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"Fine, honestly fine. He's sleeping again now."
Lusie stepped out of the house and closed off the escaping heat from the kitchen. After two years, she was an achingly familiar figure, her boho clothes and her long salt-and-pepper hair comforting. As usual, she had her medicine bag in one hand and her big purse hanging off her opposite shoulder. Inside the medicine bag there was a standard-issue blood pressure cuff, a stethoscope, and some low-level medications-all of which Ehlena had seen put to use. Inside the purse there was the New York Times crossword puzzle, some Wrigley's spearmint gum she liked to chew, a wallet, and the peach lipstick she slipped across her lips on a regular basis. Ehlena knew about the crossword puzzle because Lusie and her dad did them together, the gum because of the wrappers that went into the trash, and the lipstick was self-evident. She was guessing on the wallet.
"How are you?" Lusie waited, her gray eyes clear and focused. "You're back a little early."
"He stood me up."
The way Lusie's hand landed on Ehlena's shoulder was what made the female a great nurse: With one touch she conveyed comfort and warmth and empathy, all of which worked to reduce blood pressure and heart rate and agitation.
All of which helped the mind unscramble.
"I'm sorry," Lusie said.
"Oh, no, it's better this way. I mean, I'm looking for too much."
"Really? You sounded pretty levelheaded to me when you told me about it. You were just going for coffee-"
For some reason she spoke the truth: "Nope. I was looking for a way out. Which won't ever happen, because I will never leave him." Ehlena shook her head. "Anyway, thank you so much for coming-"
"It doesn't have to be an either-or situation. Your father and you-"
"I really appreciate your coming early tonight. It was good of you."
Lusie smiled in the way Catya had earlier in the evening, tightly, sadly. "Okay, I'll drop it, but I'm right on this. You can have a relationship and still be a good daughter to your father." Lusie glanced over at the door. "Listen, you're going to have to watch that sore on his leg. The one he did on that nail? I put a new dressing on, but I'm worried about it. I think it's getting infected."
"I will, and thank you."
After Lusie dematerialized, Ehlena went into the kitchen, locked the door and bolted it, and headed down to the basement.
In his room, her father was asleep in his huge Victorian bed, the massive carved headboard like the framing arch of a tomb. His head was against a stack of white silk pillows, and the bloodred velvet duvet was folded precisely halfway down his chest.
He looked like a king in repose.
When the mental illness had really grabbed hold of him, his hair and beard had gone white, causing Ehlena to worry that the end-of-life changes were going to start in on him. But after fifty years, he still looked the same, his face unwrinkled, his hands strong and steady.
It was so hard. She couldn't imagine life without him. And she couldn't imagine having a life with him.
Ehlena closed his door partway and went into her own room, where she showered and changed and stretched out on her bed. All she had was a twin with no headboard, one pillow, and cotton sheets, but she didn't care about the luxury stuff. She needed a place to lay her tired bones each day and that was it.
Usually she read a little before falling asleep, but not today. She just didn't have the energy. Reaching to the side, she turned off the lamp, crossed her feet at the ankles, and laid her arms out straight.
With a smile, she realized she and her father slept in exactly the same position, didn't they.
In the dark, she thought about Lusie and the way she followed through about her father's cut. Good nursing was about being concerned for the welfare of patients, even after they left. It was about coaching family members as to what follow-up care was needed, and being a resource.
It wasn't the kind of job you just dumped because your shift was over.
She turned the lamp back on with a click.
Getting up, she went over to the desktop she'd gotten for free from the clinic when the IT systems had been upgraded. The Internet was slow to connect, as always, but eventually she was able to access the clinic's medical files database.
She signed in with her password, performed one search...then another. The first was a compulsion, the second a curiosity.
Saving them both, she shut down the laptop and picked up her phone.
Chapter ELEVEN
At the razor's edge of dawn, just before the light began to gather in the eastern sky, Wrath took form in the dense woods at the northern side of the Brotherhood's mountain. No one had showed back at Hunter-bred, and the day's imminent rays had forced him to leave.
Small sticks cracked loudly under his shitkickers, the thin pine fingers brittle in the cold. There was not yet snow to muffle the sounds, but he could smell it in the air, feel that frosty bite deep in his sinuses.
The hidden entrance to the Black Dagger Brotherhood's sanctum sanctorum was at the ass end of a cave, far in the back. His hands located the trigger on the stone door by feel, and the heavy portal slid behind the rock wall. Stepping onto smooth black marble pavers, he followed them forward as the door closed behind him.
At his will, torches flamed up on either side of him, extending far, far, far into the distance and illuminating the massive iron gates that had been installed in the late eighteenth century, when the Brotherhood had turned this cave into the Tomb.
As he got closer, the gate's thick slats seemed to his blurry vision to be a lineup of armed sentries, the flickering flames animating what did not in fact move. With his mind, he parted the two halves and continued on, down a long hall fitted from floor to forty-foot ceiling with shelving.
Lesser jars of all types and kinds were stacked side by side, a display that marked generations of kills made by the Brotherhood. The oldest jars were nothing but crude, hand-thrown vases that had been brought over from the Old Country. With each yard farther, the vessels grew more modern, until you got to the next set of gates and found mass-produced shit made in China and sold at Target.
There wasn't a lot of space left on the shelves and he was depressed by that. He had helped build with his own hands this repository of the enemy's dead, along with Darius and Tohrment and Vishous, the bunch of them laboring for a month straight, working during the day, sleeping on the marble pavers. He had been the one to decide how far down into the earth to go, and he had extended the shelving corridor yards and yards past what he had thought was needed. When he and his brothers had finished erecting everything, and had stacked the older jars, he'd been convinced that they wouldn't need so much storage space. Surely by the time they had filled even three-quarters of this, the war would be over.
And here he was, centuries later, trying to find enough room.
With a dreaded sense of portent, Wrath measured with his bad eyes the last remaining spaces on the original set of shelving. It was hard not to take it as evidence that the war was coming to an end, that the vampire equivalent of the finite Mayan calendar was on these rough-hewn stone walls.
It was not with victory's glow of success that he envisioned the final jar being set up next to the others.
They were either going to run out of race to protect or run out of Brothers to do the protecting.
Wrath took the three jars out of his jacket and placed them together in a little group; then he stepped back.
He had been responsible for a lot of these jars. Before he'd become king.
"I already knew that you have been out fighting."
Wrath's head shot around at the sound of the Scribe Virgin's commanding voice. Her Holiness was hovering just inside the iron gates, her black robes about a foot off the stone floor, her light shining out from beneath the hems.
It had once been blindingly bright, that glow of hers. Now it barely cast shadows.
Wrath turned back to the jars. "So that's what V meant. About pulling the trigger on me."
"My son came to me, yes."
"But you already knew. And that's not a question, by the way."
"Yeah, she hates those."
Wrath looked over and watched V step through the gates.
"Well, check this shit out," Wrath uttered. "The mother and son reunion...is only a moment away." He let the paraphrased lyric drift. "Not."
The Scribe Virgin came forward, moving slowly past the jars. Back in the old days-or, hell, as recently as the year before-she would have assumed control of the conversation. Now she just floated along.
