Lover Revealed tbdb-4

by J. R. Ward

  Butch fixated on the blackness and went back to focusing on the palm moving over his heart. From the corner of his eye, he saw the glowing hand come up, but he was too far gone to care. He was stumbling in the most marvelous, mild way, in the midst of a gentle trip through thin air, falling into Vishous…

  Plunging into a void…

  Of darkness…

  Mr. X woke up and put his hand to his chest, feeling around for his wounds. He was satisfied with how fast they were healing, but he was far from his normal strength.

  Lifting his head with care, he glanced at what had once been a cozy den for a nuclear family. Now that the Lessening Society was occupying the house, however, the room was just four walls, faded carpet, and wilted drapery.

  Van walked in from the cheerful, empty kitchen and stopped dead. "You're awake. Jesus, I thought I was going to have to dig a hole in the backyard."

  Mr. X coughed a little. "Bring me my laptop."

  When Van brought the thing in, Mr. X heaved himself up so he was leaning against the wall. From the Windows XP startup menu, he went into My Documents and opened a Word file titled "Operational Notes." He scrolled down to the header marked «July» and panned through entries made nine months ago. There was one for each day, back from when he'd been Fore-lesser the first time. Back when he'd given a shit.

  As he searched, he was aware of Van hovering.

  "We have a new purpose, you and I," Mr. X said absently.

  "Oh, yeah?"

  "That human we saw tonight. We're going to find him." X paused at the notes from the seventeenth of the month, but they didn't give him what he was after. "We're going to find that human, and we're going to take him out. Find him… take him out."

  The guy had to die so that Mr. X's misread of the situation became fact and the Omega never knew his Trojan human hadn't been killed by the Brothers.

  The actual assassination of the man would have to be carried out by another lesser, however. After this evening's showdown, Mr. X was taking himself out of the risk pool. He could not take a chance on another serious injury.

  July… July… maybe he had the wrong month, but he could have sworn it was around then that a cop looking like that human had shown up at the Caldwell Martial Arts Academy, the Society's former HQ—ah… yes. Good record keeping was so helpful. And so was the fact that he'd demanded to see the guy's shield.

  Mr. X spoke up. "His name is Brian O'Neal. CPD badge number eight five two. Address used to be over in the Cornwell Apartments, but I'm sure he's moved. Born Boston Women's Hospital, Boston, MA, to a Mr. Edward and a Mrs. Odell O'Neal." Mr. X glanced at Van and smiled a little. "What do you bet his parents are still in Boston?"

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Rain was falling onto Butch's face. Was he outside? Had to be.

  Man… he must have passed out on some kind of bender or something. Because he was flat on his back and his head was nothing but 'slaw and the idea of opening his eyes was too much like work.

  He should probably just lie here and wait a while. Yeah… he should just sleep for a little bit…

  Except, holy hell, this rain was annoying. The shit tickled as it hit his cheeks and slid down into his neck. He lifted an arm to cover his face.

  "He's coming around."

  Whose deep voice was that? V's… yeah, and V was… his roommate? Or something. Yeah… roommate. He liked V a lot.

  "Butch?" Now, a woman. A very scared woman. "Butch, can you hear me?"

  Oh, he really knew her. She was… the love of his life… Marissa.

  Butch's eyes lazed open, but he wasn't too sure what was reality and what was trippy nonsense. Until he saw his woman's face.

  Marissa was bent over him and his head was in her lap. Her tears were what was falling on his face. And V… V was right next to her, down on his haunches, his mouth a thin, strained slash in the midst of his goatee.

  Butch struggled to speak, but there was something in his mouth. As he batted at it, trying to get it out, Marissa went to help him.

  "No, not yet," V said. "I think he's got a couple more in him."

  More what?

  From out of nowhere, Butch heard a scramble of feet.

  He lifted his head a little and was surprised to find that he was the one making the noise. His shoes were flopping up and down, and he watched as the spasms crawled up his legs. He tried to fight the progress, but the seizure took over, traveling into his hips and his torso, making his arms flap and his back slap against the floor.

  He rode the wave as best he could, trying to hang on to consciousness until it was just impossible.

  When he came back, he was dizzy.

  "That one didn't last so long," Marissa said, smoothing his hair back. "Butch, can you hear me?"

  He nodded and tried to lift his arm to her. But then his feet started up with the Fred Astaire routine again.

  Three more trips through the seizure park and the belt was finally taken out of his mouth. As he tried to speak, he realized how truly drunk he was. His brain was barely kicking over, he was so wasted. Except… hold up—he couldn't remember hitting the Scotch.

  "Marissa," he mumbled, taking her hand. "Don't want to see you drink so much." Wait, not really what he'd been going for. "Ah… don't you to see me drink so much… want."

  Whatever. God… he was so confused.

  V smiled a little, but it was the kind of falsey number doctors gave to patients who were about to throw up. "He's going to need something with sugar in it. Rhage, you got a lollipop on you?"

  Butch looked over as a wicked handsome blond guy knelt down. "I know you," Butch said. "Hey… buddy."

  "Hey, my man." Rhage reached into the pocket of his fleece and pulled out a Tootsie Pop. After ripping the wrapper off, he put the thing into Butch's mouth.

  Butch groaned. Goddamn, that was the best thing he'd ever tasted in his whole life. Grape. Sweet. Ahhhh…

  "Is he seizing again?" Marissa asked.

  "I think he likes it," Rhage murmured. "That right, cop?"

  Butch nodded and nearly lost the lollipop, so Rhage took control of the stick, holding it in place.

  Man, they were so good to him. Marissa stroking his hair and holding his hand. V's palm a warm weight on his leg. Rhage making sure the Tootsie Pop stayed where it needed to be—

  All of a sudden, higher reasoning and short-term memory came back in a rush, like his brain was being poured back into his skull. He wasn't drunk. The regression. The ancestor regression. V's hand on his chest. The blackness.

  "What was the result?" he asked, panicked. "V… what did you find out? What was—"

  Everyone around him took a deep breath and someone muttered, Thank God he's really back.

  At that moment, two steel-toed shitkickers approached from the right. Butch's eyes latched on to them, then rose higher, taking in a pair of leather-clad legs, then a huge body.

  Wrath towered over them all.

  The king reached up and removed his wraparounds, revealing brilliant, gleaming, pale green eyes. As they didn't appear to have pupils, the stare was like getting hit with a pair of klieg lights.

  Wrath smiled broadly, his fangs so very white. "What's doing… cousin."

  Butch frowned. "What…?"

  "You've got some of me in you, cop." Wrath's smile stuck around as he slid his glasses back on. " 'Course, I always knew you were a royal. Just didn't think it went past the pain-in-the-ass part, is all."

  "Are you… serious?"

  Wrath nodded. "You're of my line, Butch. One of mine."

  As Butch's chest got tight, he braced himself for another seizure. And so did everyone else: Rhage took the lollipop out and reached for the belt. Marissa and V tensed up.

  But what came out of him was a rush of laughter. A ridiculous, belly-rolling, tear-up, stupid-idiot wave of happy hysteria.

  Butch laughed and laughed and kissed Marissa's hand. Then laughed some more.

  Marissa felt the satisfaction and the excitement humming thro
ugh Butch's body as he let loose. But when he beamed up at her, she couldn't share his joy.

  He lost his smile. "Baby, it's going to be all right."

  Vishous got to his feet. "Why don't we give you guys a minute alone?"

  "Thank you," she said.

  After the Brothers left, Butch sat up. "This is our chance—"

  "If I asked, would you not do the transition?"

  He froze. As if she'd slapped him again. "Marissa—"

  "Would you?"

  "Why don't you want me with you?"

  "I do. And I would choose the future we have now over a hypothetical cast of centuries any day. Can't you understand that?"

  He blew out a long breath, his jaw tightening. "Christ, I love you."

  Okay, so clearly he didn't find her logic appealing. "Butch, if I asked you, would you not do it?"

  When he didn't reply, she covered her eyes, but she had no tears left in her.

  "I love you," he repeated. "So, yeah… if you asked me not to, I wouldn't."

  She lowered her hand, her breath catching. "Swear to this. Here and now."

  "On my mother."

  "Thank you…" She pulled him into her arms. "Oh, God… thank you. And we can work through the… feeding issue. Mary and Rhage have. I just… Butch, we can have a good future."

  They were silent for a time, just sitting on the floor. Then from out of the blue, he said gruffly, "I have three brothers and a sister."

  "Excuse me?"

  "I've never talked to you about my family. Well, I have three brothers and one sister. Well, there had been two girls, but then we lost one."

  "Oh." She sat back, thinking his tone was very odd.

  And his hollow voice gave her the total creeps as he said, "My earliest memory is of my sister Joyce coming home from the hospital as an infant. I wanted to check her out, and I ran to her crib, but my father shoved me back so my older brother and sister could look at her. As I bounced off the wall, dad picked up my brother and lifted him so he could touch her. I'll never forget my father's voice…" Butch's accent changed, the vowels flattening out. "This here's your sistah, Teddy. Yah gonna love'ah and take care'ahah. I thought, what about me? I would like to love her and take care of her. I said, Pa, I wanna help, too. He didn't even look at me."

  Marissa realized she was squeezing Butch's hand so hard she must be bruising his bones, but he didn't seem to notice. And she couldn't loosen the hold.

  "After that," he went on, "I started watching my father and my mom, watching how they were different with the other kids. Main thing was on Friday and Saturday nights. My father liked to drink, and I was the one he went for when he needed to knock something around." When Marissa gasped, Butch shook his head with a total lack of regard. "No, it's fine. It was good. I can suck back punches like you read about, thanks to him, and trust me, that's come in handy. So anyway, one Fourth of July… Hell, I was almost twelve then…" He rubbed his jaw, his beard growth scratching. "Yeah, the Fourth of July came and we were doing the family thing out at my uncle's on the Cape. My brother skims some beers from the cooler and he and his buddies go 'round back of the garage and crack them open. I hid in the bushes because I wanted to be invited in. You know… I hoped my brother would…" He cleared his throat. "When my father came looking for them, the other boys took off and my brother about crapped in his pants. My father just laughed. Told Teddy to make sure my mother never found out. Then dad saw me crouched down in the shrubs. He came over, hauled me up by the collar, and backhanded me so hard I spit blood."

  As Butch smiled in a hard way, she looked at the uneven edge of his front tooth.

  "He told me it was for being a spy and a snitch. I swore to him I was just looking, I wasn't going to tell no one. He clipped me again and called me a pervert. My brother… yeah, my brother just watched the whole thing happen. Didn't say a word. And when I walked past my mother with my split lip and the chip out of my tooth, she just held my little sister Joyce closer and looked away." He shook his head slowly. "Up at the house, I went to the bathroom and cleaned up, then headed for the room I was staying in. I didn't give a shit about God, but I went down on my knees, clapped my little hands together, and prayed like a good Catholic should. I begged God that this not be my family. Please let this not be my family. Please let there be someplace else I can go…"

  She had a feeling he didn't know he'd switched into the present tense. Or that he'd reached up and was gripping the solid gold cross around his neck like his life depended on it.

  His lips cracked into a half smile. "But God must have known I wasn't sure about Him because nothing came of it. Then that fall my sister Janie was murdered." As Marissa sucked in a breath, he pointed behind himself. "That's the tattoo on my back. I count the years since she's gone. I was the last one to see her alive, before she got in the car with those boys that just… desecrated her behind our high school."

  She reached for him. "Butch, I'm so—"

  "No, let me get this out, okay? This shit's like a train, now that it's moving, I can't stop it." He dropped the cross and shoved his hand through his hair. "After Janie disappeared and they found her body, my father never touched me again. Wouldn't come near me. Wouldn't look at me. Didn't talk to me, either. My mom went crazy after a little while and they had to put her in a psych ward. It was right around then that I started drinking. I ran the streets. Did drugs. Got in fights. The family just limped along. I never understood the change in my dad, though. I mean… for years he beat me, then… nothing."

  "I'm so glad he stopped hitting you."

  "No difference to me. The waiting to get clipped was as bad as getting my ass slammed. And to not know why… but I did find out. At my oldest brother's bachelor party. I was like twenty by then and had moved from Southie—er—South Boston to here because I was starting as a cop with the CPD. Anyway, I went back home for the party. We were in some guy's house with a lot of strippers. My father was pounding the beers hard. I was doing lines of cocaine and sucking back Scotch. Party comes to an end and I'm buzzing out of control. I'd done a lot of coke… man, I was so fucking polluted that night. So… Dad's leaving… getting a ride home from someone, and suddenly I had to talk to the sonofabitch."

  "I end up chasing him out into the street, but he's all ignoring me and shit. So in front of all the guys, I just grabbed him. I was beyond pissed. I started going off on him, about how I thought he'd been a real shitty father to me, how I was surprised he stopped cracking me because he liked it so much. I went on and on, until my old man finally looked into my face. I just froze. There was… total terror in his eyes. He was completely scared of me. Then he said, I left yah alone 'cause I couldn't have yah killin' any more of m'children, could I? I was all… What the fuck? He starts to cry and says, Yah knew she was my favorite… yah knew and that's why yah put hah in that cah w' those boys. Yah did it, yah knew what would happen." Butch shook his head. "Man, everyone heard it. All the guys. My oldest brother, too… My father actually thought I'd had my sister murdered to get back at him."

  Marissa tried to embrace him, but again he shrugged her off and took a deep breath. "I don't go home anymore. Ever. Last I heard, Ma and Pa were spending some time in Florida every year, but otherwise were still in the house I grew up in. Like, my sister Joyce, her baby was just baptized? The only reason I knew about it was because her husband called me out of guilt.

  "So here's my deal, Marissa. I've had a piece missing all my life. I've always been different from other people, not just in my family but when I was working here on the CPD force, too. I never fit in… until I met the Brotherhood. I met your kind… and, shit, now I know why. I was a stranger among humans." He cursed softly. "I wanted to go through the change not just for you, but for me. Because I felt like then… I could be who I'm supposed to be. I mean, hell, I've been living on the fringes all my life. I kind of wanted to know what being in the thick was like."

  In a powerful move, he got off the floor. "So that's why I want… why I wanted to d
o this. It wasn't just about you."

  He went over to a window and pushed aside the pale blue velvet drapery. As he stared out into the night, the glow from a lamp on the desk fell across the planes of his face, the heft of his shoulders, the thick pads of his chest. And the golden cross that lay over his heart.

  God, how he yearned as he looked out of the window. Yearned so fiercely his eyes nearly glowed.

  She thought of him the night she'd fed from Rehvenge. Saddened, hurt, paralyzed by biology.

  Butch shrugged. "But… you know, sometimes you can't have what you want. So you deal and move on." He glanced back at her. "Like I said, you don't want me to, I won't."

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Butch looked away from Marissa and stared back out into the darkness. Against the dense black screen of the night, he saw images of his family, clip art that made his eyes sting. Holy fuck, he'd never put the whole story into words before. Never expected to.

  Not a pretty picture, the whole lot of it.

  Which was another reason he'd wanted to go through the transition. He could have used another shot at life, and the change would have been like birth, wouldn't it? A new beginning, where he was something else, something… improved. And purified, too. A kind of baptism by blood.

  And man, he hungered to wipe the slate clean, all of it: the stuff with his family, the things he'd done as an adult, that shit with the Omega and the lessers.

  He winced, thinking he'd gotten so close. "Yeah… ah, I'm just going to tell Wrath and them this is not—"

  "Butch, I—"

  He cut her off by going to the door and opening it. As he looked out at the king and V, his chest burned. "Sorry, fellas. Change in plan—"

  "What will you do to him?" Marissa's voice was loud and all hard edges as it cut through the air.

  Butch glanced over his shoulder. Across the study, she looked as grim as he felt.