Lover Arisen (Black Dagger Brotherhood #20)

Lover Arisen (Black Dagger Brotherhood #20)

J.R. Ward




PROLOGUE




Dhunhd

Four weeks, two days, three hours…

…and exactly thirteen minutes prior to the Present.

To be immortal was to never know death.

As the Omega, brother of the Scribe Virgin, master of all lessers, spectacular purveyor of evil upon the earth, arrived at his lair in Dhunhd and became corporeal, the entity reminded himself that he was immortal.

He would not die. Never, ever. No extinction for him.

Fuck the Dhestroyer Prophecy.

Stumbling forth, he repeated to himself over and over again that he was going to live forever, and rule in hatred and chaos for an eternity and beyond, because he was energy and energy was not just the basis of the universe, it was the universe. Energy did not end, not as long as there were galaxies above the earth, and suns to create light, and planets that do-si-do’d in their orbits. He was infinite, nothing more powerful than he up above on earth, or down below, here in Hell—

Where was he?

The Omega stiffly pivoted and attempted to ascertain his location amid the labyrinth of gray halls. Hadn’t they been white once? Or had they been black? As his mind refused to provide him with an orientation and tripped over its own recollections, he was forced to confront all he’d been refusing to see within himself. He was often lost these recent nights, even in the alleys of downtown Caldwell, even here in his den where he’d played and fucked and recharged for an eon. And why was he afoot? Ordinarily, he would have simply summoned himself unto where he wanted to be in this, his dominion. Ordinarily… he would not have been this depleted.

But he would not die, never, not ever. No extinction for him.

Fuck that prophecy—

Why had he come here?

Ambulating again, in hopes of finding the purpose that had propelled him to this down below, he messy-processed through the corridors of his quarters and tried not to relive the past. After all, one only did that if the present was bad and the future offered no prospects for betterment—and such a hopeless place was not where he was within his destiny. No, if he currently desired a mental return unto prior events along his timeline, he was merely indulging in pleasant memories, the look back unconnected to his situation—

He was lost again.

Or mayhap that was “still.”

All appeared the same, the corridors, the rooms, the torture stations with their chains and their stains, running together and forming a visual one-note that should not have confused him, but did. With his cognition tangling, and a shocking physical frailty gathering momentum, the Omega’s legs went out from under him and he fell to the hard floor on all fours. The insult to injury was that the pain upon his palms and knees was not sweet. It offered no sexual thrill, and worse, provided no impetus for him to rise and fight further the Black Dagger Brotherhood. The stinging sensations simply… aged him.

In a manner that was wholly incompatible with immortality.

Sitting back on his knees, he regarded his filthy robing. The folds had been a brilliant white once, and from beneath them, the dense black of his essence had always spilled. Now, the draping was gray and his aura was as well, gray as the walls around him, the ceiling above, the walls in all directions. With a dull hand, he brushed at the red bloodstains of the four lessers he had just indoctrinated, humans no longer, soulless vampire hunters their new lease on life. He told himself that the portion of essence that he had imparted unto them was the reason for his current wilting, but he knew it should not have made any difference. He should have had enough of a reservoir to turn a hundred humans into his servants of evil if he so chose.

In the past, he would have been able to… do…

His thought became as lost as he was, traveling off route in his mind, diverting from the sad reality that had initiated it as if going into hiding.

In its place? A sinkhole of defeat that drained even more of the evil’s strength. For all the centuries he had been at war with his sister’s fanged creation, he had always failed to acknowledge that loss for him was a possibility upon the battlefield that his anger and jealousy had conceived. He had recognized only his inevitable triumph over his sister, and he had relished the trophies of the war, those corpses of her birthed species, those vampires she had seen fit to bring into existence because she had been granted a single act of creation. Each death had chipped away at her heart, and the satisfaction he felt with that agony had become the meal he liked best.

It had been such fun, for so long.

Now, however… all those to-and-fros seemed like a struggle conducted by another, the victories as unresonant as if they had never occurred. And as he tried to recall the sadistic joy he had once felt, he pictured Butch O’Neal, former human. If the Omega had only known that capturing the Brotherhood’s pet would endanger his very existence, he would have avoided that mortal like the… well, plague.

Some Trojan horse O’Neal had been. Instead of being a corrupted vessel embraced by those warriors, a weapon of infiltration for the Omega, the sonofabitch had been a tool against the maker who had infected him. The evil had literally engineered his own destruction—and as he considered the manner through which their paths had crossed, he wondered if he could have taken any defense against the Dhestroyer’s creation. It was as if that human had found him, not the other way around—