. Nothing to drink, but Qhuinn knew that he was taking his liquid refreshment from Mr. Daniel alone.

  John ate standing up in front of the bureau, naked as the day he was born, and when the food hit his stomach, it sucked the energy from him, draining everything from his head. Wiping his mouth with the linen napkin, he put the tray out in the hall and then headed for the bathroom, where he brushed his teeth only from habit.

  Lights off in the bath. Lights off in the room.

  Him and the Jack sitting on the bed.

  As exhausted as he was, he was not looking forward to lying down. There was an inverse relationship between his energy level and the distance between his ears and the floor: Even though he was cross-eyed, the second his head hit the pillow, his thoughts were going to start spinning and he was going to end up wide awake and staring at the ceiling, counting hours and aches.