by J. R. Ward
When he had purchased the Eliahu Rathboone B&B from its original owner, some century and a half prior, he had intended to live in it alone during his dotage. Not how things had ended up. Twenty years ago, as a result of his breakdown, he had been in the prime of life yet the throes of insanity, burned out and very much crazy, ready to wander empty rooms in the hope his mind followed the example and moved out the soul-destroying images that were cluttering up his memory banks.
No such luck. On the alone front, that was. The house had come with staff who needed jobs, and returning guests who wanted the same room for their anniversary every year, and bookings for weddings that had been made months in advance.
In an earlier incarnation of himself, he would have fucked all of it off. With everything that had happened, however, he hadn’t known who he was anymore. His personality, his character, his soul, had been through a trial of fire and failed the test. As a result, his superstructure had been collapsing, his building coming down, his once strong and resolute construction of character turning to rubble.
So he had let the humans continue to come and work and sleep and eat and argue and make love and live around him. It was the kind of move someone who was lost in the world made, a Hail Mary that was uncharacteristic and desperate, a maybe-this-will-keep-me-on-the-planet from a person in whom gravity was no longer all that interested.
Dearest Virgin Scribe, it was a horrible lightness to be insane. To feel like a balloon on a string, no ground under your feet, only a thin tether tying you to a reality you were imminently going to slip free of.
He closed the window and walked over to the trestle table he spent so many hours at. No computer on its old, chipped surface, no telephone or cell phone, no iPad or flat screen TV. Just a candleholder with a lit length of beeswax . . . and three letters . . . and a flat envelope marked FedEx.
Murhder sat down on the old wooden chair, the spindle legs protesting his weight with a creaking.
Reaching into the folds of his black shirt, he pulled out his talisman. Between the pads of his thumb and forefinger, the shard of sacred glass, wrapped in bands of black silk, was a familiar worry bead. But it was more than something for an anxious hand to toy with.
On its long silk cord, he could extend it out such that he could see the glass, and presently, he stared into its transparent face.
Some thirty years ago, he had stolen the piece of a seeing bowl from the Temple of Scribes. Totally illegal to do so. He had told no one. The Brotherhood had gone up to the Scribe Virgin’s sanctuary, where her Chosen were sequestered, to defend what should have been sacrosanct from invaders who were of the species. The Primale, the male who serviced the sacred females to provide next generations of Brotherhood members and Chosen, had been slaughtered, and the Treasury, with its inestimable wealth, had been in the process of being looted.
As always ill-gotten financial gain had been the mens rea.
Murhder had chased one of the raiders into the Temple of Scribes, and in the course of the ensuing fight, several of the workstations, where the Chosen peered into the crystal seeing bowls and recorded the goings-on down on earth, had been crashed into. After he had killed the felon, he had stood among the ruination of the orderly rows of tables and chairs and wanted to weep.
The sanctuary should never have been defiled, and he prayed that no Chosen had been injured—or worse.
He had been about to drag the body out onto the lawn when something had flashed and caught his eye. The sanctuary, being on the Other Side, had no discernible light source, just a glow across its milky white sky, so he had been unsure what had made anything wink like that.
And then it had happened again.
Stepping through the debris and bloodstains, he had stood over the glass shard. Three inches long and wide, in a lozenge shape, it had appeared as a dead combatant on a field of war.
The thing had done it a third time, that shimmer sparking up from nowhere.
As if it were attempting to communicate with him.
Murhder had slipped it into the pocket of his combat vest and not thought of the shard again. Until three nights later. He had been going through his gear, looking for a missing knife, when he’d discovered it.
That was when the sacred glass had shown him the beautiful female’s face.
So shocked had he been with what he’d seen that he’d fumbled the shard, cutting himself as he dropped it.
When he’d picked the thing up, his blood had turned the portrait red. But she was there all right—and the sight of her carved a piece of his heart out. She was terrified, her wide, scared eyes peeled open so that the whites showed, her mouth parted in shock, her skin pulled tight over her features.
The vision chilled him to the bone and promptly invaded his nightmares. Was it a Chosen who had been hurt during the sanctuary break-in? Or some other female he could still help?
Years later, he had learned who it was. And failing her had been the final blow that cost him his sanity.
Tucking the sacred shard back under his shirt, he looked at the FedEx envelope. The documents inside had already been signed by him, the inheritance left by a relation he only vaguely remembered renounced and sent further down the bloodline to another recipient, also someone he was only tangentially aware of.
Wrath, the great Blind King, had demanded them be executed. And Murhder had used that royal order as a pretext to get an audience.
The three letters were the thing.
He brought them closer, pulling them across the varnished wood. The writing on the envelopes was done in proper ink, not the stuff that came out of Bics, and the lettering was shaky, the hand wielding whatever instrument had been used palsied and therefore only partially controlled.
Eliahu Rathboone
Eliahu Rathboone House
Sharing Cross, South Carolina
No street address. No zip code. But Sharing Cross was a little town, and everyone, including the postmaster, who was also the postal deliveryman and the mayor, knew where the B&B could be found—and was aware that people at times fancied communication with a dead figure of history.
Murhder was not, in fact, Eliahu Rathboone. He had, however, put an old portrait of himself down in the front hall to mark the property as his own, and that had ignited the false identification. People “saw” the ghost of Eliahu Rathboone on the grounds and in the house from time to time, and in the modern era, those reports of a long-haired, shadowy form had spurred amateur ghost hunters and then professional ones into coming and obtaining footage.
Someone had even added, at some point, a little signage at the base of the frame, Eliahu Rathboone and the birth and death dates.
The fact that he bore only a passing resemblance to the human who had built the house centuries ago didn’t seem to matter. Thanks to the Internet, grainy images of antique pencil drawings showing the actual Rathboone were available for viewing, and other than them both possessing long dark hair, they had little in common. That did not bother the people who wanted to believe, however. They felt like he was the first owner of the house, therefore he was the first owner of the house.
Humans were big proponents of magical thinking, and he was content to let them stew in their folly. Who was he to judge? He was insane. And it was good for business—which was why the staff let the lie lay, so to speak.
The letter writer knew the truth, however. Knew lots of things.
They must have seen the B&B on the TV, though, and made the connection.
The first letter he had dismissed. The second had troubled him with details only he would know. The third had determined him unto action, although he’d not immediately known how to proceed. And that was when the King’s solicitor had arrived with news of the inheritance and Murhder had decided upon his course.
He was going to the King for help. He had no choice.
Down on a lower floor, upon the landing of the main stairs, the grandfather clock began to chime the announcement of nine o’clock.
Soo
n it would be time to go back to where he had escaped from, to see once again those whom he had no wish to cast sight upon, to reenter, for a limited period, the life which he had left and vowed ne’er to return.
Wrath, son of Wrath. The Black Dagger Brotherhood. And the war with the Lessening Society.
Although that last one was no longer his problem. Nor the other two, actually. In the august and ancient annals of the Brotherhood, he held the notorious title of being the only Brother ever expelled from membership.
No, wait . . . the Bloodletter had also been kicked out. Just not for losing his mind.
There was no scenario he had e’er expected to reengage those fighters or that King.
But this was his destiny. The sacred shard had told him thus.
His female was waiting for him to finally do right by her.
Indeed, he bore the weight of many wrongs in his life, many things that he had done to hurt others, cause pain, maim and destroy. A fighter he had been once, a killer for a cause that had been noble but whose execution had been bloodthirsty. Fate had found a way to hold him accountable, though, and now its ruthless will was once again grinding upon him.
Abruptly, the image of a female came to his mind, powerful of body, fierce of will, her short hair and her glowing gray eyes staring at him with a no-nonsense directness.
Not the one in the glass.
He saw Xhex often in his broken mind, visions of her, memories of them together as well as everything that had happened later, the only channel his mental TV was trained on. If he were apprehensive of taking his malfunctioning cognition into the Brotherhood’s orbit, meeting up with that female would ruin him, he was quite sure. At least he didn’t have to worry about running into her. His former lover had been a lone wolf all her life, and that trait, like the gunmetal color of her eyes, was so intrinsic to her makeup that he had no concern she would congregate with anyone.
That was what you did when you were a symphath living among vampires. You kept that part of your DNA a secret from everyone by removing yourself as much as possible.
Even when it came to males you were sleeping with. Males who thought they knew you. Males who stupidly ran up to the symphath colony to free you from captivity—only to learn that you hadn’t been kidnapped.
You’d gone to see your blooded family.
That noble move on his part, rooted in his need to be a savior, had been the start of the nightmare for both of them. His decision to go after her had permanently altered the course of their lives because she had kept her true nature from him.
And now . . . further repercussions, unforeseen and undeniable, had arrived unto him. At least these, however, might lead at long last to a resolution he could take to his grave in some kind of peace.
Murhder fanned the letters out. One, two, three. First, second, third.
He was not up to this task.
And on the same deep level that he knew he could not handle this pilgrimage of his, he was aware that there would be no returning from the journey. It was time to end things, however. When he had initially come unto this property, he had had some hope that in time, perhaps he would reenter his body, re-inhabit his flesh, restore his purpose and connection to the common reality in which all other mortals dwelled.
Two decades was long enough to wait to see if that happened, and in those twenty years, naught had changed. He was as unglued as he had been when he had first arrived. The least he could do was put himself out of this misery once and for all, and do it in a righteous way.
One’s last act should be virtuous. And for the female destiny provided unto you.
Rather like leaving a room clean after its use, he would take care to restore order to the chaos he had unwittingly unleashed before exiting the planet. And after that? Nothingness.
He did not believe in the Fade. He did not believe in anything.
Except suffering, and that would soon be over.
CHAPTER TWO
Ithaca, New York
Good evening, ma’am. I’m Special Agent Manfred from the FBI. Are you Dr. Watkins?”
Sarah Watkins leaned forward and checked out the badge and credentials the man held up. Then she looked over his shoulder. In her driveway, a dark gray four-door was parked behind her own car.
“How can I help you?” she said.
“So you are Dr. Watkins.” When she nodded, he smiled and put his ID away. “You mind if I come in for a minute?”
Out on her quiet street, her neighbor’s new Honda Accord ambled by. Eric Rothberg, who lived two houses down, waved and slowed to a roll.
She waved back to reassure him. He kept going. “What’s this about?”
“Dr. Thomas McCaid. I believe you worked with him at RSK BioMed.”
Sarah frowned. “He was one of the lab supervisors. Not in my division, though.”
“Can I come in?”
“Sure.” As she stepped back, she channeled her inner hostess. “Would you like something to drink? Coffee, maybe?”
“That’d be great. It’s going to be a late night.”
Her house was a small three-bedroom on a small lot on a nice-and-normal street of young families. Four years ago, when she’d bought it with her fiancé, she’d assumed at some point she’d hop on that mommy train.
She should have sold the place a while ago. “The kitchen’s this way.”
“Nice digs, you live here alone?”
“Yes.” Inside her gray-and-white kitchen, she indicated the round table with the three chairs. “I’ve got K-Cups. What’s your poison—oh, sorry. Bad phrasing.”
Agent Manfred smiled again. “It’s okay. And I’m not picky, long as it has caffeine in it.”
He was one of those good-looking bald guys, a forty-something who’d stared his missing hair in the follicle and decided not to pretend about his male pattern no-go. His nose was a ski jump that was crooked, like it had been broken a couple of times, and his eyes were a bright blue. Clothes were loose dark slacks, a dark navy windbreaker, and a black polo with FBI stitched in gold on the pec. Wedding ring was one of those titanium dark gray ones, and its prominence reassured her.
“So what’s this about?” She opened a cupboard. “I mean, I know Dr. McCaid died last week. I heard it in my lab. There was an announcement.”
“What was his reputation at the company?”
“Good. I mean, he was high up. Had been there for a long time. But again, I didn’t know him personally.”
“I’ve heard BioMed’s a big place. How long have you been there?”
“Four years.” She refilled the water tank for the machine. “We bought this house when we moved here and started at BioMed.”
“That’s right. You and your fiancé. What was his name?”
Sarah paused as she put a mug onto the grate. The agent was leaning back in her Pottery Barn chair at her Pottery Barn table, all no-big-deal. But those blue eyes were focused on her like he was videotaping all this in his head.
He knew the answers to these questions, she thought.
“His name was Gerhard Albrecht,” she said.
“He was a doctor, too. At BioMed.”
“Yes.” She turned back, and put a K-Cup of Starbucks Morning Blend in the machine. Lowering the handle, there was a hiss and then dripping into the mug. “He was.”
“You met him when you were both at MIT.”
“That’s right. We were in the Harvard-MIT HST program.” She glanced back at the agent. “I thought this was about Dr. McCaid?”
“We’ll get to that. I’m curious about your fiancé.”
Sarah wished she hadn’t tried to be polite with the coffee offer. “There’s not much to tell. Do you want sugar or milk?”
“Black is great. I don’t need anything to slow down the caffeine absorption.”
When the dripping was done, she brought the mug over and sat across the table from him. As she awkwardly linked her hands together, she felt like she’d been called to the principal’s office. Except this
principal could level all kinds of charges at you, charges that lead to prison instead of detention.
“So tell me about Dr. Albrecht.” He took a sip. “Oh, yeah, this hits the spot.”
Sarah looked at her own ring finger. If they’d made it to their wedding, she would still be wearing a band even though Gerry had been dead for two years. But they’d missed what they’d been planning by four months when he’d passed that January. And as for an engagement diamond, they’d skipped that on account of getting the house.
When she’d had to call the venue and the band and the caterers to cancel, they’d all given her the deposits back because they’d heard what had happened on the news. The only thing that hadn’t been fully refundable had been the wedding gown, but the people at the bridal shop had not charged her the other half of the cost when it came in. She’d donated the dress to Goodwill on what would have been their first anniversary.
Oh, and there had been the suit they’d bought for Gerry at Macy’s on sale. There had been no returns on that and she still had the thing. He’d always joked that he’d wanted to be buried in a “May the Force Be with You” shirt.
She would have never guessed she’d have to honor that request so soon.
That initial year after he’d been gone, she’d had all of the major holidays to get through—his birthday, his death day, and that non-event wedding anniversary. The calendar had been an obstacle course. Still was.
“I’m going to need you to be more specific,” she heard herself say. “About what you want to know.”
“Dr. Albrecht worked with Dr. McCaid, didn’t he.”
“Yes.” She closed her eyes. “He did. He was hired into the Infectious Diseases division when we graduated. Dr. McCaid was his supervisor.”
“But you were somewhere else in the company.”
“That’s right. I’m in Gene and Cell Therapy. I specialize in immunotherapy for cancer.”
She had always gotten the impression that BioMed had really only wanted Gerry, and had agreed to hire her solely because he’d made it a contingency to his own employment. He’d never said as much, of course—and ultimately, it hadn’t mattered. Her work was more than solid, and academic research centers around the country routinely tried to hire her. So why did she stay in Ithaca? She’d been wondering that lately and decided it was because BioMed was her last tie to Gerry, the last choice they had made together . . . the dissipating mirage of the future that they had planned on being long and happy and fulfilling.
