Lover Avenged(38)

“I will, and thank you.”

After Lusie dematerialized, Ehlena went into the kitchen, locked the door and bolted it, and headed down to the basement.

In his room, her father was asleep in his huge Victorian bed, the massive carved headboard like the framing arch of a tomb. His head was against a stack of white silk pillows, and the bloodred velvet duvet was folded precisely halfway down his chest.

He looked like a king in repose.

When the mental illness had really grabbed hold of him, his hair and beard had gone white, causing Ehlena to worry that the end-of-life changes were going to start in on him. But after fifty years, he still looked the same, his face unwrinkled, his hands strong and steady.

It was so hard. She couldn’t imagine life without him. And she couldn’t imagine having a life with him.

Ehlena closed his door partway and went into her own room, where she showered and changed and stretched out on her bed. All she had was a twin with no headboard, one pillow, and cotton sheets, but she didn’t care about the luxury stuff. She needed a place to lay her tired bones each day and that was it.

Usually she read a little before falling asleep, but not today. She just didn’t have the energy. Reaching to the side, she turned off the lamp, crossed her feet at the ankles, and laid her arms out straight.

With a smile, she realized she and her father slept in exactly the same position, didn’t they.

In the dark, she thought about Lusie and the way she followed through about her father’s cut. Good nursing was about being concerned for the welfare of patients, even after they left. It was about coaching family members as to what follow-up care was needed, and being a resource.

It wasn’t the kind of job you just dumped because your shift was over.

She turned the lamp back on with a click.

Getting up, she went over to the desktop she’d gotten for free from the clinic when the IT systems had been upgraded. The Internet was slow to connect, as always, but eventually she was able to access the clinic’s medical files database.

She signed in with her password, performed one search…then another. The first was a compulsion, the second a curiosity.

Saving them both, she shut down the laptop and picked up her phone.





ELEVEN




At the razor’s edge of dawn, just before the light began to gather in the eastern sky, Wrath took form in the dense woods at the northern side of the Brotherhood’s mountain. No one had showed back at Hunter-bred, and the day’s imminent rays had forced him to leave.

Small sticks cracked loudly under his shitkickers, the thin pine fingers brittle in the cold. There was not yet snow to muffle the sounds, but he could smell it in the air, feel that frosty bite deep in his sinuses.

The hidden entrance to the Black Dagger Brotherhood’s sanctum sanctorum was at the ass end of a cave, far in the back. His hands located the trigger on the stone door by feel, and the heavy portal slid behind the rock wall. Stepping onto smooth black marble pavers, he followed them forward as the door closed behind him.

At his will, torches flamed up on either side of him, extending far, far, far into the distance and illuminating the massive iron gates that had been installed in the late eighteenth century, when the Brotherhood had turned this cave into the Tomb.

As he got closer, the gate’s thick slats seemed to his blurry vision to be a lineup of armed sentries, the flickering flames animating what did not in fact move. With his mind, he parted the two halves and continued on, down a long hall fitted from floor to forty-foot ceiling with shelving.

Lesser jars of all types and kinds were stacked side by side, a display that marked generations of kills made by the Brotherhood. The oldest jars were nothing but crude, hand-thrown vases that had been brought over from the Old Country. With each yard farther, the vessels grew more modern, until you got to the next set of gates and found mass-produced shit made in China and sold at Target.

There wasn’t a lot of space left on the shelves and he was depressed by that. He had helped build with his own hands this repository of the enemy’s dead, along with Darius and Tohrment and Vishous, the bunch of them laboring for a month straight, working during the day, sleeping on the marble pavers. He had been the one to decide how far down into the earth to go, and he had extended the shelving corridor yards and yards past what he had thought was needed. When he and his brothers had finished erecting everything, and had stacked the older jars, he’d been convinced that they wouldn’t need so much storage space. Surely by the time they had filled even three-quarters of this, the war would be over.

And here he was, centuries later, trying to find enough room.

With a dreaded sense of portent, Wrath measured with his bad eyes the last remaining spaces on the original set of shelving. It was hard not to take it as evidence that the war was coming to an end, that the vampire equivalent of the finite Mayan calendar was on these rough-hewn stone walls.