The Black Dagger Brotherhood Novels 1-4

by J. R. Ward

  Almost immediately she pulled back and licked at her lips.

  “I’m going to taste different from Wrath,” he said, counting on the fact that because she’d fed from only one male, she wouldn’t know exactly why his blood hit her tongue in an odd way. Actually, her inexperience had been the only reason he’d been able to help her. Any other female who’d been around a little would know too much. “Go on, take some more. You’ll get used to it.”

  Her head dropped again and he felt the tingling sting of another bite.

  He wrapped his heavy arms around her fragile back and hugged her close as he shut his eyes. It had been so long since he’d held anyone, and though he couldn’t afford to let in much of the experience, he found it sublime.

  As she sucked at his vein, he had the absurd impulse to cry.

  O eased up on the truck’s accelerator and glided past another high stone wall.

  Damn, the houses were huge on Thorne Avenue. Well, not that you could see the mansions from the street. He just assumed that with hedges and ramparts like these, there weren’t a lot of split-levels and Cape Cods going on.

  When this particular barricade split to allow for a driveway, he hit the brakes. To the left there was a little brass plaque that read, 27 THORNE AVENUE. He leaned forward, stretching for a look beyond, but with the drive and the wall disappearing into the darkness, he couldn’t tell what was on the other side.

  On a what-the-hell whim, he turned in and proceeded down the lane. A good hundred yards from the street there was a towering set of black gates, and he stopped, noting the cameras mounted on the top of them and the intercom system and the air of keep-out.

  Well…this was interesting. The other address had been for shit, just an average house in an average neighborhood with humans in the living room watching TV. But whatever was behind a setup like this was big business.

  Now he was curious.

  Although infiltrating these barriers would require a coordinated strategy and some careful execution. And the last thing he needed was the inconvenience of tangling with the police just because he’d broken into some highflier’s McMansion.

  But why would that vampire have pulled this address out of his ass to save himself?

  Then O saw something weird: a black ribbon tied to the gate. No, two of them, one on each side, waving in the wind.

  Like they were for mourning?

  Fixated by his own dread, he got out of the truck and crunched over the ice, heading for the ribbon on the right. It was mounted seven feet off the ground, so he had to stretch up his arm to finger it.

  “Are you dead, wife?” he whispered. He dropped his hand and looked through the gates into the black night beyond.

  He went back to the truck and reversed down the driveway. He needed to get past that wall. Had to find someplace to dump the F-150.

  Five minutes later he was cursing. Damn it. There was nowhere to park on Thorne that wasn’t totally conspicuous. The street was nothing but walls, with barely any shoulder. Fucking rich people.

  O hit the gas and looked left. Right. Maybe he could leave the truck down at the bottom of the hill and jog up from the main drag. It was a half mile at an incline, but he could cover the distance quickly enough. The streetlights he’d have to pass under were a bitch, of course, but it wasn’t like anyone living on this road could see out from their ivory towers.

  His cell phone went off and he answered it with a nasty, “What.”

  U’s voice, which he was beginning to hate, was tense. “We’ve got a problem. Two lessers were arrested by the police.”

  O squeezed his eyes shut. “What the hell did they do?”

  “They were taking down a civilian vampire and an unmarked patrol car went by. Two policemen engaged the slayers and more cops showed up. The lessers were taken into custody, and I got the call just now from one of them.”

  “So bail them out,” O snapped. “Why are you calling me?”

  There was a pause. Then U’s tone had the stench of well, duh all over it. “Because you need to know this. Listen, they were packing plenty of concealed weapons, none of which they had permits for, all of which had come off the black market, with no serial numbers on the barrels. No way they’re going to get bail in the morning. No public defender is that good. You need to get them out.”

  O scanned left and right and then turned around in a driveway the size of a football field. Yeah, there was definitely no-place to park around here. He had to go down to where Thorne Avenue dumped out on Bellman Road and leave the truck in that little village.

  “O?”

  “I have things I have to do.”

  U coughed as if he were choking back a boatload of pissed-off. “No offense, but I can’t imagine anything’s as important as this. What if those slayers get into a fight in general holding? You want black blood flowing so that some EMT type figures out they’re not human? You have to contact the Omega and get him to call those two home.”

  “You do it.” O accelerated even though he was headed down the hill now.

  “What?”

  “Reach out and touch the Omega.” He came to a rolling stop at the bottom of Thorne and picked left. There were all kinds of cutie-pie, homey-ass shops on the street, and he parked in front of one called Kitty’s Attic.

  “O…That kind of request needs to come from the Fore-lesser. You know that.”

  O paused before turning off the ignition.

  Terrific. Just what he wanted. More quality time with the bastard master. Goddamn it. He couldn’t live with not knowing the fate of his woman any longer. There wasn’t time for this Society bullshit.

  “O?”

  He put his head down on the steering wheel. Banged it a couple of times.

  On the other hand, if that contact with the humans down at the police station exploded in his face, the Omega was going to come looking for him. And then where would he be?

  “Fine. I’ll go see him now.” He cursed as he put the truck in gear. Before he pulled out he looked up Thorne Avenue again.

  “And O, I have a concern about the membership. You need to meet with the slayers. Things are slipping.”

  “You’re handling the check-ins.”

  “They want to see you. They’re questioning your leadership.”

  “U, you know what they say about messengers, right?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Too much bad news will get you shot.” He turned off the phone and flipped it shut. Then hit the gas.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  As Phury sat on his bed, he was so strung out from the need to have sex, he could barely pour himself another shot of vodka. The bottle shook, the glass shook. Hell, the whole mattress was shaking.

  He looked at Vishous, who was leaning back against the headboard beside him. The brother was just as twitchy and miserable as he nodded his head to 50 Cent’s The Massacre.

  Five hours into Bella’s fertile time and they were both a mess, their bodies mostly instinct, their minds mostly fog. The compulsion to stay at the mansion couldn’t be overridden, the needing pulling them in tight, paralyzing them. Thank God for the red smoke and the Grey Goose. The numbing out helped a lot.

  Though not with everything. Phury tried not to think about what was going on in Z’s room. Because when the brother hadn’t come back, it was obvious that his body was being used, not the morphine.

  Dear God… the two of them. Together. Over and over again…

  “How you doing?” V asked.

  “’Bout the same as you, my man.” He took a deep drink from his glass, his body swimming, lost, drowning in the erotic sensations trapped under his skin. He eyed the bathroom.

  He was about to get up and head for a little privacy again when Vishous said, “I think I’m in trouble.”

  Phury had to laugh. “This won’t last forever.”

  “No, I mean…I think there’s something wrong. With me.”

  Phury narrowed his eyes. His brother’s face looked strained, bu
t otherwise it was the same as always. Handsome lines, goatee around the mouth, swirling tattoos at the right temple. Those diamond eyes were sharp, undimmed even by the Grey Goose, the blunts, the needing. Their superblack centers shined with a vast, incomprehensible intelligence, a genius so powerful it was unnerving.

  “Like what kind of trouble, V?”

  “I, ah…” Vishous cleared his throat. “Only Butch knows this. You don’t tell anyone else, true?”

  “Yeah. No problem.”

  V stroked his goatee. “My visions have dried up.”

  “You mean you can’t see—”

  “What’s coming. Yeah. I’m getting nothing anymore. The last thing I received was about three days ago, right before Z went after Bella. I saw them together. In that Ford Taurus. Coming here. After that, there’s been…nothing.”

  “You ever have something like this happen before?”

  “No, and I’m not getting anyone’s thoughts anymore, either. It’s like the whole thing dried up on me.”

  Abruptly the brother’s tension seemed to have nothing to do with the needing. He seemed rigid from…fear. Holy shit. Vishous was scared. And the anomaly was downright jarring. Of all the brothers, V was the one who never was afraid. It was like he’d been born without fear receptors in his brain.

  “Maybe it’s just temporary,” Phury said. “Or you think maybe Havers could help?”

  “This isn’t about physiology.” V finished the vodka in his glass and held out his hand. “Don’t hog the Goose, my brother.”

  Phury passed him the bottle. “Maybe you could talk to…”

  But who? Where could V, who knew everything, go for answers?

  Vishous shook his head. “I don’t want…I don’t want to talk about this, actually. Forget I said anything.” As he poured, his face closed up tight, a house battened down. “I’m sure it will come back. I mean, yeah. It will.”

  He put the bottle on the table next to him and held up his gloved hand. “After all, this godforsaken thing still glows like a lamp. And until I lose this whacked-out night-light of mine, I figure I’m still normal. Well…normal for me.”

  They fell silent for a while, Phury looking into his glass, V staring into his, the rap in the background beating, thumping, switching to G-Unit.

  Phury cleared his throat. “Can I ask you about them?”

  “About who?”

  “Bella. Bella and Zsadist.”

  V cursed. “I’m not a crystal ball, you know. And I hate telling fortunes.”

  “Yeah, I’m sorry. Forget it.”

  There was a long pause. Then Vishous muttered, “I don’t know what’s going to happen to them. I don’t know because I just can’t…see anymore.”

  As Butch got out of the Escalade, he looked up at the grungy apartment building and wondered again why in the hell John had wanted to come here. Seventh Street was nasty and dangerous.

  “This it?”

  When the boy nodded, Butch activated the security alarm on the SUV. He wasn’t particularly worried about the thing being stripped while they were gone. Folks around here would be convinced one of their dealers was inside. Or someone even more picky about their shit who’d be packing heat.

  John walked up to the tenement’s door and pushed. The thing opened with a squeal. No locks. Big surprise. As Butch followed, he put his hand inside his suit coat so he could get at his gun if he needed to.

  John went left down a long corridor. The place smelled like old cigarette smoke and moldy decay and was almost as cold as the great outdoors. The in-house residents were like rats: unseen, only heard, on the other side of thin walls.

  Down at the end the boy pushed open a fire door.

  A staircase jogged up to the right. The steps had been worn down to the particleboard, and there was the sound of dripping water from somewhere a couple of flights up.

  John put his hand on a banister that was screwed loosely into the wall, and he went up slowly until he got to the landing between the second and third floors. Up above, the fluorescent light that was sunk into the ceiling was in its death-rattle stage, the tubes flickering as if desperately trying to keep up a useful life.

  John stared at the cracked linoleum on the floor, then looked up at the window. Starburst patterns covered the thing as if it had been pummeled with bottles. The only reason the grimy glass hadn’t broken was because it was embedded with chicken wire.

  From the floor above there was a splatter of curses, a kind of verbal shotgun that was undoubtedly the beginning of a fight. Butch was about to suggest that they get out of Dodge when John turned away of his own accord and started jogging down the stairs.

  They were back in the Escalade and heading out of the bad part of town less than a minute and a half later.

  Butch came to a stop at a traffic light. “Where to?”

  John wrote and then flashed the pad.

  “Home it is,” Butch murmured, still having no idea why the kid had wanted to visit that stairwell.

  John said a passing hello to Wellsie when he came into the house and then took off for his room. He was grateful that she seemed to understand he needed some space. After he shut his door he dropped his notebook on the bed, shrugged out of his coat, and immediately headed for the shower. While the water was heating up, he stripped out of his clothes. Once he was under the spray, he stopped shaking.

  When he came back out, he put on a T-shirt and a pair of sweatpants, then eyed his laptop on the desk. He sat down in front of it, thinking that maybe he should write something. The therapist had suggested it.

  God… Talking to her about what had happened to him had been almost as bad as living through the experience the first time. And he hadn’t meant to be as candid as he’d been. It was just…about twenty minutes into the session, he’d cracked and his hand had started scribbling and he hadn’t been able to stop once the story had begun.

  He closed his eyes and tried to remember what the man who’d cornered him had looked like. Only a vague picture came to mind, but he remembered the knife clearly. It had been a five-inch, double-sided switchblade with a point on it sharp as a scream.

  He ran his forefinger over the mouse square on the laptop and the Windows XP screen saver blinked off. His e-mail account had a fresh message in it. From Sarelle. He read the thing three times before trying to reply.

  In the end, he sent her back: Hey, Sarelle, tomorrow night’s not going to work for me. I’m really sorry. I’ll get back with you sometime. TTYL, John.

  He really…didn’t want to see her again. Not for a while, at any rate. He didn’t want to see any females except for Wellsie and Mary and Beth and Bella. There was going to be nothing even remotely sexual in his life until he came to terms with what had been done to him almost a year ago.

  He moved out of Hotmail and opened a fresh document in Microsoft Word.

  He rested his fingers on the keyboard for only a moment. And then they started to fly.

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Zsadist dragged his head over to the side and looked at the clock. Ten in the morning. Ten…ten o’clock. How many hours? Sixteen…

  He closed his eyes, so exhausted he could barely breathe. He was flat on his back, legs splayed out, arms lying wherever. He’d been in that position since he’d rolled off Bella maybe an hour ago.

  He felt like it had been a year since he’d come back into the room the night before. His neck and wrists burned from the number of times she’d fed from him, and the thing between his legs was sore. The air around them was saturated with the bonding scent, and the sheets were wet with a combination of his blood and the other thing she had needed from him.

  He wouldn’t have traded a moment of it.

  As he closed his eyes, he wondered if he could sleep now. He was starved for food and blood, so hungry not even his penchant for keeping himself on edge could override the needs. But he couldn’t move.

  When he felt a hand brush over his lower belly, he peeled his lids apart to look at Bel
la. The hormones were rising in her again, and the response she called from him answered, the it growing hard once more.

  Zsadist struggled to roll over so he could go where he needed to be, but he was too weak. Bella shifted against him and he tried to lift himself again, but his head weighed a thousand pounds.

  Reaching out, he grabbed her arm and pulled her on top of him. As her thighs parted over his hips, she looked at him in shock and began to scramble off.

  “’S okay,” he croaked. He cleared his throat, but it didn’t help with all the gravel. “I know it’s you.”

  Her lips came down on his and he kissed her back even though he couldn’t lift his arms to hold her to him. God, how he loved kissing her. He loved feeling her mouth against his, loved having her right up close all in his face, loved her breath in his lungs, loved…her? Was that what had happened in the night? Had he fallen?

  The bonding scent that was all over the both of them gave him his answer. And the realization should have shocked him, but he was too tired to bother to fight it.

  Bella eased up and slid the it inside of her. As beat as he was, he groaned in ecstasy. The feel of her was something he couldn’t get enough of, and he knew it wasn’t because of her needing.

  She rode him, planting her hands on his pecs and finding a rhythm with her hips because he couldn’t thrust anymore with his. He felt himself gearing up for another explosion, especially as he watched her breasts sway with her movements.

  “You are so beautiful,” he said in his hoarse voice.

  She paused to bend down and kiss him again, her dark hair falling around him, a gentle shelter. When she straightened, he marveled at the sight of her. She was glowing with health and vitality from everything he had given her, a resplendent female who he…

  Loved. Yes, loved.

  That was the thought that shot through his brain as he came inside of her again.

  Bella collapsed on top of him, exhaled in a shudder, and suddenly the needing was over. The roaring female energy just drifted out of the room, a storm that had passed. Sighing in relief, she shifted off of him, separating her gorgeous sex from his thing. As the it flopped lifeless on his belly, he felt the cold of the room on that flesh, so unappealing compared to her warmth.