The Beast (Black Dagger Brotherhood #14) - J. R. Ward Page 0,130

over the engraved name and the dates, Bitty knelt down on the other side.

“What did she pass from?” the girl asked.

“M.S. Multiple sclerosis.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s a human disease where the body’s immune system attacks the coating that protects your nerve fibers? Without that sheath, you can’t tell your body what to do, so you lose the ability to walk, feed yourself, speak. Or at least, my mom did. Some people with it have long periods of remission when the disease isn’t active. She wasn’t one of them.” Mary rubbed the center of her chest. “There are more options for treatment now than there were fifteen or twenty years ago when she was first diagnosed. Maybe she would have lasted longer in this era of medicine. Who knows.”

“Do you miss her?”

“Every day. The thing is … I don’t want to freak you out, but I’m not convinced you ever get over a death like that of your mother’s. I think it’s more that you get used to the loss. Kind of like getting in cold water? There’s a shock to the system in the beginning, but an accommodation happens so you don’t notice the chill as much as the years pass—and sometimes, you even forget you’re in the tub at all after a while. But there are always memories that come back to you and remind you of who is missing.”

“I think of my mom a lot. I dream of her, too. She comes to me in dreams and talks to me.”

“What does she say?”

As a cold breeze rolled through, Bitty tucked some hair back behind her ear. “That everything is going to be okay, and I’m going to have a new family soon. That’s what got me thinking about my uncle.”

“Well, I think that’s lovely.” Mary let herself sit back on her butt, her thigh-level coat a barrier to the damp ground. “Does she look healthy in your dreams?”

“Oh, yes. I like that most. She’s with my baby brother, the one who passed as well.”

“We gave your mother his ashes.”

“I know. She put them in her suitcase. She said that she wanted to make sure they came with us if we were told to go.”

“It might be nice to put them together at some point.”

“I think that’s a really good idea.”

There was a long pause. “Hey, Bitty?”

“Mmm?”

Mary picked a little stick off the ground and bent it up and down to give her fingers something to do. “I, ah, I wish I’d known how worried your mom was about the resources at Safe Place. I would have worked really hard to reassure her.” She glanced over at the girl. “Are you worried about any of that?”

Bitty put her hands in her coat pockets and looked around. “I don’t know. Everyone’s really nice. You especially. But it’s scary, you know.”

“I know. Just talk to me, okay? If you get scared. I’ll give you my cell phone number. You can call me at any time directly.”

“I don’t want to be a burden.”

“Yeah, I guess that’s what worries me. Your mom didn’t want to be one, which I can absolutely respect—but the end result was that things were much harder on her, and you, than they had to be. Do you know what I mean?”

Bitty nodded and fell silent.

After a while, the girl said, “My father used to hit me.”

Deep in the grungy heart of downtown, Rhage ran through an alley, his shitkickers landing on the asphalt like thunder, his autoloader up, his rage in check so that it was an engine that drove him on, not a disaster that flipped him out.

As his target darted across another street, he stuck to the fucker like glue, that sickly sweet lesser smell like the vapor trail of a jet across the night sky, easily trackable.

It was a new recruit. Probably from out at that abandoned factory.

He could tell because the thing was all panicked, tripping and slipping before scrambling away in a mess of arms and legs, no weapons on him, no one coming to his rescue.

He was a lone rat without a mischief.

And as the slayer fell for the umpteenth time, his feet knocked out from under him by what looked like a carburetor, he finally didn’t get up again. He just held his leg to his chest and moaned, rolling onto his back.

“No, p-p-p-please, no!”

As Rhage pulled up to his prey and stopped, for the first time in recorded history, he hesitated before the kill. But he couldn’t not stab the fucker. If