Текст книги "The Shadows"

Автор книги: J. R. Ward

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Текущая страница: 36 (всего у книги 42 страниц)

SIXTY-NINE

Well, now he knew what it was like to see someone you love get mowed down by a car, iAm thought as he watched his brother sob.

Trez’s emotions had put the clinic into a deep freeze, the air so cold, breath came out of everyone’s mouths in puffs and stripped whatever clothing they had on to metaphorical shreds. Glancing up, iAm noted that the three medical professionals were likewise in extremis, Manny rubbing his eyes with his thumbs, Ehlena taking a tissue out of the shirt pocket of her scrubs, Jane wiping her face with her palms.

iAm sat up on his knees and massaged his brother’s back. He wasn’t sure whether the contact was annoying or helping—more likely, it was a neither-here-nor-there that wasn’t even noticed.

Eventually, Trez took a shuddering breath and eased back.

There was a table stand within iAm’s reach, and on it, there was a stack of folded white and blue towels. Snagging one, he put it up toward his brother.

Trez was outside of any Kleenex capability at this point.

The guy scrubbed his face and took a number of deep breaths. Then he sat back in the chair he’d been using and stared ahead.

“I want to go through the preparations,” he said hoarsely.

“You got it,” iAm replied. As the medical staff gave a collective brows-up, he said to them, “I have everything he needs. I put it in the locker room a couple of days ago.”

It had been something he’d done before he’d left to go to the Territory, just in case he didn’t make it back.

Although that had been kind of stupid. If he’d been captured and held there, he wouldn’t have been able to tell anyone where to find the shit.

“Is it okay for him to use this room?” iAm asked, even though it wasn’t really a request.

“Absolutely,” Jane said. “He can be assured of privacy.”

“Thank you.” iAm patted his brother’s knee. “I’ll be right back, okay. I’m going to go get the supplies.”

“Thanks, man,” Trez said dully.

iAm got to his feet, and as his knees cracked, he realized he’d spent quite a while crouched on the tile floor.

He couldn’t bear to look at Selena. It was just too damn hard.

Going over to Manny, he hugged the guy in a manly way, and then gave Jane and Ehlena something gentler.

“Thanks for taking such good care of them.”

Manny just shook his head. “Outcome would have been different if we’d been able to do that.”

“Some things . . .” iAm shrugged. “There’s nothing you can do.”

Heading for the door, he pushed on the panel . . . and frowned as paint chips came off in his hands. Jesus, the steel had warped, the fit in the frame no longer right.

Outside, there wasn’t, as the saying went, a dry eye in the house.

“What can we do?” the King asked, stepping forward and putting his palm out into thin air.

Approaching Wrath, iAm gave what was offered a shake, and then was surprised to find himself yanked in against that incredibly huge chest. For a moment, he allowed himself to sag into all the strength of the King’s body, to the point where he was quite certain Wrath was holding him up off the floor.

But then he needed to pull it together. There were practicalities that had to be dealt with.

As he stepped back, the group of Chosen in their robes registered, and he felt a special kinship to them as a sibling himself.

“Trez is going to tell you later,” he said, “but she wanted you to know she loved you so much. It was hard, at the end . . . she couldn’t really communicate. The love for you all was there, though.” He focused on Phury’s yellow eyes. “And you, too.”

“She was a female of great worth,” the Primale said in the Old Language. “A credit to her tradition and duties, and also an individual who mattered for her own special gifts. There is a place in the Fade open to her this night and e’ermore.”

iAm nodded, because he just couldn’t bear to think that the female’s life was just over. That one moment a person was in her body and then . . . poof! . . . she was gone as if she had never been, nothing but the translucent, ever-fading memories of others to testify she had, in fact, been born and had lived.

“I have to get something for him. In the locker room.” God, he felt like he was talking through molasses. “It’s for our way of tending to . . .”

He left the rest of that one just dangling in the breeze.

As he passed by Tohr, he stopped. The male was white as a sheet and shaking in his shitkickers, his dark blue eyes pools of suffering.

“I’m so sorry,” iAm found himself whispering.

“Jesus, why would you say that?” the Brother choked out.

“I don’t know. I have no idea.”

He hugged the male hard, and felt a deeper connection with him. Then he pulled back, squeezed Autumn’s shoulder, and thought, Man, it was going to be a long couple of nights for the pair of them as Tohr processed his PTSD.

The Brother knew exactly where Trez was in this moment.

Rhage was the last of the line-up, and strangely, he seemed to be in the worst shape. At least his Mary was by his side.

“It’s going to be okay,” iAm lied.

The truth was, he didn’t know what the fuck was going to happen next.

“You gotta give me something to do,” Hollywood said around his gritted teeth. “I gotta . . . I gotta do something.”

“You’re here. That’s enough.”

iAm embraced the guy and then kept going to the entrance to the locker room. Pushing his way inside, he stilled and just breathed for a couple of moments. Then he proceeded to the lockers immediately on the right.

There were four Nike bags in four separate units, and he took them out one after another. Strapping two on either side, he hefted the heavy weights and squeezed back out through the door.

In the tradition of the Shadows, remains were cleansed with sacred minerals and purified water over and over again while a litany of prayers was said forward and backward. Then there was a wrapping process with fragrant cloth, followed by wax that had to be melted on.

He was about to pass by Rhage again when he stopped and frowned.

Looking at the Brother, he said, “What time is it?”

Rhage checked his phone. “Five in the morning.”

“Actually, there is something you can do,” he murmured. “At nightfall.”

SEVENTY

As soon as the sun was safely under the horizon, Rhage was the first one out of the mansion. Leaving through the library’s French doors, he stalked across the empty terrace, its iron furniture having been put in storage for winter. The pool had likewise been drained and covered, the umbrellas stored away, even the flower beds and the fruit trees had been battened down for the coming snow.

It seemed appropriate. Like the compound was in mourning along with the rest of them.

At his side, a Husqvarna 460 Rancher chain saw hung from his dagger hand, all ready and waiting.

The daylight hours had been torture, the strange neutral aftermath of the death coupled with everyone having to stay indoors turning the house into zombie land.

The good news was that he was finally free and he was going to get to cut things.

Striding down to the trees at the far edge of the lawn, he penetrated the line and proceeded to the twenty-foot-tall retaining wall that ran around the compound. There was a reinforced door about twenty yards over, and he went to the thing, entered a security code on a keypad, and waited for the chunking slide that meant the internal bar had retracted.

Pushing the weight open, he stepped out and left the door wide for his brothers as well as Beth, Xhex, Payne, and all the others.

The trees beyond were mostly pines, and in the moonlight, he assessed the sizes of the trunks. He was going to avoid the old growth and stick to the young’uns.

Firing up the saw, he smelled gas and oil, and he reveled in the power as he approached a conifer that was about a foot in diameter. The blade went through the bark and into the meat of the thing like a dagger through flesh, the cut as fast and clean as a surgical strike. And as the fluffy-headed pine landed with a bounce, he moved on to the next, revving up, slicing through, monitoring the landing so no one got hurt.

In his wake, Tohr picked up the first twenty-foot-long section and dragged it off to the opening in the retaining wall. Beth was next. Z. Payne. Butch. John Matthew and Xhex. Blay and Qhuinn. On and on they went, working like an assembly line, nobody saying a word.

None of them had bothered with coats or even work gloves.

The blood that was spilled on those trunks as palms were scratched was part of their tribute.

On the autumn night air, the sweet pine pitch smelled like incense.

Rehvenge had helped him with the planning during the day. In the symphath tradition, funeral pyres had two parts: A triangular base of nine nine-foot vertical posts that was topped by a sturdy platform made of nine six-foot lengths, and an upper portion that was constructed out of ninety-six logs, of which ninety were nine feet long and six were six feet long. For the top part, each of the nine-footers was set nine zemuhs apart—which was roughly nine inches—and the succeeding layers were set across the one below perpendicularly.

The goal was to ensure plenty of airflow and a bright fire.

So that was the way they were going to do it—because none of them knew any other alternative, and although neither Trez nor Selena was a symphath, everybody figured it was best to go with something that had been proven to work rather than run the risk of a homegrown solution that failed.

Upshot was, Rhage was going to fell about sixy-five twenty-foot-plus trees. Then they were going to strip the branches and the bark using a combination of daggers, saws, and other tools, and set the whole thing up on the flat stretch of lawn to the west of the house.

As he worked, with the saw jumping at each and every cut like it was a wild animal barely leashed, he kept going back to his own past with his Mary.

He had been there, right there, where Trez had sat at the bedside of his beloved. He had known that frigid fear and disbelief that life, with all its endless permutations, had come to such a point. He had gone home and undressed and knelt on diamonds that had cut into his knees . . . and he had bowed his head to the only deity he had known and begged and pleaded for Mary to be saved.

And the Scribe Virgin had come unto him and provided him what he had asked for—but at a tremendous cost.

His Mary would be saved, but in exchange for the gift, she could not be with him. That was the payment for the incredible blessing, the balance to the miracle.

That pain had been a galaxy that had opened in his chest, an infinite wound that was so deep and of such a mortal nature, he had been surprised he had not started to bleed . . .

Rhage watched as another tree fell to the side in a dead faint to the cold ground.

He knew exactly what Trez was feeling right now.

The difference? At his nightfall, some two years ago, after he had sworn to give her up so she could be saved from her disease . . . his Mary had burst through his bedroom door alive and well, cured and saved, restored to health.

And able to unite with him.

It was the only sunshine he had known as an adult: Sure as if the roof above him had disappeared and the sun had risen just for him, warmth and light had shone down upon them both as he had held on to his female.

They had both been restored by the Scribe Virgin’s mercy in that moment.

Later, he had learned that because Mary had been rendered infertile due to her earlier cancer treatments, the Scribe Virgin had decided that that was enough to balance the gift of everlife.

And so Mary and he were together to this day.

Trez had not been granted such a miracle.

Selena had not been saved.

It was Tohr and Wellsie all over again.

Even though Rhage wouldn’t have admitted it to anyone, he didn’t understand why he and his shellan had been spared. Especially given how the Scribe Virgin had cursed him with his beast earlier in his life for being so out of control.

And yet she had then seen fit to return his beloved to him.

Thanks to the mother of the race, his Mary was now free to exist without death until she chose differently—which would be when he went unto the Fade.

The fact that they had been spared . . . seemed just as random as why Tohr and Trez had been condemned.

At least his brother had managed to go on.

He could only hope the same for that Shadow.

* * *

“Take this,” iAm said to Fritz, “to my condo at the Commodore. Place it on the outside of the glass slider on the terrace.”

“My pleasure, sire,” the butler replied. Except then the doggen’s brows went up. “Is there aught else?”

“No.”

As Fritz just stood there outside the exam room, looking confused, iAm couldn’t figure out—

Oh. Right. He wasn’t letting go of the note.

Forcing his hand to release its hold, he stepped back. “Thanks, man.”

“If there is aught else you or your brother require, please call upon me. I would do anything to be of service, especially now.”

The butler bowed low and then headed down the corridor, disappearing through the office’s glass door.

iAm looked around even though he was still alone. His eyes just needed something to do, and in that regard, he understood why Rhage and the Brothers had been begging for a duty—also why the females of the house who were not out working in the forest had gone upstairs to help prepare a meal of ceremonial dishes traditionally served at mourning meals. And why the Chosen and the Primale had shut themselves into the gym to perform ancient rituals, the perfumed smoke from the sacred candles they were burning permeating the training center with a fragrance that was both dark and sweet.

It was such a hodgepodge of belief systems and traditions, all inter-mingling around the nucleus of grief.

His brother.

And so iAm waited here.

Sometime in the next three hours, the male was going to emerge, naked and dripping in his own blood.

The marking of a male mourner’s chest and abdomen was the very last part of the preparation ritual for a departed female mate.

And as the next of kin to the sufferer, iAm was the one who was going to seal the wounds with salt, making them a forever-in-the-flesh kind of thing.

He jogged the heavy black velvet bag that was full of Morton’s best in his hand. It was tied with a golden rope, and the weight was substantial.

In the back of his mind, he couldn’t help looking to the other side of all of this. To nightfall on the following eve.

To the end of the s’Hisbe’s mourning period.

For quite some time, he’d been mulling over that solution which involved a lifetime of travel. Any debt that had once been owed to Rehvenge had been discharged, and with Selena’s death, Trez was arguably free to cash out of his businesses here in Caldwell and hit the road.

The Shadow Queen could not claim what she could not catch.

And that option was the smartest thing to do.

The problem now . . . was his thing with maichen.

iAm refocused on the closed door, imagining his brother wrapping up his beloved—and for a moment, he tried to picture Trez being in any shape to hit the road.

Probably not going to happen.

Shit. It was entirely possible that Trez was going to solve the situation for all of them.

By putting a gun to his head.

SEVENTY-ONE

Trez had no memory of being born.

But as he approached the door of the exam room, he felt as though the experience was coming back to him firsthand. After hours upon hours of nothing but pain, dogged by an exhaustion that was existential, he put his palm upon the cracked surface of the panel and realized that, even if there had been no tangible barrier between him and what was on the other side, stepping out was going to require a pushing, a forcing, a constriction that popped him free of the dense time capsule he’d been in.

Lifetimes separated the male he had been when he had come down here with Selena in his arms . . . and where he was now.

Lifetimes.

And similar to the womb, he couldn’t stay here anymore.

There was one last duty he had to fulfill; not that he had had the strength for any of this.

“Selena,” he whispered.

Her name spoken out of his dry lips was the key that unlocked the exodus . . . and out he arrived, into a world that was as new to him as it must have been when he had been birthed.

He was no more capable than he had been as a babe.

And similar to his birth . . . iAm was waiting for him.

His brother looked up so fast, the male knocked his head into the concrete wall he was leaning against. “Hey . . .”

Those dark eyes did a vertical sweep, and Trez glanced down at himself. His black slacks were stained with his blood as well as candle wax and gauze fibers from the wrapping. His chest was a raw pattern of wounds. His free hand was matted with what was on those pants.

“Salt,” Trez said. “Salt, we need . . .”

His voice was like a clarinet with a bad reed in the mouthpiece. Then again, he’d been talking to his queen for how many hours straight? So many prayers, and the odd thing had been the way they had come back to him . . . even though he had neither spoken nor heard the verses or the Shadow dialect in—

What was he doing out here again?

As iAm held up a black velvet bag, he thought, Oh, right.

It was so damn easy to let his Bojangles body fall to the floor, his knees absorbing an impact that must have been hard, but was something that didn’t register.

Leaning his head back, he arched his sternum forward, the pattern of cuts that he’d dug into himself pulling wider, reopening so that the wounds began to weep blood anew.

“Are you ready?” iAm asked over him.

He made some sound that even to his ears could have been a yes or a no or . . . something else. But his ready position clearly spoke for itself.

Breath exploded out of his raw throat as the salt hissed out of the neck of that bag and hit him on the collarbones. The flow carried with it a stinging pain that was so great his heart skipped in his ribs and his lungs spasmed up—and yet he bore the sensations willingly, telling himself that it was in service to Selena.

After this, he would be forever marked for her.

It was, he supposed, what happened in a mating ceremony—only in his case, his female was no longer with him. And with that sacred joining ritual flipped on its head, it made sense that instead of great joy, he knew only crushing sorrow; instead of becoming one with her, he was marking his solitude without her.

When there was no more salt left in the bag, he stayed where he was, out of choice and necessity. The necessity part was that the muscles in his back and shoulders had seized up on him, maybe in solidarity with his female, more likely because he’d been bent over for the last ten—or was it fifteen?—hours straight. And as for the choice part? As much as he hated the rituals because they were like a loud, screaming she’s dead in his head, he didn’t want them to be over.

Each moment that passed, every minute under his belt in this new reality was a step away from her. And these small increments, with enough of them strung together, soon would turn into nights, which would become weeks and months . . . and that passage of time was the measure of his loss.

It was taking him away from her.

While he’d been caretaking her in the final way, part of his mind had been obsessively playing back everything. From that black-robed figure coming and finding him at his club, to him picking Selena up from the bright green grass of that other place, to them fighting for her life that first time she was here. And then the collapse upstairs in iAm’s bedroom.

The first thing he was going to do, after the final part of all this was done, was race upstairs to see exactly where her knees had been on the carpet.

“Tell Fritz not to vacuum,” he blurted.

“What?”

He forced his head level and opened his lids. “Tell Fritz—he can’t vacuum your room.”

“Okay.” The word was said with the kind of calm-down someone would use to a jumper on a ledge. “All right.”

Trez looked down at his chest. There were granules all over him, some white, some pink or red from his blood.

He prayed that the doggen hadn’t been efficient about cleaning tonight. He just needed to remember exactly where it had happened. He needed to . . . remember the trip down to the clinic, and where the chair beside the exam table had been, and what he’d said to her. What the needle with the shots had looked like. How . . . everything had happened.

It wasn’t out of some morbid fascination. It was more the conviction that he didn’t want to lose anything of her.

Not one memory.

Struggling to his feet, he mumbled, “Need to build a—”

“It’s done.”

Trez shook his head and motioned with his hand. “No, no, listen. I need an ax . . . or saw . . .”

“Trez. Listen to me.”

“. . . and some gasoline or kerosene . . .”

“Here, why don’t you give me that.”

“What?” As his right wrist was gently captured by his brother, he frowned and looked down. He still had his dagger in his hand. “Oh.”

He ordered his fist to release.

When nothing moved, he tried harder. “I can’t let go.”

“Turn your hand over.” iAm pried the fingers loose one by one. “There you go.”

As the male tucked the weapon into his belt at an angle, Trez tried to get his brain to work. “But I might need that for—”

“The Brothers and their females have taken care of the pyre.”

Trez blinked. “They have?”

“They’ve been building it for the last three hours. It’s all ready.”

Swaying in his loafers, he closed his eyes and whispered, “How will I ever repay them.”

* * *

“Here, put this jacket on, you must be freezing.”

Rhage looked down at his Mary. “I’m sorry? What did you say?”

She held up a parka. “Rhage, it’s thirty-two degrees out here. All you’re wearing is a muscle shirt.”

It wasn’t that he doubted her, but he glanced at his bare arms. “Oh. Guess you’re right.”

“Let me put this on you.”

He was very aware that she was treating him like he was a child, but somehow that was okay. And when she threaded one of his arms through a sleeve, and then wrapped the body of the coat around him, he let her do as she wished.

Coat. No coat.

Didn’t matter to him.

His eyes drifted over to the pyre. It was higher than he’d anticipated, rising up like a small house off the flat section of lawn beyond the gardens and the pool. They’d had to construct a stair-like rise so that the top level could be reached, and after a discussion and following Rehvenge’s advice, they had doused the base in gasoline.

Along with everyone else, he was standing upwind of things.

Quite a crowd, he reflected. Everyone who lived in the house. All of the servants. Also all of the Chosen.

“And I brought you some gloves,” his Mary said.

As she reached for his hand, he shook his head. “I’ll just bleed into the insides of them.”

“It doesn’t matter. You may already have frostbite.”

“Is it that cold?” Wait, hadn’t she already told him what temperature it was?

“Yes,” she whispered. “It’s unseasonably cold.”

“Seems right. I don’t think it should be warm . . . that wouldn’t be . . . I think we should hurt, too.”

Which was why he really would have preferred to be without the parka. But he was incapable of denying his shellan—

From out of the corner of his eye, he caught a flash of white.

As he twisted around, his breath caught in his throat. Trez had emerged from the same door they had all been using in the library; iAm was behind him.

And so the final walk began.

Carrying that which was so precious to him, the Shadow took step after step down the lawn, closing in on what they had been laboring over. Without any conversation, but through some kind of group-think, everybody who was assembled formed two lines, providing him with an aisle.

Trez was transformed, and not in a good way. Like someone who had been on a monthlong trek with insufficient food and water, he was a shrunken, exhausted echo of himself, his face hollow, his aura that of illness, even though he was not sick in a disease sort of way.

As he passed, Rhage shivered.

The makeshift stairs they’d built creaked as Trez went up them, but Rhage wasn’t worried that the steps were going to fall apart. He and Tohr had tested them together a number of times.

And hold they did.

Silhouetted against the moonlit sky, Trez’s dark shape blocked the stars that had come out for the evening, cutting a swath from the galaxy sure as if some god had taken a pair of scissors to the fabric of the universe.

Bending down, he placed her in the center. Then he stayed up top for a while, and Rhage could imagine he was arranging things. Saying a final good-bye.

It was good that that kind of stuff was out of sight, out of hearing. Some things, even in a supportive environment, were best left to privacy.

The torch they were going to use to light it all had come from the Tomb. V had flashed over to the sanctum sanctorum and taken one from the many that lined the great hall—which was yet another way to honor the Shadow and his loss. Tohr set the thing afire when Trez finally stretched up to his full height and backed down the slats, the flames leaping to life on its head, ready to spread further, undaunted by the cold wind that was blowing.

At the foot of the pyre, Trez accepted the torch and the two males spoke. In the flickering light, it was clear that Trez’s chest had been brutally cut and sealed, and there was salt and blood and wax all down the front of his slacks.

Funny how the passage of time could be noted on something other than a clock or a calendar: The condition of that clothing and that flesh spoke about the hours the male had spent tending to his dead.

And then Tohr was falling back in line beside Autumn.

Trez stared at the pyre. Looked up to its top.

After a long moment, he went around to one of the points of the triangular base, leaned in and—

The fire took off as if it were a wild animal freed from a cage, racing over the gasoline pathways, finding its version of nutrition and commencing its meal.

Trez took a step back, the torch falling to his side as if he’d forgotten it still burned.

With a quick lunge, iAm stepped in and removed the thing, and just as he turned away, Trez began to shout.

As chalky wood smoke and orange sparks and fingers of fire cascaded into the night sky, Trez screamed in fury, his torso jutting forward on his hips, his legs sinking down as if he were about to throw himself into the heat.

Before he could think, Rhage jumped out of line and ran to the guy; iAm certainly couldn’t, what with the torch in his hand. Locking his arms around the Shadow’s pelvis, he picked Trez up and backed him away about ten feet.

Even with the wind still coming from behind them and carrying things off, the heat was tremendous.

Trez didn’t seem to notice—not the fact that he had been relocated, nor the reality that if the gusts shifted, he could still be incinerated.

He was just roaring at the pyre, his neck muscles sticking out, his chest pumping up and down, his body jacked forward against the iron bar of Rhage’s hold.

There was no tracking the precise words, but there probably weren’t any.

Sometimes language couldn’t go far enough.

All you could do was scream.