The Shadows (Black Dagger Brotherhood #13) - J. R. Ward Page 0,156

Trez kept going, heading up the stone steps and disappearing through the vestibule’s door.

iAm closed his eyes and sagged against the SUV. He didn’t need that little monologue of his brother’s in his head right now. He really didn’t.

FIFTY-ONE

Selena’s hands were stiff.

Standing at the counter in the Brotherhood’s kitchen, she tried to open a can of Coke and found that her fingers refused to grip the tab right. Instead of pulling the metal lip free, they skipped over the top.

As all kinds of warnings went off in her head, she reined in the panic, and reminded herself that she’d spent three hours in the cold without any gloves on.

Making a couple of loose fists, she blew into them; then shook her arms. Cracked her knuckles. Tried not to start looking for other problems elsewhere in her body.

People who had her disease could still get minor-league frostbite.

She faced off at the can again, her heart pounding as she watched from a great distance while she approached the pop-top once more. She viewed her hands and fingers with dispassion, as if they were attached to someone else’s wrists, moved by somebody else’s brain.

Crack! Fizz!

She exhaled and had to steady herself on the granite.

“You okay?”

Covering up the relief, she smiled as Trez came in from the dining room. “Just getting some soda. I’m thirsty.”

“How’s your stomach?”

“Very well. How’s yours?”

As he came up to her, she had the sense that he was hiding something from her as well. And it was a shock to discover that in spite of her big living-the-truth speech after she’d come out of the latest Arrest, she wanted him to keep his secret, just like she wanted to keep hers: They’d had such a wonderful night; the last thing she needed was to ruin it with heavy conversation that would just expose problems that couldn’t be solved, and questions that weren’t going to be answered until it was too late.

“Tum’s just fine.”

She forced another smile. “Would you like to head upstairs?”

“That’d be great.”

Picking up her soda, she took the palm he offered her and went out with him through the dining room and into the foyer. The house was essentially empty, the Brothers off working, Wrath seeing civilians, Beth and Marissa and Mary at Safe Place, Bella babysitting L.W. and Nalla up in the new nursery suite, the doggen attending to their duties.

All of this was going to continue, she thought, when she was gone. All of the doors opening and shutting, menus planned and consumed, people living their lives.

Dearest Virgin Scribe, she wanted to stay with them. She didn’t want to go on to what might well be absolute nothingness, an utter unplugging of who she was and what mattered to her and how she thought and felt.

Gone. Nothing left.

She had been trained—no, programmed, really—to believe in the afterlife, and serve the Mother of the Race, and adhere to traditions she had neither established herself nor volunteered for. And she had done all of that without question.

Coming to the end of her life, she wished she had asked and challenged and had a voice.

So much wasted time.

As she started up the stairs with Trez, she found herself wondering why, if there was a Fade and people continued up there … why had the Scribe Virgin demanded that everything on Earth be recorded in the Sanctuary? Why all of those volumes and volumes of lives lived … if after death, the people still existed only in a different form?

You had to preserve only that which could be lost.

Her heart started to pound, a sudden terror taking hold—

“Oh, shit,” Trez breathed.

Clearly, he’d read her mind. “I don’t know what I’m thinking. It’s probably just nonsense—”

He threw out his free hand for the banister and weaved.

“Trez! What’s wrong?”

“Shit. Fuck.” He looked over at her, but his eyes were unfocused. “Can you help me to the room? I can’t see—”

“Dearest Virgin Scribe, let me get Doc Jane!”

“No, no, it’s just a migraine.” He steadied himself with help from her. “I don’t have a lot of time. I have to get upstairs to a dark room and lie down.”

“Let me call Doc Jane—”

“No, as you remember, I’ve gotten these all my life. I know what’s coming. It’s going to be hell for eight hours, but it can’t really hurt me.”

Selena tried to take as much of his weight as she could while they hobbled up to the second-story landing and then crossed over to the door to the third floor. His big body