The Black Dagger Brotherhood Novels 5-8

by J. R. Ward

  No such thing as a hunter-bred horse. And the word farm was not usually associated with one hundred one-bedroom units sandwiched in between a Ford/ Mercury dealership and a supermarket shopping center. Agrarian? Yeah, right. Grass patches were losing the ground battle against the asphalt by a four-to-one margin and the one pond there was had clearly been man-made.

  Damn thing had cement edges like a pool, and its thin ice cover was the color of piss, like there was a chemical treatment going on.

  Considering how many humans lived in the units, it was a surprise that the Lessening Society would put troops in such a conspicuous place, but maybe this was just temporary. Or maybe the whole fucking thing was filled with slayers.

  Each building had four apartments clustered around a communal stairwell, and the numbers mounted on the outside wall were spotlit from the ground. He solved the visual challenge using the tried and true touch-and-decipher method. When he found a row of upraised digits that felt like Eight Twelve in cursive letters, he willed off the security lights and dematerialized to the staircase’s top landing.

  The lock on unit eight twelve was flimsy and easily manipulated with his mind, but he wasn’t taking anything for granted. Standing flat against the wall, he turned the horseshoe-shaped knob and opened the door only a crack.

  He closed his useless eyes and listened. No movement, just the hum of a refrigerator. Considering his hearing was acute enough to hear a mouse breathe through its nose, he figured it was clear and palmed a throwing star, then slipped inside.

  Chances were good there was a security system blinking somewhere in the place, but he didn’t plan on being here long enough to tango with the enemy. Besides, even if a slayer showed up there could be no fighting. Place was crawling with humans.

  Bottom line, he was looking for jars and that was it. After all, the feeling of wetness down his leg wasn’t because he’d hit a slush puddle on the way in. He was bleeding into his boot from the fighting back in that alley, so, yeah, if anyone who smelled like a coconut-cream pie laced with cheap shampoo appeared, he was outtie.

  At least…that was what he told himself.

  Shutting the door, Wrath inhaled, long and slow…and wished he could power-wash the inside of his nose and the back of his throat. Still, although his gag reflex started churning, the news was good: There were three distinct sweet smells interwoven in the stale air, which meant three lessers stayed here.

  As he headed for the back, where the cloying stenches were concentrated, he wondered what the hell was going on. Lessers rarely lived in groups because they fought with one another—which was what happened when you recruited only homicidal maniacs. Hell, the men the Omega picked couldn’t shut off their inner Michael Myers just because the Society felt like saving a little on rent overhead.

  Maybe they had a strong Fore-lesser in place, though.

  After the raids of the summer, it was hard to believe the lessers were tight on cash, but why else consolidate troops? Then again, the Brothers, and Wrath on the QT, had been seeing less sophisticated shit in those holsters. It used to be when you fought the slayers you had to be prepared for any special modification out on the market for any kind of weapon. Lately? They had been going up against old-school switchblades, brass knuckles, and even—gasp—a frickin’ billy club last week—all cheap weapons that didn’t require bullets or upkeep. And now they were playing The Waltons here at Hunter-poser Farms? What the fuck?

  The first bedroom he came up to was marked by a pair of perfumes, and he found two jars next to the sheetless, blanketless twin beds.

  The next crip likewise smelled of a variant of old lady…that and something else. A quick sniff told Wrath it was…Christ, Old Spice.

  Go. Fig. With the way those fuckers smelled, like you’d want to add anything to the mix—

  Holy shit.

  Wrath inhaled hard, his brain filtering out anything remotely sweet.

  Gunpowder.

  Following the metallic bite in the air, he went over to a closet that had the kind of flimsy doors you’d expect on a dollhouse. As he opened them up, the eau d’ammo bloomed, and he leaned down, feeling around with his hands.

  Wooden crates. Four of them. All nailed shut.

  The guns inside had definitely been fired, but not recently, he thought. Which suggested this might well have been a CPO purchase.

  Certified preowned by who, though.

  Whatever, he wasn’t leaving them behind. This stash was going to be used by the enemy against his civilians and his brothers, so he’d blow up the whole apartment before letting those weapons get palmed in the war.

  But if he called this in to the Brotherhood? His secret would be revealed. Trouble was, dragging the crates out by himself was a yeah-right sitch: He had no car, and there was no way of dematerializing with that kind of weight on his back, even if he cut it up into smaller loads.

  Wrath backed out of the closet and took stock of the bedroom, using touch as much as sight. Oh, good. There was a window over on the left.

  He took out his phone with a curse and flipped it open—

  Someone was coming up the stairwell.

  He froze, closing his eyes to concentrate even further. Human or lesser?

  Only one mattered.

  Wrath bent to the side and put the two jars he’d macked on a dresser, finding, natch, both the third one and the bottle of Old Spice. Palming his forty, he stood with his shitkickers planted and his gun pointed down the short hallway, directly at the unit’s front door.

  There was a jangle of keys, then a clang, as if they’d fallen out of a hand.

  The curse was a woman’s.

  As his body eased up, he let his gun fall to his thigh. Like the Brotherhood, the Society admitted only males into its ranks, so that was no slayer playing pickup sticks with those keys.

  He heard the door to the apartment across the way close, and abruptly a surround-sound TV came on loud enough so he could hear the rerun of The Office.

  He liked this epi. It was the one where the bat got loose—

  A bunch of screams rippled over, generated by the sitcom.

  Yup. The bat was flying around now.

  With the woman safely occupied, he refocused but stayed where he was, praying the coming-home bit was a theme song the enemy would pick up and carry. Staying statue and breathing shallow didn’t improve the ratio of lessers in the place, however. Some fifteen, maybe twenty minutes later, he was still completely surrounded by no slayers.

  But it wasn’t a total loss. He was copping a nice little comedy contact buzz from Dwight’s head-and bat-bagging scene in the Office’s kitchen.

  Time to get a move on.

  He hit up Butch, gave the Brother the address, and told the cop to drive like his foot was made of stone. Wrath wanted to get the guns out before anyone came, yes. But if he and his brother could get the crates out quickly, and Butch could ghost the shit, Wrath might still be able to hang around the premises for another hour or so.

  To pass the time, he hunted through the apartment, patting surfaces down with his palms in an attempt to find computers, extra phones, more goddamn guns. He’d just returned to the second bedroom when something ricocheted off the window.

  Wrath unholstered his forty again and back-flatted it on the wall next to the window. With his hand, he sprang the lock and pushed the sheet of glass open a crack.

  The cop’s Boston accent was about as subtle as a loudspeaker. “Yo, Rapunzel, you going to let down your frickin’ hair, there?”

  “Shh, you wanna wake the neighbors?”

  “Like they can hear anything over that TV? Hey, this is the bat epi…”

  Wrath left Butch to talk to himself, putting his gun back on his hip, pushing the window wide, then heading for the closet. The only warning he gave the cop as he winged the first two-hundred-pound crate out of the building was, “Brace yourself, Effie.”

  “Jesus Ch—” A grunt cut off the swearing.

  Wrath poked his head out of t
he window and whispered, “You’re supposed to be a good Catholic. Isn’t that blasphemy?”

  Butch’s tone was like someone had pissed out a fire on his bed. “You just threw half a car at me with nothing but a quote from Mrs. fucking Doubtfire.”

  “Put on your big-girl pants and deal.”

  As the cop cursed his way over to the Escalade, which he’d managed to park under some pine trees, Wrath headed back to the closet

  When Butch returned, Wrath heaved again. “Two more.”

  There was another grunt and a rattle. “Fuck me.”

  “Not on your life.”

  “Fine. Fuck you.”

  When the last crate was cradled like a sleeping baby in Butch’s arms, Wrath leaned out. “Buh-bye.”

  “You don’t want a ride back to the mansion?”

  “No.”

  There was a pause, as if Butch were waiting for the lowdown on how Wrath intended to spend what little was left of the night hours.

  “Go home,” he told the cop.

  “What do I tell the others?”

  “That you’re a fucking genius and you found the gun crates when you were out hunting.”

  “You’re bleeding.”

  “I’m getting sick of people telling me that.”

  “Then word up, stop being an ass and go see Doc Jane.”

  “Didn’t I already ‘bye’ you?”

  “Wrath—”

  Wrath shut the window, went over to the dresser, and put the three jars in his jacket.

  The Lessening Society wanted to claim the hearts of their dead as much as the Brothers did, so as soon as the slayers heard a man of theirs was down, they reconnoitered and headed to the lesser’s addy. Surely one of those bastards he’d killed tonight had called for backup in the process. They had to know.

  They had to come back here.

  Wrath chose the best defensive position there was, which was in the back bedroom, and angled his click-click-bang-bang at the front door.

  He wasn’t leaving until he absolutely had to.

  NINE

  Caldwell’s outskirts were either farm or forest, and the farms likewise came in two varieties, being either dairy or corn—with dairy predominating, given the short growing season. The forests were also binary, with a choice between the pines that led up the flanks of mountains or the oaks that led into the spun-off swamps of the Hudson River.

  No matter what the landscape, naturalis or industrialis, you had roads that were less traveled and houses spaced by miles and neighbors who were just as reclusive and trigger-happy as someone reclusive and trigger-happy himself could want.

  Lash, son of the Omega, sat at a beat-up kitchen table in a single-room hunting cabin in one of the stretches of forest. Across the weathered pine surface in front of him he’d spread every Lessening Society financial record he’d been able to find or print out or call up on his laptop.

  This was such bullshit.

  He reached over and picked up an Evergreen Bank statement that he’d read a dozen times. The Society’s largest account had one hundred twenty-seven thousand five hundred forty-two dollars and fifteen cents in it. The others, which were housed among six other banks, including Glens Falls National and Farrell Bank & Trust, had balances of between twenty bucks and twenty thousand.

  If this was all the Society had, they were teetering on the crumbling ledge of bankruptcy.

  The raids over the summer had yielded some good resellables in the form of looted antiques and silver, but realizing those funds was proving complicated, because it involved a lot of human contact. And there had been some financial accounts that had been seized, but again, siphoning off money from human banks was a complicated mess. As he’d learned the hard way.

  “Y’all want some more coffee?”

  Lash looked up at his number two and thought it was a miracle Mr. D was still around. When Lash had first entered this world, reborn by his true father, the Omega, he had been lost, the enemy now his family. Mr. D had been his guide, although like all tourist maps, Lash had assumed the bastard would wear out his usefulness as the new locale was internalized by the driver.

  Not so. The little Texan who had been Lash’s entrée was now his disciple.

  “Yeah,” Lash said, “and how about food?”

  “Y’sir. Got you some good ol’ fatback bacon, right chere, and that cheese you like.”

  The coffee was poured nice and slow into Lash’s mug. Sugar was next, and the spoon used to stir made a soft clinking sound. Mr. D would have cheerfully wiped Lash’s ass if asked, but he wasn’t a pussy. The little fucker could kill like no one’s business, the Chucky doll of slayers. Great short-order cook, too. Made pancakes that were a mile high and fluffy as a pillow.

  Lash checked his watch. The Jacob & Co. had diamonds all over it, and in the dim light from the computer screen they were a thousand points of light. But the thing was a replacement faker he’d gotten off eBay. He wanted another real one except…holy Christ…he couldn’t afford it. Sure, he’d kept all the accounts of his “parents” after he’d killed the pair of vampires who’d raised him as their own, but though there was a good load of green in those baskets, he was leery of spending any of it on frivolous shit.

  He had bills to pay. Like for mortgages and weapons and ammo and clothes and rent and car leases. Lessers didn’t eat, but they consumed a lot of resources, and the Omega didn’t care about cash. But then, he lived in hell and had the ability to conjure out of thin air anything from a hot meal to the Liberace cloaks he liked to jack his black shadow body into.

  Lash hated to admit it, but he had the feeling his true father was a little light in the loafers. No real man would be caught dead in that sparkly shit.

  As he lifted his coffee cup, his watch glimmered and he frowned.

  Whatever, that was a status symbol.

  “Your boys are late,” he bitched.

  “They be comin’.” Mr. D went over and opened the seventies-era refrigerator. Which not only had a squeaking door and was the color of a rotten olive, but drooled like a dog.

  This was ri-fucking-diculous. They needed to upgrade their cribs. Or if not all, at least one for his HQ.

  At least the coffee was perfect, although he kept that to himself. “I don’t like waiting.”

  “They be comin’, don’tchu worry. Three eggs in your omelet?”

  “Four.”

  As a series of crack and splits radiated through the cabin, Lash tapped the tip of his Waterman on the Evergreen statement. Expenses for the Society, including cell phone bills, Internet hookups, rent/mortgages, weapons, clothes, and cars ran easily fifty grand a month.

  When he’d first been getting a feel for his new role, he’d been damn sure someone in the ranks was peeling skin off the apple. But he’d been watching things carefully for months, and there was no Kenneth Lay going on that he could find. It was a simple matter of accounting, not fudging the books or embezzlement: Costs were higher than revenues. Period.

  He was doing his best to arm his troops, even stooping so low as to buy four crates of guns from bikers he’d met in jail over the summer. But it wasn’t enough. His men needed better than rehabbed Red Ryders to take out the Brotherhood.

  And while he was at the wish list, he had to have more men. He’d thought the bikers would be a good pool to recruit from, but they were proving too cohesive. Based on his dealings with them, his intuition told him he had to bring them all on or none—because sure as shit if he cherry-picked, the ones chosen would return to their clubhouse and tell their buddies about their fun new job killing vampires. And if he took them all, then he was running the risk of their splitting off from his authority.

  One-by-one recruiting was going to be the best strategy, but it wasn’t like he’d had time to do any of it. Between the training sessions with his father—which, in spite of his issues with Daddy-o’s wardrobe, were proving monstrously helpful—and his monitoring the persuasion camps and looting repositories, and trying to get his
men to focus on the job at hand, he had not even an hour left in the day.

  So shit was getting critical: To be a successful military leader required three things, and resources and recruits were two of them. And although being the son of the Omega gave him loads of benes, time was time, stopping for no man, no vampire, and no scion of evil.

  Considering the state of the accounts, he knew he had to start with resources first. Then he could go about getting the other two.

  The sound of a car pulling up to the cabin had him palming a forty and Mr. D going for his .357 Magnum. Lash kept his heat under the table, but Mr. D was all Times Square about his, holding the piece straight out, his arm extended in a line directly from his shoulder.

  When there was a knock, Lash said sharply: “You’d better be who I think you are.”

  The lesser’s answer was the right one. “It’s me ’n’ Mr. A ’n’ your pickup.”

  “Come on in,” Mr. D said, ever the good host, even though his .357 was still up and ready for action.

  The two slayers who walked through the door were the last of the pale ones, the final pair of old-timers who had been in the Society long enough to have lost their individual hair and eye coloring.

  The human who was dragged in with them was a six-foot stretch of nothing particularly interesting, a twenty-something white boy with an average face and a hairline that would be giving up the ghost in another couple years. The guy’s Wonder-bread, who-cares looks no doubt explained why he dressed the way he did: He had a leather jacket with an eagle embossed on the back, a Fender Rock & Roll Religion shirt, chains hanging from his jeans, and kicks by Ed Hardy.

  Sad. Truly sad. Like putting twenty-fours on a Toyota Camry. And if the boy was armed? No doubt it was with a Swiss Army knife that got used mostly for the toothpick.

  But he didn’t have to be a fighter to be useful. Lash had those. From this POS he needed something else.

  The guy looked at Mr. D’s welcome Magnum and glanced back at the door as if he were wondering if he could outrun a bullet. Mr. A solved the issue by closing them all in together and staying right in front of the exit.