The Black Dagger Brotherhood_An Insider's Guide

by J. R. Ward

  I press the butttttttttton, and a moment later there’s a spark and a flash and a whizzing fizzle that’s like a hundred Alka-Seltzers in a glass. The rocket shoots up to the autumn sky, an arcing trail of light and smoke streaming behind the glowing point at its tip. The angle is perfect, taking it precisely toward the center of the mansion. Its descent is just as smooth, and about three hundred feet from the ground the parachute unfurls. We watch the rocket as it slowly eases down, wagging from side to side like a lazy dog’s tail. In the lights from the library I see that it lands in a rose bed.

  We count it down, and this time we’re coordinated. As we rise to our feet and watch the rocket shoot to the heavens, I can feel that he’s about to say something.

  Butch goes back, gets another rocket, and explains to me the ins and outs of its construction. This one is about the same size as the Lag and is painted black with silver bands. We go about shooting it off, and he’s funny and charming and irreverent, and you’d be hard-pressed to imagine that just minutes before he’d shared something so deeply personal. I assume the serious conversating is done for the night, yet when we launch number three, he returns to the subject of Vishous—as if the rocket’s flaring rise and parachuted fall creates a special zone for talk.

  Butch sets up our last rocket, and this is my favorite of all of them. It’s the biggest and has David Ortiz’s Sox uniform and the words Big Papi painted on the side. We do our countdown and I press the button . . . and there’s the whiz and fizzle as what Butch built goes barreling up to the sky. As I watch the glow at the tip rise, I see that this one is going really high. At its apex, it becomes the only star in the cloudy night sky.

  We stand side by side as the parachute comes out and the rocket drifts back to earth and into the rose garden. As it floats down, swinging gently from side to side, the glow at its tip tells us its location relative to the house . . . and abruptly I know without asking the reason why he likes to aim them toward the mansion. With all the security lights, he could easily find them anywhere on the grounds. But Butch likes home . . . and he wants to send these models he spends hours working on back to where he loves and needs to be. After having been without a family or a place in the world for so long, now he has his parachute, his slow, easy ride after a blistering meteoric rise . . . and it’s the people in that mansion.

  Lover Revealed

  The People:

  Butch O’Neal

  Marissa

  Vishous

  The Scribe Virgin

  The Omega

  Mr. X

  Van Dean

  Wrath and Beth

  Zsadist

  Rehvenge

  John Matthew

  Blaylock

  Qhuinn

  Xhex

  Lash

  Ibex, Lash’s father and the glymera’s Leahdyre

  Havers

  José de la Cruz

  Mother and child

  Joyce (O’Neal) and Mike Rafferty

  Odell O’Neal

  Places of Interest (all in Caldwell, NY, unless otherwise specified):

  The Brotherhood mansion, undisclosed location

  The Tomb, on the mansion property

  Havers’s clinic, undisclosed location

  Brotherhood training center, on the mansion property

  ZeroSum (corner of Trade and Tenth streets)

  The Commodore, luxury high rise

  Blaylock’s bedroom

  Ibex/Lash’s home

  Safe Place, undisclosed location

  Summary:

  Butch O’Neal finds his true destiny as a vampire and a Brother while falling in love with Marissa, a beautiful aristocrat.

  Craft comments:

  Butch O’Neal had me from the moment I first saw him in Dark Lover, when he’s investigating Darius’s bomb scene. This description of him is from Beth’s point of view, and what I liked so much about him was how he tackled his gum:

  “So, Randall, what’s doing?” He popped a piece of gum in his mouth, wadding up the foil into a tight little ball. His jaw went to work like he was frustrated, not so much chewing as grinding.

  —DARK LOVER, p. 26

  Butch’s aggression was palpable, and in my opinion that’s hot. And my attraction to him only deepened when he arrested Billy Riddle, the young guy who attacked Beth on her way home from work. Here, Billy, who maintained Beth “wanted it,” is facedown on the floor in his hospital room, and Butch is reading the kid his Miranda rights while cuffing him:

  “Do you have any idea who my father is?” Billy yelled, as if he’d gotten a second wind. “He’s going to have your badge!”

  “If you can’t afford [an attorney], one will be provided for you. Do you understand these rights as I’ve stated them?”

  “Fuck you!”

  Butch palmed the back of the guy’s head and pressed that busted nose into the linoleum. “Do you understand these rights as I’ve stated them?”

  Billy moaned and nodded, leaving a smear of fresh blood on the floor.

  “Good. Now let’s get your paperwork done. I’d hate not to follow proper police procedure.”

  —DARK LOVER, p. 37

  Butch O’Neal was absolutely my kind of guy—a hard-ass renegade who, although he didn’t always follow the rules, had his own code of honor.

  Plus he’s a Red Sox fan, too, so there you go.

  The heroes in the Brotherhood books are not perfect, not by a long shot: For example, Wrath almost kills Butch in Dark Lover, and Rhage had a sex addiction, and Zsadist was a misogynistic sociopath before he met Bella, and Phury’s got a drug problem. The thing is, however, they have heroic qualities in addition to these faults, and that’s what makes them attractive.

  I write alpha males. Always have. The Brothers, though, are ALPHA males, if that makes sense. Maybe part of it is me getting in touch with rule two (Write Out Loud) such that everything in the BDB books is pushed as far as it can go, including the heroes and their actions. But most of it is golden rule eight (Listen to Your Rice Krispies). The Brothers in my head are just over-the-top, hyperaggressive, and, in my opinion, utterly compelling.

  Butch fits right in with the other heroes in the series: He’s got a god-awful past that has shaped who he is, as well as a complex interweave of faults and virtues. With respect to his early years, some of the details of it come out in the scene when he finally tells Marissa a little about his background (LR, pp. 322- 326.) It’s been clear all along that he’s driven to self-destruction by his sister’s abduction and murder and that he’s a cop with a razor edge because of what he sees as his culpability in that crime. As he tells Marissa about his drug use and the violence in his life and the fact that he’s always felt alienated from everyone around him, it brings into focus how critical the Brothers and their world are to him as a person—the mansion is the only place he’s ever felt comfortable in, and he doesn’t want to be on the fringes of the Brotherhood’s world as an outsider. (When you think of John and Beth, Butch is very similar to them in this regard. All three have always sensed that there is something that separates them from the humans around them, but they are unaware of the why of it all.)

  From a character standpoint, I was aware that for Butch the need to belong and be true to an inner self he could only guess at were key aspects of his makeup. And from a story perspective, I knew two things about him: He was going to end up with Marissa and his and V’s destinies were inextricably intertwined. In my mind, Marissa was the perfect heroine for him, refined, ladylike, incredibly beautiful—someone he can put on a pedestal and revere and worship. As for him and V . . . well, more on that later.

  As I mentioned before, Butch and Marissa’s love story was originally going to be a major subplot in Lover Eternal, but they demanded so much attention that I cut out their scenes and put them aside. When I got to the end of drafting Lover Awakened, my editor and I touched base about what book was next. I wanted to do Butch, but she felt it was better to stick with the Brothers that were vampi
res, and I agreed—which meant the next in line was Vishous (because at that point Tohr was gone, John Matthew hadn’t been through his transition, and Phury couldn’t have his book come after Bella had given birth).

  Trouble was, when I started to outline V, I realized something that I had known since Dark Lover: There was no way you could do Vishous’s book before Butch’s. V’s relationship with the cop, and the emotions he felt for the human, were what opened him up emotionally so that he could fall in love. Additionally, in order for him to be vulnerable to someone else, he needed to come to terms with his feelings for Butch and I couldn’t see all that happening in one book for a couple of reasons. First, I try to show as much as I can (as opposed to telling)—so V’s book would have been full of scenes between him and Butch, especially in the beginning—which would be dangerous, because that kind of plotting runs the risk of being seriously misbalanced (i.e., a ton of scenes of Butch/V, V/Butch, Vishous and Butch . . . then suddenly switching to scenes of female/V, Vishous/ female, Vishous and female). Further, with Butch unattached romantically, Vishous wouldn’t be able to let him go sufficiently to find love with someone else—to really get V bonded with his heroine, Butch needed to be happy and committed with Marissa.

  I tried to do V, though. Gave it my best shot.

  The outline didn’t work.

  After a couple of weeks of banging my head, I followed rule eight (Rice Krispies) and called up my editor in classic Houston-we-have-a-problem style. When I explained to her what the issues were, she understood and agreed. Which is only one of the billion reasons I worship her: She gets how it is with me and the Brothers.

  So Butch was up next. And, boy, talk about your corkscrews.

  When I started to outline him, I had no clue about the Destroyer Prophecy or the transformative role the cop was going to play in the war with the Lessening Society. I thought that the thrust of the book was going to be about the ancestor regression and Butch having the change jump-started on him.

  Ah . . . no.

  After I took the scenes I had already written concerning him and Marissa falling in love, and sketched out the other things I saw in my head, it was clear something was missing. The book just wasn’t as big as I sensed it was.

  I stewed about it. Worried. Stewed some more . . . and then I got the image of the Omega cutting off his finger and putting it into Butch’s abdomen.

  Actually, I got both the image and the sound of the carrot crack when the Omega did the knife action on himself.

  Ew.

  Once I tuned in to that, all these scenes came hammering down on my head. As I followed the story, it was fascinating to see how the original scenes of the book morphed. For instance, I’d known that Butch was going to get abducted by the lessers, and had seen him and Marissa reuniting in the clinic, but suddenly he was under quarantine and the consequences were much, much more dire. So there weren’t huge shifts in content, per se, but more in implication and scope within the world.

  The big theme for the book is transformation, and with respect to Butch, I love the parallel tracks of his story. Both good and evil transform him—first when the Omega has at him, and then when the change is brought on him and his vampire nature comes out. It’s as if the Lessening Society and the Brotherhood are both fighting for control of his destiny and his soul, and it’s not immediately clear who wins. For a while after Butch leaves quarantine, neither he nor the Brothers are sure whether or not he’s been turned into a lesser or what exactly he’s doing when he inhales a slayer.

  The thing I like most about where Butch ends up in terms of the world is that he’s a significant player in the war, arguably turning the tables on the Omega because he puts the evil directly at risk. The Brothers have been picking off lessers for centuries, but Butch is actually degrading the Omega’s finite being each time he takes care of business. I think this is a great ending for the cop. It gives him a place where, although he’s not purely of the Brotherhood bloodlines, he’s an equal participant in the fight to protect the species.

  And Butch isn’t the only one who changes. Marissa, too, is transformed from a cloistered female of the glymera into someone who has her own life.

  I think, of all the females, Marissa’s probably the one who resonates with me most personally, because I, too, am from a conservative, establishment background and have had to break a few molds and expectations to be who I really am. Her scene in the beginning of Lover Revealed (the one that starts on page seven), with her having a panic attack in the bathroom during that party at her brother’s, shows clearly the toll of her having lived her life in the glymera. She’s sublimated so much of herself and borne burdens for which she didn’t volunteer for so long, that she’s nearing her breaking point.

  I get asked a lot whether there are parts of me in the books and whether I take people I know and put them in. Both are a no. I’m very private, and I strictly separate my personal life from my writing life, and additionally, I would hate to think any of my friends or family would feel used. That being said, there are definitely things that happen in the books that I’ve had personal experience with. For example, as someone who’s had panic attacks, Marissa’s interlude in that bathroom really resonated with me. I didn’t put the scene in because I was revealing something of myself, but I did empathize with my heroine in the way you would when you talk to someone else who’s been through what you have.

  For Marissa, the real turning point for her as an individual comes when she burns all of her dresses in the backyard. I thought this was a great way to symbolically mark her break with tradition:

  It took her a good twenty minutes to drag each one of her gowns out into the backyard. And she was careful to include the corsets and the shawls in the pile as well. When she was finished, her clothes were ghostly in the moonlight, muted shadows of a life she would never go back to, a life of privilege . . . restriction . . . and gilded degradations.

  She pulled out a sash from the tangle and went back into the garage with the pale pink strip of satin. Picking up the gas can, she grabbed the box of matches and didn’t hesitate. She walked out to the priceless swirl of satins and silks, doused them with that clear, sweet accelerant, and positioned herself upwind as she took out a match.

  She lit the sash. Then threw it.

  The explosion was more than she’d expected, knocking her back, scorching her face, flaring into a great fireball.

  As orange flames and black smoke rose, she screamed at the inferno.

  —LOVER REVEALED, p. 266

  I had such a clear image of that fire, with her running around those burning dresses, screaming—it was such a temporal representation of the internal shift she was going through, a wiping clean of the past in preparation for her moving forward.

  And man, does she get her act together. One of my favorite scenes in the whole series is when Marissa slaps down her brother and the whole Princeps Council during its vote on mandatory sehclusion for unmated females of the aristocracy (which starts on p. 419). Rising to her feet, she asserts her status as head of her bloodline, because she is older than Havers, and votes no, putting an end to the discussion and the restriction. It was a total reversal for her from where she was in that bathroom, no longer under the glymera’s control, but asserting control over them.

  I also like where she ended up. She’s perfectly suited for running Safe Place and is making a real contribution to the race that way. Plus it’s nice that after years of strife, she and Wrath get to work together—because it gives him a chance to prove to her over and over again that he truly does respect her.

  On a side note, when it comes to the females in the series, it’s significant that at the end of Lover Revealed, the shellans all come together in Marissa’s office, and Beth gives out the little statues of the owls. It shows a side of the shellans that I hadn’t been able to work into a book yet—namely that they are, like the Brothers, bonded to one another in a special way.

  Back to Butch. At the end of the book, when
he’s being inducted into the Brotherhood, it’s clear that he isn’t complete, even with the new role he has in the world:

  Wrath cleared his throat, but still, the king’s voice was slightly hoarse. “You are the first inductee in seventy-five years. And you . . . you are worthy of the blood you and I share, Butch of mine blooded line.”