J.R. Ward the Black Dagger Brotherhood Novels 5-8 - J. R. Ward [260]
Xhex had disappeared into the main part of the club, and he searched for her, trying to see through the waterfall that separated the VIPs from the others.
He didn’t need his eyes to know where she was, though. He could sense her. In the midst of all the bodies in the club, he knew which one belonged to her. She was over by the bar.
God, the fact that she could manhandle a guy twice her size without breaking a sweat was hot as hell.
The fact that she didn’t seem offended that John had fantasized about her was a relief.
The fact that she wanted him to say her name when he came was . . . making him want to come right now.
Guess this answered whether he liked sunshine or thunder better, didn’t it. And told him exactly what he would be doing as soon as he got home.
Chapter Nine
Out past the sprawling patchwork of Caldwell’s rural farms, farther north than the towns along the Hudson River’s winding flanks, about three hours from the Canadian border, the Adirondack Mountains spring up from the earth. Majestic, carpeted in pines and cedars at their heads and shoulders, the ranges had been created by glaciers that had stretched down from the Alaskan frontier before it had been known as Alaska and before there were humans or vampires to call it a frontier.
When the last ice age retreated into history books that would be written much later, the great valley gouges that were left in the land filled with the melt-off from the icebergs. Over generations of humans, the vast geological pools were assigned names like Lake George and Lake Champ-lain and Saranac Lake and Blue Mountain Lake.
Humans, those bothersome, parasitic rabbits with their many, many children, settled in the Hudson River corridor, seeking the water, as many other animals did. Centuries passed and towns sprouted up and “civilization” was established, with all its intrusions into the environment.
The mountains remained the masters, though. Even in the age of electricity and technology and automobiles and tourism, the Adirondacks dictated the landscape of this stretch of northern New York.
So there are a lot of lonesome stretches in the midst of all those forests.
Heading up I-87, a.k.a. the Northway, the exits get farther and farther apart until you can go five miles, ten miles, fifteen miles without having a way off the road. And even if you do put your blinker on and ease onto a ramp that takes you to the right, all you’ll find is a couple of stores and a gas station and two or three houses.
People can hide in the Adirondacks.
Vampires can hide in the Adirondacks.
At the end of the night, as the sun readied itself for a big, splashy entrance stage right, a male walked through the dense woods of Saddleback Mountain alone, dragging his withered body over the ground as he would have a bag of garbage in his earlier life. His hunger was all that moved him, the primordial instinct for blood all that kept him on his feet and fighting through the branches.
Up ahead in a tangle of pine boughs, his prey was twitchy, nervous.
The deer knew it was being tracked, but it couldn’t see what it was hunted by. Lifting its muzzle, it sniffed at the air, ears pricking forward and back.
The night was cold this far north and this high up on Saddleback. Given that the male didn’t have much left on his back except rags, his teeth chattered and his nail beds were blue, but he wouldn’t have put more clothes on if he’d had them. Feeding his blood hunger was the extent of his concessions to existence.
He would not take his own life. He’d heard long ago that if you committed suicide, you couldn’t make it into the Fade, and that was where he had to end up. So he passed his days in a narrow bandwidth of suffering, waiting until he either starved to death from malnutrition or was grievously injured.
The process was taking too damn long. Then again, his escape from his old life months and months ago had brought him to these