Lassiter, page 44
Like it was flexing just to prove it was still in charge.
And what had she learned? After all this time? Well, it was that all she could do was walk through the rain and wind, and the cold, cold climate of her grief. Wrath’s absence had brought a nuclear winter to her life, and for her, there was no ultimate recovery. She remained the earth, lashed and set upon, hurtling through an icy void, even as other people’s stars continued to shine.
And it was what it was.
Nalla crossed her arms over her chest. “They won’t even talk to me.”
Plugging back into the conversation, Beth shook herself to attention. “Who won’t?”
“Males. Of any description.”
“I’m sure that’s not true—”
“They’re afraid of my father. Terrified. One of the groomsmen told Cellia that if I was in the wedding, he didn’t want to get paired with me to walk down the aisle during the ceremony. He said he was afraid he’d wind up in a ditch in pieces.”
Beth opened her mouth to deny it. But then had to close things up. Hmm, how to put this. “Zsadist is… a little protective of you, maybe.”
“He’s going to have to let me go. I’m not a child anymore, Auntie Beth. I want my own life, my own family, and I can’t… I want to move out.”
“Oh. Boy.”
Okay, she could just imagine how that conversation was going to go.
“Can you talk to him?” The girl pressed her palms together in prayer. “Please? He’ll listen to you. They all listen to you.”
Thinking back to the moment she had walked into her hellren’s study and told the Black Dagger Brotherhood exactly how it was going to go, she remembered the males down on their knees in deference to her, their daggers buried in the antique rug.
Nalla wasn’t wrong that she could stand up to them, and that they gave her special clout, but there were limits—and she was very sure that such boundaries started and ended with interfering with their children. Especially the girls and anything sexual.
Sure, things had evolved in so many necessary ways, but fathers were still fathers, especially if they were warriors.
That groomsman had a point about ending up in pieces.
“I think you need to speak to your father yourself, honey.”
“He doesn’t listen to me.”
Or worse, does and just doesn’t agree, Beth thought.
“What about your mahmen?” she asked.
Tension tightened the female’s features. “She’s always been more worried about him. But it’s fine, I can stand up for myself. I don’t need her.”
“Your mother loves you.”
“My mother loves my father. I’m just what came along when I did.”
Beth shook her head sadly, thinking of her own struggles with L.W. “Families are complicated.”
“Well, I’d like to start my own someday and find out. But at this point, that’s not going to happen because my sire will slice the throat of anybody who wants to take me out for a coffee.”
“I’m sorry,” Beth said. “I really am.”
“Me, too.”
Nalla stayed for a little longer, then left to clock in for her shift at Luchas House. As Beth listened to the back door shut, she looked across at the pan in the drying rack, and the silence closed in. Loneliness, her ever familiar, least favorite roommate, pulled up a chair and sat too close beside her, radiating a coldness that made her zip up the collar of her fleece.
A noise down below in the basement quarters, quiet though it was, reminded her she wasn’t actually alone, and a moment later the cellar door opened. Excellent timing. She’d found the best thing for composure was the requirement for her to find some.
“So are you and Lassiter staying in tonight—” Beth straightened as she saw Rahvyn’s face. “What’s wrong?”
After the tragedy, the quiet, mysterious female had been such a source of strength, and when Beth had moved out of the mansion, it had seemed only natural to have her and her mate move in with her. They hadn’t had anywhere else in mind to live in the physical world, and over the years, Lassiter had proven to be as loyal a friend as he was a protector of the race. And you know, The Golden Girls wasn’t so bad as TV went, after all.
Abruptly, she realized what time it was. “Rahvyn, aren’t you going to the Audience House? The civilians will be arriving soon.”
The female came over and sank down onto her haunches. If the strange expression on her face wasn’t alarming enough, the way she took Beth’s hands sealed the deal on OMG.
“Do you remember,” Rahvyn said softly, “a long, long time ago, when I told you to trust me.”
Beth nodded numbly. Yes, she recalled everything about that white-hot-painful time when the female had come upstairs to the bejeweled suite—and she especially remembered the first moment she had seen her hellren’s face emerge from the features of the female.
“Yes,” Beth breathed. “I do.”
“I want you to believe what you are about to see the now. Know it is not a dream. This is everything you’ve been waiting for, everything I haven’t been able to tell you.”
“What are you talking about—”
“The fallow time is through.” The female reached up and brushed Beth’s face. “You have been so very brave.”
“I don’t understand—”
“Do not try. Just feel.” Rahvyn rose to her feet. Then she bent at the waist and pressed a kiss to Beth’s forehead. “You have done well—”
The security system let off a beep as a door was opened, the front one. And justlikethat, Rahvyn up and disappeared.
“L.W.?” she called out in a shaky way. “Is that… you?”
Probably not. He didn’t come around much at all, anymore.
Except then she heard the footfalls, heavy ones. “L.W.?”
She was in the process of standing up and turning around when a figure appeared in the doorway that led to the living room. It was a tall… male… with long black hair that fell to his waist from a widow’s peak and shoulders that were as big as the whole world and a muscle shirt that showed off… forearms that were tattooed with lines and lines of Old Language symbols.
The trembling started at her legs and worked its way up to her chest and throat. Rahvyn was gone. Who was this.
And yet, as she stared into those pale green eyes with their pinpoint pupils, she knew.
“Wrath?” she choked out.
“Leelan.”
He charged forward, and lucky for that. She couldn’t feel her body anymore, and she was falling.
Her hellren’s strong arms wrapped around her, and though her mind was paralyzed, some kind of muscle memory snapped back and she fitted herself to him as she always had… and had known she never would again.
Except he was here.
She pushed back and touched his face, running her shaking hands over his features. “Where have you been.”
“I don’t know,” he said hoarsely. “I don’t know.”
He kissed her, then. Kissed her like he once had. Kissed her like she had ached for him to do, just one more time.
An eternity, a bottomless pit of time, suddenly opened up in the little kitchen, the love between two true hearts an immortality that could not be touched by any force in the universe, even the dark void of death.
“I don’t understand,” she whispered against his mouth.
Do I have to? she wondered. Did I ever?
A half-bred human who didn’t know her other side, being found by the last purebred vampire on earth, because the father who had always protected her from afar sent her a savior so she could live… and love.
And be loved.
As she blinked her eyes clear, she saw her son—their son—looming in the periphery, and as L.W. stared back at her, she thought… at least he was still alive, although a quick catalogue of his bandages made her stomach roll—
A scratching and whimpering drew her attention over her own shoulder, but before she could react, Lassiter opened the cellar door from the far side and let George, who was known for liking a cuddle with the fallen angel, bound forward.
The golden’s paws paddled on the tile for purchase, and then he shot himself toward his master in a scramble of blond fur and whimpering.
“George!” Wrath crouched down and opened his arms. “My boy!”
Wrath’s blind eyes stared straight ahead as he waited in the unfamiliar environment for his dog to come to him—and George tackled him and then went shimmy-all-over as he cried and yodeled his joy, the contortions of his body a physical release of his devotion and his own mourning because he had no words.
Beth looked up at her son. L.W.’s face was showing a rare moment of emotion, the hard features as soft as she had ever seen them, the vulnerability showing and making him appear far younger.
Maybe things would be better now.
Wrath rose back up to his full height and took George with him. Then again, it wasn’t like he had a choice. The golden had curled both front paws around his master’s shoulders like he was afraid another separation was coming and was holding on for dear life.
She knew how that felt.
What the hell is going on? she thought as she glanced back at Lassiter. Given the shock on his face, the angel wasn’t going to be much help with that. He looked like someone had just pummeled him over the head with a bag of bricks.
As Wrath extended his free arm, Beth went to him and wrapped herself around his chest and hips. Closing her eyes, she breathed in. And breathed in. And… breathed in.
The scent of him had been torture in the beginning. On the pillow beside her. On the sheets. On his clothes in their closet, the last towel he’d used in the bathroom, the rocker he’d sat in as he eased L.W. off to sleep.
Now it was back, and she squeezed him harder.
Like he would go away again, like this was a dream.
“I love you, leelan,” he said against her hair.
The tears that fell from her eyes soaked his black muscle shirt, and the source of them was not complex. Gratitude overwhelmed her. That and the confusion as to why was she so lucky? What had she done to deserve this? So many females of worth had lost their mates in the last thirty years.
Had it only been that long? It felt like eternity.
“I love you, too,” she croaked to her husband. “There has never been anyone but you for me… ever.”
III.
As Lassiter stood in the open doorway at the top of the basement stairs, his hand stayed locked on the handle he’d turned to let George out.
He’d been lying on the sofa in the common area, the dog snoozing on his chest as he often did, the last episode of the first season of The Golden Girls playing in the background, when he’d heard the footsteps overhead. And it was weird. The sounds that were transmitted down to him had seemed like what he’d been waiting for: For the previous three days, he’d been unsettled and twitchy, especially when Rahvyn had gone in to be Wrath for the civilians.
Driven by some kind of paranoia, he’d stuck with her for every moment of every hour, the sense that something was coming making him extra protective. She, on the other hand, had seemed perfectly calm, and outwardly speaking, there had been nothing unusual to anything, the glymera a constant simmering threat, Lash and the Lessening Society all over Caldwell, the demon fucking shit up, the normal stresses of the Brotherhood and their grown families ever present.
When Rahvyn had announced she wasn’t going in tonight to the Audience House and had canceled the session, it had been a relief just to chill.
Sensing his mate’s presence beside him, he shook his head.
“You knew about this,” he whispered as he stared across the kitchen at a reunion that seemed as shocking as the tragic loss of Wrath had been all those years ago. “Didn’t you.”
He glanced over at his mate as the King pulled his son into the clinch as well, the family made whole once again.
Rahvyn was invisible to everybody but him, and she was wiping tears from her eyes, her silver stare worried. “I wanted to tell you. It’s been eating me up for all this time. But I had to be the only one who knew. The demon Devina has the ability to travel through time as well, and though Wrath experienced the time jump as but a moment, his soul has been in the in-between for thirty years. If anyone had known, there was a risk that it would get out to her somehow and she could have gotten to him. If we’d lost him at that point? There was no coming back, and he would have ended up in a place that was worse than Dhunhd.”
“You hid him in time,” Lassiter whispered with awe. “That night… when I saw the meteor in the sky, that was Wrath.”
“And me. I swept him up the second before the explosion went off.” She reached for him. “Please… forgive me—”
Lassiter opened his arms, and as she became corporeal, he drew her in close to him. “Oh, my God, there’s nothing to forgive. You’re fucking brilliant!”
As she snuggled in to his chest, she said, “The Book let me know what was going to happen, and I fought going down and getting involved. But then I thought of Beth. It all happened so quickly, and this was the solution that came to me.”
“Genius. Absolute genius.”
She pulled back. “I hated lying to her. To you.”
The torment was in her face, her eyes luminous with the conflict she’d kept to herself.
He shook his head and turned her so she could see the clutch of the First Family. “That is all that matters to me. Whatever sacrifices we had to make, known and unknown, don’t matter—as long as we can have that.”
Lassiter wiped his face, and as he brought his hand down, he regarded the shimmer of silver on the pads of his fingertips.
And then Wrath looked up. “Rahvyn! Lassiter!”
There was more hugging at that point, and then the King wanted to go find Fritz. As the First Family, and the golden, descended down into the basement, Lassiter glanced around and marveled at how the house seemed full again. Even though it technically hadn’t been empty.
He looked into his shellan’s silver eyes. “You’re a miracle, you know that?”
“I’m not an angel, though.” Rahvyn reached up above his head. “I don’t have a halo like you do.”
“You don’t need one, you’re my Gift of Light.” He smiled. “Like I always tell you, you brought it back for me. Forever.”
As he stared into her eyes, he felt the future before them all, stretching out into time. He could see no details, none of the grand events or nightly minutiae, neither the sunshine nor the rain. He knew there would be both, of course. That was the way life worked—and because you couldn’t predict any of it, and could control only some of it… the most important thing was who you were with, who you surrounded yourself with.
Who your friends were.
Maybe that was why The Golden Girls was his favorite show.
And why he knew the great Betty White got it right when she’d spoken his favorite quote of hers: Replay the good times. Be grateful for the years you had.
That was everybody’s immortality right there.
“Hey, you want to go down and watch some TV while Wrath shocks the shit out of everybody we know and love?” Then he murmured, “And maybe a little somethin’ more, you know, if you’re interested in a religious experience?”
Rahvyn smiled and linked her arm around his waist. “You bet, angel mine. It’s a date.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
With so many thanks to the readers of the Black Dagger Brotherhood books! This has been a long, marvelous, exciting journey, and I can’t wait to see what happens next in this world we all love. I’d also like to thank Meg Ruley, Rebecca Scherer and everyone at JRA, and Hannah Braaten, Jamie Selzer, Sarah Schlick, Jennifer Bergstrom, Jennifer Long, and the entire family at Gallery Books and Simon & Schuster.
To Team Waud, I love you all. Truly. And as always, everything I do is with love to and adoration for both my family of origin and of adoption.
Oh, and thank you to Naamah, my Writer Dog II, and Obie, Writer Dog-in-Training, who work as hard as I do on my books!
More from this Series
Darius
The Savior
Book 17
The Sinner
Book 18
Lover Unveiled
Book 19
Lover Arisen
Book 20
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
J. R. WARD is the author of more than forty novels, including those in her #1 New York Times bestselling Black Dagger Brotherhood series. There are more than fifteen million copies of her novels in print worldwide, and they have been published in twenty-seven different countries. She lives in the South with her family.
JRWard.com
Facebook.com/JRWardBooks
Twitter: @JRWard1
FOR MORE ON THIS AUTHOR:
SimonandSchuster.com/Authors/J-R-Ward
SimonandSchuster.com
@GalleryBooks
BY J. R. WARD
THE BLACK DAGGER BROTHERHOOD SERIES
Dark Lover
Lover Eternal
Lover Awakened
Lover Revealed
Lover Unbound
Lover Enshrined
The Black Dagger Brotherhood: An Insider’s Guide
Lover Avenged
Lover Mine
Lover Unleashed
Lover Reborn
Lover at Last
The King
The Shadows
The Beast
The Chosen
The Thief
The Savior
The Sinner
Lover Unveiled
Lover Arisen
Lassiter
THE BLACK DAGGER LEGACY SERIES
Blood Kiss
Blood Vow
Blood Fury
Blood Truth
THE BLACK DAGGER BROTHERHOOD: PRISON CAMP
The Jackal
The Wolf
The Viper
THE BLACK DAGGER BROTHERHOOD WORLD
