by J. R. Ward
Except then he thought of Butch and decided it probably just depended on who you were with.
V covered his face with his good hand, wishing like hell his feelings would go away. He hated himself for these thoughts, for this attachment, for his useless pining, and the familiar litany of shame brought on a whitewash of fatigue. As bone-deep exhaustion Tom Sawyer’ed him from head to foot, he fought the wave, knowing it was dangerous.
This time he didn’t win. Didn’t even get a vote. His eyes slammed shut even as fear licked up his spine and left his skin in a quilt of goose bumps.
Oh…shit. He was falling asleep….
Panicked, he tried to open his lids, but it was too late. They had become masonry walls. The vortex had him and he was being sucked down no matter how much he tried to pull himself free.
His grip loosened on the glass in his hand and dimly he heard the thing hit the floor and splinter. His last thought was that he was just like that tumbler of vodka, shattering and spilling, unable to hold himself inside anymore.
Chapter Three
A couple of blocks to the west, Phury picked up his martini and eased back into a leather banquette at ZeroSum. He and Butch had been pretty quiet since landing at the club about a half hour ago, the two of them just doing the people-watching thing from the Brotherhood’s table.
God knew there was plenty to see around here.
On the other side of a waterfall wall, the club’s dance floor was tweaking with techno music as humans rode waves of Ecstasy and coke and did dirty deeds in designer clothes. The Brotherhood never hung on the general-pop side, though. Their little slice of real estate was in the VIP section, a table all the way in the back next to the fire escape. The club was a good spot to R & R. People left them alone, the booze was top-drawer, and it was smack-dab in downtown, where the Brotherhood did most of their hunting.
Plus it was owned by a relative, now that Bella and Z were mated. Rehvenge, the male who ran it, was her brother.
Also happened to be Phury’s drug dealer, too.
He took a good long one from the rim of his shaken-not-stirred. He was so going to have make another buy tonight. His stash was weighing low again.
A blond woman shimmied past the table, her breasts bobbing like apples under silver sequins, her postage-stamp skirt flashing her ass cheeks and her lamé thong. The getup made her look like something more than just half-naked.
Dirty was maybe the word he was looking for.
She was typical. Most of the human females in the VIP section were within an inch of getting arrested for indecent exposure, but then, the ladies tended to be either professionals or the civilian equivalent of whores. As the prostitute hit the next banquette over, for a split second he wondered what it would be like to buy some time with someone like her.
He’d been celibate for so long, it seemed totally off the page even to think like that, much less follow through on the idea. But maybe it would help him get Bella out of his mind.
“See something you like?” Butch drawled.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Oh? You mean you haven’t noticed that blonde who just flashed by here? Or the way she was checking you?”
“She’s not my type.”
“Then look for a long-haired brunette.”
“Whatever.” As Phury finished his martini, he wanted to throw the glass into a wall. Shit, he couldn’t believe he’d even thought about paying for sex.
Desperate. Loser.
God, he wanted a blunt.
“Come on, Phury, you have to know that all the chicks here case you when you come. You should just try one.”
Okay, way too many people were pushing him tonight. “No, thanks.”
“I’m just saying—”
“Fuck you and shut it.”
Butch cursed under his breath and didn’t comment any further. Which made Phury feel like an asshole. As he should. “I’m sorry.”
“Nah, it’s cool.”
Phury waved down a waitress, who came right over. As his empty was taken away, he muttered, “She tried to set me up with someone tonight.”
“Excuse me?”
“Bella.” Phury picked up a soggy cocktail napkin and started folding it up into squares. “Said there was some social worker at Safe Place.”
“Rhym? Oh, she’s very cool—”
“But I’m—”
“Not interested?” Butch shook his head. “Phury, man, I know you’re probably going to bite my head off again, but it’s time for you to get interested. This shit with you and the females? Gotta end.”
Phury had to laugh. “Be blunt, why don’t you?”
“Look, you need to live a little.”
Phury nodded over at the bionic blonde. “And you think that buying sex constitutes living a little?”
“With the way she’s looking at you, you wouldn’t have to pay.”
Phury forced his brain to try on the scenario. He pictured himself getting up and walking over to the woman. Taking her by the arm and moving her into one of the private bathrooms. Maybe she’d blow him. Maybe he’d prop her up on the sink and spread her legs and pump into her until he came. Total elapsed time? Fifteen minutes, tops. After all, he might be a virgin, but the mechanics of sex were pretty simple. All his body would need was a tight hold and some friction and he’d be good to go.
Well, in theory. He was limp in his trousers right now. So even if he wanted to bust his cherry tonight, it wasn’t going to happen. At least, not with her.
“I’m good,” he said as his fresh martini arrived. After he swirled the olive around with a finger, he popped it into his mouth. “Really. I’m good.”
The two of them went back to the silent routine, with nothing between them but the dim thumping from the music on the other side of the waterfall wall. Phury was about to bring up sports because he couldn’t handle the quiet when Butch stiffened.
A female across the VIP area was staring their way. It was that security chief, the one who was jacked like a male and had a male’s haircut. Talk about a hard-ass. Phury had seen her cuff drunken human men around like she was whapping dogs with a newspaper.
But wait, she wasn’t looking at Phury. She was all about Butch.
“Whoa, you’ve had her,” Phury said. “Haven’t you.”
Butch shrugged and swallowed the Lag in his glass. “Only once. And it was before Marissa.”
Phury glanced back at the female and had to wonder what that sex had been like. She seemed like the kind who could make a male see stars. And not necessarily in a fun way.
“Is anonymous sex any good?” he asked, feeling like he was twelve.
Butch’s smile was slow. Secret. “I used to think it was. But when that’s all you know, sure, you think cold pizza is fantastic.”
Phury took a pull on his martini. Cold pizza, huh. So that’s what was out there waiting for him. How inspiring.
“Shit, I don’t mean to be a buzz kill. It’s just better with the right person.” Butch tossed back his Lag. As a waitress headed over to pick up for a refill, he said, “Nah, I stop at two now. Thanks.”
“Wait!” Phury said, before the woman took off. “I’ll have another one. Thanks.”
Vishous knew the dream had come to him, because he was happy in it. The nightmare always started out with him in a state of bliss. He was, in the beginning, wholly happy, utterly complete, a Rubik’s Cube solved.
Then the gun went off. And a bright red stain bloomed on his shirt. And a scream sliced through air that seemed dense as a solid.
Pain hit him like he’d been ripped into by bomb shrapnel, like he’d been doused in gasoline and matched up, like his skin had been taken off in strips.
Oh, God, he was dying. No one lived through this kind of agony.
He fell to his knees and—
V shot up from the bed like he’d been boot-licked in the head.
In the penthouse’s cage of black walls and night-backed glass, his
breath sounded like a hacksaw going through hardwood. Shit, his heart was pounding so fast he felt like he should put his hands up to keep it in place.
He needed a drink…now.
On sloppy legs he went to the bar, grabbed a fresh glass, and poured himself about four inches of Grey Goose. The long-tall was almost at his lips when he realized he wasn’t alone.
He unsheathed a black dagger from his waistband and whirled around.
“It is only I, warrior.”
Jesus Christ. The Scribe Virgin stood before him swathed in black robes from head to foot, her face covered, her tiny form dominating the penthouse. From beneath her hem a glow spilled out onto the marble floor, bright as the noonday sun.
Oh, this was an audience he wanted right now. Yup, yup.
He bowed and stayed put. Tried to figure out how he could keep drinking in this position. “I am honored.”
“How you lie,” she said dryly. “Lift thyself, warrior. I would see your face.”
V did his best to marshal some hi-how’re-ya onto his puss, in hopes of camoing the oh-fuck-me that was there. Goddamn it. Wrath had threatened to turn him in to the Scribe Virgin if he couldn’t pull it together. Guess that dime been dropped.
As he eased upright, he figured sucking some Goose would be perceived as an insult.
“Yes, it would,” she said. “But do what you must.”
He swallowed the vodka like it was water and put the glass on the wet bar. He wanted more, but hopefully she wouldn’t be staying long.
“The purpose of my visit has naught to do with your king.” The Scribe Virgin floated over, stopping when she was just a foot away. V fought the urge to step back, especially as she reached out her glowing hand and brushed his cheek. Her power was like that of a lightning bolt: deadly and precise. You didn’t want to be her target. “It is time.”
Time for what? But he kept a lid on himself. You didn’t ask questions of the Scribe Virgin. Not unless you wanted to add being used as floor wax to your résumé.
“Your birthday draws near.”
True, he was going to be three hundred and three years old soon, but he couldn’t think why that would warrant a private visit from her. If she wanted to fly him some birthday jollies, quick something in the mail would be just fine. Fuck it, she could rock out an e-card from Hallmark and call it a day.
“And I have a gift for you.”
“I am honored.” And confused.
“Your female is ready.”
Vishous jerked all over, like someone had goosed him in the ass with a jackknife. “I’m sorry, what—” No questions, dumb ass. “Ah…with all due respect, I have no female.”
“You do.” She dropped her glowing arm. “I have picked her from among all the Chosen to be your first mate. She is the most pure of blood, the finest of beauty.” As V opened his mouth, the Scribe Virgin steamrolled right over him. “You will be mated, and the two of you will breed, and you will also breed with the others. Your daughters shall replenish the ranks of the Chosen. Your sons shall become members of the Brotherhood. This is your destiny: to become the Primale of the Chosen.”
The word Primale dropped like an H-bomb.
“Forgive me, Scribe Virgin…ah…” He cleared his throat and reminded himself that if you pissed Her Holiness off, they’d need barbecue tongs to pick up your steaming pieces. “I mean no offense, but I will take no female as my own—”
“You will. And you will lay with her in the proper ritual and she will bear your young. As will the others.”
Visions of getting trapped on the Other Side, surrounded by females, unable to fight, unable to see his brothers…or…God, Butch…snapped the hinge on his mouth. “My destiny is as a fighter. With my brothers. I am where I should be.”
Besides, with what had been done to him, could he even sire young?
He expected her to hit the fan at his insubordination. Instead she said, “How fearless of you to deny your station. You are so like your father.”
Wrong. He and the Bloodletter had nothing in common. “Your Holiness—”
“You shall do this. And you shall submit of your own volition.”
His reply shot out, hard and cold. “I’d need a good goddamned reason.”
“You are my son.”
V stopped breathing, his chest going concrete on him. Surely she meant that in the broader sense.
“Three hundred and three years ago you were born of my body.” The Scribe Virgin’s hood rose off her face of its own volition, revealing a ghostly, ethereal beauty. “Lift thy so-called cursed palm and know our truth.”
Heart in his throat, V brought up his gloved hand, then ripped the leather off with messy tugs. In horror he stared at what was behind his tattooed skin: The glow in him was just like hers.
Jesus Christ… Why the hell hadn’t he made the connection before?
“Your blindness,” she said, “afforded your denial. You did not want to see it.”
V stumbled away from her. When he hit the mattress, he let his ass go down and told himself now was not the time to lose his mind—
Oh, wait…he’d already lost it. Good deal, or he’d be totally freaking out right now.
“How…is this possible?” Sure, that was a question, but who the fuck cared at this point?
“Yes, I think I shall pardon your inquiry this one time.” The Scribe Virgin floated around the room, moving without walking, her robes unaffected by the trip, as if they were carved from stone. In the silence she made him think of a chess piece: the queen, the one among the others on the board who was free to move in all directions.
When she finally spoke, her voice was deep. Commanding. “I wanted to know conception and birth physically, so I assumed a form sufficient to perform the sexual act and went to the Old Country in a fertile condition.” She paused before the glass doors in front of the terrace. “I chose the male based on what I believed were the most desirable masculine attributes for the survival of the species: strength and cunning, power, aggression.”
V pictured his father and tried to imagine the Scribe Virgin having sex with the male. Shit, that must have been a brutal experience.
“It was,” she said. “I received exactly what I had gone out to find in full measure. There was no going back once the rutting started, and he was characteristic to his nature. At the end, though, he withheld himself from me. Somehow he knew what I was after and who I was.”
Yeah, his father had excelled at finding and exploiting the motivations of others.
“It was perhaps foolish of me to think I could pass for something I was not with a male like him. Cunning, indeed.” She looked across the room at V. “He told me he would give me his seed only if a male young would be placed with him. He had never successfully begotten the live birth of a son, and his warrior loins wanted that satisfaction.
“I, however, wanted my son for the Chosen. Your father may have understood tactics, but he was not the only one. I knew well his weakness too, and had it within me to guarantee the sex of the young. We agreed that he would have you three years after the birth for three centuries, and that he could train you to fight on this side. Thereafter you would be for my purpose.”
Her purpose? His father’s purpose? Shit, didn’t he get a vote?
The Scribe Virgin’s voice got lower. “Having reached our accord, he forced me beneath him for hours, until the form I was in nearly died from it. He was possessed by the need to conceive, and I endured him because I was the same.”
Endured was right. V, like the rest of the males in the warrior camp, had been forced to watch his father have sex. The Bloodletter hadn’t distinguished between fighting and fucking and had made no allowances for females’ size or weakness.
The Scribe Virgin began shifting around the room again. “I delievered you unto the camp on your third birthday.”
V became dimly aware of a humming in his head, like a train was gathering speed. Thanks to his parents’ little bargain, he’d been living his life i
n ruins, stuck dealing with the aftermath of his father’s cruelty as well as the war camp’s vicious lessons.
His voice dropped to a growl. “Do you know what he did to me? What they did to me there?”
“Yes.”
Throwing all rules of etiquette into the shitter, he said, “Then why the fuck did you let me stay there.”
“I had given my word.”
V burst to his feet, his hand going to his privates. “Glad to know your honor stayed intact, even if I didn’t. Yeah, that’s a fair fucking exchange.”
“I can understand your anger—”
“Can you, Mom? That makes me feel so much better. I spent twenty years of my life fighting to stay alive in that cesspool. What did I get? A scrambled head and fucked-up body. And now you want me to breed for you?” He smiled coldly. “What if I can’t impregnate them? If you know what happened to me, you ever think of that?”
“You are able.”
“How do you know?”
“Think you there is any part of my son I cannot see?”
“You…bitch,” he whispered.
A blast of heat came out of her body, hot enough to singe his eyebrows, and her voice cracked through the penthouse. “Do not forget who I am, warrior. I chose your father unwisely, and we both suffered for the mistake. Do you think I remained unharmed as I saw what course your life laid? Think you I watched from afar unaffected? I died every day for you.”
“Well, aren’t you Mother fucking Teresa,” he shouted, aware that his own body had started to heat up. “You’re supposed to be all-powerful. If you’d given a shit, you could have stepped—”
“Destinies are not chosen, they are conferred—”
“By who? You? Then are you the one I should hate for all the shit that was done to me?” Now he was glowing all over; he didn’t even have to look down at his forearms to know that what was within his hand had spread throughout him. Just. Like. Her. “God…damn you.”
