Lover Arisen (Black Dagger Brotherhood #20)(91)

He wasn’t sure why he was back here.

Striding by a parked car, he backtracked to check out the license plate. The sticker in the corner had a date that made sense to him. It was just over two years past when he had “died.”

No, not died. Not in the conventional sense. Rotted out, was more like it, on that mattress, unable to fight the tide of putrefaction that had seeped through and out of his body: Forsaken by his sire. Stabbed and left to degrade and decay in Hell. Abandoned like an experiment gone wrong—or worse, forgotten like a toy that had been explored, mastered, and discarded.

He’d wanted to think his sire had played a long game with his “birth” and the embedding of him in his infant state into the rarefied bosom of that aristocratic family. It had been a very strategic move on the Omega’s part, allowing him to infiltrate the enemy from the very moment of his first awareness, setting his son on a course not only to be trained by the Black Dagger Brotherhood, but to fight with them.

He had been the chosen one, not a lesser initiated into the Lessening Society, but the blooded son, the heir to power, the special gift to the earth.

When the son had been ready, he had assumed control of the coordinated vengeance against all vampires, and the first thing he had done was kill the family who had raised him. And then, because he had been in the mansions of all the aristocracy, he had taken the army of slayers out to do what they did best. He himself had led the slaughter, and nearly all of the glymera had been wiped out. The resulting societal chaos had been almost enough to topple the Blind King, and that auspicious beginning had been as he’d intended to go on. He’d been determined to eradicate all of that species he’d been reared among.

But somewhere along the line…

His father had become the enemy. The son just hadn’t known it until far too late.

When he had arrived down in Dhunhd, he’d been shocked, and he’d suffered, and he was now a hundred thousand years older than he had been before. Forged in the fire of the agony, he was harder. Stronger. And he couldn’t begin to guess about the motivation for him being renewed.

From a tactical point of view, it was stupid. The Omega was powerful and terrifying, and all of that was in the son—who was now disaffected and pissed off at having had to perpetually stew in the kind of pain that came when you were hit by a car and every bone in your body was broken. Why would anyone volunteer for an enemy that knew so much about—

The male stopped. Looked up to the sky. Looked down to his feet.

Then he turned in a circle. All the way around.

“Father?” he said quietly.

Closing his eyes, he reached out with his instincts, searching for…

His lids raised. And then he frowned when what was in front of him came into focus. It was the exit to a multi-level parking garage, the “Do Not Enter” sign glowing red above an arch in the concrete walling.

He couldn’t sense the Omega. Anywhere.

Back before his death, he’d known his sire’s presence sure as he recognized his own reflection, the dogged awareness of the evil who had spawned him like the sky above him, the ground beneath his feet, the air around him.

A law of nature.

And now… all he sensed was an absence of that particular chord within the musical arrangement of his reality. A bass note that was gone.

Had the Brotherhood finally done it? Had they eliminated that which had hunted them?

Twisting about, he glanced behind himself and tried to pick up on the echoes of any lessers…

Unless his resurrection had wiped out his ability to recognize the footprints of evil in Caldwell… it seemed like he was all alone. The sole survivor of some kind of Armageddon that had wiped out not only the Lessening Society, but its very origins, its creator and master.

Putting his hands on his stomach, he ran his palms down the ribbing of muscle and briefly clasped his sex. Then he touched his face. His throat. His pecs.

He had a substance. He had form. He had thoughts and free will.

Was it possible that the Omega had somehow known he wouldn’t survive whatever had happened? And in a last-ditch effort to have a part of him live on, carry on… he had brought back that which he had forsaken?

As the male considered where he’d woken up, he realized the bedding platform had been the Omega’s. The private quarters… had been the Omega’s. He knew this because he had been summoned there from time to time.

He wasn’t forsaken, he realized. He was the evil’s goddamn lifeboat.

Was it conceivable that he had not been discarded, but that his rotting had been tied to the Omega’s accelerating decline?

He would never know.

He was here now. That he did know.

And he knew one other thing.

That smoking hot brunette had helped bring him back to the earth. He had no clue who the hell she was or why she’d been going on about true love and other fantasies of a romantic variety. He didn’t care. Down in his father’s private quarters, the male had been aware, but going nowhere until she had summoned him—and she had some tricks up her own sleeve, apparently.

If their paths crossed again, he was going to enjoy submitting her.

But right now, he needed a plan. He needed resources. He needed…

The male let his head fall back. There was no seeing any stars, assuming they were not covered by clouds. Too much ambient light. He was sure they were up there, though, and in any event, their presence did not depend on his eyes for validation. They just were.