The Chosen

by J. R. Ward

  Qhuinn turned back to the bassinets, and it seemed incongruous, inappropriate, just all around bad, that they were having this kind of conversation anywhere near such innocents.

  "This is not a bunch of civilians," Tohr pointed out. "You're not meeting the Bastards in a drawing room tomorrow night and trading paperwork back and forth. I'll say it again, people are going to get killed if you decide to take matters into your own hands. And if that happens, and it will, you're going to have to look those two kids in the eyes when they're older with those deaths on your conscience. You will turn their father into a murderer, and you're going to put Wrath in a horrible position--again, assuming the two of you survive. Think about it. Ask yourself if vengeance is worth the price."

  Tohr turned away to leave, but then stopped. "I was almost a father once. It was a job I was looking forward to, praying for. I would do almost anything to be where you stand now over those young of yours. Sacrifice is relative...and you got a lot to lose over a male who's really not of consequence to your larger life. Don't be an asshole on this one, my brother, just don't."

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  "Well, this rather settles things, doesn't it."

  As Throe stood over the bloody bed, he looked at his balloon, as he had come to think of the shadow, and smiled.

  "You are efficient, aren't you."

  The thing waved a little from its tether above the carpet, and one could surmise it was pleased with the praise. Or perhaps not. But what did it matter; his shadow had not denied him when he had ordered it to kill his lover's mate and had been quite accomplished at the task: The entity had readily taken the dagger Throe had provided, followed him down the hall like a dog after its master, and then when Throe had opened the door and pointed to the old male sitting up against the headboard, the death had come about quicker than the beat of a heart.

  Which was something that hellren did not have anymore.

  "What have you done!"

  As a shriek sounded out behind him, Throe pivoted on his velvet slipper. "Oh, hello, darling. You're up early."

  Before his lover could respond, Throe lunged forward and caught her around the neck. As he started to squeeze, her eyes popped wide and that talented mouth of hers cranked open in a scream that had no sound.

  Dragging her into the bedroom, he kicked the door shut as she clawed at his hands and gaped like a fish.

  The entity approached from the side as if in inquiry, and Throe smiled at it again. "Oh, how kind of you. But I've got this."

  Switching his grip to her face, he gave a quick jerk and snapped her neck. Then to avoid making a noise, he escorted her gently down to the carpeted floor.

  Standing over her, he noted that she was in that baby-doll nightgown he liked, the one with the lace bodice and the flouncy skirt that reached just below her panties.

  "Such as shame, really. She was a bit of fun."

  Throe straightened his silk bathrobe. He'd popped free of one of his slippers and rectified that problem by stepping over the cooling body of the female and stuffing his foot back where it belonged.

  "Well, this is just fine." He looked around the very well appointed bedroom suite. "You know, I think I'll move in here. Once we get rid of that mattress."

  Except then he thought of the doggen in the house. There were at least fourteen of them.

  It would take them some time to eliminate that lot, and it rather seemed a waste. Good help was very hard to find.

  And then there were matters of security and finance that needed to be addressed. Fortunately, he had set the identity theft in motion weeks ago, getting into the hellren's computer downstairs, putting tracers on things, gaining access bit by bit to accounts, data, and permissions.

  He considered briefly giving the staff the option to stay. But then he looked at the mess on the bed. If his shadow friend could kill like that?

  It was a good guess it could work a fucking vacuum.

  They were going to need more of them, however. Throe had checked The Book to see if there were some kind of reproduction that could be brought to bear with the shadows, but it appeared that if Throe wanted an army, he was going to have to make them one by one. The hard way.

  Very inconvenient. And his hand was still recovering from its puncture wound.

  He was going to require more supplies. And time. And...

  Alas, it seemed uncharitable, indeed, ungrateful, to despair over aught. He had money. He had a home he liked. And he had a weapon that was better than any gun, knife, or fist.

  "My destiny," he murmured to the silent room, "is within my reach."

  Throe brought up his palms--but as he nearly rubbed them together, he stopped himself. One did not want to turn oneself into a caricature of a villain. It was quite unseemly.

  "Come," he said to his balloon. "I must needs get dressed and you shall help me. And then we need to go out."

  Testing his toy against a lesser was going to be important and there was no reason to wait. The thing had performed admirably just now, but that had been against a nearly incapacitated geriatric. If it was going to face the Brothers and the Omega's fighters, even the Band of Bastards, it was going to need to perform at a very high level.

  Just as Throe stepped out into the corridor, he heard the floor polisher running downstairs. If any of the staff found these bodies, there was going to be pandemonium. And with the King accepting audiences the now, the Brotherhood could descend before he was prepared for them and ruin everything.

  Fates, he hated these delays. But a proper strategist recognized that there were necessary sequences to things.

  As with chess, it was one move at a time.

  "Come on," he said in a bored voice to the shadow. "We have to clean house first. And I must insist that you do so with a certain reserve this time. I don't want to ruin any of the art or textiles. Besides, whatever mess you make, you're going to have to tidy up."

  With that, the pair of them headed off together, toward the stairs and the doggen who was doing his or her job down below.

  The pink slip that was about to be delivered unto them was going to hurt.

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  As the sun set and darkness came over Caldwell, Layla stirred in the bed she and Xcor had put to such glorious use during the day. Against her back, her warrior was nestled in close as her own skin, his body seeking hers even as he slept on.

  "Do not think of it, my love," he murmured.

  Turning in his embrace, she stroked his hair. His face. His shoulders. "How do you always know?"

  He didn't reply to that, just kissed her throat. "Tell me something."

  "What?"

  "If I had been another male, if my face had been different, if the course of my life had been upon another path, would you..."

  "Would I what?"

  It was a long while before he answered her. "Would you have mated me properly? And lived under the same roof with me...and borne my young and raised them with me? If I had been a cobbler or a farmer, a horse trainer or a mead maker, would you have stood beside me and been my shellan?"

  She touched his upper lip. "I am your shellan now."

  As he exhaled, his eyes closed. "I wish it had all been different. I wish that that one night, so long ago, I had picked another campfire to visit, another forest to walk through."

  "I don't. For if you hadn't gone there, wherever it was, we never would have met."

  "Maybe that would have been the better course."

  "No," she said firmly. "Everything is the way it should be."

  Except for the part that he was leaving her.

  "Maybe in the future," she whispered, "after Lyric and Rhamp are grown and on their own, I might come to find you? After their transitions are over and--"

  "They will always need their mahmen. And your life will always be here in the New World."

  Even as she wanted to argue with him, she knew he was right. It was going to be decades before the young were truly independent, and who knew what the state of the wa
r was going to be then? If Rhamp followed in his father's footsteps and became a Brother, Layla would not rest while he was out in the field even if she were in Caldwell itself. Over an entire ocean? She couldn't fathom it.

  And then what if Lyric wanted to fight? There were females in the training center program. Lyric could well decide to pick up a dagger.

  She could have two young out there in the war.

  "There is grace in not fighting that which cannot be changed," he said as he kissed her collarbone. "Let it go. Let me go when the time comes."

  "But maybe there's another solution." Although she couldn't imagine what it might be. "What if..."

  "Qhuinn will never accept me around your young. Even if the Brotherhood and your King were to embrace me and my males, the father of your son and daughter will ne'er have me in their presence, and if I am not in your life, things between you and him will ease. Or at least that is my hope and my fervent prayer, that someday he will accept you back into his life."

  But that will never happen, she thought. Qhuinn's fury knew no bounds nor any time limit. Some things, like ink on parchment, were indelible.

  "Make love to me?" she whispered.

  With a now-familiar surge of power, Xcor moved on top of her, their bodies so at ease with each other by now that his sex entered hers with no positioning, just a smooth glide.

  As he began to thrust inside of her, she thought of the sex they'd had during the daylight hours. Her ehros training had come to the fore in ways that had shocked, titillated, and surprised him--and he had not complained. But that was not to say it had been a happy time. For both of them, the hours had held a desperation, a rush to the touching and kissing and penetrations, much as one would consume quickly that which was on a plate about to be taken away.

  And yet now, as Xcor found his rhythm and she echoed it with her own, this was a different sort of lovemaking. This was not even about sex, per se.

  This was the closest their souls could come to merging, the body parts secondary to their hearts being joined.

  Just before she found a bittersweet release, she whispered in his ear, "You'll be safe out there tonight?"

  When he didn't answer her, she wasn't sure whether it was because he had started to orgasm...or because he knew he couldn't promise her that and he didn't want to lie to her.

  --

  At the Pit, Vishous sat back in his padded chair and stared at the image on his computer monitor. The combination of pixels, of the light and dark, the gray and green and deep blue, had taken, ohhhhhh, eight hours to isolate and process to the point where you could see this much of them.

  And as he looked at the face of the mystery shooter, the one who had saved Tohr's life in that alley some time ago, all he could do was shake his head.

  "Too fucking weird."

  The features were fairly clear now, but yeah, that distorted upper lip of Xcor's was the dead giveaway. Without it, you might have struggled to say who it was, as all fighters with short hair, heavy brows, and hard jawlines were like dimes in a sock drawer.

  Pretty indistinguishable.

  But no, you add that hare lip, and you got yourself a traitor. Who actually wasn't much of a traitor as it turned out--

  "Hi."

  As V heard an unfamiliar voice, he snapped his head up. Jane was standing in front of him, her scrubs wrinkled, her Crocs stained with blood, her hair sticking straight up as if it were trying to get away from her brain. She looked worn out, worn down, dragged through a rat hole.

  He opened his mouth to say something to her, but then his phone went off.

  When he saw who was calling him, he felt the blood rush out of his head.

  "You can get that," she said with a yawn. "I'll wait."

  V silenced the ringer and heard nothing but his heart pounding. "It's nothing important."

  Jane went over to the leather couch and collapsed into its far corner of cushions. "I don't know what to do about Assail. It's a complete psychotic break. I've never seen anything like it, and I don't want to again." She rubbed her face. "And I can't help him. I can't bring him around. I've been out to Havers's a hundred times, combing through his back cases, talking to his staff and him. Manny's reached out to people in the human world. All we're getting is dead ends and it's killing me."

  She was staring off into space as she spoke, her eyes rapt as if she were replaying conversations in her head, ever searching for an angle or an answer she might have missed.

  She rubbed her no-doubt-aching temples. "I can't tell you how hard this is. Watching the suffering and not being able to do anything about it."

  As V's cell phone rang again, he nearly knocked the thing on the floor as he went to put it on mute.

  "Are you sure you don't want to get that?" Jane said. "Sounds urgent."

  "What can I do to help you?" he asked.

  "Nothing. Just let me go to sleep. I can't remember the last time I rested." She looked over at him. "Even ghosts need a recharge as it turns out."

  Even as she said the words, her corporeal form began to disappear, the colors of her eyes and her skin, even the clothes that warmed to her immortal body temperature, fading out.

  Disappearing before his very eyes.

  She said some other things, and so did he, nothing earth-shattering, everything logistical, like when he was heading out, when she was heading back.

  And then she was on her feet again and shuffling over to him. As he looked up from his chair, he saw her lips moving and he told his own to smile in response even though he had no clue what had come out of her mouth.

  "Well?" she prompted.

  "What?"

  "Are you all right? You seem off."

  "Lot going on right now. You know, in the war."

  "Yes, I heard. Payne and Manny were talking about it."

  "You better get to bed before you fall over."

  "You are so right."

  But instead of leaving, she reached out to him and ran her ghostly hand through his hair--and as she did, he thought there was a reason he didn't like people to touch him.

  And that was true on levels other than the literal.

  "I love you," she said. "I'm sorry we haven't been able to spend much time together lately."

  "It doesn't matter."

  "I think it does."

  Vishous extended his gloved hand and took her hand away. Forcing another smile, he said, "You've got your work. I've got mine."

  "True, and we're going nowhere."

  He was well aware that she meant that in the reassuring, our-relationship-is-solid kind of way, and as he nodded, he was also well aware that she would take his apparent affirmation in the same vein.

  As she wandered off down to their bedroom alone, however, he knew that he was agreeing with the statement in an entirely different way.

  And that should have made him sad.

  But he felt nothing.

  FIFTY-NINE

  When someone started to knock on Qhuinn's door, he was not about to get up from bed to answer the attention-seeker. He had another hour before it was time to go to the meeting in Wrath's study and most likely get his ass chewed--also maybe get kicked out of the Brotherhood as Tohr had been--and aside from him having managed to get himself showered and dressed, he was too much of a basket case to do anything else.

  Like, you know, attempt civil discourse. Or do anything other than breathe.

  The knock got louder.

  As he lifted his head and bared his fangs, he opened his mouth to issue a fuck-off--

  But burst to his feet instead.

  Rushing over, he yanked the door wide like there were Girl Scouts with Do-si-dos order sheets on the other side.

  Blay was standing there in the corridor looking so edible it was nearly illegal, his body clad in leather and weapons--which happened to be Qhuinn's favorite outfit on the guy. Other than buck naked.

  "Mind if I come in?" he said.

  "Yes. I mean, no, shit, please. Yeah, come in."

 
; Man, if he were any smoother, he'd be a Brillo pad.

  Blay shut the door and those beautiful eyes of his went over to the bassinets.

  "Do you want to see them?" Qhuinn said, stepping aside, even though he wasn't in the way.

  "Yes, I do."

  Blay walked over, and although he was facing away, Qhuinn could feel the smile on the guy's face as he greeted one and then the other.

  But when he turned around again, he was all business.

  Here it comes, Qhuinn thought as he went across and sat on the bed. The answer to the rest of his life. And he knew without being aware of the specific details that this was going to hurt.

  Blay reached into his leather jacket. "I don't want this."

  As he took out the documents that Saxton had prepared, Qhuinn felt his heart drop. He didn't have much to offer aside from his own goddamn children. If Lyric and Rhamp couldn't bring the male around, nothing would--

  "I love you," Blay said. "And I forgive you."

  For a split second, Qhuinn couldn't decipher the syllables. And then, when they did sink in, he was sure he must have heard them incorrectly.

  "I'll say it again. I love you...and I forgive you."

  Qhuinn leaped up and crossed the distance between them faster than a match lighting. But he got strong-armed before he could kiss the guy.

  "Hold on," Blay countered. "I have some things to say."

  "Whatever it is, I agree to it all. Anything, everything, I'm in."

  "Good. Then you'll make it right with Layla."

  Qhuinn took a step back. And another.

  Blay tapped the documents in his open hand. "You heard me. I don't need any parental rights to be legally granted. You don't have to pull some showy bullshit like this--although I appreciate the sentiment, and honestly, it did convince me you were really serious about what you said. But you told me you would do anything, and I'm taking you as a male of your word. You're not going to be right with me until you're right with Layla."

  "I don't know if I can do that, Blay." Qhuinn put his palms up. "I'm not being an asshole here. I'm really not. It's just...I know myself. And after she put them in danger like that, and lied for so long to cover it up? I can't come back from that, not even for you."