Lover Unleashed (Black Dagger Brotherhood #9)(73)

Clearly, she didn’t want to go into it. “Okay. Well, I’m here for you . . . for as long as I’m allowed to be.”

He rubbed his face. It was a total waste of time to worry about how long this was going to last, how much time he had. But he couldn’t help it. Losing Payne was going to kill him even though he barely knew her.

Wait a minute. Jane had been human. And she was here. Maybe there was—

What. The. Fuck.

“Jane . . . ?” he said weakly as he looked at his old friend. “What . . .”

Words deserted him at that point. She was sitting in the same chair, in the same position, wearing the same clothes . . . except he could see the wall behind her . . . and the steel cabinets . . . and the door across the way. And not “see” as in on the far side of her shoulders. He was looking through her.

“Oh. Sorry.”

Right before his eyes, she went from translucent to . . . back to normal.

Manny jumped out of his chair and pinwheeled back until the examination table bit into his ass and stopped him.

“You need to talk to me,” he said hoarsely. “Jesus . . . Christ . . .”

As he grabbed for the cross that hung around his neck, Jane’s head dropped and one of her hands tucked some of her short hair behind her ear. “Oh, Manny . . . there’s a lot you don’t know.”

“So . . . tell me.” When she didn’t reply, the screaming in his head got way too loud. “You’d better f*cking tell me, because I’m really done with feeling like a lunatic.”

There was a long silence. “I died, Manny, but not in that car wreck. That was staged.”

Manny’s lungs got tight. “How.”

“A gunshot. I was shot. I . . . died in Vishous’s arms.”

Okay, he so could not breathe over here. “Who did it?”

“His enemies.”

Manny rubbed his crucifix, and the Catholic in him suddenly believed in the saints as so much more than examples of good behavior.

“I’m not who you once knew, Manny. On so many levels.” There was such sadness in her voice. “I’m not even actually alive. That was why I didn’t come back to see you. It wasn’t about the vampire/human thing . . . it’s because I am not really here anymore.”

Manny blinked. Like a cow. A number of times.

Well . . . the good news in all this, he supposed, was that finding out his former trauma surgeon was a ghost? Barely a blip on his radar. His mind had been blown too many times to count, and like a joint that had been dislocated, it had total and complete freedom of movement.

Of course, its functionality was f*cked.

But who was counting.





TWENTY-SIX


Alone in downtown Caldwell, Vishous stalked the night by himself, traversing the underbelly stretch beneath the city’s bridges. He’d started out at his penthouse, but that hadn’t lasted more than ten minutes, and what an irony that all those glass windows had felt so confining. After launching himself into the air from the terrace, he’d coalesced down by the river. The other Brothers would be out in the alleys looking for lessers and finding them, but he didn’t want to be around the peanut gallery. He wanted to fight. Solo.

At least, that was what he told himself.

It dawned on him, however, after about an hour of aimless wandering, that he wasn’t really looking for some kind of hand-to-hand showdown. He wasn’t actually looking for anything.

He was utterly empty, to the point where he was curious where the ambulation routine was coming from, because he sure as f*ck wasn’t doing anything consciously.

Stopping and staring across the sluggish, stinking waters of the Hudson, he laughed cold and hard.

In all the course of his life, he’d accumulated a body of knowledge to rival the Library of frickin’ Congress. Some of it was useful, such as how to fight, how to make weapons, how to get information and how to keep it secret. And then there was some that was relatively useless on a day-to-day basis, like the molecular weight of carbon, Einstein’s theory of relativity, Plato’s political shit. There were also thoughts that he ruminated on once and never again, and their polar opposites, the ideas that he took out at regular intervals and played with like toys when he was bored. There were also things he never, ever let himself think of.

In and among those various cognitive outposts was a huge stretch of cerebellum that was nothing but a dump yard of bullshit that he didn’t believe in. And given that he was a cynic? It was miles and miles of rotting, metaphorical Hefty bags full of trash along the lines of . . . fathers were supposed to love their sons . . . and mothers were gifts beyond measure . . . and blah, blah, blah.

If there was a mental equivalent of the EPA, that part of his brain would have been cited, fined, and closed down.

But it was funny. Tonight’s little stroll in this underpass of Godand-awful by the river had him ruminating through that landfill and pulling something out of the pile:

Bonded males were nothing without their females.

So bizarre. He’d always known he’d loved Jane, but being the tight-ass that he was, he had stitched up his feelings without realizing a needle and thread were in his proverbial hand. Shit, even when she’d come back to him after she’d died, and he’d known for that brief moment what the term overjoyed not just meant, but felt like . . . he hadn’t truly let himself go.