J.R. Ward: The Shadows

“Look, unless you need me, I’ma—”

“For you, the statue will waltz.”

As Trez’s phone went off again, he found that the heebs had overtaken every square inch of his body. “With all due respect, I have no clue what you’re talking about. Take care of that Brother for however long you need to, no one’s going to disturb you here.”

“Be present. Even when you think it will kill you.”

“No offense, V, but I’m not hearing this. Later.”

FIVE

In the training center’s medical suite, Luchas, son of Lohstrong, lay on his back in a hospital bed with his torso and head propped up on pillows. His broken body was stretched out before him, rather like a landscape raked by bombs, scars and missing pieces transforming that which had previously functioned normally and well into a hodgepodge of painful, debilitating dysfunction.

His left leg was the biggest problem.

Ever since he had been rescued from that oil drum the lessers had imprisoned him in, he had been in a period of “rehabilitation.”

Odd word for what was really going on for him. The official definition, as he had looked it up on a tablet, was to restore someone or something to its former state of normal functioning.

After so many months of physical and occupational therapy, however, he was confident in concluding that the nightly mental and bodily grind of movements both small and large was getting him no closer to his former self than it was successfully turning back time. The only things he knew for sure were: he was in pain; he still couldn’t walk; and the four walls of this hospital room, that were all he had known since he had been locked in that cramped stasis, were driving him insane.

Not for the first time, he wondered how his life had come to this.

And that was stupid. He knew the facts oh, so well. The night of the raids, the slayers had infiltrated his family’s regal home, as they had so many others. They had slaughtered his father and his mahmen , and done the same to his sister. When they had come to him, they had decided to spare his life so that he could be used as a guinea pig, a test for whether a vampire could be turned into a lesser . Incapacitating him, they had packed him away in an oil drum at some location and had stored him in the Omega’s blood.

There had been no experimentation, however. They had lost interest in him, or forgotten about him, or some other outcome had transpired.

Unable to get free, he had suffered in the black viscous void, living but barely alive, waiting for his doom to come, for what had felt like an eternity.

Unsure whether he had been in some way turned.

His mind, once a thing he had held with great pride for its scholarly achievement and capacity, had become as crippled as his body, twisting in on itself, once clear pathways of thought tangling into a dark nightmare of paranoia and terror.

And then his brother, the one he had never had time for, the one he’d looked down upon, the one he’d always felt so superior to . . . had arrived and become his savior. Qhuinn, the deviant with the blue eye and the green eye, the family embarrassment with the critical defect, the one who had been kicked out of the house and therefore not at home when the attack occurred, had turned out to be the only reason he had gotten free.

That male had also turned out to be the strongest member of the bloodline, living and working with the Black Dagger Brotherhood, fighting with honor, defending the Race against the enemy with distinction.

Whilst Luchas, the former golden boy, the heir to the mantle that no longer existed . . . was now the one with the defects.

Karma?

He lifted his now-mangled hand, staring at the stubs that were all that were left of four out of his five fingers.

Probably.

The knock upon the door was soft, and as he inhaled, he caught the scents on the other side. Bracing himself, he pulled the sheets up higher on his thin chest.

The Chosen Selena wasn’t alone, as she had been last evening.

And he knew what this was about.

“Come in,” he said in a voice he still didn’t recognize. Ever since his ordeal, his speech had been huskier, deeper.

Qhuinn came in first, and for a moment, Luchas recoiled. Whenever he had seen his brother previously, the male had been in civilian garb. Not tonight. He’d clearly come fresh from the theater of conflict, black leather covering his powerful body, weapons strapped on his hips, his thighs . . . his chest.

Luchas frowned as he noticed two particular fighting implements: His brother had a pair of black daggers upon his sternum, the handles facing down.

Strange, he thought. It was his understanding that such blades were reserved only for members of the Black Dagger Brotherhood.

Mayhap they allowed their soldiers to wear them as well now?

“Hey,” Qhuinn said.

Behind him, the Chosen Selena was silent as a ghost, her white robes floating around her slender body, her dark hair woven up high on her head in the traditional style of her sacred order.

“Greetings, sire,” she said with an elegant bow.

Glancing down at his leg, Luchas wanted desperately to get out of bed and pay her the respect she was due. Not an option. The limb was, as always, wrapped up tight in white gauze from toe to knee, and underneath that sterile dressing? Flesh that would not heal, the heat of the infection simmering like a pot of water on the verge of breaking into a boil.

“So they tell me you’ve stopped feeding,” Qhuinn said.

Luchas looked away, wishing there was a window so that he could feign distraction.

“Well?” Qhuinn demanded. “Is that true?”

“Chosen,” Luchas murmured. “Will you kindly permit us a moment alone?”

“But of course. I shall await your summoning.”

The door shut silently. And Luchas found that all of the oxygen in the room appeared to have departed with the female.

Qhuinn pulled a chair over to the bedside and sat down, propping his elbows on his knees. His shoulders were so wide, the leather jacket he had on creaked in protest.

“What’s going on, Luchas?” he asked.

“This could have waited. You shouldn’t have come in from fighting.”

“Not according to your vital signs.”

“So the doctor called you in, did she?”

“She talked to me, yes.”

Luchas closed his eyes. “I had a . . .” He cleared his throat. “Before all of this, I’d had a vision of what I would be doing, what my future was going to be. I was . . .”

“You were going to be like Father.”

“Yes. I wanted . . . all the things I had been taught defined a life as worth living.” He lifted his lids and glared at his body. “This was not it. This . . . I am as a young is. People tending to my needs, bringing me food, washing me, wiping me. I am a brain trapped in a broken vessel. I do nothing for myself—”

“Luchas—”

“No!” He slashed his mutilated hand through the air. “Do not placate me with promises of some future health. It’s been nine months, brother mine. Preceded by a captivity in Hell that lasted a century. I’m done with being a prisoner. Done with it.”

“You can’t kill yourself.”

“I know. Then I do not enter the Fade. But if I don’t eat, and I don’t feed, that”—he jabbed a finger at his leg—“will get the best of me and carry me off. Not suicide. Death by sepsis—isn’t that what Doc Jane is so worried about?”

With a sharp motion, Qhuinn took off his jacket and let it land on the floor. “I don’t want to lose you.”

Luchas put his hands over his face. “How can you say that . . . after all the cruelty in our household . . .”

“Not your doing. That was the ’rents.”