by J. R. Ward
Damn . . . she was beautiful.
“You think,” Jane said softly.
Okay, now would be a great time for his mouth to stop working independently.
He cleared his throat. “Can we go back about a half hour?”
“No problem.”
The image reversed, the little counter in the lower right-hand corner draining down in milliseconds.
As he saw himself checking her over in that towel, it was too frickin’ obvious that they were attracted to each other. Oh, God . . . that fucking hard-on so gave him another reason not to look at Jane.
“Wait . . .” He sat forward. “Slow down. Here it is.”
He watched himself back into the bath in a rush. . . .
“Holy . . . crap,” Jane breathed.
And there it was: Payne up on her knees at the bottom of the bed, her body long and lean and balanced perfectly as her eyes focused on the bathroom door.
“Is she glowing?”
“Yeah,” he murmured, “she is.”
“Hold on. . . .” Jane hit forward, running the images in proper order. “You’re testing her sensations here?”
“Nothing. She felt nothing. And yet—go back again . . . thanks.” He pointed at Payne’s legs. “Here, though, she clearly has muscle control.”
“This isn’t logical.” Jane played and replayed the file. “But she did it . . . oh, my God . . . she does it. It’s a miracle.”
Sure the fuck looked like one. Except . . . “What’s the impetus,” he muttered.
“Maybe it’s you.”
“No way. My operation clearly didn’t do the ticket or she would have been kneeling before tonight. Your own exams showed she remained paralyzed.”
“I’m not talking about your scalpel.”
Jane reversed the file back to the moment Payne rose up, and froze the frame. “It’s you.”
Manny stared at the image, and tried to see something other than the obvious: Sure as hell, it seemed that as Payne had looked at him, the glow in her had gotten brighter and she was able to move.
Jane forwarded the file frame by frame. As soon as he came out of the bathroom and she was lying back, the glow was gone . . . and she had no feeling.
“This makes no sense,” he muttered.
“Actually, I think it does. It’s her mother.”
“Who?”
“God where to start with that.” Jane indicated her own body. “I’m what I am because of the Scribe Virgin.”
“Who?” Manny shook his head. “I don’t understand any of this.”
Jane smiled a little bit. “You don’t have to. It’s happening. You just need to stay with Payne and . . . see how she changes.”
Manny resumed staring at the monitor. Well, shit, it seemed like that Goateed Hater had made the right call. Somehow, the motherfucker had known this was what would happen. Or maybe the guy had merely hoped. Either way, it looked like Manny was a kind of medicine for that extraordinary creature lying on that bed.
So damn right he was going to hang in.
But he wasn’t fooling himself. This wasn’t going to be about love or even sex; it was about getting her up and moving so she could live her life again—no matter what it took. And he knew he wasn’t going to be allowed to stay with her at the end of it. They were going to discard him like an empty orange bottle from the pharmacy—and yeah, sure, she might get attached to him, but she was a virgin who didn’t know any better.
And she had a brother who was going to force her to make the right choices.
As for him? He wasn’t going to remember any of this, was he.
Gradually, he became aware of Jane’s stare on his profile. “What,” he said without taking his eyes off the screen.
“I’ve never seen you like this about a female.”
“I’ve never met anyone like her before.” He put up his palm to stop any conversating. “And you can save the don’t-go-there. I know what’s coming at the end of this.”
Hell, maybe those bastards were going to kill him and roll him into the river. Make it look like an accident.
“I wasn’t going to say that, actually.” Jane shifted in her seat. “And believe me . . . I know how you feel.”
He glanced over at her. “Yeah?”
“It’s how I was when I first met Vishous.” Her eyes watered, but she cleared her throat. “Back to you and Payne—”
“What’s going on, Jane. Talk to me.”
“Nothing’s going—”
“Bullshit—and right back at you. I’ve never seen you like this before. You look ruined.”
She drew in a great breath. “Marital problems. Plain and not so simple.”
Clearly, she didn’t want to go into it. “Okay. Well, I’m here for you . . . for as long as I’m allowed to be.”
He rubbed his face. It was a total waste of time to worry about how long this was going to last, how much time he had. But he couldn’t help it. Losing Payne was going to kill him even though he barely knew her.
Wait a minute. Jane had been human. And she was here. Maybe there was—
What. The. Fuck.
“Jane . . . ?” he said weakly as he looked at his old friend. “What . . .”
Words deserted him at that point. She was sitting in the same chair, in the same position, wearing the same clothes . . . except he could see the wall behind her . . . and the steel cabinets . . . and the door across the way. And not “see” as in on the far side of her shoulders. He was looking through her.
“Oh. Sorry.”
Right before his eyes, she went from translucent to . . . back to normal.
Manny jumped out of his chair and pinwheeled back until the examination table bit into his ass and stopped him.
“You need to talk to me,” he said hoarsely. “Jesus . . . Christ . . .”
As he grabbed for the cross that hung around his neck, Jane’s head dropped and one of her hands tucked some of her short hair behind her ear. “Oh, Manny . . . there’s a lot you don’t know.”
“So . . . tell me.” When she didn’t reply, the screaming in his head got way too loud. “You’d better fucking tell me, because I’m really done with feeling like a lunatic.”
There was a long silence. “I died, Manny, but not in that car wreck. That was staged.”
Manny’s lungs got tight. “How.”
“A gunshot. I was shot. I . . . died in Vishous’s arms.”
Okay, he so could not breathe over here. “Who did it?”
“His enemies.”
Manny rubbed his crucifix, and the Catholic in him suddenly believed in the saints as so much more than examples of good behavior.
“I’m not who you once knew, Manny. On so many levels.” There was such sadness in her voice. “I’m not even actually alive. That was why I didn’t come back to see you. It wasn’t about the vampire/human thing . . . it’s because I am not really here anymore.”
Manny blinked. Like a cow. A number of times.
Well . . . the good news in all this, he supposed, was that finding out his former trauma surgeon was a ghost? Barely a blip on his radar. His mind had been blown too many times to count, and like a joint that had been dislocated, it had total and complete freedom of movement.
Of course, its functionality was fucked.
But who was counting.
TWENTY-SIX
Alone in downtown Caldwell, Vishous stalked the night by himself, traversing the underbelly stretch beneath the city’s bridges. He’d started out at his penthouse, but that hadn’t lasted more than ten minutes, and what an irony that all those glass windows had felt so confining. After launching himself into the air from the terrace, he’d coalesced down by the river. The other Brothers would be out in the alleys looking for lessers and finding them, but he didn’t want to be around the peanut gallery. He wanted to fight. Solo.
At least, that was what he told himself.
It dawned on him, however, after about an hour of aimless wandering, that he wasn’
t really looking for some kind of hand-to-hand showdown. He wasn’t actually looking for anything.
He was utterly empty, to the point where he was curious where the ambulation routine was coming from, because he sure as fuck wasn’t doing anything consciously.
Stopping and staring across the sluggish, stinking waters of the Hudson, he laughed cold and hard.
In all the course of his life, he’d accumulated a body of knowledge to rival the Library of frickin’ Congress. Some of it was useful, such as how to fight, how to make weapons, how to get information and how to keep it secret. And then there was some that was relatively useless on a day-to-day basis, like the molecular weight of carbon, Einstein’s theory of relativity, Plato’s political shit. There were also thoughts that he ruminated on once and never again, and their polar opposites, the ideas that he took out at regular intervals and played with like toys when he was bored. There were also things he never, ever let himself think of.
In and among those various cognitive outposts was a huge stretch of cerebellum that was nothing but a dump yard of bullshit that he didn’t believe in. And given that he was a cynic? It was miles and miles of rotting, metaphorical Hefty bags full of trash along the lines of . . . fathers were supposed to love their sons . . . and mothers were gifts beyond measure . . . and blah, blah, blah.
If there was a mental equivalent of the EPA, that part of his brain would have been cited, fined, and closed down.
But it was funny. Tonight’s little stroll in this underpass of Godand-awful by the river had him ruminating through that landfill and pulling something out of the pile:
Bonded males were nothing without their females.
So bizarre. He’d always known he’d loved Jane, but being the tight-ass that he was, he had stitched up his feelings without realizing a needle and thread were in his proverbial hand. Shit, even when she’d come back to him after she’d died, and he’d known for that brief moment what the term overjoyed not just meant, but felt like . . . he hadn’t truly let himself go.
Sure, his permafrost had slicked over on its top layer from the warmth she brought to him, but the inside, the deep inside, had stayed the same. Good God, they’d never even gotten properly mated. He’d just moved her into his room and loved every minute of having her there as they’d gone about their nights separately.
He’d fucking wasted those hours.
Criminally wasted them.
And now here they were, separated by rifts that, in spite of his intelligence, he had no clue how to cross.
Christ, when she’d been holding those leathers in her hands and waiting for him to talk, it was like someone had stapled his lips together—probably because he’d felt guilty about what he’d done at his place, and how fucked-up was that? His own hand hardly counted as cheating.
The trouble was, however, that even being drawn to the type of release he’d once had so much of had felt wrong. But that was because sex had always been a part of it.
Naturally, this made him think of Butch. The solution the guy had suggested was so obvious, V was surprised he hadn’t realistically considered it sooner himself—but then again, asking his best friend to beat the shit out of him wasn’t exactly a casual idea to have.
He wished he’d had that option a week ago. Maybe it would have helped things . . . Except that scene in the bedroom wasn’t his and Jane’s only issue, was it. She should have come to him first about the sitch with his sister. He should have been briefed and decided what to do with the two of them.
As anger rose like a stench inside of him, he feared what was on the other side of this emptiness. He wasn’t like other males, never had been, and not just because of the Mommie Dearest deity crap: Knowing his luck, he’d be the one bonded male on the face of the planet who got past these purposeless numbs at losing his shellan . . . and went somewhere oh, so much darker.
Insanity, for instance.
Wait, he wouldn’t be the first, would he. Murhder had gone mad. Absolutely and irrevocably.
Maybe they could start a club. And the handshake could involve daggers.
Emo-ass motherfuckers that they were—
With a snarl, V pivoted in the direction of the prevailing wind, and he would have offered up a prayer of thanks if he didn’t hate his mother so much: In and among the tendrils of fog, riding upon the vapors of gray and white humidity, the sweet smell of the enemy gave him purpose and a definition that his numb state had not just lacked, but seemed likely to reject.
His feet started to walk and then jog and then run. And the faster he went, the better he felt: To be a soulless killer was far, far, far better than to be a breathing void. He wanted to maim and murder; he wanted to tear with his fangs and claw with his hands; he wanted the blood of slayers on him and in him.
He wanted the screams of those he killed to ring in his ears.
Following the sickly stench, he cut over into the streets and weaved in and out of alleys and straightaways, tracking the scent as it grew stronger and stronger. And the closer he got, the more relieved he became. There had to be a number of them—and even better news? No sign of his brothers, which meant first come . . . first served.
He was saving this for himself.
Rounding the last corner of the quest, he plowed into a short, squat stretch of urban armpit and skidded to a halt. The alley had no outlet on the other side, but like a chute system for livestock, the buildings on either side were directing the wind that came off the river outward, the herd of molecules scrambling and picking up the smells on their hooves and galloping it straight into his sinuses.
What . . . the . . . hell . . . ?
The stench was so strong, his nose filed relocation papers—but there weren’t a bunch of those pale-ass fools standing around, stroking each other’s knives. The place was empty.
Except then he noticed the sound of dripping. As if a faucet hadn’t been quite turned off.
After throwing up some mhis, he pulled his glove free of his glowing hand and used his palm to light the way. Walking forward, the illumination formed a shallow pool of clear-and-visi right in front of him, and the first thing he came to was a boot . . . which was attached to a camo’d calf . . . and a thigh and hip. . . .
That was it.
The slayer’s body had been cut in half, sure as if it had been deli sliced, the cross section leaking portions of the intestinal tract, the stump of the spine showing bright white in and among all the greasy black.
A resonant scratching drew him over to the right.
This time he saw a hand first . . . a pale hand that was digging its nails into the damp asphalt and retracting like it was trying to hoe up the ground.
The lesser was just torso, but it was still alive—although that wasn’t a miracle; it was how they worked: Until you stabbed them through the heart with something that was made of steel, they hung around, no matter what state their bodies were in.
As V slowly moved his palm-light upward, he got a load of the thing’s face. Its mouth was stretching wide, the tongue clicking as if it were trying to speak. Typical of the current crop of killers, this one was a new recruit, his dark skin and hair having yet to turn floury white.
V stepped over the bastard and kept going. A couple of yards over, he found the two halves of a second one.
As the back of his neck went ants-all-over in warning, he passed his glowing hand around, moving outward from the bodies in a concentric circle.
Well, well, well . . . wasn’t this a blast from the past.
And so not in a good way.
Back at the Brotherhood’s compound, Payne lay in her bed, waiting.
She was not good at patience at the best of times, and she felt as though ten years passed before her healer finally came back to her. When he did, he brought with him a thin booklike panel.
As he sat down on the bed, there was tension in his strong, handsome face. “Sorry that took so long. Jane and I were firing up this laptop.”
She had no clue what th
at meant. “Just tell me whatever there is to say.”
With quick, nimble hands, he opened the top half of the contraption. “Actually, you need to see it for yourself.”
Feeling as though she wanted to curse loud and often, she dragged her eyes to the screen. Immediately, she recognized the image of the room she was in. This was from before, however, because as she lay on the bed, she was staring at the bathroom. The frame was frozen like a picture, but then a little white arrow moved when he touched something and the picture became animated.
With a frown, she focused on herself. She was glowing: Any piece of flesh that showed was illuminated from within. Why ever was that—
First she sat up from the pillow, her neck craned so that she could spy on her healer. More leaning to the side. And then maneuvering downward upon the bed . . .
“I sat upright,” she breathed. “Onto my knees!”
Indeed, her luminescent form had raised itself up perfectly and hovered with precise balance as she watched him in the shower.
“You most certainly did,” he said.
“I am aglow as well. Why is that, though?”
“We were hoping you could tell us. You ever do that before?”
“Not that I was aware of. But I have been imprisoned for so long, I feel as though I know not myself.” The file stopped. “Do play it again?”
When her healer didn’t reply, and the pictures didn’t renew their action, she glanced over at him—only to recoil. His face was showing a thunderous rage, the anger so deep, his eyes were nearly black.
“Imprisoned how?” he demanded. “And by who?”
Strange, she thought dimly. She’d always been told humans were a far milder form of creature than vampires. But her healer’s protective response was every bit as deadly as that of her own species.
Unless, of course, it wasn’t about protection. It was entirely possible that her having been jailed was not attractive to him.
And who could blame him?
“Payne?”
“Ah . . . Forgive me, healer—perhaps my word choice is incorrect, as English is a second language to me? I have been under my mother’s care.”