by J. R. Ward
Rehv stared up into his mother’s eyes and never loved her more.
He nodded once. “Look upon mine face and be assured, I so swear it. Bella and her issue shall never know. The past shall die with thee and me.”
His mother’s shoulders eased under her dressing gown, and her shuddering sigh spoke loudly of her relief. “You are the son other mothers may only wish for.”
“How can that possibly be true,” he said softly.
“How can it not.”
Madalina gathered herself up and took the kerchief from his hand. “I must needs do this one again, and then perhaps you will help me to my bed?”
“Of course. And I’d like to call Havers.”
“No.”
“Mahmen—”
“I should like my passing to be without medical intervention. None would save me now, anyway.”
“You can’t know that—”
She lifted her lovely hand with its heavy diamond ring. “I shall be dead before nightfall tomorrow. I saw it within the bowl.”
Rehv’s breath left him, his lungs refusing to work. I’m not ready for this. I’m not ready. I’m not ready….
Madalina was so precise with the final kerchief, lining up its corners carefully, sweeping the iron back and forth slowly. When she was finished, she moved the perfect square over to the others, making sure that everything was lined up.
“It is done,” she said.
Rehv leaned on his cane to rise and offered her his arm, and together they shuffled into her bedroom, both unsteady.
“Are you hungry?” he asked as he pulled back the covers and helped her lie down.
“No, I am well as I am.”
Their hands worked together to arrange the sheets and the blanket and the duvet so that everything was folded precisely and lying directly across her chest. As he straightened, he knew she would not be getting out of bed again, and he couldn’t bear it.
“Bella needs to come here,” he said roughly. “She needs to say good-bye.”
Her mother nodded and shut her eyes. “She must come now, and please have her bring the young.”
Back in Caldwell, at the Brotherhood mansion, Tohr paced around his bedroom. Which was a joke, really, considering how weak he was. Lurched was about all he could pull off.
Every minute and a half he checked the clock, time passing at an alarming rate until he felt as if the world’s hourglass had been shattered and seconds, like sand, were spilling all over the place.
He needed more time. More…Shit, would that even help, though?
He just couldn’t figure out how to get through what was about to happen and knew more stewing wasn’t going to change that. For example, he couldn’t decide whether it was better to have a witness. The advantage was that it was even less personal that way. The disadvantage was that if he cracked wide open, there was another person in the room to see.
“I’ll stay.”
Tohr glanced over at Lassiter, who was lounging on the chaise by the windows. The angel’s legs were crossed at the ankles, and one combat boot ticked from side to side, another hateful measure of time.
“Come on,” Lassiter said, “I’ve seen your sorry ass naked. What could possibly be worse than that.”
The words were typical bravado, the tone surprisingly gentle—
The knock on the door was soft. So it wasn’t a Brother. And given that there was no food aroma working its way under the door, it wasn’t Fritz with a tray of eats destined for the porcelain throne.
The call to Phury had worked, evidently.
Tohr started to shake from head to toe.
“Okay, easy, there.” Lassiter got up and came over fast. “I want you to park it over here. You’re not going to want to do this anywhere near a bed. Come on—no, don’t fight me. You know this is the drill. It’s biology, not choice, so you need to take the guilt out of it.”
Tohr felt himself getting pulled across to a stiff-backed chair that was by the bureau, and right in fucking time: His knees lost interest in their calling, the pair of them falling loose so that he hit the woven seat so hard he bounced.
“I don’t know how to do this.”
Lassiter’s gorgeous puss appeared right in front of his. “Your body’s going to do it for you. Take your mind and your heart out of it and let your instinct do what needs to be done. This is not your fault. This is how you survive.”
“I don’t want to survive.”
“You don’t say. And here I thought all this self-destructive crap was just a hobby.”
Tohr didn’t have the strength to lash out at the angel. Didn’t have the strength to leave the room. Didn’t even have enough in reserve to cry.
Lassiter went over to the door and opened it. “Hey, thanks for coming.”
Tohr couldn’t bear to look at the Chosen who entered, but there was no ignoring her presence: Her delicate, flowery scent drifted over to him.
Wellsie’s natural fragrance had been stronger than that, made not only of rose and jasmine, but the spice that reflected her backbone.
“My lord,” a female voice said. “I am the Chosen Selena, here to serve you?”
There was a long pause.
“Go to him,” Lassiter said softly. “We need to get this over with.”
Tohr put his face in his hands, his head falling loose on his neck. It was all he could do to breathe in and out as the female settled on the floor at his feet.
Through his spindly fingers, he saw the white of her flowing robes. Wellsie hadn’t been into dresses all that much. The only one she’d ever truly liked had been the red-and-black gown she’d mated him in.
An image from that sacred ceremony appeared in his mind, and he saw with tragic clarity the moment when the Scribe Virgin had clasped both his and Wellsie’s hands and declared that it was a good mating, a very good mating indeed. He’d felt such warmth linked to his female through the mother of the race, and that sensation of love and purpose and optimism had increased a million times over as he’d stared into his love’s eyes.
It had seemed as if they had a lifetime of only happiness and joy before them…and yet now here he was on the other side of unthinkable loss, alone.
No, worse than alone. Alone and about to take another female’s blood into his body.
“This is happening too fast,” he mumbled behind his palms. “I can’t…I need more time….”
So help him, God, if that angel said one word about how now was the right moment, he was going to make that bastard wish his teeth were made out of safety glass.
“My lord,” the Chosen said softly, “I shall come back if that is your wish. And come back anon if then is not right. And return and return once more until you are ready. Please…my lord, verily I should only wish to help, not hurt you.”
He frowned. She sounded very kind, and there wasn’t a sultry note to any of the syllables that had left her lips.
“Tell me the color of your hair,” he said through his hands.
“It is black as the night and bound tight as my sisters and I could make it. I took leave to wrap it in a turban as well, though you did not ask that of me. I thought…perhaps it would help further.”
“Tell me the color of your eyes.”
“They are blue, my lord. A pale sky blue.”
Wellsie’s had been sherry colored.
“My lord,” the Chosen whispered, “you need not even look upon me. Allow me to stand behind you, and take my wrist that way.”
He heard the rustle of soft cloth, and the scent of the female shifted around until it came from behind him. Dropping his hands, Tohr saw Lassiter’s long, jeans-clad legs. The angel’s ankles were crossed again, this time as he leaned back against the wall.
A slender arm draped in white cloth appeared before him.
In slow tugs, the sleeve of the robing was gradually lifted higher and higher.
The wrist that was exposed was fragile, the skin white and fine.
The veins beneath the surface
were light blue.
Tohr’s fangs slammed down from the roof of his mouth and a snarl came out of his lips. The bastard angel was right. Suddenly there was nothing on his mind; everything was his body and what he’d deprived it of for so long.
Tohr clamped a hard hand on her shoulder, hissed like a cobra, and bit the Chosen’s wrist down to the bone, locking his fangs in place. There was a cry of alarm and a scramble, but he was gone as he drank, his swallows like fists on a rope, pulling that blood down into his gut so fast he didn’t have time to taste it.
He nearly killed the Chosen.
And he knew this only later, after Lassiter finally peeled him free and knocked him out with a punch to the head—because the instant he’d been separated from the source of those nutrients, he’d tried to go for the female again.
The fallen angel had been right.
Horrible biology was the ultimate driver, winning over even the stoutest of heart.
And the most reverent of widowers.
THIRTY-FOUR
When Ehlena got home, she put on a fake face, sent Lusie off, and checked with her father, who was “making incredible strides” in his work. The second she could get free, though, she went into her room to hop online. She had to figure out how much money they had, down to the penny, and didn’t think she was going to like what she came up with. After signing onto her bank account, she scrolled through the checks that had yet to clear and tallied up what was due the first week of the month. The good news was that she was still going to get her pay for November.
Their savings account had just under eleven grand in it.
There was nothing left to sell. And no fat on the monthly budget.
Lusie would have to stop coming. Which would suck, because she’d take on another client to fill the spot, so when Ehlena found a new job there’d be a nursing care hole to plug.
Although that was assuming she could get another position. Sure as hell it wasn’t going to be in nursing. Getting fired for cause was not what any employer wanted to see on a résumé.
Why had she lifted those fucking pills?
Ehlena sat staring at the screen adding and readding all the little numbers until they blurred together, not even the sum of them registering anymore.
“Daughter mine?”
She quickly shut down the laptop, because her father didn’t do well with electronics, and composed her face. “Yes? I mean, yes?”
“I wonder if you would care to read a passage or two of my work? You seem anxious, and I find such pursuits calm my mind.” He shuffled to the side and gallantly extended his arm.
Ehlena stood up because sometimes all a person could do was accept the direction of others. She didn’t want to read any of the gibberish he had committed to the page. Couldn’t bear to pretend that everything was okay. Wished that, even if just for an hour, she could have her parent back so she could talk through the bad position she had landed them both in.
“That would be lovely,” she said in a dead, elegant voice.
Following him into his study, she helped settle him into his chair and looked around at the sloppy stacks of paper. What a mess. There were black leather binders crammed to the point of breaking. File folders stuffed wide. Spiral-bound notebooks with pages lolling out of their confines like the tongues of dogs. White loose-leaf paper sprinkled here and there, as if the pages had tried to fly away and gotten only so far.
It was all his diary, or so he maintained. In reality, it was just pile after pile of nonsense, the physical manifestation of his mental chaos.
“Here. Sit, sit.” Her father cleared off the seat next to his desk, moving over steno pads that were held together with tan rubber bands.
After she sat down, she put her hands on her knees and squeezed hard, trying not to lose it. It was as if the debris in the room were a spinning magnet that made her own thoughts and machinations rotate even faster, and that was absolutely not the help she needed.
Her father glanced around the office and smiled as if in apology. “Such industry for a comparatively small yield. Rather like harvesting pearls. The hours I have spent herein, the many hours to fulfill my purpose…”
Ehlena barely heard him. If she couldn’t afford the rent here, where would they go? Was there anything even cheaper that didn’t have rats and hissing cockroaches in it? How would her father fare in an unfamiliar environment? Dearest Virgin Scribe, she’d assumed they’d hit bottom the night he’d burned down the proper house they’d been renting. What was lower than this?
She knew she was in trouble when everything got blurry.
Her father’s voice continued on, marching across her panicked silence. “I have endeavored to record with faithfulness all that I saw….”
Ehlena didn’t hear much more.
She cracked in half. Sitting in the little side chair, swamped by her father’s mindless, useless prattle, confronted by her actions and where a bad call had landed both of them, she wept.
It was about so much more than losing the job. It was Stephan. It was what had happened with Rehvenge. It was the fact that her father was an adult who couldn’t comprehend the realities of their situation.
It was that she was so alone.
Ehlena held herself and wept, hoarse breaths barking out of her lips until she was too exhausted to do anything but sag into her own lap.
Eventually, she heaved a great sigh and wiped her eyes with the sleeve of the uniform she no longer needed anymore.
When she looked up, her father was sitting stock-still in his chair, his expression one of utter shock. “Verily…my daughter.”
See, this was the thing. They might have lost all the monetary trappings of their previous station, but old habits died hard. The reserve of the glymera still defined their discourse—so a great wailing session was tantamount to her flipping onto her back at the breakfast table and having an alien bust out of her stomach.
“Forgive me, Father,” she said, feeling like an utter fool. “I believe I shall excuse myself.”
“No…wait. You were going to read.”
She closed her eyes, her skin tightening up all over her body. On some level, her whole life was defined by his mental pathology, and though for the most part she saw her sacrifices as his due, tonight she was too raw to be able to pretend the crucial importance of something as worthless as his “work.”
“Father, I…”
One of the desk drawers opened and shut. “Here, daughter. Take into thy hands more than just a passage.”
She dragged her lids open…
And had to lean forward to make sure she was seeing things right. Between her father’s two palms was a perfectly aligned stack of white pages about an inch thick.
“This is my work,” he said simply. “A book for you, mine daughter.”
Downstairs in the Tudor safe house, Rehv waited by the windows in the living room, staring out over the rolling lawn. The clouds had cleared, and a half-assed moon hung winter-bright in the sky. In his numb hand, he held his new cell phone, which he had just clipped shut with a curse.
He couldn’t believe that above him his mother was on her deathbed and that at this very moment his sister and her hellren were speeding to beat the sunrise to get here…and yet work was raising its ugly horned head.
Another dead drug dealer. Which made three in the last twenty-four hours.
Xhex had been short and to the point, which was her way. Unlike Ricky Martinez and Isaac Rush, whose bodies had been found down by the river, this guy had turned up in his car in a strip mall parking lot with a bullet through the back of the skull. Which meant that the car had to have been driven there with the body in it: No way anyone would be stupid enough to pop a motherfucker in a place that undoubtedly had security-camera coverage. As the police scanner hadn’t reported anything further, though, they were going to have to wait for the newspapers and the morning news on TV tomorrow for more details.
But here was the problem, and the reason that he’d cursed.
>
All three of them had made buys from him within the last two nights.
Which was why Xhex had interrupted him at his mother’s. The drug business was not merely deregulated, but totally unregulated, and the stasis point that had been reached in Caldwell so that he and his high-level broker colleagues could make money was a very delicate kind of thing.
As a big player, his suppliers were a combination of Miami traffickers, New York harbor importers, Connecticut meth labbers, and Rhode Island X makers. They were all businessmen, just like him, and most of them were independents, i.e., unaffiliated with the mob here in the States. The relationships were solid, the men on the other end as careful and scrupulous as he was: what they did was simply a matter of financial transactions and product changing hands, just like any other legitimate segment of the economy. Shipments came into Caldwell to various residences and were transferred to ZeroSum, where Rally was in charge of the sampling and the cutting down and the packaging.
It was a well-oiled machine that had taken ten years to set up, and required a combination of well-reimbursed employees, threats of bodily harm, actual beatings, and constant relationship building to maintain.
Three dead bodies was enough to throw the whole arrangement into the shitter, causing not just an economic shortfall, but a power struggle on the lower levels that no one needed: Someone was picking off people on his turf, and his colleagues were going to wonder if he was doing a discipline or, worse, being disciplined himself. Prices would fluctuate, relationships would be strained, information would get twisted.
This needed tending to.
He had to make some calls to reassure his importers and producers that he was in control of Caldwell and that nothing was going to impede the sale of their goods. But Christ, why now?
Rehv’s eyes shifted to the ceiling.
For a moment, he fantasized about giving it all up, except that was just bullshit. As long as the princess was in his life, he had to stay in business, because there was no way in hell he was going to let that bitch take down his family’s fortunes. God knew Bella’s father had done enough in that direction by making bad financial decisions.
