The Beast

by J. R. Ward

  Over at the bedside, Mary kept her palm on Bitty's shoulder. "It's okay, you can touch her. Here."

  Mary leaned forward and took the soft, cold hand. "Hello, Annalye. Bitty's come to see you."

  Glancing at the girl, she nodded encouragement . . . and Bitty frowned.

  "Is she dead already?" the girl whispered.

  Mary blinked hard. "Ah, no, sweetheart. She's not. And she can hear you."

  "How?"

  "She just can. Go ahead. Talk to her. I know she'll want to hear your voice."

  "Mahmen?" Bitty said.

  "Take her hand. It's all right."

  As Mary inched back, Bitty reached out . . . and when contact was made, the girl frowned again.

  "Mahmen?"

  All at once, alarms started to go off with renewed panic, the shrill sounds cutting through the fragile connection between mother and daughter, bringing the medical staff toward the bed in a rush.

  "Mahmen!" Bitty grabbed on with both hands. "Mahmen! Don't go!"

  Mary was forced to pull Bitty out of the way as Havers started barking orders. The girl fought against the hold, but then collapsed as she screamed, her arms stretching toward her mother, her hair tangling.

  Mary held on to the small straining body. "Bitty, oh, God . . ."

  Havers got up on the bed and began chest compressions as the crash cart was brought over.

  "We've got to go," Mary said, pulling Bitty back toward the door. "We'll wait outside--"

  "I killed her! I killed her!"

  *

  As Vishous skidded up to Rhage, he fell to his knees and went for the brother's leather jacket and shirt, ripping the layers wide, exposing--

  "Oh . . . fuck."

  The bullet had entered to the right of center, exactly where the six-chambered heart of a vampire beat within its cage of bone. And as Rhage gasped for breath and spit blood, V looked around with a whole lot of frantic. Fighting everywhere. Cover nowhere. Time . . . running out--

  Butch came running at them, head ducked, body hauling ass and then some as he shot a pair of forties all around himself, pumping rounds off so that the slayers in range had to hit the ground and go fetal to avoid getting plugged with lead. The former cop slid into base feet-first, his weapons still up and kicking, his bulldog legs and torso plowing to a stop in the thick brown grass.

  "We gotta move him," that Boston accent announced.

  Rhage's mouth opened wide, and the inhale that came next rattled like a box of rocks.

  Ordinarily, V's brain was slick as shit, his intelligence so great that it was as much a personal characteristic as a faculty, defining everything about his life. He was the rational one, the logical one, the cynical sonofabitch who was never wrong.

  And yet his gray matter promptly crashed.

  Years of performing medical assessment and intervention in the field told him that his brother was going to die within a minute or two, assuming that the heart muscle had in fact been torn or pierced and one, or more than one, of the chambers was spilling blood into the chest cavity.

  Which would both cut off cardiac function as the peritoneal sac flooded and fatally compromise blood pressure.

  It was the kind of catastrophic injury that required immediate surgical intervention--and even assuming you had all the necessary technology and equipment available in a sterile clinical situation, success wasn't on lock.

  "V! We gotta move him--"

  Bullets sizzled by and they both hit the ground. And with a terrible mental recalculation, V's processing unit came to an untenable conclusion: Rhage's life or theirs.

  Fuck! I did this to him, V thought.

  If he hadn't told the brother about the vision, Rhage wouldn't have run out early and he would have been more in control during the fight--

  Vishous upped his muzzles and dropped three slayers who were closing in, while Butch twisted on the ground and did the same in the opposite direction.

  "Rhage, stay with us," V grunted as he popped out the empty clips and refilled the butts of his guns one after the other. "Rhage, you've got to--shit!"

  More shooting. And he was hit in the goddamn arm.

  As his own blood flowed, he ignored it, his brain reengaging to find a solution that didn't equal Rhage on a funeral fucking pyre. He could call his Jane in, because she couldn't be killed. But she couldn't perform open-heart surgery here, for fuck's sake. What if--

  The flash of light was so bright, so sudden, that he wondered who the hell was wasting time stabbing a slayer back to the Omega--

  The second blast of illumination had him cranking around and looking down at Rhage. Oh . . . shit. Twin shafts of brilliant light streamed out of the brother's eye sockets, lasering up into the sky in parallel streams that could have bull's-eyed the face of the moon.

  "Fuuuuuck!"

  Total change of plan. The motherfucking theme of the night.

  V hauled over to Butch and peeled him off Rhage. "Move it!"

  "What are you doing--Holy Mary, mother of God!"

  The pair of them broke out in a crouched run, their heads ducked, their legs ripping across the open area as they jumped over writhing lessers and varied their course to make themselves more difficult targets. When they reached the closest abandoned classroom building, they one-after-the-othered around the corner and went into auto-cover, V taking the front, Butch on the back.

  With his chest pumping, Vishous leaned around. Out in the center of the clearing, the change was torturing Rhage's downed body, his arms and legs contorting as his torso jerked and twisted, the beast emerging from the flesh of the male, the great dragon breaking free from the DNA it was forced to share.

  If Rhage hadn't died out there already, this was surely going to kill him.

  And yet there was no way of stopping the transformation. The Scribe Virgin had embedded the curse into every single one of Rhage's cells, and when the thing came out, the process was a train that no one could slow down or stop.

  Death was going to take care of the problem.

  Rhage's death . . . was going to stop all this.

  V closed his eyes and screamed inside.

  A second later, he popped his lids and thought, No fucking way. No fucking way he was going to let this happen.

  "Butch," he barked. "I gotta go."

  "What? Where are you--"

  That was the last thing Vishous heard as he up and disappeared.

  FOUR

  No pain.

  There was no pain from the gunshot in Rhage's chest. And that was his first clue that shit was critical. Wounds that hurt tended not to be the kind that put you into shock. No sensation? Probably a good indication, along with the fact that he'd been blown off his shitkickers and the hit was right at his breastbone, that he was in mortal danger.

  Blink. Try to breathe. Blink.

  Blood in his mouth, thick in his throat . . . a rising tide that went against his efforts to get oxygen down to his lungs. Hearing had been reduced to a muffled version of same, as if he'd lain back in a bathtub and the water level had come up over both his ears. Sight was in and out, the night sky above him revealed and obscured as things failed and kick-started again. Breath was getting harder and harder to draw, a gathering weight settling on his chest, first like a duffel bag, then a linebacker . . . now in station wagon territory.

  Fast, this was happening very fast.

  Mary, he thought. Mary?

  His brain spit out his shellan's name--maybe he was even saying it?--as if his mate could hear him somehow.

  Mary!

  Panic flooded into his bloodstream and poured right into his rib cage--along with the plasma he was no doubt leaking all over the fuck. His only thought, more than of his death or the battle or even his brothers' safety, was . . . oh, God, let the Scribe Virgin hold up her side of the bargain.

  Let him not end up in the Fade alone.

  Mary was supposed to be able to leave the earth with him. She was supposed to be allowed to follow him when he went unto
the Fade. That was part of the arrangement he'd made with the Scribe Virgin: He kept his curse, his Mary survived her leukemia, and because his mate was infertile from her cancer treatments, she got to stay with him for however long she wanted.

  You're going to fucking die tonight.

  Just as he heard Vishous's voice in his head, the brother's face shot into his vision, replacing the heavens. V's mouth was moving, that goatee shifting around as he enunciated his words. Rhage tried to bat the male away, but his arms weren't listening to his brain.

  Last thing he needed was someone else dying. Although as the son of the Scribe Virgin, V was probably the least likely to worry about something as vanilla as popping his cog. But as Butch, the number three in the troika, arrived on a slide-in and started yapping, too? Now, there was a guy with no Grim Reaper hall pass--

  Shooting. Both of them started shooting.

  No! Rhage ordered them. Tell Mary I love her and leave me the fuck here before you get--

  V recoiled as if some kind of lead had found something of his.

  And that was when it happened.

  The scent of his brother's blood was what did it. The second that copper sting hit Rhage's nose, the beast awoke within its cage of his flesh and began to come out, the change initiating internal earthquakes that snapped his bones and shredded his internal organs and transformed him into something else entirely.

  Now there was pain.

  As well as the sense that this effort was a waste of fucking time. If he was dying, the dragon was just taking his place at the crap table.

  "Tell Mary to come with me," Rhage shouted as he went completely blind. "Tell her . . ."

  But he had the sense that his brothers had already taken off, and thank God for it: V's blood was no longer on the air and there was no reply coming back at him.

  Even as his life force ebbed, he did his best to go with the flow as the ripping and tearing racked his dying body. Even if he'd had the energy, fighting that tide was wasted effort, and didn't make things any easier. Still, as his mind and soul, his own emotions and consciousness, receded, it was eerie that he didn't know whether it was the death, or the transformation that was backseating him.

  As the beast's nervous system took over completely and the sensations of pain disappeared, Rhage retreated into a metaphysical float zone, like who and what he was had been put in a snow globe up on the time continuum's shelf.

  Only in this instance, he had the sense he would not be taken back down.

  And it was funny. Each and every entity that had consciousness and an awareness of its own mortality inevitably wondered, from time to time, about the when and where, the how and why of its demise. Rhage had been guilty of that morbid drift of thought himself, especially during his pre-Mary period, when he'd been alone with nothing but a catalog of his failures and weaknesses to keep him company during the dense, deserted hours of daylight.

  For him, those rambling questions were being unexpectedly answered tonight: "Where" was in the middle of the field of conflict, at an abandoned girls' school; "how" was by bleeding out at the heart, as a result of a gunshot wound; "why" was in the line of duty; "when" was probably in the next ten minutes or so, maybe less.

  Given the nature of his work, none of that was a surprise. Okay, maybe the prep-school part, but that was it.

  He was going to miss his brothers. Jesus . . . that hurt more than the beast stuff. And he was going to worry about all of them, and the future of Wrath's kingship. Shit, he was going to miss seeing Nalla and L.W. grow up. And Qhuinn's twins being born hopefully alive and well. Would he be able to see them all from the Fade?

  Oh, his Mary. His beautiful, precious Mary.

  Terror hit him, but it was hard to hold on to the emotion as he felt himself weaken even further. To calm down, he told himself that the Scribe Virgin didn't lie. The Scribe Virgin was all powerful. The Scribe Virgin had determined the balance needed to save his Mary's life and had given them a great gift to counter-balance the fact that his shellan could not have children.

  No children, he thought with a pang. He and his Mary would never have children in any form now.

  That was so sad.

  Strange . . . he hadn't thought he'd wanted them, at least not consciously. But now that it would never happen? He was totally bereft.

  At least his Mary would never leave him.

  And he had to have faith that when he went to that door to the Fade, and he proceeded through it to whatever was on the other side, she would be able to find him.

  Otherwise, this whole death thing would have been unbearable to go through. The idea that he could be dying and would never see his beloved again? Never smell her hair? Know her touch? Speak his truth even though she already knew how much he loved her?

  All that was why death was such a tragedy, he thought. It was the great separator, and sometimes it struck without warning, a vicious thief robbing people of emotional currency that would bankrupt them for the rest of their lives. . . .

  Shit, what if the Scribe Virgin was wrong? Or had lied? Or wasn't all-powerful?

  Abruptly, his panic refueled, and his thoughts began to jam up, getting stuck on the distance that had come between him and his shellan lately, distance that he had taken for granted that he had time and space to correct.

  Oh, God . . . Mary, he said in his head. Mary! I love you!

  Shit. He should have talked out the stuff with her, dug down deep to discover where the problem was, mended them back so that they were once more soul-to-soul.

  The trouble was, he realized with dread, when your heart finally stopped beating in your chest, everything that you wished you'd said but hadn't, all the missing pieces of yourself that you had yet to give, all the failures you had stuffed under the rug in the guise of life being so very busy . . . that stopped, too. The mid-stride step, never to be completed, was the worst regret anyone could have.

  You just maybe didn't learn that until all the things you'd ever wondered about your death actually happened. And yup, those questions you'd wondered about, the how's and why's, where's and when's . . . turned out to be pretty goddamned immaterial when you left the planet.

  They had been losing ground, he and Mary.

  Lately . . . they had been losing touch with each other.

  He didn't want to go out like this--

  White light wiped out everything, eating him alive, stealing his consciousness.

  The Fade had come for him. And he could only pray that his Mary Madonna would be able to find him on the other side.

  He had things he desperately needed to say to her.

  *

  Vishous resumed his form in a white marble courtyard that was open to a milky sky so vast and bright that there were no shadows thrown by the fountain in the center or by the tree full of colorful, chirping finches over in the corner.

  All of whom went silent as they sensed his mood.

  "Mother!" His voice echoed, bouncing between the walls. "Where the fuck are you!"

  As he strode forward, the trail of blood that he left in his wake was brilliant red, and when he stopped at the door to the Scribe Virgin's private quarters, drops fell from his elbow and his leg with soft impacts. When he pounded and called her name some more, speckles of the shit hit the white panel like nail polish dropped on a floor.

  "Fuck this."

  Slamming his shoulder into the thing, he broke into his mother's quarters--only to pull up short. Over on the bedding platform, beneath sheets of white satin, the entity who had created the vampire race, but also bodily borne forth him and his sister, was lying in utter stillness and silence. There was no corporeal form to her, however. Just a three-dimensional pool of light that had once been brilliant as a flash bomb, but was now that of an old-fashioned oil lamp with a clouded shade.

  "You have to save him." As Vishous crossed the bare marble floor, he was dimly aware that the room was empty but for the bed. Who cared, though. "Wake the fuck up! Someone who matters is dying and you're
going to stop it, goddamn it."

  If she had had a body, he would have grabbed her and forced her to pay attention. There were no arms for him to drag her out of bed with or shoulders to shake.

  He was about to yell again when words were spoken throughout the quarters as if they were piped in through Surround Sound.

  What shall be will be.

  Like that explained everything. Like he was a cocksucker for coming and bothering her. Like he was wasting her time. "Why did you create us if you don't give a shit."

  Exactly what are you concerned with. His future, or yours.

  "What the hell are you talking about?" Oh, and yeah, he knew you weren't supposed to question her, but fuck that for a laugh. "What's that supposed to mean?"

  Is translation truly necessary?

  As V locked his jaws, he reminded himself that Rhage was beasting out and dying in that incarnation down on the field: Trading bitch slaps with mommy dearest wasn't the critical path here.

  "Just save him, all right. Move him out of the theater of conflict so we can operate on him and I'll leave you to rot in peace."

  And that would solve his destiny how.

  Okay, now he knew why humans with mother issues went on Lassiter's talk shows. Every time V got around this female, he came down with a case of womb-induced psychosis.

  "He'll keep fucking breathing, that's what'll be solved."

  Destiny will simply be served by other means.

  V pictured Hollywood pulling a bath-mat slip-and-fall that killed him at home. Or a choke job on a turkey leg. Or God only knew what else that could carry a brother off.

  "So change it. You're so fucking powerful. Change his destiny right now."

  There was a long pause, and he wondered whether or not she'd fallen asleep or some shit--and, man, did he hate her. She was such a goddamn quitter, pulling out of the world, sequestering herself up here as a recluse in a sulk because no one was kissing her ass like she wanted.

  Boo-fucking-hoo.

  Meanwhile, one of the best fighters in the war, who was an absolute mission-critical part of the King's private guard, was about to go poof! off the planet. And V was the last person to want somebody else to wipe his butthurt away, but he had to give saving Rhage his best shot, and who the fuck else had this kind of pull?

  "He's important," V snapped. "His life matters."

  To you.