The Black Dagger Brotherhood_ An Insider's Guide - J. R. Ward [106]
Beth Randall, the heroine, is resilient, super-smart, physically beautiful and the half-human daughter of one of Wrath’s band of warrior brothers. When her father is killed by their enemies, Wrath is forced to accept Beth as a responsibility and help her through her transition. Through being with Beth, and supporting her, Wrath is compelled to relive his own transition and the deaths of his parents. Beth helps him process the events more accurately and he is able see how his perceived failure to protect those he loved from death was not in fact the result of a lack of honor or internal weakness of his. This helps to free him of his burden of self-hatred and heals his emotional scars, leaving him able to love her with passion and commitment.
As for Beth, when we meet her at the beginning of the book, her life is as lonely and emotionally barren as Wrath’s. Having grown up in the foster care system, she has no idea who her parents were and she has no familial support system whatsoever. She’s stuck in a nowhere job. She longs for a relationship but can’t seem to make the right connections with men. She also has no clue that she’s half-vampire. When Wrath enters her life, she’s swept up into a new world that gives her the opportunity to love and be loved as well as to find a family. And through Wrath, she finally gets that critical link to a parent she’s always wanted. She also gets a good dose of excitement and passion.
The secondary romance features Wrath’s shellan, or titular wife, Marissa and a hardened homicide detective. Marissa has loved Wrath for centuries but he’s always been out of her reach emotionally and physically. She’s a gentle soul who’s lonely and she longs for the day when Wrath finally sees all she has to offer. Marissa’s a tricky character to portray. She can’t come across as a doormat because that’s boring. But she needs to be a foil to Wrath’s dark menace and their incompatibility has to be believable.
In the course of the book, Marissa realizes Wrath will never love her and this frees her to find her heart’s other half in Detective Butch O’Neal. Butch is a good man who, not unlike Wrath, can tread the edge of madness when he lets his anger out. His daily life is a bleak stretch of death and red tape and he’s been slowly losing his soul, figuratively speaking, for years. He meets Marissa and her inner purity refreshes him and gives him an optimism about life and love that he’s lost. He also finds the vampire culture to be more compatible with his temperament. The complications inherent in him being a human and Marissa a vampire will only be partially solved by the end of the book. Their future will not be clear.
A note on Wrath’s foes. In large measure, the average vampire in this series (apart from the heroes) simply wants to live in peace and co-exist with humans without being discovered. Vampires have been hunted systematically since the Middle Ages out of intolerance and a lack of understanding over their race’s need to drink blood. Terrible acts of violence have been perpetrated by members of the so-called Lessening Society and vampires have been driven nearly to extinction. A select corps of vampire warriors are the defenders of the race and Wrath is the strongest arm among this band of brothers.
The band of brothers offers avenues for development of a series. Each one of the six of them have a crucial weakness. They have lost family, been betrayed by friends and lovers, suffered and endured great pain. They fight for their race, facing their enemies with courage and skill, but at the end of the night, all but one go home alone. The manner in which love tames a savage beast of man, revealing his caring, nurturing core, is a universal tenet of romance. Each of these men are in need of salvation and