J.R. Ward the Black Dagger Brotherhood Novels 5-8 - J. R. Ward [659]
Instead, he was falling down the stairs like a drunk.
He cleared his throat. And had to clear it once more. “I need…I need to go talk to someone.”
“Okay,” Beth said. “We can bring whoever it is to you—”
“No, I’ll get there by myself. If you’ll excuse me.” He stood up and stepped forward…right into the coffee table. Biting back a curse as he rubbed his shin, he said, “Would you just leave me here? Please.”
“May I…” Beth’s voice broke. “May I clean up your face?”
Absently, he wiped his cheek and felt wetness. Blood. He was still bleeding. “It’s fine. I’m okay.”
There was a soft shuffle as the two females walked over to the door, then the click of the lock as one of them turned the handle.
“I love you, Beth,” Wrath said quickly.
“I love you, too.”
“It’s…going to be all right.”
With another click, the door shut back into place.
Wrath sat down on the floor right where he was, because he didn’t trust himself to circumnavigate the library to get in a better position. As he settled in, the crackle from the fire gave him some frame of reference…and then he realized he could picture the room in his mind.
If he reached out to the right…yup. His hand brushed against one of the smooth legs of the table by the sofa. He rode the length up to the boxy bottom and patted across the surface of the thing to find…yes, the coasters Fritz kept stacked neatly there. And a small leather book…and the lamp base.
This was comforting. In some strange way, he had felt as if the world had disappeared just because he couldn’t see it. But in fact everything was all there still.
Closing his eyes, he sent out a request.
It was a long while before it was responded to, a long, long while before he was spirited away and found himself standing on a hard floor, beside a fountain that chattered softly. He had wondered if he would be blind here on the Other Side as well, and he was. Still, as with the layout of the library, he knew what the place looked like, even if he couldn’t see it. Over there to the right was a tree full of chirping birds, and in front of him, past the sprinkling fountain, would be the loggia with the columns that was part of the Scribe Virgin’s private quarters.
“Wrath, son of Wrath.” He did not hear the mother of the race approach, but then she levitated around such that her black robes never touched whatever floor was beneath her. “You have come unto me for what purpose.”
She knew damn well why he was here, and he wasn’t playing her game anymore. “I want to know if you did this to me.”
The birds fell silent, as if shocked by his temerity.
“Did what to you.” Her voice sounded the same as it had when she’d appeared at the Tomb with Vishous: distant and disinterested. Which kinda pissed a guy off when he was having trouble making it down his own stairs.
“My fucking sight. Did you take it away from me because I went out to fight?” He ripped his wraparounds off his face and tossed them across the slick floor. “Did you do this to me.”
In days gone by she would have lashed him until he bled for that kind of insubordination, and as he waited to see what came at him, he almost hoped she licked his ass with a lightning bolt.
There was no smiting, however. “What was going to be was going to be. Your fighting had nothing to do with your loss of sight, and neither did I. Now go back to your world and leave me to mine.”
He knew she had turned away, because her voice faded as she headed off in the opposite direction.
Wrath frowned. He’d come expecting a fight, and he wanted one. Instead? He got nothing to engage with, not even a row over his deliberate disrespect.
The radical shift in paradigm was so stark, for a moment he forgot all about his blindness. “What is wrong with you?”
He got no answer, just a door shutting softly.
In the Scribe Virgin’s absence, the birds