The Black Dagger Brotherhood_ An Insider's Guide - J. R. Ward [112]
After Butch books Billy Riddle into holding, he leaves his office, headed for his squalid apartment. On the way out, he meets up with a prostitute named Cherry Pie who’s a regular overnight guest in the women’s holding cell. They talk and go their separate ways. On impulse, Butch heads back to the Screamer’s neighborhood and pulls up in front of another bar. A woman comes out and they drive over to the river, parking underneath the bridge over the Hudson River. While the woman is having sex with him, Butch looks out at the river, thinking how beautiful the sunlight on the water is. When she asks him if he loves her, he says, yeah, sure. He knows she doesn’t care that he’s lying and he feels the desperation of his life intensely.
The next scene features the lesser who set up the bomb under Darius’s car. Mr. X is a martial arts instructor working out of an academy in town. He’s decided that to win the war against the vampires, spec ops techniques should be used and he posts the details of his bombing on a secured Lessening Society website. His good mood lasts all day long. When his four o’clock Kung Fu class arrives, he’s still smiling. He’s about to start his students sparing when one comes in late. It’s Billy Riddle. His nose is bandaged and he has to sit out the session. Mr. X lets Billy lead the class’s warm-up.
Towards the end of the day, Beth goes to the police station. Butch tells her that her attacker’s been sprung on bail. Butch has discovered that Billy has a juvenile record and is the son of a powerful businessman. Beth tells him that she will take the stand and testify if the plea bargaining negotiations fall through. When Butch asks her how she’s doing, she deflects his concern by asking about the bombing. He counters by asking her whether she’s had dinner. She tells him she’s not eating with him but he dangles a detail about the bombing in front of her and walks out of the office. She ends up following him.
Across town in Darius’s mansion, Wrath is getting ready to go out when Marissa materializes in his chamber. She’s sensed his pain over his loss and has come to try and ease his suffering. Caught up in his drive to avenge Darius, and his need to get to Beth to talk to her about her transition, Wrath tells Marissa to go home. He goes to Beth’s apartment, and while he waits in the shadows for her, he reflects on his own transition. This flashback is important to establish one of his essential internal conflicts. Prior to his transition, he was a weakling, incapable of protecting his parents when they were slaughtered by lessers in front of him. After the deaths of his mother and father, he struck out on his own, unable to bare the reverence with which he was held by other vampires solely by the accident of his birth and his pure blood. When he emerged from the change, his body having mutated into a tower of strength, he was on his way to becoming a warrior. But it would be a cold, hard path.
Beth comes home having found dinner with Butch to be surprisingly relaxing. She changes for bed and gets annoyed with her cat who’s back to pacing and purring at the sliding door. She’s about to get in bed when Wrath comes into her home. This time, he’s smoking a drug which has relaxing properties, and as he exhales into the air, Beth finds that she can’t run from him. Her body won’t move. And then she discovers she’s not all that interested in bolting. As he comes up to her, she’s overwhelmed with lust for him. They end up making love and it’s explosive. An important note: the drug Wrath uses has no aphrodisiac properties, it’s just a relaxant and the reader knows this. I thought it would be very unattractive of him to seduce her with some kind of sex drug and take advantage of her.
Across town, Mr. X heads out into the night. He approaches Cherry Pie and they strike up a deal for sex. In a dark alley, she starts to come on to him and he cuts her throat. His plan is to capture a vampire, using her blood as bait. Sure enough one of them, not a solider but a civilian, approaches. Mr.