The Black Dagger Brotherhood Novels 5-8

by J. R. Ward

  “You weren’t at First Meal,” she said.

  “I was teaching.” He glanced over his shoulder and was relieved to see she looked good, her coloring bright, her eyes clear.

  “Have you eaten at all?”

  “Yes,” he said, lying.

  “Okay…well…shouldn’t you wait for Rhage?”

  “We’ll meet up later.”

  “Phury, are you okay?”

  He told himself it was not his place to say anything. He’d already closed that door with his pep talk to Z. This was totally none of his—

  As always with her, he had no self-control. “I think you need to talk to Z.”

  Her head eased to one side, her hair falling farther down her shoulder. God, it was lovely. So dark, yet not black. It reminded him of fine mahogany that had been carefully varnished, glowing with reds and deep browns.

  “About what?”

  Shit, he so shouldn’t be doing this. “If you’re keeping something from Z, anything…you need to tell him.”

  Her eyes narrowed, then slid away as she changed her stance, her weight shifting from one foot to the other, her arms crossing over her chest. “I…ah, I won’t ask how you know, but I can assume it’s because he does. Oh…damn it. I was going to talk to him after I see Havers tonight. I made an appointment.”

  “How bad is it? The bleeding?”

  “Not bad. That’s why I wasn’t going to say anything until I went to Havers. God, Phury, you know Z. He’s nervous as hell about me already, so preoccupied I’m terrified he’ll be distracted in the field and get himself hurt.”

  “Yeah, but see, it’s worse now, because he doesn’t know what’s going on. Talk to him. You have to. He’ll be tight. For you he’ll stay tight.”

  “Was he angry?”

  “Maybe a little. But more than that he’s just worried. He’s not stupid. He knows why you wouldn’t want to tell him anything was wrong. Look, take him with you tonight, okay? Let him be there.”

  Her eyes watered a little. “You’re right. I know you’re right. I just want to protect him.”

  “Which is exactly the way he feels about you. Take him with you.”

  In the silence that followed, he knew the indecision in her eyes was hers to contend with. He’d said his piece.

  “Be well, Bella.”

  As he turned away, she grabbed his hand. “Thank you. For not being upset with me.”

  For a moment he pretended that it was his young inside of her and that he could gather her close and go with her to the doctor’s and hold her afterward.

  Phury gently took her wrist and pulled her free of him, her hand slipping off his skin on a soft brush that stung like barbs. “You are my twin’s beloved. I could never be angry at you.”

  As he walked out through the vestibule and into the cold, windy night, he thought how true it was that he could never be pissed with her. Himself, on the other hand? Not a problem.

  Dematerializing downtown, he knew that he was heading for a collision of some kind. He didn’t know where the wall was or what it was made of or whether he was going to drive himself into it or get thrown at it by someone or something else.

  But the wall was waiting in the bitter darkness. And part of him wondered whether there wasn’t a big, fat H painted on it.

  Chapter Seventeen

  V watched Jane go into the bathroom. As she pivoted to put her change of clothes down on the counter, the profile of her body was an elegant S curve that he needed to get his hands on. His mouth over. His body into.

  The door shut and the shower started and he cursed. God…her hand had felt so good, taken him higher than any full-on sex had lately. But it had been one-sided. There had been no scent of arousal from her at all. To her it had been a biological function to explore. Nothing more.

  If he was honest with himself, he’d thought that maybe seeing him orgasm would turn her on—which was nuts, given what was doing below his waist. No one in their right mind would think, Oh, yeah, check out the one-balled wonder. Yum.

  Which was why he always kept his pants on when he had sex.

  As he listened to the shower run, his arousal softened and his fangs retracted back up into his jaw. Funny, when she’d been handling him, he’d surprised himself. He’d wanted to bite her—not to feed because he was hungry, but because he wanted her taste in his mouth and the mark of his teeth on her neck. Which was pretty fucking out of character. Typically he bit females only because he had to, and when he did, he never particularly liked it.

  With her? He couldn’t wait to pierce a vein and suck what ran through her heart right down into his gut.

  When the shower stopped, all he could think about was being in that bathroom with her. He could just imagine her all naked and wet and pink from the heat. Man, he wanted to know what the back of her neck looked like. And the stretch of skin between her shoulder blades. And the hollow at the base of her spine. He wanted to run his mouth from her collarbone to her navel…then have a go between her thighs.

  Shit, he was getting hard again. And that was pretty damn useless. She’d satisfied her curiosity with his body, so she wouldn’t be up for throwing him a bone and relieving him again. And even if she was attracted to him, she already had someone, didn’t she. With a nasty growl he pictured that dark-haired doctor type who was waiting for her back in her real life. The guy was of her kind and no doubt wholly masculine as well.

  The very idea of that bastard treating her right, not just during the day but between the sheets at night, made his chest sting.

  Shit.

  V put his arm over his eyes and wondered exactly when he’d had a personality transplant. Theoretically Jane had operated on his heart, not his head, but he hadn’t been right since he’d been on her table. Thing was, he just couldn’t help but want her to see him as a mate—although that was an impossibility for a whole host of reasons: He was a vampire who was a freak…and he was going to become the Primale in a matter of days.

  He thought about what was waiting for him on the Other Side, and even though he didn’t want to go into the past, he couldn’t stop himself. He went back to what had been done to him, recalling what had set the wheels in motion for the mauling that had left him half a male.

  It was perhaps a week after his father burned his books that Vishous was caught coming out from behind the screen that hid the cave paintings. His undoing was the diary of the warrior Darius. He’d avoided his precious possession for days and days, but eventually he’d given in. His hands had craved the weight of the binding, his eyes the sight of the words, his mind the images it gave him, his heart the connection he found with the writer.

  He was too alone to resist.

  It was a kitchen whore who saw him, and they both froze when she did. He didn’t know her name, but she had the same face that all females had in the camp: hard eyes, lined skin, and a slash of a mouth. There were bite marks layered on her neck from males feeding from her, and her shift was dirty and frayed at the hem. In one hand she had a rough-hewn shovel, and behind her she was dragging a wheelbarrow with a broken wheel. She’d obviously drawn the short straw and been forced to tend to the privy pits.

  Her eyes shifted down to V’s hand as if she were measuring a weapon.

  V deliberately made a fist with the thing. “’Twould be a shame should you say a thing, would it not.”

  She paled and scurried off, dropping the shovel as she ran.

  News of what had happened between him and the other pretrans had been all around the camp, and if it made them fear him, that was all to the good. To protect his only book he wasn’t above threatening anyone, even females, and he was unashamed by this. His father’s law held that no one was safe in the camp: V was quite confident that female would use what she’d seen to her own benefit if she could. That was the way.

  Vishous left the cave through one of the tunnels that had been bored out of the mountain, and emerged in a thicket of brambles. The winter was coming upon them all fast, the cold
making the air dense as bone. Up ahead he heard the stream rushing and wanted a drink, but he stayed hidden as he scrambled up the pine-covered incline. He always kept away from the water for a distance after he came out, not just because it was what he’d been taught to do upon penalty of punishment, but because in his pretrans state he was no match for what might come at him, be it vampire, human, or animal.

  At the beginning of every night, the pretrans tried to fill their empty bellies at the stream, and his ears picked up the sounds of the other pretrans who were fishing. The boys had congregated at the wide section of the stream, where the water formed a still pool off to one side. He avoided them, choosing a spot farther upriver.

  From out of a leather pouch he took a length of finespun thread that had a crude hook and a flashing weight of silver tied on the end. He cast his meager tackle into the rushing water and felt the string go tight. As he sat down on a rock, he wound the string around a shaft of wood and held the thing between his palms.

  The waiting was neither here nor there, neither burden nor pleasure, and when he heard an argument downriver, he had no interest. Skirmishes were also the way of the camp, and he knew what the fight amongst the other pretrans was about. Just because you pulled a fish from the water did not mean you could keep it.

  He was staring into the rushing current when the oddest sensation touched the back of his neck—as if he’d been tapped upon the nape.

  He leaped up, dropping his line on the ground, but there was no one behind him. He sniffed the air, probed the trees with his eyes. Nothing.

  As he bent down to retrieve his line, the stick flipped out of his reach and off the bank, a fish having taken the bait. V lunged for it, but could only watch the crude handle skip into the stream. With a curse, he ran after it, jumping from rock to rock, tracking it farther and farther downstream.

  Whereupon he met up with another.

  The pretrans he’d beaten with his book was coming up the stream with a trout in his hand, one that, given his rapacious satisfaction, had no doubt been stolen from another. As he saw V, the bobbing stick with V’s catch on it went by him and he stopped. With a shout of triumph, he shoved the kicking fish in his pocket and went after what was V’s—even though it took him in the direction of his pursuers.

  Perhaps because of V’s reputation, the other boys got out of the way as he went after the pretrans, the group abandoning the chase and becoming cantering spectators.

  The pretrans was faster than V, moving recklessly from stone to stone, whereas V was more careful. The leather soles on his coarse boots were wet, and the moss growing on the backs of the rocks was slick as pig fat. Even though his prey was pulling ahead, he held back to ensure his footing.

  Just as the stream widened into the pool the others had been fishing in, the pretrans leaped onto the flat face of a stone and got within reach of V’s hooked fish. Except as he stretched out to grab the stick, his balance shifted…and his foot popped out from under him.

  With the slow, graceful tumble of a feather, he fell headfirst into the rushing stream. The crack of his temple on a rock inches below the surface was loud as an ax striking hardwood, and as his body went limp, the stick and the line spirited along.

  As V came up to the boy, he remembered the vision he’d had. Clearly it had been wrong. The pretrans did not die on top of the mountain with the sun upon his face and the wind in his hair. He died here and now in the arms of the river.

  It was a bit of a relief.

  Vishous watched as the body was pulled into the dark, still pool by the current. Just before sinking below the surface, it rolled over so it was faceup.

  As bubbles breached unmoving lips and rose to the surface to catch the moonlight, V marveled at death. All was so calm after it came. Whatever screaming or yelling or action that caused the soul its release unto the Fade, what followed was like the dense quiet of falling snow.

  Without thinking, he reached down into the frigid water with his right hand.

  All at once a glow suffused the pool, emanating from his palm…and the pretrans’s face was illuminated as surely as if the sun shone upon it. V gasped. It was the vision realized, exactly as he had foreseen it: the haze that had muddled the clarity was in fact the water, and the boy’s hair waved to and fro not from wind, but from the currents deep in the pool.

  “What do you do unto the water?” a voice said.

  V looked up. The other boys stood lined up on the curving bank of the river, staring at him.

  V snatched his hand from the water and put it around his back so no one would see it. Upon its removal, the glow in the pool faded, the dead pretrans left to the black depths as if he’d been buried.

  V rose to his feet and stared at what he knew now were not only his competitors for scarce food and comforts, but now his enemies. The cohesion between the gathered boys as they stood shoulder-to-shoulder told him that however contentious they were within the camp’s dry womb, they had been bonded over one like mind.

  He was an outcast.

  V blinked and thought about what had come next. Funny, the turn in the road you anticipated was never the one with the black ice on it. He’d assumed that the other pretrans would drive him out of the camp, that one by one they would go through their change, then gang up on him. But fate liked surprises, didn’t it.

  He rolled on his side and became determined to get some sleep. Except as the door to the bathroom opened, he had to crack an eyelid. Jane had changed into a white button-down shirt and a pair of loose black yoga sweats. Her face was flushed from the heat of her shower, her hair spiky and damp. She looked amazing.

  She glanced over at him briefly, a quick cursory review that told him she assumed he was asleep; then she went over and sat in the chair in the corner. As she drew her legs up, she wrapped her arms around her knees and lowered her chin. She seemed so fragile that way, just a twist of flesh and bone within the embrace of the chair.

  He shut his eye and felt wretched. His conscience, which had been all but unplugged for centuries, was awake and aching: He couldn’t pretend he wasn’t going to be fully healed in another six hours. Which meant her purpose was over and he was going to have to let her go when the sun went down tonight.

  Except what about the vision he’d had of her? The one of her standing in the doorway of light? Ah, hell, maybe he’d just been hallucinating…

  V frowned as he caught a scent in the room. What the hell?

  Inhaling deeply, he hardened in a rush, his cock thickening, growing heavy on his belly. He looked across the room at Jane. Her eyes were closed, her mouth a little open, her brows down…and she was aroused. She might not have felt entirely comfortable with it, but she was definitely aroused.

  Was she thinking of him? Or the human male?

  V reached out with his mind with no real hope of getting into her head. When his visions had dried up, so too had the running tickertape of other people’s thoughts, the one that could be forced on him or picked up at his will—

  The vision in her mind was of him.

  Oh, fuck, yeah. It was so totally him: He was arching on the bed, his stomach muscles tightening, his hips pushing up as she worked his sex with her palm. This was right before he came, when he’d removed his gloved hand from what was doing below his cock and made a grab for the duvet.

  His surgeon wanted him even though he was partially ruined and not her kind and holding her against her will. And she was aching. She was aching for him.

  V smiled as his fangs punched out into his mouth.

  Well, wasn’t this the time to be a humanitarian. And relieve some of her suffering…

  Shitkickers planted in a wide stance, fists curled at his side, Phury stood over the lesser he’d just knocked stupid with a nasty shot to the temple. The bastard was lying facedown in a dirty slush pile, its arms and legs flopped to the side, its leather jacket torn up the back from the fighting.

  Phury took a deep breath. There was a gentlemanly way to kill your enemy. In t
he midst of war, there was an honorable manner to bring death upon even those you hated.

  He looked up and down the alley and sniffed the air. No humans. No other lessers. And none of his brothers.

  He bent down to the slayer. Yeah, when you took out your enemies, there was a certain standard of conduct to be upheld.

  This was not going to be it.

  Phury picked the lesser up by its leather belt and its pale hair and swung the thing headfirst into a brick building like a battering ram. A muffled, meaty thunch lit out as the frontal lobe shattered and the spinal column pierced through the back of the skull.

  But the thing was not dead. To kill a slayer you needed to stab him in the chest. If left as it was now, the bastard would just be in a perpetual rotting state until the Omega eventually came back for the body.

  Phury dragged the thing by an arm behind a Dumpster and took out a dagger. He didn’t use the weapon to stab the slayer back to its master. His anger, that emotion he didn’t like to feel, that force that he didn’t permit to attach to people or events, had started to roar. And its impulse was undeniable.

  The cruelty of his actions stained his conscience. Even though his victim was an amoral killer who had been about to take out two civilian vampires twenty minutes ago, what Phury was doing was still wrong. The civilians had been saved. The enemy was incapacitated. The end should be brought cleanly.

  He didn’t stop himself.

  As the lesser howled in pain, Phury stuck with what he was doing to the thing, his hands and blade moving swiftly through skin and vitals that smelled like baby powder. Black, glossy blood ran onto the pavement and covered Phury’s arms and oiled up his shitkickers and splashed onto his leathers.

  As he kept going, the slayer became a StairMaster for his fury and his self-hatred, an object to work out the feelings. Naturally his actions made him think even less of himself, but he didn’t stop. Couldn’t stop. His blood was propane and his emotions were flame and the combustion was inescapable now that it had been ignited.