Lover Unveiled (Black Dagger Brotherhood 19)

See? Symphaths weren’t all bad.

Just mostly. And he was half vampire, thanks to his mahmen.

Of course, the first meeting they’d had about the Book thing and that female had gone okay. Last night, people had kept their cool. Listened. Been content for more information. Now, though, they’d had nearly twenty-four hours to think about the implications of it all, so this “simple status update” had turned into Dramaggedon.

“. . . all bullshit,” someone was saying. “It was just rumors. Fucking gossip—”

“My grandmahmen told me about the magic in the Old Country—are you calling her a liar? Are you saying my grandmahmen is a fucking liar—”

Oh, great. The only thing worse than someone calling a Brother’s mahmen out was if the offender went up a generation in the bloodline and tossed his granny on the bonfire of disgrace.

Rehv checked his rose gold Royal Oak. Christ, they’d been in here for an hour and a half. And with the way things were going? This bunch of hotheads was going to be trading rythes for the rest of the night.

At least Fritz, the mansion’s butler, would be happy. That doggen loved to clean blood out of expensive carpets. If the male’s gig running this household full of killers ever went tits-up, he had a future at Stanley Steemer—

Boom!

As Wrath’s fist slammed into the great wooden desk, everybody shut up, but no one jumped in surprise. Frankly, Rehv had been waiting for the kibosh. He was willing to bet they all had.

“Enough of this bullshit,” Wrath ground out while he stroked George’s chin to calm the golden’s nerves. “We’re done debating whether magic exists or it doesn’t. You want to jerk yourselves off on that subject—or all over each other’s fucking relatives—you can do it on your own fucking time.”

Ah, yes. Nothing like a leader with the interpersonal skills of a chain saw.

Those black wraparounds swung to V, who was smoking a hand-rolled by the fireplace. “You haven’t found the female yet.”

“No, I mean, I tracked the car registration and the address tied to that license plate, but that’s just what she fronts to the human world. I checked out the house in question, but there were no vampires anywhere in it. I haven’t found anything else on her, but if she and her bloodline haven’t volunteered to be in a database, it’s going to be needle-and-a-haystack time. But whatever, I’ll go deeper, true?”

“That’s what he said,” someone muttered on reflex.

“When I saw her,” Rehv murmured, “she seemed . . . really normal. Way too vanilla for where she came to find me. Hard to imagine what someone like that would want with the Book. Repaint her house? Find a missing Blockbuster videotape from back before the Internet existed?”

“You don’t go after something like that unless you’re crazy,” Butch said.

Rehv nodded. “I read her grid. She’s way fucking desperate. But her parents died, like, three years ago, and I don’t think she’s mated, given how she was with one of the fighters. I sensed a sibling, a brother . . . what’s she missing? What does she need so badly that she’s willing to roll dice with black magic.”

“Most of the time”—V ashed on the hot side of the fender—“if I can see where someone’s been, I can figure out where they’re headed.”

“It just doesn’t add up.”

“You’d be surprised how many people’s insides don’t match their outsides.”

Somebody from the back piped in, “Does this mean you secretly like to cuddle, V?”

As V flipped off Rhage, conversation re-bubbled, although at a much more reasonable volume level—which wasn’t going to last.

And as the Brothers started to get louder again, a voice cut in, “This is a seriously dangerous situation. No matter who the female is or what she’s using the Book for.”

Everyone looked to the study’s doors. Another interested party had entered the chat, but with all the hot air in the room, nobody had noticed the arrival.

Lassiter, the fallen angel, was leaning back against the closed doors, arms crossed over a t-shirt that read “BOY MILK” on his pecs. With his zebra-print leggings, his blond-and-black hair spilling down, and all of his gold chains and piercings, he was what David Lee Roth going through a Mr. T phase would have looked like.

“The forces that can be unleashed courtesy of those pages?” Lassiter shrugged. “They’re like nothing else on the planet. Real finger-of-God shit. And the problem is going to be, once you release those energies, it’s a tiger out of the cage. Who hasn’t eaten for a month. There’s no reasoning with them, no stopping them.”

“Why hasn’t this come along before?” Tohr demanded. “I mean, we have stories and rumors from the Old Country. But nothing substantial.”

“Balance.” Lassiter fiddled with some of his bracelets, winding them around his thick wrist, the links offering up a soft chatter of metal on metal. “There has to be balance in the world, and the Omega was weighty enough on the bad-news side of the scale. He’s gone now, though, and destiny has a horror vacui. That dark presence has to be replaced with something, and it has been.”