The Black Dagger Brotherhood Novels 5-8

by J. R. Ward

  Darius focused on what he could see of the manse next door. “We shall do that. In one manner . . . or another.”

  For their sakes, he prayed that the humans in that estate had not dared to take one of theirs. The other race was to be avoided, by the king’s orders, but if they had the temerity to aggress upon a vampire? And a noble female at that?

  Darius would slaughter each one of them in their beds and leave the bodies to rot into a stench.

  THIRTY-ONE

  Gregg Winn woke up with Holly curled against him, her lush fake breasts a pair of twin pillows pressing into his side.

  A quick glance at the clock and he saw that it was seven a.m. Might as well get packed and head for Atlanta.

  “Holly.” He nudged her with his hand. “Wake up.”

  She let out something close to a purr and stretched, her body arching into his and turning his morning hard-on into a raw need that he was inclined to do something about. Memories of how she’d ended up in his bed curbed that impulse quickly, though.

  Proving that he was a gentleman in some ways.

  “Holly. Come on. Wakey-wakey.” He pushed her hair back and smoothed it down her shoulder. “If we get a move on, we’ll be in Atlanta by late afternoon.”

  Which, considering he’d cost them a day chasing after this Rathboone thing, was going to come in handy.

  “Okay. I’m up. I’m up.”

  Actually, he was the only one of the two who got vertical. Holly just nestled into the warm space he’d left and went right back to sleep.

  He took a shower and then filled up his suitcase as loudly as he could but she was dead to the world. Not so much asleep as in a coma.

  He was just about to go a round with Stan, who was even worse at the whole rousing thing, when a knock sounded on the door.

  Could the stoner fool already be awake?

  Gregg started talking to his cameraman as he opened the door. “Listen, let’s pack up the van—”

  It was the tight-ass butler. Looking as if someone had dumped red wine all over his couch.

  Gregg lifted his palm. “We’re leaving, okay. We’re taking off. Just give us—”

  “The owner has decided to allow you to film here. For your special.”

  Gregg blinked like an idiot. “Excuse me?”

  The butler’s tone grew even more disgusted. If that was possible. “The owner spoke to me this morning. He said you are permitted to host your show herein.”

  One day too late, Gregg thought with a curse to himself. “Sorry. My team and I are—”

  “Thrilled,” Holly finished for him.

  As he glanced over his shoulder, his narrator was pulling her robe into place and getting off the bed.

  “That’s great news,” she said pointedly while smiling at the butler.

  Who seemed to be yo-yoing between disapproval and enchantment at the sight of her all fuzzy and warm and au naturel.

  “Very well then,” the butler said, after he cleared his throat. “Do let me know if you need anything.”

  With a bow, he disappeared down the hall.

  Gregg shut the door. “I thought you wanted out of here.”

  “Well . . . I was safe with you, right?” She sidled up to him, stroking his chest. “I’ll just stay with you.”

  The satisfaction in her voice made him suspicious. “Did you play me. About that whole sex thing with . . . whoever it was?”

  She shook her head without hesitation. “No . . . but I truly think it was all a dream.”

  “What about the fact that you said you’d actually had sex.”

  Her plucked brows furrowed as if she were trying to see through frosted glass. “It’s just too hazy to have been real. Last night, I was totally confused, but in daylight . . . it all seems silly.”

  “You were pretty sure when you came in here.”

  She shook her head slowly. “Nothing except a really vivid, incredible dream . . . it didn’t actually happen.”

  He searched her face and found nothing but certainty.

  Abruptly, she put her hand up to her temple. “Do you have any aspirin?”

  “Headache?”

  “Yeah. It just came on.”

  He went over and took his dopp kit out of his suitcase. “Listen, I’m willing to give it a shot here, but if we decide to stay, there’s no pulling out. We need to fill our time slot, so we can’t just bolt for Atlanta in a day or two.”

  Frankly, they were already in last-minute land.

  “I understand,” she said as she sat on the bed. “I absolutely get it.”

  Gregg brought her the aspirin, then went into the bathroom and snagged her a glass of water. “Listen, why don’t you go back to bed. It’s early yet and Stan’s no doubt still passed out.”

  “What are you going to do.” She yawned as she handed him back the Bayer and the empty glass.

  He nodded to his laptop. “I’ll take this downstairs to the living room and start going through the footage we captured last night. It should have all uploaded from the remote cameras.”

  “Stay here?” she asked as she shifted her manicured toes under the sheets.

  “You sure?”

  Her smile as she put her head down on the pillow revealed her perfect caps . . . and the sweet side of her personality. “Yes. I’ll sleep better, plus you smell nice after your shower.”

  Man, she had some kind of way about her: With her looking up from his bed like that, it would have taken an army to drag him out of the room.

  “Okay. Go to sleep, Lolli.”

  She smiled at the pet name he’d given her after he’d first started sleeping with her. “I will. And thank you for staying with me.”

  As she closed her eyes, he went over to the wing chair by the window and fired up his laptop.

  The feeds from the tiny cameras they’d hidden out in the hall and downstairs in the living room and outside in the big oak next to the porch had indeed uploaded.

  Given what had happened, he wished like hell they’d put a remote in Holly’s room, but that was the thing. As ghosts didn’t actually exist, why would they have bothered? The shots had been taken just for selling the atmosphere of the place . . . and for doctoring up later when it came time to “call forth the spirits of the house.”

  As he started to look through the images that had been captured, he realized he’d been doing this for how long? Two years? And he had yet to actually see anything or hear anything that couldn’t be explained.

  Which was fine. He wasn’t trying to prove the existence of spirits. He was out to sell entertainment.

  The only thing he’d learned in the past twenty-four months was that it was a good job lying had never been a problem for him. Matter of fact, his total comfort with falsity was why he was a perfect television producer: It was all about the goal for him and the particulars, whether they were locations, talent, agents, home owners or whatever was on film or tape, were nothing but soup cans in a cupboard to be positioned at his will. To get the job done, he’d lied about contracts and dates and times and images and sounds. He’d fudged and misled and threatened with fallacies.

  He’d manufactured and cued up and—

  Gregg frowned and leaned into the screen.

  Moving the cursor to the rewind button on the Windows Media Player, he replayed the segment that had been recorded in the hallway.

  What he saw was a dark shape moving along the corridor outside their bedrooms and . . . disappearing into Holly’s. The time on the lower right-hand corner: 12:11 a.m.

  Which was just about forty-five minutes before she came to him.

  Gregg replayed the segment, watching that huge shadow walk down the center of the dimly lit hallway, blocking the illumination that came in through the window at the far end.

  In his mind, he heard Holly’s voice: Because I had sex with him.

  Anger and anxiety swirling in his head, he let the recording play on, the minutes ticking by in that right-hand corner. And then there it was, someo
ne leaving Holly’s room, stepping out, blocking the light, about thirty minutes later.

  The figure headed off the opposite way it came almost as if it knew where the camera had been mounted and didn’t want to show its face.

  Just as Gregg was getting ready to call the local police . . . the damn thing disappeared into thin air.

  What. The. Fuck.

  THIRTY-TWO

  John Matthew came awake, sensed Xhex beside him, and panicked.

  Dream . . . was this a dream?

  He sat up slowly, and when he felt her arm slip down his chest to his belly, he caught it before it hit his hips. God, what he held with care was warm and weighted and . . .

  “John?” she said into a pillow.

  Without thinking, he curled around her and smoothed her short hair. The instant he did, she seemed to fall right back to sleep.

  A quick look at his watch told him it was four in the afternoon. They’d slept for hours, and if the growl in his stomach was anything to go by, she must be starving as well.

  When he was sure she was out like a light again, he slipped free of her hold, and moved around quietly, writing her a quick note before drawing on his leathers and T-shirt.

  In his bare feet, he padded out into the hall. Everything was quiet because there was no training here anymore, and that was a damn shame. There should have been shouts of sparring from the gym and the drone of lectures in the classroom and the slam of lockers being shut in the showers.

  Instead, silence.

  But he and Xhex weren’t alone, as it turned out.

  When he got to the office’s glass door, he froze with his hand on the pull.

  Tohr was asleep at the desk . . . well, on it. His head was down on his forearm and his shoulders were slumped.

  John was so used to feeling anger toward the guy, it was a shock to have nothing of the sort light him up. Instead . . . he felt a crushing sadness.

  He’d woken up next to Xhex this morning.

  But Tohr was never, ever getting that again. He was never going to roll over and smooth Wellsie’s hair. He was never going to go to the kitchen to bring her something to eat. He was never going to hug her or kiss her.

  And he’d lost a baby along the way.

  John opened the door and expected the Brother to snap up, but Tohr didn’t. The male was out cold. Made sense, though. He’d been busy getting back into shape, eating and working out twenty-four/seven, and the effort was showing. His pants no longer hung off him and his shirts weren’t sagging. But clearly the process was exhausting.

  Where was Lassiter? John wondered as he went by the desk and into the closet. The angel usually stuck pretty close to the Brother.

  Ducking into the hidden door in the supply shelves, he walked through the tunnel toward the house. As he went, the fluorescent lights in the ceiling stretched out far, far ahead of him, giving the impression of a predestined path—which considering how things were going was a comfort. When he came to a shallow set of stairs, he mounted them, entered a code, and went up another flight. Emerging into the foyer, he heard the TV in the billiard room and figured that was where the angel was.

  No one else in the house would be watching Oprah. Not without a gun to his head.

  The kitchen was empty, the doggen no doubt catching some food in their own quarters before they had to get First Meal made and set for the household. Which was just as well. He really didn’t want help.

  Moving fast, he snagged a basket from the pantry and filled the bitch up to the gunwales. Bagels. Thermos full of coffee. Jug of OJ. Cut fruit. Danish. Danish. Danish. Mug. Mug. Glass.

  He was going for high calories and praying she liked sweets.

  On that note, he made a turkey sandwich, just in case.

  And for a different reason he slapped together a ham and cheese.

  Striding out through the dining room, he headed back for the door beneath the grand staircase—

  “Lot of food for two,” Lassiter said, his usual smart-ass routine dialed down.

  John wheeled around. The angel was in the doorway to the billiard room, lounging against the ornate archway. He had one boot crossed over the other and his arms linked across his chest. His golden piercings glinted, giving the impression there were eyes all over him, eyes that missed nothing.

  Lassiter smiled a little. “So you’re seeing things from a different angle now, are you.”

  As recently as the night before John would have thrown back a fuck off, but now he was inclined to nod. Especially as he thought of the cracks in the hallway concrete that had been caused by the pain Tohr had been through.

  “Good,” Lassiter said, “and about damned time. Oh, and I’m not with him at the moment because everyone needs to be alone. Plus I got to have my O fix.”

  The angel turned away, his blond-and-black hair swinging. “And you can shut it. Oprah’s awesome.”

  John shook his head and found himself smiling. Lassiter might be a metrosexual pain in the ass, but he’d brought Tohr back to the Brotherhood and that was worth something.

  Through the tunnel. Out the back of the closet. Into the office where Tohr was still asleep.

  As John stepped up to the desk, the Brother woke up on a full-body spasm, his head whipping off the desk. Half of his face was mashed in, as if someone had hit him with a round of spray starch and ironed his shit badly.

  “John . . .” he said roughly. “Hey. You need anything?”

  John reached into the basket and took out the ham and cheese. Placing it on the desk, he slid it toward the male.

  Tohr blinked as if he’d never seen two slices of rye pulling a cinch on some meat before.

  John nodded down at it. Eat, he mouthed.

  Tohr reached out and placed his hand on the sandwich. “Thanks.”

  John nodded, his fingertips lingering on the surface of the desk. His good-bye was a quick knock of his knuckles. There was too much to be said in the little time he had, his big concern being that Xhex not wake up alone.

  When he hit the door, Tohr said, “I’m really glad you got her back. I’m so damned glad.”

  As the words drifted over to him, John’s eyes latched onto those cracks out in the corridor. That would have been him, he realized. If Wrath and the Brothers had rolled up to his door with bad news about his female, instead of the good kind, he’d have reacted the exact same way Tohr had.

  Tore up from the floor up. Followed by a big outtie.

  Over his shoulder, John looked at the pale face of the male who had been his savior, his mentor . . . the closest thing to a father he’d ever known. Tohr had gained weight but his face was still hollow and maybe that would never change, no matter how many meals he ate.

  As their stares locked, John had the sense that the pair of them had been through so much more than just the sum of years they’d known each other.

  John put the basket down at his feet. I’m taking Xhex out tonight.

  “Yeah?”

  I’m going to show her where I grew up.

  Tohr swallowed hard. “You want the keys to my house?”

  John recoiled. He’d meant just to include the guy in what was doing with him, kind of a toe-in-the-pool thing to mending shit between them.

  I didn’t expect to take her there—

  “Go. It would be good for you to check it out. The doggen get over there just once a month, maybe twice.” Tohr shifted and pulled open one of the desk drawers. As he took out a key fob, he cleared his throat. “Here.”

  John caught the keys and made a fist around them, shame constricting his chest. He’d been busy shitting on the guy lately and, even still, the Brother manned up and offered what had to be a killer for him?

  “I’m glad you and Xhex have found each other. It makes cosmic sense, it truly does.”

  John shoved the keys in his pocket to free up his hand. We’re not together.

  The smile that briefly showed on the guy’s face seemed ancient. “Yeah, you are. You two are meant to be together.
”

  Jesus, John thought, guess his bonding scent was obvious. Still, there was no reason to go into all the why-nots that were surrounding the pair of them.

  “So, you going to Our Lady?” When John nodded, Tohr reached down to the floor and picked up a Hefty bag. “Take this with you. It’s drug money confiscated from that brownstone. Blay brought it back. Figure they could use it.”

  As Tohr got to his feet, he left the loot on the desk and picked up the sandwich, peeling back the Saran Wrap, and taking a bite.

  “Good work with the mayo,” he murmured. “Not too much. Not too little. Thanks.”

  Tohr headed for the closet.

  John whistled softly and the Brother stopped, but didn’t turn around. “It’s okay, John. You don’t have to say anything. Just be safe out there tonight,’kay?”

  With that Tohr ducked out of the office, leaving John alone in the wake of a kindness and dignity he could only hope to live up to someday.

  As the closet door closed, he thought . . . he wanted to be like Tohr.

  Heading out into the corridor, it was funny to have that running through his brain again, and its return kind of righted the world: Ever since he’d first met the guy, whether it was the Brother’s size, or his intelligence, or the way he treated his female, or how he fought, or even the deep sound of his voice . . . John had wanted to be like Tohr.

  This was good.

  This was . . . right.

  As he walked down to the recovery room, he wasn’t exactly looking forward to tonight. After all, the past was oftentimes better left buried . . . especially his, because it stank.

  But the thing was, he had a better chance at keeping Xhex from tearing off after Lash this way. She was going to need another night, maybe two, before she was at her full strength. And she should feed again at least one more time.

  This way, he would know where she was and keep her by his side for the evening.

  No matter what Tohr believed, John wasn’t fooling himself. Sooner or later, she was going to bolt and he wasn’t going to be able to stop her.

  On the Far Side, Payne strolled around the Sanctuary, her bare feet tickled by the springy green grass, her nose filled with the scents of honeysuckle and hyacinth.