Lover Enshrined (Black Dagger Brotherhood 6)

He dug one grave that was five feet down into the earth, seven feet long, and four feet across.

The resulting pile of dirt was bigger than he'd thought, and it smelled like the lawn did after a heavy rainstorm, musky and sweet. Or maybe he was the sweet part.

The gathering glow in the east had him tossing the shovel out of the hole and leaping up to level ground. He had to move fast before the sun came up, and he did. He put his father in first. His mother was second. He angled them so they were spooning, with his father doing the holding.

He stared down at the two of them.

He was surprised that he needed to do this before he could get another squadron of men in here to try and empty the place, but whatever. These two had been his parents for the first part of his life, and though he'd told himself he didn't give a shit about them, he did. He wasn't going to have those lessers desecrating their rotting bodies. The house? Fine, fair game. But not the bodies.

With the sun rising, and golden rays spearing through the oak's leafy arms, he made a phone call and then put the dirt back where it had been.

Holy shit, he thought when he'd finished. The thing really looked like a grave, with its domed bread-loaf top from all the displacement.

He was returning the shovel to its home in the garage when he heard the first of the cars pull up to the front door. Two lessers got out just as a second sedan eased onto the driveway, followed by a Ford F-150 and a minivan.

The bunch of them smelled as sweet as the sunshine while they filed into his parents' house.

The U-Haul moving truck, driven by Mr. D, was the last to arrive.

As the Fore-lesser took charge and the looting commenced, Lash went up and took a quick shower in his old bathroom. While he was drying off, he went over to his closet. Clothes... clothes... somehow, what he'd been wearing lately didn't strike the right note anymore, and he took out a spank Prada suit.

His military minimalist-chic stage was so over. He wasn't the Brotherhood's good little soldier-in-training anymore.

Feeling all sexy beast and shit, he went over to his bureau, opened up his jewelry drawer, and -

Where the f**k was his watch? The Jacob & Co. with the diamonds?

What the hell had...

Lash looked around and sniffed the air of his room. Then he flipped his vision to blue so that the prints of anyone who had been touching his shit showed up pink, just as his father had taught him.

Fresh, characterless prints, ones more vivid than those he'd left days ago, were on the bureau. He inhaled again. John had... John and Qhuinn had been here... and one of those miserable motherfuckers had taken his f**king watch.

Lash picked up the hunting knife on his desk and, with a roar, pitched it across the room, where it landed blade-first in one of his black pillows.

Mr. D appeared in the doorway. "Suh? What's wrong - "

Lash wheeled around and pegged the guy with his finger, not to make a point but to use another one of his real father's gifts.

But then he took a deep breath. Dropped his arm. Straightened his suit.

"Make me..." He had to clear the rage out of his throat.

"Make me breakfast. I want to take it in the sunroom, not at the dining table."

Mr. D left, and about ten minutes later, when Lash wasn't seeing double anymore from fury, he went downstairs and parked it in front of a nice spread of bacon, eggs, toast with jam, and OJ.

Mr. D had squeezed the oranges himself, evidently. Which, considering how good the shit tasted, was justification enough for not having blasted the f**ker right out of his combat boots.

The other slayers ended up all gathered in the sunroom's entryway, watching him eat like he was pulling off a magic trick and a half.

Just as he took a good last long suck from his cup of coffee, one of them said, "What the f**k are you?"

Lash wiped his mouth with his napkin and calmly removed his jacket. As he stood up, he undid the buttons down the front of his pastel pink shirt.

"I am your motherfucking king."

With that, he opened the shirt and willed his skin to slit down the sternum. With his ribs cranked wide, he bared his fangs and exposed his black, beating heart.

As a group, the lessers jumped back. One even crossed himself, the f**ker.

Lash calmly closed up his chest and rebuttoned his shirt and sat back down. "More coffee, Mr. D."

The cowboy blinked stupidly a couple of times, doing an excellent impression of a sheep confronted with a math problem. "Yes... yes, suh."

Lash picked up his cup again and met the pale faces in front of him. "Welcome to the future, gentlemen. Now get your asses moving, I want the first floor of this place empty before the mailman comes at ten thirty."

Chapter Fifty-four

The east caldwell community center was located between Caldie Pizza & Mexican and the Caldwell Tennis Academy, over on Baxter Avenue. Housed in a big old farmhouse that had been built way back when the surrounding acreage had been used to grow corn, the place had a nice front lawn and a flagpole and some swing sets out back.

When Phury materialized behind the facility, all he could think about was getting gone again. He checked his watch. Ten minutes.

Ten minutes of having to make himself stay.

God, he wanted a red smoke. His heart was doing laps in his ribs and his palms felt like dripping washcloths and his itchy skin was driving him nuts.

Trying to get out of his body, he looked at the parking lot. Twenty cars were in it, with no pattern in the makes or models. There were trucks and Toyotas and a Saab convertible and a pink VW Bug and three minivans and a MINI Cooper.

He put his hands in his pockets and walked over the grass to the sidewalk that ran around the building. When he reached the asphalt stretch that made up the drive and the parking lot, he took it over to the double doors under the aluminum-sided porte cochere.

Inside, the place smelled like coconut. Maybe from the floor wax on the linoleum.

Just as he was thinking seriously of taking off, a human man stepped out of a doorway, the sound of a toilet flushing fading as the door marked MEN eased shut behind him.

"Are you a friend of Bill W's?" the guy asked as he dried his hands with a paper towel. He had kind brown eyes, like a retriever, and a tweedy jacket that looked heavy for summer. His tie was knit.

"Ah, I don't know."

"Well, if you're looking for the meeting, it's down in the basement." His smile was so natural and easy, Phury nearly returned it before he remembered the dental differences between species. "I'm going there now if you want to come with me. If you want to wait a little, that's fine too."

Phury looked down at the man's hands. He was still drying them, going back and forth, back and forth.

"I'm nervous," the guy said. "Hands are sweaty."

Phury smiled a little. "You know... I think maybe I'll come with you."

"Good. I'm Jonathon."

"I'm Ph-Patrick."

Phury was glad they didn't shake. He didn't have a paper towel, and his pockets were making his own sweaty palms worse.

The ECCC's basement had cement-block walls that were whitewashed in cream; a floor carpeted in low-napped, high-traffic dark brown; and a lot of fluorescent lights in the low ceiling. Most of the thirty or so chairs that were arranged in a fat circle had someone parked in them, and when Jonathon headed to a vacancy at the center, Phury nodded a see-you-later and took one as close to the door as he could.

"It's nine o'clock," a woman with short black hair said. Getting to her feet, she read off a piece of paper: "Everything that's said here, remains here. When someone is talking, there is no side conversation or cross talk..."

He didn't hear the rest of it because he was too busy checking out who was there. No one else was wearing Aquascutum like he was, and they were all humans. Each one of them. Age range was early twenties to late forties, maybe because the time of day was convenient for folks who worked or went to school.

Staring at the faces, he tried to figure out what each one had done to end up here, in this coconut-smelling, stark basement with their butts planted on black plastic.

He didn't belong here. These were not his people, and not just because none of them had fangs and a problem with sunlight.

He stayed anyway, because he had nowhere else to go, and he wondered whether that could be true for some of them as well.

"This is a speaker group," the woman said, "and tonight Jonathon is going to talk."

Jonathon stood up. His hands were still working the remnants of the paper towel, rubbing back and forth over what was now an impacted Bounty cigar.