Lover Unveiled (Black Dagger Brotherhood 19)

Plus rain. Snow. Sleet. Hail. Which led to the fun and games of faucet-running noses, frostbitten toes, and oh, yeah, black ice that sent your car face-first into a tree trunk.

And then, because June through August didn’t want to miss out on the opportunity to harass people, you got the too-hot summer. So in addition to bees, wasps, and yellowjackets, you had armpit sweat. Chafing. Flip-flops.

He couldn’t fucking stand flip-flops. Nobody ever needed to see anybody else’s piggies-go-to-market.

And there was another part to it all. To make his climate intolerance and allergy to nature’s so-called wonders worse? He lived with Vishous. Who was only too happy to call a person out as a “pussy” if they happened to bring up the fact that maybe staying indoors was a great idea when the temperature was higher, or lower, than seventy degrees.

Whatever. Put that snarky SOB in a world full of Hallmark cards, MLM hun-bots, and “Save Britney” hashtags, and see how he did—

As the wind changed direction and half of the angel’s pec-length hair spidered into his face, he batted the stuff away and glared to the northeast.

“I swear to fucking God, I will put a muzzle on you.”

Aware that he had just told a force of nature to quit it or he’d give it something to cry about, he decided maybe he was just spoiled. His office was on the Other Side, up in the Sanctuary. Where it was always seventy degrees with no breeze—and no ticks, hornets, or mosquitos. Brown recluses. Asps.

Vishouses.

Talk about muzzles. Technically, there were options for dealing with that brother. In the hierarchy of things, the real flowchart of authority? Lassiter was the apex asshole, above even Wrath. And no matter how annoyed that made V, it was what it was: Gravity. The rise and fall of the sun. The supremacy of Eddie Van Halen’s guitar licks, Bea Arthur’s sense of style, the New York Yankees’ batting average . . . and Lassiter’s buck-stops-here.

Actually, he didn’t really give a fuck about baseball. He just really enjoyed messing with V’s Red Sox obsession.

“Like shooting fish in a barrel,” he said to himself.

As he considered fresh approaches to winding up tall, dark, and judgy, the cave he was looking for came forth to greet him. The craggy hole in the side of the mountain was utterly unremarkable, nothing but a split in a vein of granite that was camo’d by trees and brush. Unless you knew it was there, you’d never see it—and that was the point.

Slipping inside, he got a prickly whiff of earth and mold—another grand recommendation for camping—and in the darkness, he orientated himself by throwing a golden glow around the low-ceiling’d—

Directly in front of him, on just an any-closer-and-it-woulda-bit-ya foot away, was a mound of pottery shards that was hip height and wide as a dance floor.

The remnants of the Black Dagger Brotherhood’s collection of lesser jars.

Picking up an irregularly shaped piece that had a blue glaze, he thought of the Omega. The Lessening Society. The end of that era.

How many trips had it taken to clear the mess out? he wondered as he tossed the shard back and stepped around the pile.

Heading into a subtle curve in the fissure, he came up to a set of iron gates that were covered with a shiny-bright mesh. The bars were thick as a male’s wrist, and the fine weave of steel, which prevented vampires from dematerializing inside, had been soldered on. The lock was copper.

With a sweep of his hand, he cast the venerable barrier aside and stepped into a hall set with torches that hissed and spit on their mountings. The sounds of brooms a-whisking escorted him forward, and soon enough, the ruination presented itself. From floor to ceiling, shelving made from hand-hewn planks was hanging in disarray, the lengths broken or mostly missing, the ragged ends like something had bitten at them. As he went along, he pictured things as they had been before, the horizontal levels set with jars of an incalculable number of different shapes and sizes and colors. There must have been . . . shit, a thousand of them? No, maybe more. And inside of those jars? The hearts of the lessers that the Brotherhood had killed.

The containers had been from every century, from ancient pottery ones that had been handmade all the way up to cheapo, mass-produced stuff from Target.

The collection had existed for so long, and been added to for so many years, that it had, in the manner of all things frequently seen, been taken to be permanent. The Omega had fixed that. Like a late-summer wasp on its last throes, the evil had come in to sting one final time, reclaiming the hearts he had removed during inductions to bolster his lagging strength.

The evil had ultimately been defeated, however.