by J. R. Ward
Two open questions remained. Could he dematerialize? And could he handle sunlight? V had suggested holding off on both of those for a month or so, and that was fine. There was enough to worry about in the meantime.
"You're not quitting, right?" V asked as he looked up from the bicep curls he was doing. The weight in each of his hands was probably two seventy-five. Butch could pull them that heavy now, too. "Nah, I still got juice." He went over to an elliptical machine and got on to stretch his legs out.
Man, on the topic of juice… he was totally and completely sexed out. All the time. Marissa had moved into his bedroom at the Pit and he couldn't keep his hands off her. He felt so bad about it, and he tried to hide the need, but invariably she knew when he wanted her and she never turned him away, even if it was only to finish him.
She really seemed to relish the sexual control she had over him. And so did he.
God, he was hardening again now. All he had to do was think of her and he was ready even if he'd already gone four, five times that day. And the thing was, what made his sex drive such a pleasure was that it wasn't just about needing a release. It was all about her. He wanted to be with her, inside of her, all around her: not sex for sex's sake, but… well… making love. To her.
Man, he was a total frickin' sap.
But, hell, why should he front? This had been the best week of his whole miserable life. He and Marissa were so good together—and not just in the sack. Aside from training himself in the gym, he'd spent a lot of time helping her with the social services project, and the common purpose had brought them even closer together.
The Safe Place, as she'd named the house, was ready to start running now. V had wired the Colonial up but good, and though there was still a lot to do, at least they could begin accepting folks in earnest. Right now there was just the mother and the child with the leg in a cast, but it sounded like there would be a lot more.
Man, throughout everything, all the changes, all the new things, all the challenges, Marissa was amazing. Smart. Capable. Compassionate. He'd decided his vampire nature, that previously buried part of him, had chosen his female very wisely.
Although he still had some guilt over mating her. He kept thinking about everything she'd walked away from—her brother, her old life, all that fancy glymera shit. He'd always felt like an orphan after leaving both his family and where he'd grown up behind, and he didn't want that for her. But he wasn't going to let her go.
Hopefully, they could finish the mating ceremony soon. V had said it wouldn't be a good idea cutting into him during the first week, which was fine, but they were going to do the carving ASAP. And then he and Marissa were going to walk down the aisle, too.
Funny, he'd started going to midnight Mass all regularlike. Wearing his Sox cap, and keeping his head down, he sat in the back of Our Lady and stayed to himself as he reconnected with God and the Church. The services eased him immeasurably, in a way nothing else could.
Because the darkness was in him still. He was not alone in his skin.
Inside of him there was a shadow, something that lurked between the spaces of his ribs and the disks of his spine. He sensed it there always, shifting around, pacing, watching. Sometimes it actually looked out of his eyes, and that was when he feared himself the most.
But going to church helped. He liked to think the goodness in the air there seeped into him. Liked to believe that God listened to him. Needed to know that there was a strength outside of himself that would help him stay connected to his humanity and his soul. Because without that he would be dead though his heart still beat.
"Hey, cop?"
Without losing a stride on the elliptical, Butch looked over to the weight room's door. Phury was standing in it, that amazing hair of his shining red, yellow, and brown under the fluorescent lights.
"What up, Phury?"
The brother came in, his limp hardly noticeable. "Wrath wants you to come to our meeting tonight before we go out."
Butch glanced at V. Who was studiously lifting and keeping his eyes on the mats. "What for?"
"Just wants you there."
"Okay."
After Phury left, he said, "V, you know what's doing about this?"
His roommate shrugged. "Just come to the meetings."
"Meeting-s? Like every night?"
Vishous kept pumping, his biceps veining up hard-core under all the weight. "Yeah. Every night."
Three hours later, Butch and Rhage headed out in the Escalade… and Butch wondered what the hell had happened. He was fully strapped under a black leather jacket with a Glock under each arm and an eight-inch hunting knife on his hip. He was going in tonight as a fighter.
It was just a trial and he had to talk to Marissa, but he wanted this to work out. He wanted… yeah, he wanted to fight. And the brothers wanted him to as well. The bunch of them had talked it all through, especially the shit about his dark side. The bottom line was he was capable and he wanted to kill lessers and the Brotherhood needed more bodies on their side of the war. So they were going to give it a shot.
As Rhage drove them downtown, Butch looked out the window and wished V wasn't off for the night. He would have liked his roommate to be with him for this maiden-voyage stuff, although at least Vishous was sitting it out because it was his turn to on the rotation schedule, not because he was losing it. Hell, V seemed to be doing much better with the dreams; there hadn't been any more screams in the middle of the day.
"You ready for the field?" Rhage asked.
"Yeah." In fact, his body was roaring to be used, and used specifically like this, in battle.
About fifteen minutes later, Rhage parked behind Screamer's. As they got out and walked toward Tenth Street, Butch halted halfway down the alley and turned to the side of the building.
"Butch?"
Struck by a sense of his own history, he reached out and touched once again the blackened bomb burst pattern where Darius's car had blown up. Yeah… it had all started here last summer… at this place. And yet as he felt the scratchy, damp bricks under his palm, he knew the real beginning was right now. His true nature was uncovered now. He was who he needed to be… now.
"You okay, my man?"
"Full circle, Hollywood." He turned to his buddy. "Full circle." As the brother gave him a Huh, what? Butch smiled and started walking again.
"So how's this usually go down?" he said, as they came out on Tenth.
"On an average night, we cover a twenty-five-block radius twice. This is trolling, really. Lessers are looking for us, we're looking for them. We fight as soon as we—"
Butch stopped and his head swiveled around all by itself, his upper lip curling off his fancy new fangs.
"Rhage," he said softly.
The brother let out a low laugh of satisfaction. "Where are they, cop?"
Butch started gunning toward the signal he'd picked up on, and as he went along, he felt the raw force of his body. The damn thing was like a car with a performance engine in it, no longer a Ford but a Ferrari. And he let loose as he pounded down the dark street with Rhage on his tail, the two of them moving in harmony.
The two of them moving like killers.
Six blocks away they found three lessers confabbing it at the throat of an alleyway. As a unit, the slayers' heads turned and the second Butch locked eyes with them, he felt that horrible recognition flare. The linkup was immutable, marked by dread on his side and confusion on theirs: They seemed to recognize he was both one of them and a vampire.
In the dark, grungy alley, the battle bloomed like a summer thunderstorm, the violence coalescing, then exploding out in punches and kicks. Butch took head shots and body shots and ignored them all. Nothing hurt bad enough to care about, as if his skin were armor and his muscles were steel.
Eventually, he slammed one of the slayers on the ground, straddled the thing, and reached for the knife at his hip. But then he stopped, overcome by a need he couldn't fight. Leaving the blade where it was, he leaned down, got face
-to-face, and took control with his stare. The lesser's eyes popped in terror as Butch's mouth opened.
Rhage's voice came at him from a vast distance. "Butch? What are you doing? I got the other two, so all you need to do is stab that thing. Butch? Stab him."
Butch just hovered over the lesser's lips, feeling a surge of power that had nothing to do with his body and everything to do with the dark part in him. It started so slowly, the inhale almost gentle… and the breath went on forever, one steady draw that grew in strength until the blackness passed out of the lesser and into him, the transfer one of the true essence of evil, the Omega's very nature. As Butch swallowed the vile black rush and felt it settle into his blood and bones, the lesser dissolved into a gray mist.
"What the fuck?" Rhage breathed.
Van stopped running at the entrance of the alley and followed an instinct that told him to melt into the shadows. He'd come prepared to fight, called in by a slayer who said some hand-to-hand with two Brothers was going down. But as he arrived now, he saw something he just knew wasn't right.
A tremendous vampire was on top of a lesser, the two locked stare to stare as he… shit, sucked the slayer into nothingness.
As a fall of ash floated down onto the dirty pavement, the blond Brother at the scene said, "What the fuck?"
At that moment, the vampire who'd done the consuming lifted his head and looked down the alley directly at Van, even though the darkness should have hidden his presence.
Holy shit… it was the one they were looking for. The cop. Van had seen the guy's picture on the Internet in those articles from the CCJ. Except he'd been human then and he sure as fuck wasn't now.
"There's another one," the vampire said in a hoarse, ragged voice. His arm lifted weakly and he pointed at Van. "Right there."
Van took off running, not about to get smoked up.
It was so time to find Mr. X about this.
Chapter Forty-two
About a half mile away, in his penthouse overlooking the river, Vishous picked up a fresh bottle of Grey Goose and cracked the thing open. As he poured himself another glass of hooch, he looked at the pair of empty one-liters that were on the bar.
They were going to get another friend. Real soon.
As rap music pounded, he took his crystal glass and the newly opened Goose and weaved his way over to the sliding glass door. With his mind, he willed the lock free and pushed the thing wide.
A cold blast hit him and he laughed at the sting as he stepped outside, surveyed the night sky, and drank deeply.
Such a good liar he was. Such a good one.
Everyone thought he was fine because he'd camo'd his little problems. He wore a Sox hat to hide the eye twitch. Set his wristwatch to go off every half hour to beat back the dream. Ate though he wasn't hungry. Laughed though he found nothing funny.
And he'd always smoked like a chimney.
He'd even gone so far as to flat-out front to Wrath. When the king had asked how he was doing, V had looked the brother right in the face and told him, in a thoughtful, reflective voice, that although he continued to «struggle» with falling to sleep, the nightmare was «gone» and he felt much more "stable."
Bullshit. He was a pane of glass with a million cracks in it. All he needed was one soft tap and he was going to shatter.
The fracture potential wasn't just about his lack of visions or his twelve-gauge dream. Sure, all that shit made it worse, but he knew he would be where he was even without that overlay.
Watching Butch with Marissa was killing him.
Hell, V didn't begrudge them their happiness or anything. He was damn glad it had worked out for the pair, and he was even starting to like Marissa a little. It just hurt to be around them.
The thing was… although it was totally inappropriate and creeped him out, he thought of Butch as… his. He'd brought that man into the world. He'd lived with him for months. He'd gone out to get the guy after the lessers had done their business all over him. And he'd healed him.
And it had been his hands that had turned him.
With a curse, Vishous weaved his way over to the four-foot-high wall that ran all the way around the penthouse's terrace. The Goose bottle made a little scraping noise as he put it down, and he swayed as he brought his glass up to his mouth. Oh… wait, he needed another refill. He palmed the vodka and spilled a little as he poured. Again with the quiet scraping noise as he set the Goose back on the ledge.
He drank the stuff down, then bent over and looked at the street thirty floors below. Vertigo grabbed him by the head and shook him until the world spun and from out of the twirling mess, he found the term for his particular brand of suffering. He was brokenhearted.
Shit… what a mess.
With a total absence of mirth, he laughed at himself, the hard sound getting sucked away by the gusting, bitter March wind.
He put a bare foot up on the cold stone. As he reached out to steady himself, he glanced down at his ungloved hand. And froze with terror.
"Oh… Jesus… no…"
Mr. X stared at Van. Then shook his head slowly. "What did you say?"
The two of them were standing in a wedge of shadow at the corner of Commerce and Fourth Street, and Mr. X was very glad they were alone. Because he couldn't believe what he was hearing and didn't want to look too stunned in front of any of the others.
Van shrugged. "He's a vampire. Looked like one. Acted like one. And recognized me immediately, although how he saw me I have no idea. But the slayer he took out? See, that was the weird thing. The guy just… vaporized. Not at all like what happens when you stab one of us. And the blond Brother was totally shocked. So does any of this kind of thing happen often?"
None of it happened often. Especially the part about a guy who had been a human but now apparently had fangs. That shit just went against nature, and so did the inhalation routine.
"And they just let you go?" Mr. X said.
"The blond was all worried about his buddy."
Loyalty. Christ. Always loyalty with those Brothers. "Did you notice anything about O'Neal? Other than that he seemed to have gone through the change?"
Maybe Van was just mistaken—
"Um… his hand was fucked up. Something's wrong with it."
Mr. X felt a tingle go through him, like his body was a bell that had been struck. He kept his voice deliberately calm. "What exactly was wrong?"
Van brought up his hand and curled the pinkie in tight to the palm. "It's kind of bent like this. The little finger's all stiff and curled up, like he can't move it."
"Which hand?"
"Ah… the right. Yeah, the right one."
In a daze, Mr. X leaned back against the side of the Valurite Dry Cleaners building. And the prophecy came to him:
There shall be one to bring the end before the master,
a fighter of modern time found in the seventh of the
twenty-first,
and he shall be known in the numbers he bears:
One more than the compass he apperceives,
Though mere four points to make at his right,
Three lives has he,
Two scores on his fore,
and with a single black eye, in one well will he be
birthed and die.
Mr. X's skin tightened all over. Shit. Shit.
If O'Neal could sense lessers, maybe that was the one more than the compass he apperceived. And the hand thing fit if he couldn't point using his pinkie. But what about the extra scar—wait… the entryway where the Omega had put a part of himself into O'Neal… including his belly button that would be two scores. And maybe the black mark that had been left behind was the eye the Scrolls had mentioned. As for the born and die, O'Neal had been birthed in Caldwell as a vampire and would probably find his death here at some point, too.
The equation added up, but the real kicker was not the math. It was that no one, but no one, had ever heard of a lesser being offed like that.
Mr. X focused on Van, realiza
tion sliding into place and realigning everything. "You are not the one."
"You should have left me," Butch said as he and Rhage pulled up outside of V's building. "Left me and gone after that other lesser."
"Yeah, right. You were looking like roadkill, and there were more slayers on the way, I guarantee it." Rhage shook his head as they both got out. "You want me to walk you up? You're still sporting that special dead-squirrel glow."
"Yeah, whatever. Go back out and fight those fuckers."
"I love it when you get all hard-core on me." Rhage smiled a little, then grew serious. "Listen, about what hap—"
"That's why I'm going to talk to V."
"Good. V knows everything." Rhage put the Escalade's keys in Butch's hand and gave him a squeeze on the shoulder. "Call me if you need me."
After the brother disappeared into thin air, Butch went into the lobby, waved at the security guard, and grabbed an elevator. The ride up the building took forever and he passed the time feeling the evil in his veins. His blood was black again. He knew it. And he fucking reeked of baby powder.
When he stepped out, feeling like a leper, he heard music thumping. Ludacris's Chicken N Beer was all over the place.
He pounded on the door. "V?"
No answer. Hell. He'd already barged in on the brother once—
For some reason, the door clicked and eased open half an inch. Butch pushed it wider, every cop instinct in him screaming while the rap grew louder.
"Vishous?" As he stepped inside, a cold breeze shot through the penthouse, barrelling in through an open sliding glass door. "Yo… V?"
Butch glanced at the bar. There were two empty bottles of Goose and three caps on the marble counter. Binge time.
Heading for the terrace, he expected to find V passed out on a lounger.
Instead, Butch walked into a whole lot of heaven-help-us: Vishous was up on the wall that ran around the building, naked, swaying in the wind and… glowing all over.