The Shadows (Black Dagger Brotherhood #13) - J. R. Ward Page 0,207

he let her do as she wished.

Coat. No coat.

Didn’t matter to him.

His eyes drifted over to the pyre. It was higher than he’d anticipated, rising up like a small house off the flat section of lawn beyond the gardens and the pool. They’d had to construct a stair-like rise so that the top level could be reached, and after a discussion and following Rehvenge’s advice, they had doused the base in gasoline.

Along with everyone else, he was standing upwind of things.

Quite a crowd, he reflected. Everyone who lived in the house. All of the servants. Also all of the Chosen.

“And I brought you some gloves,” his Mary said.

As she reached for his hand, he shook his head. “I’ll just bleed into the insides of them.”

“It doesn’t matter. You may already have frostbite.”

“Is it that cold?” Wait, hadn’t she already told him what temperature it was?

“Yes,” she whispered. “It’s unseasonably cold.”

“Seems right. I don’t think it should be warm … that wouldn’t be … I think we should hurt, too.”

Which was why he really would have preferred to be without the parka. But he was incapable of denying his shellan—

From out of the corner of his eye, he caught a flash of white.

As he twisted around, his breath caught in his throat. Trez had emerged from the same door they had all been using in the library; iAm was behind him.

And so the final walk began.

Carrying that which was so precious to him, the Shadow took step after step down the lawn, closing in on what they had been laboring over. Without any conversation, but through some kind of group-think, everybody who was assembled formed two lines, providing him with an aisle.

Trez was transformed, and not in a good way. Like someone who had been on a monthlong trek with insufficient food and water, he was a shrunken, exhausted echo of himself, his face hollow, his aura that of illness, even though he was not sick in a disease sort of way.

As he passed, Rhage shivered.

The makeshift stairs they’d built creaked as Trez went up them, but Rhage wasn’t worried that the steps were going to fall apart. He and Tohr had tested them together a number of times.

And hold they did.

Silhouetted against the moonlit sky, Trez’s dark shape blocked the stars that had come out for the evening, cutting a swath from the galaxy sure as if some god had taken a pair of scissors to the fabric of the universe.

Bending down, he placed her in the center. Then he stayed up top for a while, and Rhage could imagine he was arranging things. Saying a final good-bye.

It was good that that kind of stuff was out of sight, out of hearing. Some things, even in a supportive environment, were best left to privacy.

The torch they were going to use to light it all had come from the Tomb. V had flashed over to the sanctum sanctorum and taken one from the many that lined the great hall—which was yet another way to honor the Shadow and his loss. Tohr set the thing afire when Trez finally stretched up to his full height and backed down the slats, the flames leaping to life on its head, ready to spread further, undaunted by the cold wind that was blowing.

At the foot of the pyre, Trez accepted the torch and the two males spoke. In the flickering light, it was clear that Trez’s chest had been brutally cut and sealed, and there was salt and blood and wax all down the front of his slacks.

Funny how the passage of time could be noted on something other than a clock or a calendar: The condition of that clothing and that flesh spoke about the hours the male had spent tending to his dead.

And then Tohr was falling back in line beside Autumn.

Trez stared at the pyre. Looked up to its top.

After a long moment, he went around to one of the points of the triangular base, leaned in and—

The fire took off as if it were a wild animal freed from a cage, racing over the gasoline pathways, finding its version of nutrition and commencing its meal.

Trez took a step back, the torch falling to his side as if he’d forgotten it still burned.

With a quick lunge, iAm stepped in and removed the thing, and just as he turned away, Trez began to shout.

As chalky wood smoke and orange sparks and fingers of fire cascaded into the night sky, Trez screamed in fury,