by J. R. Ward
V reached into that pea head and tripped a bunch of wires.
Like magic, the bouncer dropped the I’m-in-charge-here-not-you act and leaned to the side to open the way in. “Right through here.”
Thank you, motherfucker.
Striding past the guy, V entered the club’s anteroom. Oh, look, they had a coat check. And what do you know, the big-breasted, puff-lip’d attendant was staring over at V like she wanted to take his pants and check them in with her hands and her tongue.
He kept right on going.
The facility was an old shirt-making factory converted into absolutely nothing at all. The space’s retrofitting for the event was happy hands at home, from the sound system’s cobbled-together collection of woofers and tweeters to the strung-up lights that hung from the ceiling by bungee cords and strings to the random lasers that shot through the dim space with all the coordination of free radical electrons.
After years of monitoring humans on the internet, he was well familiar with the characters the people were playing. Pyre’s Revyval was a popular tabletop role-playing game, and the world building and vampire-based characters of it had long metastasized out of the pages of its rule book and away from those eight-sided dice that were used to determine character motivation and strength.
As he moved through the crowd, looking for some staircase that went to a lower level, he wanted to shove people out of his way. About a year ago, he had set up an emergency calling service for the vampire species, a 911-style clearinghouse for everything from crimes to medical problems. Manned by volunteers, the callers were screened and help was assigned as necessary. The incident he was currently responding to had been logged in about twenty minutes ago. A female had phoned with the report of a body on the lower level of this place. She had refused to give her name, but she had been very clear about the location within the club—
There it was. A steel door in the far corner.
He beelined for the thing and ripped it open. The stairwell beyond smelled nasty and was refrigerator-cold, and he made fast work out of the descent. The instant he broke out into a subterranean corridor, he smelled the blood. Fresh. Female.
Vampire.
“Sonofabitch.”
Striding down, he used his nose to determine whether there was anyone else around. Nope, right now, although there had been plenty of traffic tonight: All kinds of faded scents, human and vampire, masculine and feminine, lingered like shadows, nothing but two-dimensional representations of the living-and-breathing who had come down here and fucked and gone back up to the party.
The female who had done the dialing had apparently not stuck around. So it was impossible to know which of the scents was hers.
But he knew where to stop.
In front of one of the many doors.
The fresh blood was loud as a scream here.
Before he opened the way in, he frowned and dropped to his haunches. A single footprint gleamed red on the concrete floor, its heel toward the door, its triangled toes pointed away. V looked up and down the corridor. Yes . . . there. Another print. Nearly invisible. And then a final one after that, so faint he only saw it because he was looking for the damn thing.
The killer? he wondered. Or the caller who reported she’d found a body?
Maybe they were one in the same.
He rose to his full height, grabbed the door handle, and opened up. The area beyond was pitch black, and the piss-poor light from the flickering fixtures in the corridor didn’t illuminate shit. Didn’t matter. He knew exactly where the body was, and not just because of the overwhelming scent of blood. As his eyes adjusted, he could tell there was something hanging from the ceiling directly in front of him, and like the footprint, it glistened, the spastic light from over his shoulder blinking across glossy contours.
V unsheathed his lead-lined glove, releasing the glowing palm and fingers of his curse from the confines that protected the world from immolation. The illumination that emanated from his hand was so bright, he blinked from the glare, and as he held it forward, he ground his molars.
A masked female was hanging from the ceiling, a meat hook piercing the base of her skull, its speared point protruding out of her open mouth and touching the tip of her nose. Her throat had been slashed, the veins draining their load down the front of her naked body, her blood a transparent death shroud that colored her pale flesh bright red.
Through the mask’s twin holes, her eyes were open and staring straight at V.
“Motherfucker,” he said.
Just like the other two.
• • •
Boone opened the front door to his father’s house and stepped over the threshold. The familiar smells of lemon floor polish, freshly baked bread, and roses from the ladies’ parlor made him feel like he was in a distorted dream.
It should be different, he thought as he looked around the formal foyer. Everything should be different.
His father was no longer alive. And that monumental change seemed like the kind of thing that should be reflected in this mansion that had always defined the male. Sure as his station in society and his money and his bloodline had made Altamere the male he was, so too had this sprawling manse determined the course of, and provided the grounding to, his life.
“The door is ajar.”
At the clipped syllables, Boone looked to the left. Marquist was standing in the archway of the dining room. He had a polishing cloth in his hand, his jacket was removed and his starched white sleeves were jacked up by a pair of black elastic bands.
The door is ajar.
As if the butler were part of the alarm system of the house.
“My father is dead,” Boone said.
Marquist blinked. And then that cloth started to tremble ever so slightly. Other than that, the male showed no reaction at all.
“Ehrmine’s gone, too,” Boone continued. “They’re both . . . gone.”
The butler blinked a number of times. And Boone knew damn well any upset was not because of the loss of the female. Ehrmine had been no more significant to Marquist’s nightly existence than she had been to Altamere’s.
Without another word, the butler turned on his heel and walked away. His free hand, the one without the cloth, reached out into thin air, as if, in his mind, he were steadying himself on the wall.
The flap door into the kitchen wing opened and closed as he disappeared through it.
Boone turned to the cold breeze that was funneling into the warm house. Stepping back out over the threshold, he stood on the stoop and stared past the curving drive to the lawn. In the light of the security fixtures that were tacked under the mansion’s roofline, the blanket of snow that covered the grounds of the estate was pristine, its weight buffering the already subtle contours of the property all the way down to the stone pillars by the road. At irregular intervals, mature oaks and stands of birches, currently barren of leaves, filled out vacancies like polite guests at a lawn party, and there were also flower beds that would be filled with pale blooms when the warm weather came.
As the cold wind blew against his fighting gear, he thought of his blood mahmen.
Back when Illumna had gone unto the Fade, he’d never gotten a clear story about what had happened to her. It had been sudden and unexpected, at least from his point of view. She had been young, healthy, and relatively free of bad habits. Nonetheless, one evening, he had come down for First Meal, and his father had informed him, over the scones and the eggs Benedict, that her Fade Ceremony was being conducted on the Thursday following.
That was it.
His sire had then risen from the head of the dining room table, picked up the Wall Street Journal, and departed.
Boone could remember looking down at where his mahmen had always sat. There had been a setting of china and silverware put out for her, as if her presence had been anticipated.
Left to his own devices, he had gone up to his room and set himself down at his desk. He’d had some notion of writing Illumna a lette
r, putting to page the questions going through his mind. But he hadn’t gotten far with it because he’d never really been able to ask her anything in life—and death, as it turned out, did not cure that.
Next thing he’d known, it was time for Last Meal. He had dressed in a different suit than he’d worn at the start of the night, as was appropriate, and joined his father at the dining table once again. Marquist had served them, as was customary when they had no guests.
There had been no setting for Boone’s mahmen then.
His eyes had lingered on her empty chair while his father had talked to the butler about . . . the same stuff he always did: Social gossip, house issues, staffing issues. Boone had stayed silent. Then again, even when Illumna had been alive, Altamere and his butler had always done all the talking at “family” meals, the normal boundaries between master and servant disappearing in the relative privacy.
At the time, the lack of real conversation around the loss of Boone’s blood mahmen had not struck him as weird. That was the way things were done; the more likely a subject was to upset, the less that was aired on the topic.
Or maybe it had been more a case of the death being unimportant.
Fast-forward two decades. The fact that he was standing here in the winter wind, with a shoulder that was throbbing from its stitches and a headache that was pounding from his empty stomach . . . with no one to talk to . . . was right out of the family playbook. The aristocracy had always been better at appearances, fancy velvet curtains drawn across stages that were ultimately empty—
The first of the shapes materialized out of thin air over on the right, the big body appearing in the shadows of the house’s exterior lights, taking solid form.
Boone’s eyes watered as he recognized who it was. And before he could offer a greeting, there was another directly on the male’s heels, a female this time.
Craeg and Paradise.
In quick succession, three others arrived. Axe. Novo. Peyton.
His trainee class.
As the five of them came up the walkway, Boone felt a loosening in the center of his chest, although what was unleashed was unwelcome. The sadness seemed like a waste of time, not only because it wasn’t going to do anything to fix what had happened at that glymera party, but because it wasn’t like he wanted his father back. Or his stepmahmen.
Craeg took off his Syracuse ball cap. “Hey, my man.”
The hug that followed said more than any words could have: We’re here for you. You are not alone. Whatever you need, we got you.
Paradise, Craeg’s mate, was next. And as she wrapped her arms around Boone, he relaxed into her embrace.
“I know this is hard,” she said. “I am really sorry.”
As a fellow member of the glymera and a distant cousin, she understood exactly how it was in aristocratic families. How grief was one more thing that was swept under the Oriental, put away in the safe, tucked into the silver closet.
Axe and Novo and Peyton were up next, and then Boone just stood there like a planker.
“Let’s go inside,” Paradise said gently.
“Oh, right. Yes, of course. It’s cold out here.”
Next thing he knew, they were all in the ladies’ parlor, sitting on the formal sofas, looking at each other. He expected Marquist to burst in at any moment. When that didn’t happen, he took a deep breath.
“I’m glad you guys came.”
“Do you want us to stay overday with you?” Paradise asked.
“I don’t know what I want, to be honest.” He looked at the vase of flowers set on the coffee table in front of them all. “I just . . .”
Axe spoke up. “I know, it’s hard to explain—”
“My father was traitor.”
As he said the words, he realized he was trying them on for size. Testing the weight of them. Strapping on the shame for the first time, and undoubtedly not the last.
“My father . . . was a traitor.” He shifted his eyes to his friends. “He was directly involved in the previous plot to overthrow Wrath, and there is a good chance he was part of a revival of that treason tonight.”
Craeg cursed and turned his hat around and around in his hands. Paradise put a hand on Boone’s shoulder. Axe made like he was spitting on the ground.
“I tried to get him to stay home.” Boone shook his head. “I told him not to go there. But he refused to listen to me.”
“Your father is not you,” Paradise said. “You are not him.”
“I know.” He cleared his throat. “Anyway, I just want to go back to work.”
He studiously ignored the volley of worried looks that his friends shared. But as long as his shoulder was good to go, what was the problem?
“When will you be doing the Fade Ceremony?” Novo asked. “We want to be there.”
“I haven’t gotten that far.” Speaking of which, where was the body? Who had his stepmahmen’s? “But I’ll let you know.”
He had no brothers or sisters, no grandparents, no aunts or uncles who were still alive after the raids. But he had a couple dozen cousins in the glymera, none of whom he knew well at all because he had kept such a low profile socially. Benign estrangement aside, however, he was willing to bet that all of them would want to show up for Altamere’s ceremony.
They would surely come, if only to gawk, assuming the news of how the death had occurred would hit the gossip phone tree—and how could it not? His father had been attacked in front of over twenty other members of the aristocracy, and all of them, evidently, had survived.
And as for Boone’s stepmahmen? He had to assume that her family would take care of, and honor properly, her remains. She had, after all, come from a very good bloodline with plenty of proud heritage of their own.
As if his father would have mated anybody lesser than he.
“I’m going to keep the ceremony low-key,” Boone heard himself say. “You are all welcome to attend, but I understand if—”
The gonging sound that echoed around the foyer was a surprise, and at first, his congested brain didn’t know what the interruption was caused by.
“That’s the front door,” he mumbled.
Getting to his feet, he was aware of a tensing throughout his chest and shoulders, although that was not because of whoever might have arrived: He didn’t want to go the rounds with the butler.
But Marquist didn’t make an appearance.
As Boone opened the heavy panels, he exhaled in a combination of surprise and curious relief. “Oh, it’s you. You didn’t have to come . . . but I’m glad to see you.”
“I just heard.” Rochelle’s pale eyes were just as lovely and warm as they had been a year before. “I am so sorry.”
There was a long pause. And then they both moved at the same time.
Even though he had not seen the female since the night their arrangement had ended, and in spite of the fact that it was totally improper, Boone opened his arms wide, and in a similar breach of protocol, Rochelle stepped in against him. At first, the contact was light, but then they were holding each other tightly. Like his father’s house, she smelled the same, Cristalle by Chanel perfume and the expensive French soap she had always favored. She was dressed in the same style, too, wearing an Escada suit that tastefully set off the subtle curves of her figure.
It was black. For mourning. And as most aristocratic females only wore color, he knew she had changed for him before she’d came over.
As they eased back, he noticed absently there was loose snow on the crown of her blond chignon.
“Oh,” she said with a start, “you have guests.”
Boone glanced over his shoulder and saw his fellow trainees leaning forward in their various seats and staring out of the archway at him—at him and Rochelle—with wide, interested eyes.
“Come meet my friends,” he said. “You already know Peyton and Paradise, of course.”
As he drew her in beside him, it felt natural to walk into the elegant parlor with her against his hip. But the f
act that he was still armed, and so were the people on those sofas, was a reminder that his life had diverged greatly from Rochelle’s since their arrangement.
She had stayed in society, yet he hadn’t heard she’d been mated? Then again, he was out of everything, for the most part.
He was so glad she’d come, though.
“Everyone,” he announced, “this is Rochelle.”
FIVE
“You don’t have to make me tea.”
As Boone spoke up, he stared across the kitchen at Rochelle. She was over at the sixteen-burner stove, putting a copper kettle on an open flame. He was over in the alcove of windows, at the table where the staff sat and took their meals. There was no one else around. Marquist had clearly announced the passing to the other staff and the doggen had all retired unto mourning for their master, as was proper.
Meanwhile, the butler was probably polishing Altamere’s shoes with his own tears.
Man, their relationship had had some blurry lines, hadn’t it.
“Boiled water is the only thing I know how to make,” Rochelle said.
The other trainees had left shortly after her arrival, as if they were hoping Boone needed privacy with the female. He was going to have to take care of that after nightfall. When he went back to work.
He would set them straight that there was nothing going on.
“And even so,” she murmured, “I may burn this kettle.”
“Don’t worry, I’m no great chef, either,” he murmured as he rolled his shoulder, testing out its range of movement.
“Where is your china?” She pivoted around and measured a square mile’s worth of cupboards. “So many places to choose from.”
Boone shrugged. “Let me help. We should be able to find it together.”
When he went to stand up, she shook her head. “You stay put. I’ll do the sleuthing.”
She worked her way around the cabinets, opening up the double-sided, paneled doors, inspecting all manner of spices, mixing bowls, cooking equipment. She finally found some mugs above one of the three dishwashers. They were fine porcelain and ornamented with a hand-painted gold-and-maroon pattern. They were rarely used, however. Boone’s father had not approved of them, calling them unforgivably coarse.
