The Beast (Black Dagger Brotherhood #14) - J. R. Ward Page 0,196
got dead quiet—
Before something could be said, Zsadist burst into the room and everybody recoiled.
“What the fuck happened to you?” V demanded.
The brother had steam rising up off of him—and not because he was pissed. There was, like, actual smoke curling from the shoulders of his leather jacket and the bottoms of his shitkickers. And, Jesus Christ, the stench—he smelled like burned rubber, bad chemicals, and a three-day-old campsite.
“Nothing,” the guy said as he sauntered over to his twin. “Just roasting marshmallows.”
“Is that my flamethrower?” somebody asked indignantly.
“How many square feet was the marshmallow,” someone else muttered.
“Hey, was it a Stay Puft?” Lassiter cut in.
The King cursed. “Oh, for fuck’s sake, did you burn that bitch’s house down?”
Well, hello, everyone clearly thought as they went quiet and stared at Z.
“Technically, it was her old man’s,” Rhage felt compelled to comment. “Assuming we’re talking about the cunt who held that blood slave in her basement.”
Wrath shook his finger in Rhage’s direction. “Hey, no ‘See you next Tuesdays’ if you’re going to be a father. You need to drop that shit right now and get used to it before you bring that little girl into this fucking house.”
Annnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnd now everyone and their uncle turned around to eyeball him.
Fantastic.
Can we go back and talk about the marshmallow? he thought to himself.
As he hoped for a change of subject, and absolutely nothing like that happened, he shook his head. Wasn’t this just like the Brotherhood mansion, where news traveled faster than … well, a bonfire, for instance.
“Okay, A,” he said to the crowd, “I don’t know if we can adopt Bitty yet. Two, that holier-than-thou, no-cussing speech would have been a lot more effective if it didn’t have ‘shit’ and an f-bomb in it. And D, yes, Mary and I are trying to become parents, and no, I don’t want to talk about it yet. Can we be done.”
Lassiter came over. “High five for the Home Alone ref.”
“I did it for you, you piece of shit.” Rhage clapped palms with the douchebag. “And thanks for your support. Now let’s move on to the next crisis. Does anyone want to drop their trousers and admit to having a thong on? Or are we going to get serious and start sharing pedicures.”
Wrath spoke up. “Rhage is right. We got problems. V and Payne, take it away.”
Instantly, the vibe in the room changed, everybody getting serious as the siblings went over and stood in front of the fire. Man, you could see the family resemblance between them, with that jet-black hair and those diamond eyes. V was a little taller than his sis, broader, too, of course, and then there were those warning tattoos at his temple and the goatee. Payne was no slouch, however, her fighter’s body covered in exactly the same leather as her brother’s was, her muscled arms and legs making Ronda Rousey look like someone’s shrunken grandmother.
“The Scribe Virgin is dead.”
As V dropped the bomb, there was a momentary period of silent saaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay-whaaaaaaaaaaaaat. Then a shit-ton of gasps and cursing in the room, all kinds of WTF hitting the airwaves.
Vishous put his palms out. “Before you ask any questions, we don’t know more than that. I went up to see her, found all of her shit gone, and a missive in the Chosen cemetery. She said she was going to appoint a successor in due time. That’s it.”
Rhage glanced back and forth between the pair of them. Payne’s face was a mask of not-gonna-go-there, like she had been fed up with the drama about two hundred years ago and was peacing out over her mother. V was much the same.
“How can she die if she’s immortal?” somebody asked.
Vishous lit up and shrugged. “Look, I don’t mean to blow this off, but I got nothing else to offer you all at this point.”
Rhage whistled softly and took a Tootsie Pop out of his pocket. As he saw that he’d outed a grape one, he thought, Well, maybe it was all going to work out somehow.
Fuck. Who was he kidding.
Down in the training center, Layla was going to the bathroom. Again.
Ever since the young had been born, she felt as though she had been peeing, and sure enough, her body was showing the change of not just having jettisoned the infants’ weight, slight though it was, but apparently seven hundred thousand gallons of water.
Unbelievable.
Why hadn’t anyone told her about this? Then again, there had been a lot more important things to talk about.