Chapter One
The King’s Audience House, Caldwell, NY
Some graduations happened in private.
Some of these important markers of the next stage of life had no caps and gowns, no orchestras playing the humans’ “Pomp and Circumstance.” There was no stage to walk across or diploma to hang on your wall. No witnesses, either.
Some graduations were marked by the simple and the everyday, the nothing-special—like a person reaching out to a Dell monitor and hitting the little blue button on the lower right corner of the computer screen. Such a mundane action, done many times in a week, a month, a year—but nonetheless, for one particular instance, a great division between before and after occurred.
As Paradise, blooded daughter of Abalone, First Adviser to Wrath, son of Wrath, sire of Wrath, King of all vampires, sat back in her office chair, she stared at the now-black screen in front of her. Amazing. The night she had been waiting for was almost here.
For most of the last eight weeks, time had been going at a crawl, but in these final couple of evenings it had switched things up and flipped into catapult mode. Suddenly, after having suffered through seven-thousand-hour waits for the moon to rise, she felt like she wanted to slow it all down again.
Her first job was now a thing of the past.
Looking across the desk, she moved the office phone over an inch—then switched the AT&T whatever it was back to where it had been. She straightened the stained-glass dragonfly shade on the Tiffany lamp. Made sure the blue pens were in one holder and the red ones in another. Smoothed her palm over the dust-free blotter and the top of the monitor.
The waiting room was empty, the silk chairs unoccupied, the magazines put in order on the side tables, the drinks that had been served by doggen to those who had come all cleaned up.
The last civilian had left about thirty minutes ago. Dawn was about two hours off. All in all, it was the normal end to a night of hard work, the time when she and her father would head back to the family estate to enjoy a meal full of talk and plans and mutual respect.
Paradise leaned forward and looked around the archway of the parlor. Across the foyer, the double doors that led into what had previously been the mansion’s formal dining room were closed.
Yup, just a normal night except for the very un-normal meeting that was taking place in there: Right after the final appointment had left, her father had been called into the audience chamber and those doors had shut tight.
He was in there with the King, and two members of the Black Dagger Brotherhood.
“Don’t you do this to me,” she said. “Don’t you take this away from me.”
Paradise got up and walked around, re-straightening magazines, re-plumping throw pillows, stopping in front of the oil painting of a French king.
Heading back to the archway, she stared at the closed panels of the dining room and listened to the pounding of her heart.
Lifting her hands, she prodded the calluses on her palms. They hadn’t come from working here for her father and the Brotherhood for the last couple of months, organizing the schedule and tracking issues, resolutions and follow-ups. No, for the first time in her life she had been hitting the gym. Pumping iron. Running on treadmills. Working the StairMaster. Pull-ups, push-ups, sit-ups. Erg machine.
Before now, she hadn’t even known what an erg machine was.
And it was all in preparation for tomorrow night.
Assuming that group of males in the King’s audience room wasn’t taking it all away from her.
Tomorrow, at midnight, she was supposed to join the Scribe Virgin only knew how many males and females at a secret location—where she was going to try to make the cut for the Black Dagger Brotherhood’s training program for soldiers.
It was a good plan—something she had decided to pursue, a chance to be independent and kick some ass and prove to herself she was more than her pedigree. The problem? Fully blooded daughters from the glymera, from one of the Founding Families no less, did not train to become soldiers. They didn’t handle guns or knives. They didn’t learn to fight or defend themselves. They didn’t even know what a lesser was.
They didn’t even associate with soldiers.
Daughters like her were trained in needlepoint, classical music and singing, manners, and running vast households filled with doggen. They were expected to know the complicated social calendar and the festival cycles, keep up with the wardrobe requirements of all of that, and know the difference between Van Cleef & Arpels, Boucheron and Cartier. They were cloistered, protected, and cherished as all jewels were.
The only dangerous thing they were permitted to do? Breed. With a hellren chosen by their family to ensure the sanctity of their bloodlines.
It was a miracle her father was letting her do this.
He had certainly not been on board when she’d first shown him the application—but he’d had a change of heart and let her apply to the program: The raids of a couple of years ago, when so many vampires had been killed by the Lessening Society, had proved what a dangerous place Caldwell, New York, could be. And she’d told him that she didn’t want to go out and fight in the war. She just wanted to learn to defend herself.
Once she’d framed it in terms of her safety? That was when her father had changed his tune.
The real truth was that she just wanted something that was hers. An identity that came from a place other than what her birthright had forced on her.
Plus Peyton had told her she couldn’t do it.
Because she was female.
Screw that.
Paradise checked those closed doors again. “Come on…”
Pacing around, she eventually wandered out into the foyer, but she didn’t want to get too close to where the males were meeting—as if that might jinx things.
God, what were they talking about in there?
Usually the King left right after the last audience of the night. If he and the Brotherhood had any private business or stuff about the war to deal with, it was handled back at the First Family’s residence, a place so secret that not even her father had been invited to go there.
So yeah, this had to be about her.
Back in the waiting area, she went to the desk and counted the hours she had sat at it. She’d only had the job a couple of months, but she’d liked the work—to a point. In her absence, assuming she stayed in the BDB training program, a cousin of hers was taking over, and she’d spent the last seven nights showing the girl the ropes, clarifying the procedures Paradise had put into place, making sure that the transition was going to go smoothly.
Sitting back down in her chair, she opened the middle drawer and took out her application—as if that could somehow reassure her that this was all going to still happen.
As she held the paperwork in her hands, she wondered who else was going to be at the orientation tomorrow … and thought of the male who’d shown up here at the audience house, looking for a printed-out version of the application.
Tall, big shoulders, deep voiced. Wearing a Syracuse baseball cap, and jeans that had been worn out from what looked like actual work.
The community of vampires was a small one, and she’d never seen him before—but maybe he was just a civilian? That was another change in the training program. Before now, only males from the aristocracy were invited to work with the Brotherhood.
He had given her his name, but refused to shake her hand.
Craeg. That was all she knew.
He hadn’t been rude, though. In fact, he’d been supportive of her applying.
He’d also been … captivating in a way that had shocked her—to the point where she’d waited for weeks to see if he brought the application back. He hadn’t. Maybe he’d scanned it and sent the thing in that way.
Or maybe he’d decided not to try for the program after all.
It seemed crazy to be disappointed that she might never see him again.
As her phone went off with a chirp, she jumped and went for the thing. Peyton. Again.
She would see him at the orientation tomorrow night—and that would be soon enough. After that fight they’d had about her joining the program, she’d had to pull away from the friendship.
Then again, if the Brotherhood was putting their foot down in there with her father? That righteous indignation she felt toward the guy was going to be a moot point. But come on, females were allowed to apply.
The problem was, she was not a “normal” female.
FFS, she did not know what she was going to do if her father took it all back. Surely the Brotherhood wouldn’t wait until the last minute to deny her a spot, though.
Right?
Across town, Marissa, mated shellan of the Black Dagger Brother Dhestroyer, a.k.a. Butch O’Neal, sat back in her desk chair at Safe Place. As the thing let out a creak, she tapped her Bic pen on the OfficeMax calendar blotter and shifted the phone receiver to her other ear.
Cutting into the stream of blabbering, she said, “Well, I certainly appreciate the invitation, but I can’t—”
The female on the other end didn’t miss a beat. She just kept on talking, her aristocratic intonation sucking up all the bandwidth—until it was a wonder that the entire zip code didn’t suffer an electrical brownout. “…and you can understand why we need your help. This is the first Twelfth Month Festival Ball that has been held since the raids. As the shellan of a Brother, and a member of a Founding Family, you would be a perfect chair of the event—”
Giving her no another shot, Marissa cut in, “I’m not sure you’re aware of this, but I work full-time as the director of Safe Place and—”
“…and your brother said that you would be a good choice.”
Marissa fell silent.
Her first thought was that she found it highly unlikely that Havers, the race’s physician and her very, very, very estranged next of kin, had recommended her for anything other than an early grave. Her second was more along the lines of a calculation … how long had it been since she had spoken to him? Two years? Three? Not since he’d thrown her out of their house, about five minutes before dawn, when he’d found out she was interested in a mere human.
Who had actually turned out to be Wrath’s cousin and the embodiment of the Dhestroyer legend.
How ya like me now, she heard in her head.
“So you just have to chair the event,” the female concluded. As if it were a done deal.
“You must needs forgive me.” Marissa cleared her throat. “But my brother is not in a position to proffer my name for anything, as he and I haven’t seen each other for quite some time.”
When a whole boatload of nothing-but-quiet came over the connection, she decided she should have aired her family’s dirty laundry about ten minutes ago: Members of the glymera were supposed to observe rigid codes of behavior—and exposing the colossal rift in her bloodline, even though it was well-known, was something that was simply not done.
Far more appropriate for others to whisper about it behind your back.
Unfortunately, the female recovered and changed tactics. “At any rate, it is vitally important for all members of our class to resume the festivals—”
A knock on the door to her office brought Marissa’s eyes around. “Yes?”
Over the phone, the female said, “Wonderful! You can come to my estate—”
“No, no. There’s someone who needs me.” She spoke up louder. “Come on in.”
The moment she saw the expression on Mary’s face, she cursed. Not good news. Rhage’s shellan was a consummate professional, so for her to look like that? It was really a problem—
Was that blood on her shirt?
Marissa dropped her tone and cut the politeness. “My answer is no. My job requires all my time. Besides, if you’re this passionate, you should take the job. Good-bye.”
Dropping the phone back in the cradle, she got to her feet. “What’s going on?”
“We’ve got an intake who needs medical assistance STAT. I can’t reach Doc Jane or Ehlena anywhere. I don’t know what to do.”
Marissa rushed around the desk. “Where is she?”
“Downstairs.”
The pair of them hit the stairwell at a run, Marissa in the lead. “How did she come to us?”
“I don’t know. One of the security cameras picked her up out on the lawn, crawling.”
“What?”
“My cell phone went off with an alert, and I ran out there with Rhym. We carried her into the parlor.”
Rounding the corner at the bottom, Marissa skidded on one of the throw rugs …
And stopped altogether.
When she saw the condition of the female on the sofa, she put one hand over her mouth. “Oh, dear God…” she whispered.
Blood. There was blood everywhere, on the floor in drips, soaking through white towels pressed to wounds, pooling under one of the female’s feet on the carpet.
The girl had been beaten so badly there was no way to identify her, her features so swollen that, if she hadn’t had long hair and a torn skirt, you wouldn’t even have known what sex she was. One arm was clearly dislocated, the limb hanging badly from the shoulder … and she had only the left high-heeled shoe on, her stockings shredded.
Her breathing was bad, very bad. Nothing but a rattling in her chest, as if she were drowning in her own blood.
Rhym, the intake supervisor, looked up from where she had crouched by the couch. Through the tears in her eyes, she whispered, “I don’t think she’s going to live. How can she live…?”
Marissa had to pull herself together. It was the only option. “Doc Jane and Ehlena are both unreachable?” she said in a hoarse voice.
“I’ve tried the mansion,” Mary replied. “The clinic. Their cell phones. Two times in all places.”
For a split second, Marissa was terrified about what that meant for her own life. Were the Brothers in medical trouble? Was Butch okay?
That lasted only a moment. “Give me your phone—and get the residents into the Wellsie annex. I want everyone there in case I have to bring a male in.”
Mary tossed over her phone and nodded. “I’m on it.”
Safe Place was exactly that—a safe place for female victims of domestic violence to come for shelter and rehabilitation with their young. And after Marissa had spent countless, useless centuries in the glymera, being nothing but the unclaimed betrothed of the King, she had found her calling here, in service to those who had been at best verbally abused, at worst, horrifically treated.
Males were not allowed inside.
But to save the life of this female here, she would break that rule.
Answer your phone, Manny, she thought as the first ring sounded. Answer your damn phone …