The Black Dagger Brotherhood_ An Insider's Guide - J. R. Ward [95]
This shit was definitely not red smoke. There was no mellow easing, no polite knock on the door before the drug stepped into his brain. This was an all-guns-blazing assault with a battering ram, and as he threw up, he reminded himself that what he’d gotten was what he’d wanted.
Dimly, in the far background of his consciousness, he heard the wizard start laughing. . . . heard his addiction’s cackling satisfaction get rolling even as the heroin took over the rest of his mind and body.
As he passed out while throwing up, he realized he’d been cheated.
Instead of killing the wizard, he was left only with the wasteland and its master.
Good job, mate . . . excellent job.
—LOVER ENSHRINED, p. 431
It was a wonder Phury lived through it, and I shudder to think what would have happened if Blay hadn’t come to stay at the mansion and he and Qhuinn and John hadn’t walked into that spare bedroom.
So that was Phury’s bottom, and to his credit he didn’t stay there. The first significant step he took in his recovery was the choice he made the following day. He goes to complete the Primale ceremony with Layla, but instead of laying with her, he sits on the steps in the vestibule of the Primale Temple and makes a personal resolve to stop drugging:
As the wizard started to get pissed and Phury’s body milk-shaked it something fierce, he stretched out his legs, lay down on the vestibule’s cool marble floor, and got ready for a whole lot of going-nowhere.
“Shit,” he said as he gave himself over to the withdrawal. “This is going to suck.”
—LOVER ENSHRINED, p. 459
This in turn led to what was for me the most significant scene between Cormia and Phury as a couple—the one where she helps him through his detox hallucinations. By taking him around his parents’ overgrown garden and directing him to clean it up (the scenes start on page 468), Cormia is a hero in her own right, being strong when her male can’t be and providing him with leadership when he needs to be led.
The symbolic nature of the ivy, when Phury’s either remembering how it covered the statues in his parents’ garden or using it to do away with one of his drawings, is obvious. The past has been choking him all along, and I loved the fact that during those hallucinations, not only does he free the statues, but he frees himself—and gets to see his parents in a happier place.
As a result of the detox, Phury then has the lucidity and the gumption to re-haul the whole construct of the Chosen—which was about fricking time. I love this part when he becomes resolved:
After a lifetime of watching history unfold in a bowl of water, Cormia realized as she measured the medallion being held aloft that for the first time she was seeing history made right in front of her, in live time.
Nothing was ever going to be the same after this.
With that emblem of his exalted station waving back and forth under his fisted grip, Phury proclaimed in a hard, deep voice, “I am the strength of the race. I am the Primale. And so shall I rule!”
—LOVER ENSHRINED, p. 484
That is Phury’s inner heroic nature being truly realized—and man, does he go to town with it when he goes to see the Scribe Virgin.
About that confrontation. During his conversation with the Scribe Virgin, I think he hits on what is her essential failing when it comes to the race she created and loves. She’s too overprotective and has to, as Phury says, have faith in her creation. The traditions of the vampire race are hindering their survival as much as the war with the Lessening Society is, and things must change: The pool of candidates for the Brotherhood must be opened up so that more warriors can be brought on, and the Chosen need and deserve to be liberated.
A note on all the social and religious restrictions within the vampire race. There were those at the beginning