Lover Unbound (Black Dagger Brotherhood 5)

Shit, he wished it could be clinical, all cup-and-baster. But vampires had tried IVF in the past, to no success. Young had to be conceived the good old-fashioned way.

Man, he did not want to think of how many females he was going to have to be with. He just couldn't go there. If he did, he was going to -

Vishous stopped in the middle of the tunnel.

Opened his mouth.

And screamed until his voice gave out.

Chapter Thirty-four

When Vishous and Phury crossed over to the other side together, they took form in a white courtyard surrounded by a white arcade of Corinthian columns. In the center was a white marble fountain that splashed crystal clear water into a deep white cistern. In the far corner, on a white tree with white blossoms, a flock of rainbow-colored songbirds was gathered as if they'd been sprinkled on top of a cupcake. The sweet calls of the finches and the chickadees harmonized with the chiming sound of the fountain, as if both cadences were in the same key of joy.

"Warriors." The Scribe Virgin's voice came from behind V and made his skin pull like plastic over his bones. "Kneel and I shall greet you."

V ordered his knees to bend, and after a moment they hinged like rusty legs on a card table. Phury, on the other hand, didn't seem to be suffering from a case of the stiffs and went down smoothly.

Then again, he wasn't hitting the floor in front of a mother he despised.

"Phury, son of Ahgony, how fare thee?"

In a perfectly eloquent voice, the brother replied in the Old Language, "I fare well, for I am before thee with purity of devotion and depth of heart."

The Scribe Virgin chuckled. "A proper greeting in the proper way. Lovely of you. And surely more than I will get from my son."

V felt rather than saw Phury's head whip toward him. Oh, sorry, V thought. Guess I forgot to mention that happy little fact, my brother.

The Scribe Virgin drifted closer. "Ah, so my son has not told you his maternal lineage? Out of decorum, I wonder? Concern for upsetting the generally held principle of my so-called virginal existence? Yes, that is why, is it not, Vishous, son of the Bloodletter."

V lifted his eyes, though he hadn't been invited to. "Or maybe I just refuse to acknowledge you."

It was exactly what she expected him to say, and he could sense this not from reading her thoughts, but because on some level the two of them were one and the same, indivisible in spite of the air and space between them.

Yay.

"Your reticence to concede my maternity of you changes nothing," she said in a hard tone. "A book unopened alters not the ink on its pages. What is there is there."

Without permission, V stood and met his mother's hooded face, eye for eye, strength for strength.

Phury was no doubt blanching white as flour, but whatever. He'd match the decor that way. Besides, the Scribe Virgin wasn't going to toast her future Primale or her precious little boy. No way. So he didn't give a f**k.

"Let's get this over with, Mom. I want back to my real life - "

V found himself flat on his back and not breathing in the blink of an eye. Though there was nothing on top of him and his body didn't seem to be compressed, he felt like he had a grand piano on his chest.

As his eyes bugged out and he fought to drag some air into his lungs, the Scribe Virgin floated over to him. Her hood lifted from her face of its own volition, and she stared down at him with a bored expression on her ghostly, glowing face.

"I would have your word that you will comport yourself with respect toward me whilst we are before my assembled Chosen. I concede that you have some liberties by definition, but I will not hesitate to determine you a worse future than the one you wish to forsake if you reveal them in public. Are we in agreement?"

Agreement? Agreement? Yeah, right, that kind of shit presupposed free will, and from everything he'd learned over the course of his life, it was clear he had none.

Fuck. Her.

Vishous exhaled slowly. Relaxed his muscles. And embraced the suffocation.

He held her stare... as he began to die.

After about a minute into the self-imposed drowning, his autonomic nervous system kicked in, his lungs punching against his chest walls, trying to drag down some oxygen. He locked his molars, pressed his lips together, and tightened his throat so that the draw reflex was rendered impotent.

"Oh, Jesus," Phury said in a shaky voice.

The burn in V's lungs spread throughout his torso as his vision started to fuzz and his body shook in the battle between mental will and the biological imperative to breathe. Eventually the war became less a f**k-you to his mother and more a fight to gain what he wanted: peace. Without Jane in his life, death was really his only option.

He began to black out.

All at once the nonexistent weight was lifted; then air shot through his nose and into his lungs sure as if it were a solid and an invisible hand had shoved the shit into him.

His body took over, hammering back his self-control. Against his will he sucked in oxygen like it was water, curling over on his side, breathing in great drafts, his vision gradually clearing until he could focus on the hem of his mother's robes.

When he finally peeled his face off the white floor and looked up at her, she was no longer the bright form he was used to. She had dulled, as if her glow were on a dimmer switch and someone was trying to pull off mood lighting.

Her face was the same, though. Translucent and beautiful and hard as a diamond.

"Shall we proceed in for the presentation?" she said. "Or perhaps you would like to receive your mate lying prostrate on my marble?"

V sat up, dizzy but not caring if he passed the f**k out. He supposed he should feel some kind of triumph for winning the fight with her, but he didn't.

He glanced at Phury. The guy was freaked, his yellow eyes peeled like grapes, his skin sallow and pasty. He looked like he was standing in the middle of a gator pool wearing steaks for shoes.

Man, going by how his brother was handling this little family spat, V couldn't imagine the Chosen would deal any better with open conflict between him and his Joan Crawford mother-mare. And V might not have any affinity for that bunch of females, but there was no reason to rile them up.

He got to his feet, and Phury stepped in at just the right time. As V listed to one side, the brother caught him under the armpit and steadied him.

"You will follow me now." The Scribe Virgin led the way to the arcade, floating above the marble, making neither sound nor any particular movement, a tiny apparition of solid form.

The three of them proceeded down the colonnade to a pair of gold doors V had never been through before. The things were massive and marked with an early version of the Old Language, one that bore enough relation to the current written symbology that V could translate:

Behold the sanctuary of the Chosen, sacred domain of the Race's past, present and future.

The doors opened unhanded, revealing a pastoral splendor that under other circumstances might have calmed the shit out of even V. Except for the fact that everything was white, it could have been any Ivy League-type college campus, the buildings Georgian-formal and spread out widely amidst rolling, milky grass and albino oak and elm trees.

A runner of white silk had been stretched out, and he and Phury walked on it while the Scribe Virgin ghosted along about a foot above the thing. The air was at the perfect temperature and so absolutely calm there was no sensation of it passing over exposed skin. Although gravity still held V down, he felt lighter and somewhat buoyant... as if, with a running start, he could go bounding off across the lawn like those pictures of men on the moon.

Or, shit, maybe this lunar-walk sensation was because he had some brain-fry going on.

When they crested a hill, an amphitheater was revealed down below. As were the Chosen.

Oh, Jesus . . . The forty or so females were dressed in identical white robes with their hair up and their hands gloved. Their coloring varied from blond to brunette to redhead, yet they seemed to be all the same person because of their long, lean builds and those matching robes. Split into two groups, they lined either side of the amphitheater, presenting themselves at a three-quarter turn with their right feet out slightly. They reminded him of the caryatids of Roman architecture, those sculptures of females that supported pediments or roofs on their regal heads.

Staring at them now, he wondered whether they had hearts that beat and lungs that pumped. Because they were as still as the air.

See, this was the problem with the Other Side, he thought. Nothing ever moved here. There was life... without life.