The Beast (Black Dagger Brotherhood #14) - J. R. Ward Page 0,11

arrangement he’d made with the Scribe Virgin: He kept his curse, his Mary survived her leukemia, and because his mate was infertile from her cancer treatments, she got to stay with him for however long she wanted.

You’re going to fucking die tonight.

Just as he heard Vishous’s voice in his head, the brother’s face shot into his vision, replacing the heavens. V’s mouth was moving, that goatee shifting around as he enunciated his words. Rhage tried to bat the male away, but his arms weren’t listening to his brain.

Last thing he needed was someone else dying. Although as the son of the Scribe Virgin, V was probably the least likely to worry about something as vanilla as popping his cog. But as Butch, the number three in the troika, arrived on a slide-in and started yapping, too? Now, there was a guy with no Grim Reaper hall pass—

Shooting. Both of them started shooting.

No! Rhage ordered them. Tell Mary I love her and leave me the fuck here before you get—

V recoiled as if some kind of lead had found something of his.

And that was when it happened.

The scent of his brother’s blood was what did it. The second that copper sting hit Rhage’s nose, the beast awoke within its cage of his flesh and began to come out, the change initiating internal earthquakes that snapped his bones and shredded his internal organs and transformed him into something else entirely.

Now there was pain.

As well as the sense that this effort was a waste of fucking time. If he was dying, the dragon was just taking his place at the crap table.

“Tell Mary to come with me,” Rhage shouted as he went completely blind. “Tell her…”

But he had the sense that his brothers had already taken off, and thank God for it: V’s blood was no longer on the air and there was no reply coming back at him.

Even as his life force ebbed, he did his best to go with the flow as the ripping and tearing racked his dying body. Even if he’d had the energy, fighting that tide was wasted effort, and didn’t make things any easier. Still, as his mind and soul, his own emotions and consciousness, receded, it was eerie that he didn’t know whether it was the death, or the transformation that was backseating him.

As the beast’s nervous system took over completely and the sensations of pain disappeared, Rhage retreated into a metaphysical float zone, like who and what he was had been put in a snow globe up on the time continuum’s shelf.

Only in this instance, he had the sense he would not be taken back down.

And it was funny. Each and every entity that had consciousness and an awareness of its own mortality inevitably wondered, from time to time, about the when and where, the how and why of its demise. Rhage had been guilty of that morbid drift of thought himself, especially during his pre-Mary period, when he’d been alone with nothing but a catalog of his failures and weaknesses to keep him company during the dense, deserted hours of daylight.

For him, those rambling questions were being unexpectedly answered tonight: “Where” was in the middle of the field of conflict, at an abandoned girls’ school; “how” was by bleeding out at the heart, as a result of a gunshot wound; “why” was in the line of duty; “when” was probably in the next ten minutes or so, maybe less.

Given the nature of his work, none of that was a surprise. Okay, maybe the prep-school part, but that was it.

He was going to miss his brothers. Jesus … that hurt more than the beast stuff. And he was going to worry about all of them, and the future of Wrath’s kingship. Shit, he was going to miss seeing Nalla and L.W. grow up. And Qhuinn’s twins being born hopefully alive and well. Would he be able to see them all from the Fade?

Oh, his Mary. His beautiful, precious Mary.

Terror hit him, but it was hard to hold on to the emotion as he felt himself weaken even further. To calm down, he told himself that the Scribe Virgin didn’t lie. The Scribe Virgin was all powerful. The Scribe Virgin had determined the balance needed to save his Mary’s life and had given them a great gift to counter-balance the fact that his shellan could not have children.

No children, he thought with a pang. He and his Mary would never have children in any form now.

That