The Shadows (Black Dagger Brotherhood #13) - J. R. Ward Page 0,205

candles they were burning permeating the training center with a fragrance that was both dark and sweet.

It was such a hodgepodge of belief systems and traditions, all inter-mingling around the nucleus of grief.

His brother.

And so iAm waited here.

Sometime in the next three hours, the male was going to emerge, naked and dripping in his own blood.

The marking of a male mourner’s chest and abdomen was the very last part of the preparation ritual for a departed female mate.

And as the next of kin to the sufferer, iAm was the one who was going to seal the wounds with salt, making them a forever-in-the-flesh kind of thing.

He jogged the heavy black velvet bag that was full of Morton’s best in his hand. It was tied with a golden rope, and the weight was substantial.

In the back of his mind, he couldn’t help looking to the other side of all of this. To nightfall on the following eve.

To the end of the s’Hisbe’s mourning period.

For quite some time, he’d been mulling over that solution which involved a lifetime of travel. Any debt that had once been owed to Rehvenge had been discharged, and with Selena’s death, Trez was arguably free to cash out of his businesses here in Caldwell and hit the road.

The Shadow Queen could not claim what she could not catch.

And that option was the smartest thing to do.

The problem now … was his thing with maichen.

iAm refocused on the closed door, imagining his brother wrapping up his beloved—and for a moment, he tried to picture Trez being in any shape to hit the road.

Probably not going to happen.

Shit. It was entirely possible that Trez was going to solve the situation for all of them.

By putting a gun to his head.

SEVENTY-ONE

Trez had no memory of being born.

But as he approached the door of the exam room, he felt as though the experience was coming back to him firsthand. After hours upon hours of nothing but pain, dogged by an exhaustion that was existential, he put his palm upon the cracked surface of the panel and realized that, even if there had been no tangible barrier between him and what was on the other side, stepping out was going to require a pushing, a forcing, a constriction that popped him free of the dense time capsule he’d been in.

Lifetimes separated the male he had been when he had come down here with Selena in his arms … and where he was now.

Lifetimes.

And similar to the womb, he couldn’t stay here anymore.

There was one last duty he had to fulfill; not that he had had the strength for any of this.

“Selena,” he whispered.

Her name spoken out of his dry lips was the key that unlocked the exodus … and out he arrived, into a world that was as new to him as it must have been when he had been birthed.

He was no more capable than he had been as a babe.

And similar to his birth … iAm was waiting for him.

His brother looked up so fast, the male knocked his head into the concrete wall he was leaning against. “Hey…”

Those dark eyes did a vertical sweep, and Trez glanced down at himself. His black slacks were stained with his blood as well as candle wax and gauze fibers from the wrapping. His chest was a raw pattern of wounds. His free hand was matted with what was on those pants.

“Salt,” Trez said. “Salt, we need…”

His voice was like a clarinet with a bad reed in the mouthpiece. Then again, he’d been talking to his queen for how many hours straight? So many prayers, and the odd thing had been the way they had come back to him … even though he had neither spoken nor heard the verses or the Shadow dialect in—

What was he doing out here again?

As iAm held up a black velvet bag, he thought, Oh, right.

It was so damn easy to let his Bojangles body fall to the floor, his knees absorbing an impact that must have been hard, but was something that didn’t register.

Leaning his head back, he arched his sternum forward, the pattern of cuts that he’d dug into himself pulling wider, reopening so that the wounds began to weep blood anew.

“Are you ready?” iAm asked over him.

He made some sound that even to his ears could have been a yes or a no or … something else. But his ready position clearly spoke for itself.

Breath exploded out of his raw throat as the salt