Lover Enshrined (Black Dagger Brotherhood 6)

God, the fact that she could manhandle a guy twice her size without breaking a sweat was hot as hell.

The fact that she didn't seem offended that John had fantasized about her was a relief.

The fact that she wanted him to say her name when he came was... making him want to come right now.

Guess this answered whether he liked sunshine or thunder better, didn't it. And told him exactly what he would be doing as soon as he got home.

Chapter Nine

Out past the sprawling patchwork of Caldwell's rural farms, farther north than the towns along the Hudson River's winding flanks, about three hours from the Canadian border, the Adirondack Mountains spring up from the earth. Majestic, carpeted in pines and cedars at their heads and shoulders, the ranges had been created by glaciers that had stretched down from the Alaskan frontier before it had been known as Alaska and before there were humans or vampires to call it a frontier.

When the last ice age retreated into history books that would be written much later, the great valley gouges that were left in the land filled with the melt-off from the icebergs. Over generations of humans, the vast geological pools were assigned names like Lake George and Lake Champ-lain and Saranac Lake and Blue Mountain Lake.

Humans, those bothersome, parasitic rabbits with their many, many children, settled in the Hudson River corridor, seeking the water, as many other animals did. Centuries passed and towns sprouted up and "civilization" was established, with all its intrusions into the environment.

The mountains remained the masters, though. Even in the age of electricity and technology and automobiles and tourism, the Adirondacks dictated the landscape of this stretch of northern New York.

So there are a lot of lonesome stretches in the midst of all those forests.

Heading up I-87, a.k.a. the Northway, the exits get farther and farther apart until you can go five miles, ten miles, fifteen miles without having a way off the road. And even if you do put your blinker on and ease onto a ramp that takes you to the right, all you'll find is a couple of stores and a gas station and two or three houses.

People can hide in the Adirondacks.

Vampires can hide in the Adirondacks.

At the end of the night, as the sun readied itself for a big, splashy entrance stage right, a male walked through the dense woods of Saddleback Mountain alone, dragging his withered body over the ground as he would have a bag of garbage in his earlier life. His hunger was all that moved him, the primordial instinct for blood all that kept him on his feet and fighting through the branches.

Up ahead in a tangle of pine boughs, his prey was twitchy, nervous.

The deer knew it was being tracked, but it couldn't see what it was hunted by. Lifting its muzzle, it sniffed at the air, ears pricking forward and back.

The night was cold this far north and this high up on Saddleback. Given that the male didn't have much left on his back except rags, his teeth chattered and his nail beds were blue, but he wouldn't have put more clothes on if he'd had them. Feeding his blood hunger was the extent of his concessions to existence.

He would not take his own life. He'd heard long ago that if you committed suicide, you couldn't make it into the Fade, and that was where he had to end up. So he passed his days in a narrow bandwidth of suffering, waiting until he either starved to death from malnutrition or was grievously injured.

The process was taking too damn long. Then again, his escape from his old life months and months ago had brought him to these woods by erratum rather than engineering. He'd meant to send himself somewhere else, somewhere even more dangerous.

Couldn't remember anymore where that had been, though.

The fact that his enemies were not this far and this deep in the Adirondacks had first saved, but now frustrated him. He was too weak to dematerialize around trying to find slayers, and he wasn't strong enough for long walks, either.

He was stuck here in the mountains, waiting for death to find him.

During the day, he hid from the sunshine in a cave, an abscess in the mountain's granite his shelter. He didn't sleep much. Hunger and his memories kept him mercilessly alert and aware.

Up ahead, his prey took two steps away from him.

Taking a deep breath, he forced himself to gather his strength. If he didn't do this now, he was finished for the night, and not just because the sky was beginning to lighten to the east.

In a rush, he disappeared and took form around the deer's neck. Clamping onto its slender withers, he sank his fangs into the jugular that ran up from its flickering, panicked heart.

He didn't kill the lovely animal. Took only enough to see him through another black day and into another blacker night.

When he was done he opened his arms wide and let the thing bounce off in four-footed flight. Listening to it crash through the forest's skirt, he envied the animal's freedom.

There was little return of strength for the male. Lately, it was nearly a wash between the energy he expended to feed and what he got in return. Which meant the end had to be coming soon.

The male sat down on the forest's bed of decaying pine needles and looked up through the boughs. For a moment, he imagined that the night sky was not dark, but white, and that the stars above were not cold planets reflecting light, but the souls of the dead.

He imagined he was looking up at the Fade.

He did this often, and among the great scattering of sparkles overhead, he found the two that he counted as his own, the two that had been taken from him: a pair of stars, one larger and glowing superbright, the other smaller and more tentative. They were close together, as if the little one were seeking the shelter of its m -

The male couldn't say that word. Even in his head. Just like he couldn't say the names he associated with the stars.

Didn't matter, though.

Those two were his.

And he would join them soon.

Chapter Ten

The clock next to phury ticked over so that the digital readout formed a pattern of toothpicks: eleven eleven in the morning.

He checked his stash. It was getting a little low, and even as cooked as he was, he got a case of the cardio-shimmies. As he worked the math, he tried to smoke slower. He'd been dipping into the open Baggie of red smoke for about seven hours now... so if he did some extrapolating, he was going to run out around four in the afternoon.

Sun went down at seven thirty. He could be at ZeroSum no earlier than eight.

Four-hour dead zone. Or, more accurately, four hours that he might live a little too clearly.

If you'd like, the wizard said, I could read you a bedtime story. It's the dog's bollocks. Male models self after alcoholic father. Ends up dead in an alley. Is mourned by no one. Classic, practically Shakespearian.

Unless you've heard it before, mate?

Phury turned up "Donna non vidi mai" and inhaled hard.

As the tenor's voice soared according to Puccini's dictations, he thought of Z's singing. What a voice that brother had. Like a church organ, his range went from liquid highs to basses so deep they turned your marrow into an ear-drum, and if he heard something once, he could replicate it perfectly. Then put his own spin on the melody or think of something entirely new. Everything was his forte: opera, blues, jazz, old-fashioned rock and roll. He was his own XM Radio.

And he always led the chants in the Brotherhood's temple.

Hard to fathom that Phury would never hear that voice in the sacred cave again.

Or around the house, come to think of it. It had been months since Z had sung anything, probably because worrying about Bella didn't put him in a Tony Bennett kind of way, and there was no telling whether his impromptu concerts would return or not.

Bella's destiny would be the decider on that.

Phury took another hit off the blunt. God, he wanted to go see her. Wanted to reassure himself that she was okay. Visual confirmation was so different from an abundance of no-news-is-good-news.

But he wasn't in visitation shape, and not just because he was toasted. Reaching up, he put his hands to his neck and prodded the residual injury from that chain being wrapped around his throat. He was a quick healer, but not that quick, and Bella's eyes were working just fine. No reason to upset her.

Plus Z would be with her, and going eyeball-to-eyeball with his twin was way too bullet-to-chamber, considering the way things had been left in that alley.

A rattling sound from over on the bureau brought his head up.

Across the room, the Primale medallion was vibrating, the ancient gold talisman acting like a beeper. He watched as it moved around on the wood, dancing in a little circle as if it were looking for a partner among the silver brush set he'd put it next to.