The Black Dagger Brotherhood Novels 1-4

by J. R. Ward

  Yeah, sucking back Scotch and pining after a female vampire who didn’t want him were about all he had time for. Besides, there was no reason to screw with a system that worked. The lovelorn crap fueled the boozing, and whenever he was drunk, he missed Marissa even more, so then he’d want to do another shot…. And there you had it. One hell of a merry-go-round. Even made the room spin, too.

  “You talk to Z?” Phury asked.

  Butch stripped off his cashmere coat and hung it in the closet. “Yeah. He wasn’t happy.”

  “Is he going to stay away from there?”

  “I think so. Well, assuming he didn’t burn the place down after he kicked me out. He had that special little twinkle in his eye as I left. You know, the one that makes your balls get tight when you’re standing next to him?”

  Phury dragged a hand through his outrageous hair. The stuff fell down past his shoulders, all blond and red and brown waves. He was a handsome Joe without it; with that mane, he was…okay, fine, the brother was beautiful. Not that Butch went that way, but the guy was better-looking than a lot of women. Dressed better than most of the ladies, too, when he wasn’t in his ass-kicking clothes.

  Man, it was a good thing he fought like a nasty bastard or he might have been taken for a nancy.

  Phury sucked in a deep breath. “Thanks for dealing with—”

  A phone rang on a desk full of computer equipment.

  “Outside line,” V murmured, going over to his IT command center.

  Vishous was the resident computer genius in the Brotherhood—actually, he was the resident genius on everything—and he was in charge of communications and security at the compound. He ran it all from the Four Toys, as he called his quartet of PCs.

  Toys…yeah, right. Butch didn’t know jack about computers, but if those suckers were toys, then they were in the Department of Defense’s playground, too.

  While V waited for the call to dump into voice mail, Butch glanced at Phury. “So, have I shown you my new Marc Jacobs suit?”

  “Did that come in already?”

  “Yeah, Fritz brought it over earlier and fitted it.”

  “Sweet.”

  As they went back to the bedrooms, Butch had to laugh. He was as guilty as Phury when it came to being a metrosexual thread humper. Funny, he hadn’t given a shit about his clothes when he’d been a cop. Now that he was with the Brothers, he was working his walk in haute couture and loving it. So, like Phury, he was lucky he fought dirty.

  The Brother was fondling yards of fine black wool on a hanger and making appropriate “ahhhing” sounds when V came in.

  “Bella’s alive.”

  Butch and Phury whipped their heads around as the suit landed on the floor in a heap.

  “Civilian male was abducted from the alley behind ZeroSum tonight and taken to a place way out in the woods for the purpose of feeding Bella. He saw her. Talked with her. Somehow she let him go.”

  “Tell me he can find the place again,” Butch breathed, aware of a suffocating urgency. And he wasn’t the only one on instant alert. Phury looked so intense he didn’t seem capable of speech.

  “Yeah. He marked his way out, dematerializing two hundred yards at a time until he reached Route 22. He’s e-mailing me the trail on a map. Damn smart for a civilian.”

  Butch ran out to the living room, heading for his coat and the keys to the Escalade. He hadn’t taken off his holster, so his Glock was still strapped under his arm.

  Except V got between him and the door. “Where you going, my man?”

  “Has that map come through your e-mail yet?”

  “Stop.”

  Butch glared at his roommate. “You can’t go out during the day. I can. Why the hell should we wait?”

  “Cop”—V’s voice grew soft—“this is Brotherhood business. You’re not going in on this.”

  Butch stalled. Ah, yes, shut down again.

  Sure, he could work around their periphery, do some crime scene analysis, get his gray matter churning over tactical problems. But when the fighting started, the Brothers always kept him off the field.

  “Goddamn it, V—”

  “No. You’re not handling this. Forget it.”

  It was two hours later before Phury had enough information to go to his twin’s room. He figured there was no point in getting Zsadist agitated with a half-story, and it had taken a while for the plan to jell.

  When he knocked and there wasn’t an answer, he stepped inside and winced. The room was cold as a meat locker.

  “Zsadist?”

  Z lay on a couple of folded blankets in the far corner, his naked body drawn up tightly against the chill in the room. There was a sumptuous bed not more than ten feet away from him, but it had never been used. Z slept on the floor always, no matter where he had lived.

  Phury walked over and knelt down beside his twin. He wasn’t going to touch the male, especially when he would be caught unaware. Z was likely to come to on the attack.

  My God, Phury thought. Asleep like this, all his anger banked, Z was almost frail.

  Hell, take back the almost. Zsadist had always been so damned thin, so terribly lean. Now, though, he was just big bones and veins. When had this happened? Christ, back during Rhage’s rythe, they’d all been naked in the Tomb, and Z certainly hadn’t looked like a skeleton. That had been only about six weeks ago.

  Right before Bella’s abduction…

  “Zsadist? Wake up, my brother.”

  Z stirred, black eyes opening slowly. Usually he came awake in a rush and at the slightest noise, but he’d fed, so he was sluggish.

  “She’s been found,” Phury said. “Bella’s been found. She was alive as of early this morning.”

  Z blinked a couple of times, as if he weren’t sure whether he was dreaming. Then he hefted his torso off the pallet. His nipple rings caught the light from the hall while he rubbed his face.

  “What did you say?” he asked in a gravel voice.

  “We have a bead on where Bella is. And confirmation that she’s alive.”

  Z grew more alert, his consciousness moving like a train, gathering speed, creating power with its momentum. With every second the force of him was coming back, the vicious vitality surging until he no longer looked weak at all.

  “Where is she?” he demanded.

  “In a one-room house in the woods. A civilian male got loose because she helped him escape.”

  Z sprang to his feet, landing in a lithe punch to the floor. “How do I get to her?”

  “The male who escaped e-mailed V the directions. But—”

  Z headed for his closet. “Get a map for me.”

  “It’s noontime, my brother.”

  Z stopped. Abruptly, a blast of cold came out of his body, making the temperature of the room feel balmy. And those black eyes were dangerous as hammer claws when they flashed over his shoulder.

  “So send the cop. Send Butch.”

  “Tohr won’t let him—”

  “Fuck that! The human goes.”

  “Zsadist—stop. Think. Butch wouldn’t have any backup, and there could be multiple lessers at the location. You want to risk her getting killed in a botched rescue attempt?”

  “The cop can handle himself.”

  “He’s good, but he’s only a human. We can’t send him in there.”

  Z bared his fangs. “Maybe Tohr is more worried the guy will get pinched and squeal about us on one of their tables.”

  “Come on, Z, Butch knows shit. He knows a lot of shit about us. So of course that’s part of it.”

  “But if she helped a captive escape, what the hell do you think those lessers are doing to her right now!”

  “If a pack of us go at sundown, we’re more likely to get her out alive. You know that. We have to wait.”

  Z stood there naked, breathing deeply, his eyes narrow slits of rank hatred. When he finally spoke, his voice was a nasty growl.

  “Tohr better pray to God she’s still alive when I find her tonight. Or I
will have his fucking head, brother or no brother.”

  Phury shifted his eyes to the skull on the floor, thinking that Z had already proven how good he was at decapitation.

  “Did you hear me, brother?” the male snapped.

  Phury nodded. Man, he had a bad feeling about how this was going to play out. He really did.

  Chapter Six

  As O drove his F-150 truck along Route 22, the waning four-o’clock sun stung his eyes and he felt as if he were hungover. Yeah…along with the headache, he had the same body crawls he used to get after a night of boozing, the little tremors flickering just under his skin like worms.

  The long line of regret he was towing behind him also reminded him of his drinking days. Like when he’d woken up next to an ugly woman he despised, but had fucked anyway. The whole thing was just like that…only much, much worse.

  He shifted his hands on the steering wheel. His knuckles were busted open and he knew he had scratches on his neck. As images of the day blinded him, his stomach heaved. He was disgusted by the things he’d done to his woman.

  Well, now he was disgusted. When he’d been doing them…he’d been righteous.

  Christ, he should have been more careful. She was a living thing, after all…. Shit, what if he’d gone too far? Oh, man… He should never have let himself do those things. The trouble was, as soon as he’d seen that she’d freed the male he’d brought her, he’d lost it. Just splintered into shrapnel that had torn right through her.

  He lifted his foot from the gas. He wanted to go back and take her out of her pipe and reassure himself that she was still breathing. Except there wasn’t enough time before the meeting of the Primes started.

  As he stomped on the accelerator, he knew he wouldn’t be able to leave her once he saw her anyway, and then the Fore-lesser would come looking for him. And that would be a problem. The persuasion center was a mess. Goddamn it…

  O slowed and wrenched the wheel to the right, the truck lurching off Route 22 onto a one-lane dirt road.

  Mr. X’s cabin, also the Lessening Society’s HQ, was smack in the middle of a seventy-five-acre forest, completely isolated. The place was nothing more than a small log setup with a dark green shingled roof and an outbuilding about half the size behind it. As O pulled up, there were seven cars and trucks parked in a loose configuration, all of them domestic, most of them at least four years old.

  O walked inside the cabin and saw he was the last to show. Ten other Primes were packed into the shallow interior space, their pale faces grim, their bodies broad and heavy with muscle. These were the Lessening Society’s strongest men, the ones who had been in it the longest. O was the only exception when it came to time served. He had just three years since his induction, and none of them liked him because he was new.

  Not that they got a vote. He was as tough as any Prime and had proved it. Jealous fuckers… Man, he was never going to be like them, just cattle for the Omega. He couldn’t believe the idiots prided themselves on their paling out over time and losing their identities. He fought against the fading. He colored his hair to keep it the dark brown it had always been, and he dreaded the gradual lightening of his irises. He did not want to look like them.

  “You’re late,” Mr. X said. The Fore-lesser leaned back against a refrigerator that wasn’t plugged in, his pale eyes latching onto the scratches all over O’s neck. “Been fighting?”

  “You know how those Brothers are.” O found a place to stand across the way. Though he nodded to his partner, U, he didn’t acknowledge anyone else.

  The Fore-lesser continued to look at him. “Has anyone seen Mr. M?”

  Fuck, O thought. That lesser he’d taken out for walking in on him and his wife would have to be accounted for.

  “O? You got something to say?”

  From the left, U spoke up. “I saw M. Right before dawn. Fighting with a Brother downtown.”

  As Mr. X shifted his stare to the left, O was cold-shit shocked at the lie.

  “You saw him with your own eyes?”

  The other lesser’s voice was steady. “Yeah. I did.”

  “Any chance you’re protecting O?”

  Wasn’t that the question to ask? Lessers were cutthroats, always jockeying with one another for position. Even among partners there was little loyalty.

  “U?”

  The guy’s pale head went back and forth. “He’s on his own. Why would I risk my skin for his?”

  Clearly that was some logic Mr. X felt he could trust, because he went on with the meeting. After the quotas for kill and capture were assigned, the group broke up.

  O went over to his partner. “I have to go back to the center for a minute before we go out. I want you to follow me.”

  He had to find out why U had saved his ass, and he wasn’t worried about the other lesser seeing the shape the place had been left in. U wouldn’t cause trouble. He wasn’t particularly aggressive or an independent thinker, more operator than innovator.

  Which made it even more weird that he’d taken the initiative he had.

  Zsadist stared at the grandfather clock in the mansion’s foyer. By the position of the hands he knew he had eight minutes before the sun was officially down. Thank God it was winter and the nights were long.

  He eyed the double doors and knew just where he was going as soon as he could get through them. He’d memorized the location the civilian male had given them. Was going to dematerialize and be there in the blink of an eye.

  Seven minutes.

  It would be better to wait until the sky was all dark, but fuck that. The instant that godforsaken fireball slipped over the edge of the horizon, he was out. To hell with it if he ended up with a bitch of a tan.

  Six minutes.

  He rechecked the daggers on his chest. Took the SIG Sauer out of the holster at his right hip and ran through it one more time, then did the same for the one that was on the left. He felt for the throwing knife at the small of his back and the six-inch blade he had on his thigh.

  Five minutes.

  Z cocked his head to the side, cracking his neck to loosen it up.

  Four minutes.

  Fuck this. He was going now—

  “You’ll fry,” Phury said from behind him.

  Z closed his eyes. His impulse was to lash out, and the urge grew irresistible as Phury kept talking.

  “Z, my man, how’re you going to help her if you fall flat on your face and start steaming?”

  “Do you get off being a buzz kill? Or does it just come natural?” As Z glared over his shoulder, he had a sudden memory of that one night Bella had come to the mansion. Phury had seemed so taken by her, and Z remembered the two of them standing together and talking, right where his boots were planted now. He’d watched them from the shadows, wanting her as she’d smiled and laughed with his twin.

  Z’s voice got sharper. “I’d think you’d want to get her back, being that she was all into you and shit, thinking you were handsome. Or…maybe you want her to stay gone because of that. Did your vow of celibacy get shaken, my brother?”

  As Phury winced, Z’s instinct for weakness jumped into the opening. “We all saw you checking her out that night she came here. You were looking, weren’t you? Yeah, you were, and not just at her face. Did you wonder how she’d feel underneath you? Did you get all nervous about breaking that nosex promise to yourself?”

  Phury’s mouth thinned into a slash, and Z hoped the male’s response was a nasty one. He wanted something hard to come back at him. Maybe they could even go at it for the remaining three minutes.

  But there was only silence.

  “Nothing to say to me?” Z glanced at the clock. “Just as well. It’s time to go—”

  “I bleed for her. The same as you do.”

  Z looked back at his twin, witnessing the pain on the male’s face from a long distance, as if he were staring through a pair of binoculars. He had a passing thought that he should feel something, some kind of shame or sorrow for forcing Phur
y to give up that intimate, sad revelation.

  Without a word, Zsadist dematerialized.

  He triangulated his reappearance to a wooded area about one hundred yards away from where the civilian male said he’d escaped from. As Z took form, the fading light in the sky blinded him and made him feel like he’d volunteered for an acid facial. He ignored the burning and headed in a northeasterly direction, jogging over the snow-covered ground.

  And then there it was, in the middle of the woods, about a hundred feet from a stream: a single-story houselike structure with a black Ford F-150 and a nondescript silver Taurus parked off to one side. Z sidled up to the structure, staying behind the trunks of pine trees, moving quietly in the snow as he worked the building’s periphery. It had no windows and only one door. Through the thin walls he could hear movement, talking.

  He took out one of his SIGs, flipped off the safety, and considered his options. Dematerializing inside was a dumb move, because he didn’t know the interior layout. And his only other alternative, though satisfying, wasn’t that strategic either: Kicking the door down and going in shooting was damn appealing, but as suicidal as he was, he wasn’t going to risk Bella’s life by lighting the place up.

  Except then, miracle of miracles, a lesser came out of the building, the door shutting with a smack. Moments later a second one followed, and then there was the beep-beep of a security alarm activating.

  Z’s first instinct was to shoot them both in the head, but he held his finger to the side of the trigger. If the slayers had reactivated the alarm, there was a good chance no one else was in-house, and his chances of getting Bella out had just improved. But what if that was SOP on exit regardless of whether the place was empty? Then all he’d do is announce his presence and set off a shit storm.

  He watched the two lessers as they got in the truck. One had brown hair, which usually meant the slayer was a new recruit, but this guy didn’t act like a FNG: He was sure in his boots and doing the talking. His pale-haired buddy was the one sporting the bobble-head nod.

  The engine started up and the truck backed around, packing the snow under its tires. Without headlights, the F-150 headed down a barely-there lane through the trees.