by J. R. Ward
There was a slight pause. “What are you talking about? I got a message Thursday from some guy saying she had to reschedule. I thought that was why you were calling. To gloat that she blew me off and you were keeping her.”
A nasty sensation wrapped around the back of Manello’s neck, like someone had slapped a palmful of cold mud on him.
He kept his voice level. “Come on, would I do that?”
“Yeah, you would. I trained you, remember? You get all your bad habits from me.”
“Just the professional ones. Hey, the guy who called—you get his name?”
“Nope. Figured it was her assistant or something. Obviously wasn’t you. I know your voice, plus the guy was polite.”
Manny swallowed hard. Okay, he needed to dump this call right away. Jesus Christ, where the hell was Jane?
“So, Manello, can I assume you’re keeping her?”
“Let’s face facts, I’ve got a lot of things I can offer her.” Himself being one of them.
“Just not the chairmanship of a department.”
God, at the moment, all this bullshit medical politicking didn’t matter. Jane was MIA, as far as Manny was concerned, and he needed to find her.
With perfect timing, his assistant poked her head through his door. “Oh, sorry—”
“No, wait. Hey, Falcheck, I’ve got to go.” He hung up as Ken was still saying good-bye and immediately started dialing Jane’s house. “Listen, I need to make a phone—”
“Dr. Whitcomb just called in sick.”
Manny looked up from the phone. “Did you speak to her? Was she the one who called?”
His assistant looked at him a little funny. “Of course. She’s been down all weekend with the flu. Goldberg’s going to cover her cases today and man the chute. Hey, are you okay?”
Manny put the receiver down and nodded even though he felt light-headed as hell. Shit, the idea that something had happened to Jane thinned his blood to water.
“You sure, Dr. Manello?”
“Yeah, I’m good. Thanks for the info on Whitcomb.” As he stood up, the floor only weaved a little. “I’m due in the OR in an hour, so I’m going to food up. You got anything else for me?”
His assistant ran through a couple of issues with him, then left.
As the door shut Manny sank back into his chair. Man, he needed to gather the reins in his head. Jane Whitcomb had always been a distraction, but this shaky relief that she was fine surprised him.
Right. He needed to go eat.
Kicking himself in the ass, he got to his feet again and picked up a stack of residency applicant files to read in the lounge. In the process of taking them in hand, something slipped off the desk. He bent over and picked it up, then frowned. It was the printout of a photograph of a heart…that had six chambers.
Something flickered in the back of Manny’s mind, some kind of shadow that moved around, a thought on the verge of actualization, a memory about to crystallize. Except then he got a sharp, shooting pain right at the temples. As he cursed, he wondered where the hell the photograph had come from, and checked the date and time at the bottom. It had been taken here, on his premises, in his OR, and the print job had been done in his office: His machine had a hiccup in it that left an ink dot on the lower left-hand corner, and the mark was there.
He turned to his computer and did a search of his files. No such photograph existed. What the fuck?
He checked his watch. No time to keep digging, because he really did have to eat before he went to operate.
As he left his big-cheese office, he decided he was going to be an old-fashioned doctor this evening.
Tonight he was going to pay a house call, the first of his professional career.
Vishous pulled on a pair of loose black silk pants and a matching top that looked like a smoking jacket from the forties. After he put the godforsaken Primale medallion around his neck, he left his room while lighting up. On his way down the hall he heard Butch swearing out in the living room, the rolling, under-the-breath litany marked by a lot of F-words and an interesting twist on a-hole V was going to have to remember.
V found the guy on the couch, glowering over Marissa’s laptop. “What’s doing, cop?”
“I think this hard drive has bitten it.” Butch glanced up. “Jesus Christ…you look like Hugh Hefner.”
“So not funny.”
Butch winced. “I’m sorry. Shit…V, I’m s—”
“Shut up and let me look at the PC.” V picked the thing up off Butch’s lap and did a quick maintenance scan. “Dead.”
“Should have known. Safe Place is in a cluster fuck of IT shit. Their server’s down. Now this. Meanwhile Marissa’s up at the mansion with Mary trying to figure out how to hire more staff. Man, she doesn’t need this.”
“I put four new Dells in the supply cabinet outside Wrath’s study. Tell her to go get one, true? I’d set it up for her now, but I gotta go.”
“Thanks, man. And yeah, I’ll get ready to come with you—”
“You don’t have to be there.”
Butch frowned. “Fuck that. You need me.”
“Someone else can stand in.”
“I’m not abandoning you—”
“Wouldn’t be abandonment.” Vishous wandered over to the foosball table and spun one of the rods. As the row of little men did backflips, he exhaled. “It’s kind of like…I don’t know, if you’re there, it’s all too fucking real.”
“So you want somebody else to back you?”
V spun the rod again, a whirring noise rising up from the table. He’d chosen Butch on a knee-jerk, but the truth was, the male was a complication. V was so damned close to the guy it was going to be harder to front his way through the presentation and the ritual.
V looked across the living room. “Yeah. Yeah, I think I want someone else.”
In the short silence that followed, Butch assumed the look of someone holding a plate of food that was too hot: uneasy and insecure. “Well…as long as you know I would be there for you, no matter what was doing.”
“I know you’re solid.” V went to the phone, thinking over his choices.
“Are you su—”
“Yes,” he said, dialing. When Phury answered his call, V said, “You mind standing in with me today? Butch is going to hang back. Yeah. Uh-huh. Thanks, man.” He hung up. It might be an odd choice, because the two of them had never been particularly close. But then, that was the point. “Phury’s going to do it, no problem. I’m going to bounce to his room now.”
“V—”
“Shut it, cop. I’ll be back in a couple hours.”
“I wish like hell you didn’t have to—”
“Whatever. This isn’t going to change things.” After all, Jane would still be gone; he would still be a bonded male without his mate. So yup, yup, nothing different, nothing mattered.
“You’re absolutely positive you don’t want me to go?”
“Just be here with the Goose when I get back. I’m going to need a drink.”
V left the Pit through the underground tunnel, and as he walked over to the mansion, he tried to give himself some perspective.
This Chosen he was mating was just a body. Same as he was. The two of them were going to do what needed to be done, when it was necessary. It was just male parts meeting female parts, then thrust and repeat until the male ejaculated. And as for his complete and utter lack of arousal? Not a problem. The Chosen had salves to ensure an erection and incense that made you come. So even though he had absolutely no interest in sex, his body would do what it was born and bred to do: ensure that the best lines in the species survived.
Shit, he wished it could be clinical, all cup-and-baster. But vampires had tried IVF in the past, to no success. Young had to be conceived the good old-fashioned way.
Man, he did not want to think of how many females he was going to have to be with. He just couldn’t go there. If he did, he was going to—
Vishous stopped in the middle of the tu
nnel.
Opened his mouth.
And screamed until his voice gave out.
Chapter Thirty-four
When Vishous and Phury crossed over to the other side together, they took form in a white courtyard surrounded by a white arcade of Corinthian columns. In the center was a white marble fountain that splashed crystal-clear water into a deep white cistern. In the far corner, on a white tree with white blossoms, a flock of rainbow-colored songbirds was gathered as if they’d been sprinkled on top of a cupcake. The sweet calls of the finches and the chickadees harmonized with the chiming sound of the fountain, as if both cadences were in the same key of joy.
“Warriors.” The Scribe Virgin’s voice came from behind V and made his skin pull like plastic over his bones. “Kneel and I shall greet you.”
V ordered his knees to bend, and after a moment they hinged like rusty legs on a card table. Phury, on the other hand, didn’t seem to be suffering from a case of the stiffs and went down smoothly.
Then again, he wasn’t hitting the floor in front of a mother he despised.
“Phury, son of Ahgony, how fare thee?”
In a perfectly eloquent voice, the brother replied in the Old Language, “I fare well, for I am before thee with purity of devotion and depth of heart.”
The Scribe Virgin chuckled. “A proper greeting in the proper way. Lovely of you. And surely more than I will get from my son.”
V felt rather than saw Phury’s head whip toward him. Oh, sorry, V thought. Guess I forgot to mention that happy little fact, my brother.
The Scribe Virgin drifted closer. “Ah, so my son has not told you his maternal lineage? Out of decorum, I wonder? Concern for upsetting the generally held principle of my so-called virginal existence? Yes, that is why, is it not, Vishous, son of the Bloodletter.”
V lifted his eyes, though he hadn’t been invited to. “Or maybe I just refuse to acknowledge you.”
It was exactly what she expected him to say, and he could sense this not from reading her thoughts, but because on some level the two of them were one and the same, indivisible in spite of the air and space between them.
Yay.
“Your reticence to concede my maternity of you changes nothing,” she said in a hard tone. “A book unopened alters not the ink on its pages. What is there is there.”
Without permission, V stood and met his mother’s hooded face, eye for eye, strength for strength.
Phury was no doubt blanching white as flour, but whatever. He’d match the decor that way. Besides, the Scribe Virgin wasn’t going to toast her future Primale or her precious little boy. No way. So he didn’t give a fuck.
“Let’s get this over with, Mom. I want back to my real life—”
V found himself flat on his back and not breathing in the blink of an eye. Though there was nothing on top of him and his body didn’t seem to be compressed, he felt like he had a grand piano on his chest.
As his eyes bugged out and he fought to drag some air into his lungs, the Scribe Virgin floated over to him. Her hood lifted from her face of its own volition, and she stared down at him with a bored expression on her ghostly, glowing face.
“I would have your word that you will comport yourself with respect toward me whilst we are before my assembled Chosen. I concede that you have some liberties by definition, but I will not hesitate to determine you a worse future than the one you wish to forsake if you reveal them in public. Are we in agreement?”
Agreement? Agreement? Yeah, right, that kind of shit presupposed free will, and from everything he’d learned over the course of his life, it was clear he had none.
Fuck. Her.
Vishous exhaled slowly. Relaxed his muscles. And embraced the suffocation.
He held her stare…as he began to die.
After about a minute into the self-imposed drowning, his autonomic nervous system kicked in, his lungs punching against his chest walls, trying to drag down some oxygen. He locked his molars, pressed his lips together, and tightened his throat so that the draw reflex was rendered impotent.
“Oh, Jesus,” Phury said in a shaky voice.
The burn in V’s lungs spread throughout his torso as his vision started to fuzz and his body shook in the battle between mental will and the biological imperative to breathe. Eventually the war became less a fuck-you to his mother and more a fight to gain what he wanted: peace. Without Jane in his life, death was really his only option.
He began to black out.
All at once the nonexistent weight was lifted; then air shot through his nose and into his lungs sure as if it were a solid and an invisible hand had shoved the shit into him.
His body took over, hammering back his self-control. Against his will he sucked in oxygen like it was water, curling over on his side, breathing in great drafts, his vision gradually clearing until he could focus on the hem of his mother’s robes.
When he finally peeled his face off the white floor and looked up at her, she was no longer the bright form he was used to. She had dulled, as if her glow were on a dimmer switch and someone was trying to pull off mood lighting.
Her face was the same, though. Translucent and beautiful and hard as a diamond.
“Shall we proceed in for the presentation?” she said. “Or perhaps you would like to receive your mate lying prostrate on my marble?”
V sat up, dizzy but not caring if he passed the fuck out. He supposed he should feel some kind of triumph for winning the fight with her, but he didn’t.
He glanced at Phury. The guy was freaked, his yellow eyes peeled like grapes, his skin sallow and pasty. He looked like he was standing in the middle of a gator pool wearing steaks for shoes.
Man, going by how his brother was handling this little family spat, V couldn’t imagine the Chosen would deal any better with open conflict between him and his Joan Crawford mother-mare. And V might not have any affinity for that bunch of females, but there was no reason to rile them up.
He got to his feet, and Phury stepped in at just the right time. As V listed to one side, the brother caught him under the armpit and steadied him.
“You will follow me now.” The Scribe Virgin led the way to the arcade, floating above the marble, making neither sound nor any particular movement, a tiny apparition of solid form.
The three of them proceeded down the colonnade to a pair of gold doors V had never been through before. The things were massive and marked with an early version of the Old Language, one that bore enough relation to the current written symbology that V could translate:
Behold the sanctuary of the Chosen, sacred domain of the Race’s past, present and future.
The doors opened unhanded, revealing a pastoral splendor that under other circumstances might have calmed the shit out of even V. Except for the fact that everything was white, it could have been any Ivy League–type college campus, the buildings Georgian-formal and spread out widely amidst rolling, milky grass and albino oak and elm trees.
A runner of white silk had been stretched out, and he and Phury walked on it while the Scribe Virgin ghosted along about a foot above the thing. The air was at the perfect temperature and so absolutely calm there was no sensation of it passing over exposed skin. Although gravity still held V down, he felt lighter and somewhat buoyant…as if, with a running start, he could go bounding off across the lawn like those pictures of men on the moon.
Or, shit, maybe this lunar-walk sensation was because he had some brain-fry going on.
When they crested a hill, an amphitheater was revealed down below. As were the Chosen.
Oh, Jesus…The forty or so females were dressed in identical white robes with their hair up and their hands gloved. Their coloring varied from blond to brunette to redhead, yet they seemed to be all the same person because of their long, lean builds and those matching robes. Split into two groups, they lined either side of the amphitheater, presenting themselves at a three-quarter turn with their right feet out slightly. They reminded him of the caryatids of Greek
architecture, those sculptures of females that supported pediments or roofs on their regal heads.
Staring at them now, he wondered whether they had hearts that beat and lungs that pumped. Because they were as still as the air.
See, this was the problem with the Other Side, he thought. Nothing ever moved here. There was life…without life.
“Come forward,” the Scribe Virgin commanded. “The presentation awaits.”
Oh…God… He couldn’t breathe again.
Phury’s hand landed on his shoulder. “You need a minute?”
Fuck a minute; he needed centuries—although even assuming he had that kind of time, it wasn’t going to change the outcome. With a sense of destiny, he pictured that civilian vampire he’d found in the alley, the one who he’d come upon that night he’d been shot, the one who he’d killed that lesser to avenge.
They needed more warriors in the Brotherhood, he thought as he started to walk again. And it wasn’t like the stork was going to get the job done.
Down in front there was only one seat in the house, a golden thronelike production that was positioned up close to the lip of the amphitheater’s stage. From this vantage point, he realized that what he’d assumed was a blank white wall at the back was really a vast white velvet curtain that hung down as motionless as if it had been painted on a mural.
“You. Sit,” the Scribe Virgin said to him, obviously beyond sick of his ass.
Funny, he felt the same way about her.
V planted it as Phury took root like a tree behind the throne.
The Scribe Virgin floated over to the right, assuming a position at the side of the stage, a Shakespearean director, the driver of all the drama.
Man, what he wouldn’t give for an asp right about now.
“Proceed,” she called out in a clipped voice.
The curtain split down the middle and retracted, revealing a female covered in jeweled robes from head to foot. Flanked by two Chosen, his intended seemed to be standing at an odd angle. Or maybe she wasn’t standing. Jesus, it appeared as though she was on some kind of slab that had been tilted upright for viewing. Like a butterfly mounted.
