by J. R. Ward
Wrath is headed for a dark alley to dematerialize to Darius’s when he senses he’s been tracked. It’s a member of the Lessening Society, a group of humans who have sold their souls to become vampire killers. He draws the lesser into the shadows, slits its throat with a martial arts throwing star, and takes its wallet and cell phone. Wrath stabs the lesser through the heart, causing it to disintegrate. Wrath then dematerializes to Darius’s guest chamber. Marissa comes to him and feeds. In their scene, the dynamics of their relationship are very clear. Marissa is very attached to him, hoping that someday he will turn to her and realize that her love is what is missing from his cold, warrior existence. He’s strained by her devotion and loyalty and loathes himself for all he cannot give her. Before he can take her back to her brother’s house, there’s a knock on the chamber door. It’s Darius’s butler. Darius has been killed by a car bomb outside of Screamer’s. Wrath tames his rage so that he can get details and asks Fritz to call the band of brothers together. Before the butler leaves, he gives Wrath an envelope from Darius. When Wrath is alone, he lets out his vengeance, causing a black whirlwind of anger to swirl around him.
When Beth gets home, she takes a forty-five minute shower and finds that though her nerves are shot, her body is recovering. She’s starving. After she eats, she’s sitting with her cat, thinking that she should file a report with the cops, when the phone rings. It’s Jose De La Cruz, one of the policemen who’s taken her under his wing. He tells her about a car bomb that’s just exploded outside a bar downtown. He urges her to be careful when she shows up on the scene because Hard Ass, a.k.a., Homicide Detective Butch O’Neal, is on the case. Though she tries, Beth finds herself unable to talk about what happened for fear of breaking down. She tells Jose she can’t go to the crime scene tonight and has to reassure him that she’s fine when he gets worried about her. After she hangs up, she decides she must make a report after all and heads out, taking pepper spray with her.
The band of brothers show up at Darius’s. Wrath must give the wallet and the cell phone to someone else because he can’t see well enough to go through them. The wallet yields a driver’s license and the cell phone has a call log that one of the brothers says he’ll investigate. The brothers are looking to Wrath for leadership and for once this doesn’t annoy him. He tells them that they are going to go raiding in retaliation. Typically, large scale battles with lessers are to be avoided because the carnage attracts the notice of human police. But Darius’s death can not go un-avenged. The immediate quest for the brothers therefore is to find the nearest Lessening Society training and recruiting facility and take it out. These facilities move often and typically take the form of some kind of legitimate business in the human world as a shield.
When the brothers leave, Wrath takes out Darius’s envelope and opens it. Inside is a sheet of paper and a picture of what appears to be a dark-haired female. Wrath calls Fritz in to read the note to him. Darius has left his mansion, Fritz and his half-breed daughter in Wrath’s care. Wrath curses.
Downtown, Beth arrives at the bomb scene, looking for Jose. She’s not there as a reporter, she’s come to file a report on her attacker so that he can’t hurt some other woman. Jose’s not around but Butch O’Neal comes over, annoyed that she’s arrived on the scene. When he sees her split lip, he pulls her into a quiet corner and demands to know what the hell happened to her face. She prevaricates and asks to talk with Jose. She doesn’t want to relive the trauma of the attack with someone like Hard Ass O’Neal. Butch pressures her and doesn’t back off until she threatens to do an expose on his heavy handed interrogation techniques. He leaves her and she goes back to her apartment in a cab.
An hour or so later, Beth is getting ready for bed when her cat starts acting oddly. He’s pacing in front of the sliding glass door which opens out to the cruddy little courtyard behind her place. A knock on her front door gets her attention. She looks through the peephole and groans. It’s Butch O’Neal. She opens the door and he barges in, looking around and taking a seat. Earlier in the night, Butch responded to a report of a guy down and bleeding in an alley off Trade Street. Putting it all together, he’s deduced that Beth was attacked on her way home and he’s come to try and help.
Outside, in the courtyard, Wrath is in the shadows watching. When Beth opens the sliding door to let some air in, he catches her scent and is enthralled. He also recognizes that the change, her transition, is coming on fast. He overhears her and the cop talking.
When Beth finishes recounting her attack, Butch leaves her place and goes to the local emergency department. He finds her assailant, who’s dressed exactly as she described, and does a hard number on young Billy Riddle. At the end of the meeting, Butch has Billy pinned on the floor of the hospital room and is rubbing the kid’s nose into the linoleum. He arrests Billy.
After the cop leaves Beth’s apartment, Wrath comes into her home. He terrifies her so badly, he’s forced to erase the memory of him from her mind so he can try again. Early in the morning, she wakes up from what she assumes is an awful nightmare, grateful that the horrible night is finally over.
Wrath goes back to Darius’s house and down into the guest chamber. He showers and shaves and then takes out a black marble slab. After pouring pebble-sized, rough cut diamonds onto the platform, he knees on the rocks naked, prepared to observe the death ritual in honor of Darius. He will sit in the position unmoving for the whole day and reflect on the proud warrior who’s now gone. Before Wrath goes into his trance, he thinks of Beth and vows that not only will he protect her, he will help her through her transition.
After Butch books Billy Riddle into holding, he leaves his office, headed for his squalid apartment. On the way out, he meets up with a prostitute named Cherry Pie who’s a regular overnight guest in the women’s holding cell. They talk and go their separate ways. On impulse, Butch heads back to the Screamer’s neighborhood and pulls up in front of another bar. A woman comes out and they drive over to the river, parking underneath the bridge over the Hudson River. While the woman is having sex with him, Butch looks out at the river, thinking how beautiful the sunlight on the water is. When she asks him if he loves her, he says, yeah, sure. He knows she doesn’t care that he’s lying and he feels the desperation of his life intensely.
The next scene features the lesser who set up the bomb under Darius’s car. Mr. X is a martial arts instructor working out of an academy in town. He’s decided that to win the war against the vampires, spec ops techniques should be used and he posts the details of his bombing on a secured Lessening Society website. His good mood lasts all day long. When his four o’clock Kung Fu class arrives, he’s still smiling. He’s about to start his students sparing when one comes in late. It’s Billy Riddle. His nose is bandaged and he has to sit out the session. Mr. X lets Billy lead the class’s warm-up.
Towards the end of the day, Beth goes to the police station. Butch tells her that her attacker’s been sprung on bail. Butch has discovered that Billy has a juvenile record and is the son of a powerful businessman. Beth tells him that she will take the stand and testify if the plea bargaining negotiations fall through. When Butch asks her how she’s doing, she deflects his concern by asking about the bombing. He counters by asking her whether she’s had dinner. She tells him she’s not eating with him but he dangles a detail about the bombing in front of her and walks out of the office. She ends up following him.
Across town in Darius’s mansion, Wrath is getting ready to go out when Marissa materializes in his chamber. She’s sensed his pain over his loss and has come to try and ease his suffering. Caught up in his drive to avenge Darius, and his need to get to Beth to talk to her about her transition, Wrath tells Marissa to go home. He goes to Beth’s apartment, and while he waits in the shadows for her, he reflects on his own transition. This flashback is important to establish one of his essential internal conflicts. Prior to his transition, he was a weakling, incapable of protecting his parents when they were slaughtered by lessers in front o
f him. After the deaths of his mother and father, he struck out on his own, unable to bare the reverence with which he was held by other vampires solely by the accident of his birth and his pure blood. When he emerged from the change, his body having mutated into a tower of strength, he was on his way to becoming a warrior. But it would be a cold, hard path.
Beth comes home having found dinner with Butch to be surprisingly relaxing. She changes for bed and gets annoyed with her cat who’s back to pacing and purring at the sliding door. She’s about to get in bed when Wrath comes into her home. This time, he’s smoking a drug which has relaxing properties, and as he exhales into the air, Beth finds that she can’t run from him. Her body won’t move. And then she discovers she’s not all that interested in bolting. As he comes up to her, she’s overwhelmed with lust for him. They end up making love and it’s explosive. An important note: the drug Wrath uses has no aphrodisiac properties, it’s just a relaxant and the reader knows this. I thought it would be very unattractive of him to seduce her with some kind of sex drug and take advantage of her.
Across town, Mr. X heads out into the night. He approaches Cherry Pie and they strike up a deal for sex. In a dark alley, she starts to come on to him and he cuts her throat. His plan is to capture a vampire, using her blood as bait. Sure enough one of them, not a solider but a civilian, approaches. Mr. X shoots him with a tranquilizer gun but it has no affect and the vampire turns on him. Mr. X uses a throwing star in the course of their combat. He prevails against the vampire but is disappointed that his plan failed.
Meanwhile, in the basement laboratory under another mansion in town, Marissa’s brother Havers looks up from his work on vampire blood typing. The grandfather clock in the corner has started to chime. It’s time for a meal and Havers goes to his sister’s room. He finds her staring off into the night and her sorrow cuts at his heart. Marissa is incredibly precious to him, especially since his shellan died. He feels as if, because of his sister’s gentle nature, she needs to be with a civilian male who will care for her, not just use her for her blood. He asks her to come down to eat but she declines. He senses that she’s been to see Wrath, even though she just fed the night before. He asks her why she puts herself through this. She tells him it’s fine. Havers counters that Wrath shows her no respect, no doubt forces her to feed in some back alley. That’s not true, she protests. She tells him that they meet at Darius’s a lot of the time because Wrath stays there. You don’t have to do this to yourself, he says. She doesn’t answer him and he leaves her, feeling his own brand of loneliness as he goes down to a sumptuous table and finds himself having another meal by himself.
In her apartment, Beth stirs when she feels something soft on her face. It’s Wrath. He’s running his fingertips over her features, desperately wishing he could see her. He tells her she’s beautiful and for once the comment doesn’t turn her off. Wrath’s cell phone goes off and he leaves the bed. It’s one of the brothers. There’s a number of businesses in the call log of the phone Wrath lifted off the lesser he’d killed the night before. They’re going to go check them out and want Wrath to come in the event they find a facility and all hell breaks loose.
Wrath starts to dress. Beth watches him and is surprised when her cat, Boo, leaps up into his arm and purrs. A low sound comes out of this menacing man as he purrs back. Beth asks what his name is. He tells her and recites his cell phone number, making her repeat it until she remembers it. He tells her he has to go and may not be able to get back to her tonight but she should call him if she gets followed or if she feels afraid at any time. Wrath drops Boo and straps on a shoulder holster. That’s when it hits her. Obviously, Wrath’s been sent by the boys at the police station to protect her. She asks him if Butch sent him. Wrath comes over and sits next to her. He debates telling her it was her father but he has to meet his brothers and doesn’t want to open that issue without having the time to really talk to her. Wrath kisses her and asks her to come to him in the day. He gives her Darius’s address and she agrees to drop by in the morning. He figures that they’ll be able to talk in the chamber and there’ll be time to answer all of her questions then.
After he leaves, she falls asleep, totally sated. She wakes up in the morning, and when she steps out into the sunlight, her eyes ache. She figures it’s a hangover from whatever he was smoking around her. She goes to her office because it’s too early to go see Wrath. She gets a call from Jose. A prostitute was killed in an alley over night. When Beth arrives at the police station, Butch is there and he tells her that there was a throwing star found in the alley, similar to one found around the car bomb. There’s probably some kind of turf war going on between the pimps, he says. They talk a little more and he asks her out to dinner again. She tells him no but thanks him for sending his friend to her. Butch asks what the hell she’s talking about.
Beth leaves, disturbed by the ramifications of what she did the night before. She’s had sex with a total stranger. Who looks like a trained killer. It felt somehow different if Butch or one of the cops was involved and suddenly the idea of going to some address to meet that man strikes her as foolhardy. Just as night is falling, she calls up Butch and asks him if he still wants to have dinner with her. She doesn’t want to be alone and eating with him is better than being jumpy at home.
At Darius’s house, Wrath’s been prowling around his chamber all day long, waiting for Beth to arrive. And his temper was on a short leash before she blew him off. The night before he and his brothers had cased several places including a monastery, a prep school, a martial arts academy, and a meat packing plant. It wasn’t clear that anything suspicious was going on in any of them. They also went through the dead lesser’s apartment, learning nothing.
The moment the sun goes down, Wrath leaves the mansion and goes on the hunt for Beth through the city. He’s aware as he moves around that he feels fatigued but he shrugs off the sensation, consumed with the need to find her. He ends up waiting for her behind her apartment. When Butch pulls up to the front of the building with her, Wrath senses her presence and approaches the car. Butch leans over to kiss Beth just as Wrath looks inside. Even with his poor eyesight, he recognizes what’s happening. His first instinct is to rip the door off, drag the human male out, and bite him. But he controls himself with discipline and sticks to the shadows. Jealousy and possessiveness are two emotions he’s not real familiar with and he’s surprised at the depth of his feelings.
Beth is not attracted to Butch and tells him so. She gets out of the car and walks across the street to the front door of her building. Butch waits to make sure she gets inside safely, but just before he takes off, he sees a giant of a man heading around to the back courtyard. Butch gets out of the car and follows.
When Beth walks in her apartment, Wrath is at her back door. He’s about to enter when Butch cocks his gun and tells him to freeze. Wrath turns and confronts Butch just as Beth opens the door and runs outside. Butch demands that Wrath put his hands on the building and spread his legs. Wrath toys with the idea of killing the cop but he doesn’t want to terrify Beth. Besides, not even Wrath can survive a bullet to the head fired at point blank range. With Beth looking on, Butch pats Wrath down and starts peeling weapons off him. Daggers, blades, and throwing stars get spread out on the picnic table. Butch tries to get Beth to go inside but she won’t leave. He asks what the hell Wrath was doing casing the building. Wrath says he was just out for a walk. Butch presses Wrath into the wall, drags his arms behind him, and puts cuffs on him. Wrath asks what he’s being arrested for and Butch says concealed weapons, trespassing, stalking, and maybe murder. He tells Wrath that throwing stars like his have been found at two murder sites.
As Butch starts to lead Wrath off, Beth wonders if Wrath killed that prostitute after he left her apartment the night before. She just can’t understand how a man can have such different sides. He was so gentle with her when he held her after they’d made love. She jumps in front of the men and demands a chance to talk with Wrath. Butch tell
s her to go inside and lock her doors. He drags Wrath off with Beth jogging along side. She asks Wrath why he’s come to her. Wrath looks over at her and tells her that her father sent him. She stops, stunned.
Butch puts Wrath in the back of the car and drives him down to the station. Butch keeps an eye on him in the rear view mirror because something tells him that even handcuffed the man is deadly dangerous. They pull up to the back of the station. As Butch gets him out, Wrath steps back into the shadows. Butch is trying to pull him forward when Wrath breaks free of the cuffs like they’re made of twine. Wrath grabs Butch, lifts him off the ground, and holds him against the building. For the first time in his adult life, Butch is sure he’s about to be killed. And how ironic that he can see the window of his office while it’s happening.
Wrath is tempted to end the man’s life but there’s something intriguing about the guy. He’s not terrified as most human males would be. He’s resigned, like he’s looking forward to death, and Wrath sees a little of himself in Butch. Wrath tells Butch that he’s not going to harm Beth. On the contrary, he’s come to save her. At that moment, Beth leaps out of a cab and runs over to them. She tells Wrath to put Butch down. Butch is dropped to the ground, dazed.
Beth is determined to find out about her father and urges Wrath away from the station before Butch regains his wits. She hails a cab and Wrath tells the driver to take them to Darius’s mansion’s neighborhood. He has them dropped off a block or two away and they walk to Darius’s. Fritz, the butler, greets them at the door.
Wrath leads Beth into the drawing room and down to the guest chamber. She’s frightened but determined to learn about her father. Wrath’s bedroom is a foreign place with its spooky black walls and candles but she doesn’t feel as if he presents a danger to her.