Blood Truth

by J. R. Ward

  Another image of that male popped into her head. It was of when she had first seen him down in that basement corridor. He had been backing away from the open door to the storage room where that female had been killed, his head turned away from the cell phone in his palm, his eyes squeezed shut as if he were trying to wipe something out of his mind.

  Perhaps a picture of that murdered female.

  You can trust me. I won’t hurt you—

  As her phone went off with a text, she frowned and glanced over at her cloak. The black folds were hanging on a peg by the door, next to her parka and her yellow rain slicker. Getting to her feet, she wondered who the wrong number was looking for.

  It was not someone reaching out for her.

  Both parents gone. Sister . . . gone. No extended relations. And as for friends? Isobel had been the social one, and after her death, all those people who had orbited her sister’s charismatic center had spiraled off in search of another sun around which to circle.

  Maybe it was the Brotherhood.

  Helania dug into the cloak and took the burner phone she used out of the hidden inner pocket. It was a text from an unknown number:

  I just wanted to apologize if I didn’t handle things as well as I could have tonight. I’m worried I made you feel uncomfortable by racing after you. I am very sorry. Please do not be deterred from sharing things with Butch or anyone else. All that matters is that we find out who is hurting these females. Thank you for reading this, Boone

  Helania froze where she stood.

  Then she looked over to where she’d been sitting and wondered if he’d somehow picked up on the fact that she’d been thinking about him.

  Back on the couch, she read the message through two more times, noting that unlike the texts she’d used to get from Isobel, there were no abbreviations. No emojis. No text grammar. It was more like an email. Or a handwritten letter.

  Abruptly, she realized she was sitting forward with her phone cupped in her hands.

  Like she might do something with it.

  Like she might reply to him.

  Her heart rate jumped into a higher gear, and she felt a flush hit her face. As her fingertip floated across the phone’s screen, she watched from a distance.

  No text. Nope.

  Things were ringing.

  She slapped the phone up to her ear, shocked that she had put a call through. She had no idea what she was going to say or why she was calling him. Especially as she was just a civilian, and he was not only clearly an aristocrat, but also someone who was affiliated with the Black Dagger Brotherhood—

  “Hello?” a male voice said on the other end. “. . . hello?”

  Helania cleared her throat. “Hi.”

  There was a sharp intake. “Helania?”

  “I got your text.” Like he didn’t know that? “And I, ah . . .” She looked around her apartment as if the cheap furniture and galley kitchen could throw some syllabic suggestions her way. “I just wanted to reassure you that I—look, it’s an awkward situation. You didn’t do anything wrong. I was . . . it’s just hard. This whole thing is hard.”

  “Of course it is.” There was a rustling like he was sitting up against some pillows—and she had to wonder if he was in his bed. “I only figured that I didn’t help things and I wanted to make it right somehow.”

  More rustling. He was definitely in bed—and damn it, she was suddenly wondering what he looked like without all that outerwear on. Not naked, of course. Just street clothes. Jeans . . . t-shirt—

  Oh, horseshit. She was wondering what he slept in. And whether it was a birthday suit.

  “Hello?” he said.

  “Sorry.” Helania shook her head. “It’s okay. Everything is okay.”

  Yeah, right, she thought. Nothing was okay. Not why they had met or what she had noticed about him when they had . . . or what she was thinking about now.

  “I’ve never done anything like this before,” he murmured.

  Well, what do you know. I’ve never called a male out of the blue and talked to them, either. Especially not after I met them at a murder scene.

  “How are you tied to the Brotherhood?” she blurted. “I think you said something about it, but I can’t remember.”

  “I’m in their training program.”

  “For the war?”

  “Yes, I’m a soldier.”

  “So you fight?” Okay, that was a stupid thing to say. But wow. “Against the lessers?”

  “Among other things,” he said dryly. “I’m off rotation at the moment.”

  “Because you’re injured?” For some reason, that spiked her anxiety. Which was nuts given that they were strangers. Why did it matter to her if he was hurt? “Sorry, that’s none of my business—”

  “No, I’m not wounded.” There was a pause. “My sire died recently.”

  “Oh, no.” Helania forgot all about beds and birthday suits. “I am so sorry.”

  Closing her eyes, she wanted to know the why of the death with the same urgency that she didn’t want him to be hurt by the enemy.

  What is happening to me? she wondered.

  And jeez, it was like three people were on this phone call: him, her, and this inner-voice thing that kept speaking up in her head.

  “He was killed last night, actually.” Boone exhaled. “So it’s pretty new.”

  Helania sat back against a sea of needlepoint pillows. “That is no time at all.”

  “You are so right.”

  It was hard to believe he was functioning as well as he seemed to be. The first two nights after Isobel had gone unto the Fade? There had been no way she could handle anything. Hell, that had been the whole first week or so. Maybe month.

  “What happened?” she heard herself ask.

  TEN

  Boone’s suite was in the front of his father’s house, and the combination of rooms took up a good quarter of the mansion’s grand expanse. He had a sitting room, an inner sanctum with no windows for sleeping, a walk-in closet, and an agate bathroom that had always been one of his favorite places in the world. There was also a petit déjeuner with a small fridge, microwave, coffeepot and the like.

  It was a world unto itself within the larger universe of the household, and as he extended his legs under his covers and stared across at his shelves full of the works of Nietzsche, Hegel, Sartre and the Greek greats, he realized he had never brought anyone else up here.

  Well . . . until now.

  Yes, he realized Helania wasn’t actually with him. But as he held his phone tight to his ear, he felt like that lonely track record he’d been rocking was being broken.

  She might as well have been with him in the flesh . . . and he liked it.

  But on that note.

  “Will you excuse me for a moment?” he said.

  “If this is a bad time—”

  “No!” He sat up so fast, he knocked a pillow onto the side table and had to catch the lamp with his free hand. “I mean, no, not at all. Just give me one sec.”

  He went to put the cell phone facedown on the bedside table, but then changed his mind and stuffed it under the remaining pillows. Then he moved the covers aside and leaped buck-ass naked out of bed. His body did not appreciate the chill, but that was not the reason he hightailed it into his closet. He felt like he was streaking in front of the female, his hey-nannies out on display, his cheeks flashing, everything he’d come into this world with on parade.

  In his closet, he flipped on the overhead lights—and looked at his collection of tailor-made suits with serious consideration. But come on, they weren’t on a date. It was a damn phone call, for godsakes. Not even FaceTime.

  He pivoted to the casual section and snagged out of a built-in set of drawers a pair of nylon warm-up pants and the Syracuse sweatshirt Craeg had lent to him a month ago. Back in the bedroom, he jumped into bed and shoved his hand under the pillows. After some hunt and peck with his palm, he grabbed that cell like it was going to self-destruct if he didn’t get a hold
of the thing.

  “Helania? Hello?”

  “Hi. I’m still here.”

  Boone felt a blush hit his face and was so glad she couldn’t see him. And then he went to get back under the sheets—only to decide that that was inappropriate. Jumping out of bed again, he landed on the fallen soldier pillow, lost his balance, threw out an arm—and caught himself on the wall while he banged the side of his foot into that side table.

  “Boone? Are you okay?”

  “Fine—yup, fine, just great.” FUCK. Fuck. Fuckfuckfuck. “Just stubbed my . . .” Right side of my entire body, goddamn it. “Toe.”

  Screw making hospital corners on the fucking bedsheets, he decided. At this rate, if he didn’t sit his ass down, he was going to end up on life support with a concussion and a broken hip.

  “I didn’t mean to get too personal,” she said.

  “No, it’s fine.”

  Stretching out on top of the duvet, he brought his foot up and inspected the damage. Nice work. A crowbar couldn’t have done it better.

  Clearing his throat, he said, “I’m just not used to talking about my sire’s death, you know? The whole thing seems surreal. I came home tonight and sat at his desk for the first time in my whole life. I keep expecting to wake up and find him here.”

  “You must miss him terribly.”

  Opening his mouth to answer that truthfully, he decided to leave that one where it was. Somehow, he didn’t think Hell, no, I’m glad he’s pushing up daisies—oops, filling out an urn, I mean was going to help him make a good first impression.

  Second impression, that was. His first being chasing after her into the dark like a stalker.

  He really needed to ask the guys in the training program for some help with this dating stuff.

  Boone refocused. “I was told it happened quickly. He didn’t suffer. And that is a consolation.”

  “So you weren’t . . . there.”

  “Not when he passed, no.”

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “Anything.”

  “Do you feel responsible? Because you weren’t with him, I mean? Even if . . . there was maybe nothing you could have done?”

  Boone rubbed the center of his chest as a dull ache abruptly flared into something he was becoming familiar with—and probably needed to get used to. Guilt, it turned out, had a half-life like something that was radioactive.

  And a sting that was just the same as being stabbed.

  “I am completely responsible,” he said roughly.

  “I know what that feels like.”

  “Who did you lose?”

  When she didn’t immediately reply, he had a thought that he would wait forever for her answer. And the moment that realization hit him, he reminded himself of Butch’s warning: The truth was, he did not know this female at all and they had met under unusual and traumatic circumstances. A combination of male lust and high drama was probably making him feel a connection that was deeper than it actually was.

  Take out the “probably.”

  After a very long time, she whispered, “My sister.”

  Boone sat forward, the math adding up. “Tell me.”

  Even though he knew. He knew—and it was a relief, in a tragic way. It would explain why she was in that club, watching after other females so closely.

  “She was killed eight months ago,” Helania whispered.

  “At Pyre,” he insisted, even as he resolved to let her go at her own pace. “She was killed at the club, too, wasn’t she.”

  There was another long silence. “Yes.”

  Boone closed his eyes and gripped his cell phone hard.

  “That is just terrible,” he said. “I can’t even imagine what you’ve been through. What your family has—”

  “It’s just me. Isobel was all I had. Our parents died in the fifties.”

  “Can you tell me what happened to her? And I’m asking you as a friend, not as part of any investigation, I promise—”

  “I have to go.”

  Boone cursed internally—and had to fight not to press her. “I understand. Just . . . if you ever want to talk, you know where to find me?”

  When there was no reply, he realized that she had hung up already.

  • • •

  The thing Butch liked most about the Pit was the people in it.

  As he sat down on his black leather sofa, with a bottle of Lagavulin on the coffee table in front of him and a rocks glass with ice-and-a-splash against his palm, he smiled over at his roommate. Vishous was behind his Four Toys, the bank of computers and monitors, the kind of thing that could be used to land the space station on the head of a pin in the middle of a hurricane.

  Ya know, if you were wicked bored or some shit. And had nothing better to do than save humanity.

  He and V had moved into this carriage house when the Brotherhood had taken residence in the great gray mansion across the courtyard. And then, after he had mated Marissa and V had settled down with Doc Jane, its two bedrooms had managed to accommodate everyone.

  Plus Butch’s wardrobe.

  Okay, fine, the carbon-based life-forms were good to go in their allotted four-wall-configurations. His clothes, on the other hand, had kind of metastasized from his closet out into the hallway. But no one was complaining about the extremely expensive and very classy fire hazard. Yet.

  “What’s that grin about,” came a mutter from behind all that computer equipment.

  “I’m just in a good mood.” Butch swirled the Lag in his glass. “You know, I’m sure you had one once. It probably scared you, though.”

  “Nah, I gave it up for Lent.”

  “You’re not Catholic.”

  “You infected me.” V leaned back and looked around the monitors. “Gave me a case of mono-Pope-leosis.”

  “That joke is blasphemous, but worse, it’s not that funny.”

  “Well, at least I can guess why you’re full of the joys of spring, tra-la. Marissa still recovering in your bed?”

  “Wait, wait, I can’t talk right now.” Butch took his heavy gold Jesus piece out of his silk shirt and squeezed his eyes shut. “I’m praying for your eternal soul.”

  “Don’t bother.”

  “Come on, don’t you want to go to Heaven?”

  “I wouldn’t know anyone up there. And don’t get too prissy with that religious bullshit, true? I don’t want to spend eternity without you, so you need to come to Dhunhd with me.”

  “Will they have Milk Duds there?”

  “Yes, but they’ll all be melted together. And we’ll be surrounded by Yankees fans, televangelists, and no booze.”

  “We’ll think of some way to pass the time.”

  “We always do.”

  Butch took another long draw off the rim of his glass and let his happy glow bloom all over his shit. And yes indeedy, doody, his beautiful shellan was in fact sleeping off a marathon session that had taken them through Last Meal and left Marissa too satisfied to need food. And didn’t that make him feel like he’d been a good husband. Or hellren, to use the vampire word.

  Grabbing the remote, he angled the whacker over the foosball table and turned on the flat-screen. No reason to change the channel. ESPN was on so much, it was like it had punched out all the other networks in a bar fight.

  V cleared his throat from behind the monitors. “So I made a mistake.”

  Cue the sound of tires screeching.

  Butch tilted forward so he could see the guy. “What did you say?”

  “You heard me.”

  “Throwing around the m-word, huh. It must be serious. What happened? Did you try to solve pi to twelve thousand digits and get number eleven thousand nine hundred ninety-nine wrong?”

  Those diamond eyes shot over. “I’m being real.”

  Butch dropped the bullshit. “Talk to me.”

  V typed some things on his keyboard, that diamond stare of his going back and forth as if he were reading something on one of the screens. And as silence grew be
tween them, Butch was content to wait the guy out. The brother was not a big talker to begin with unless he was exercising his constitutional right to be sarcastic. And then he could be downright chatty. But when it came to anything remotely emotional? It was hard for him.

  “I ruined that scene down in the club’s storage room,” V muttered. “Didn’t I.”

  Butch blinked. “You took all those pictures first.”

  “But I wasn’t careful after that.” Before Butch could respond, V continued, “I was so focused on getting the body out of there and over to Havers’s before dawn came that I just wrecked the goddamn place. It wasn’t until you went there tonight that I realized what I’d done . . . tromping all over the floor, shoving things out of the way, calling in Zypher and Balthazar with their size fourteens.”

  “It was an evolving situation. A lot of things were happening.”

  “No excuse.” Those eyes looked over. “I made things harder on you with the investigation. I might even have fucked you for finding out who did it. It was inexcusable.”

  Thinking back to that storage room, Butch couldn’t deny that there had been substantial displacement of the scene due to the body being removed. But as much as he would have liked to do a proper quarantine and search, they had never discussed what the protocol for responding to a murder would be. Further, there were extenuating circumstances.

  “Here’s the thing,” he said, “there are priorities for us that didn’t exist when I was on the human side of things. Getting that body out of there was the prime directive. Could you have disturbed things less? I don’t know. Most of the club had emptied out, from what you told me, but there were still humans on-site. It was not a secure retrieval of the remains by a long shot. You did what you had to. I can deal with the rest.”

  “Next time, if there is one, I call you in first. Everybody calls you in first.”

  “Good deal.” Butch frowned as he thought about the case. “You know, I got a bad feeling about it all.”

  “Why?”

  He threw back what was left in his glass and gave the ice a ride, circling, circling, circling. “I don’t know, maybe I’m just out of shape with this kind of work.”

  “I spilled my beans. You spill yours.”

  Butch smiled a little, thinking that was fair enough. “Well, I do think the killer is one of us. Female vampires are strong. It would take one hell of a human to overpower one.”