The Black Dagger Brotherhood: 20th Anniversary Insider’s Guide

Chapter 6 Butch, the Dhestroyer

Butch, the Dhestroyer

a.k.a. Brian O’Neal, former homicide detective

“Well, fancy meeting you here.”

That Boston accent. And of course he knows it’s me without turning around. He might have started out as a human—or at least half Homo sapiens. In the end, he was one of them.

Butch’s head goes left, and I see his profile. From the side, his nose looks pretty good. As the male pulls a pivot and faces me, that’s when I see the old damage. I’ve never asked him for details on how he broke it, but I’m guessing more than once and at least one time in a bar fight.

“Been a while.” He smiles, though. “Thought we were meeting in the big house.”

“We are.” I awkwardly nod at the door. “But it was open so…”

“You thought you’d kill some time, huh.” He takes a drink from the glass and then scowls like it’s not supposed to be empty. “Sorry I ruined your bid for privacy—and I know I can’t get you any of this, but you look like you could use some.”

He’s not wrong. “Yeah, I’m not a drinker.”

His shrug is all about the it’s-your-loss as he goes over to the galley kitchen.

To make sure I don’t stare at him, I look around at the blank walls and the unclutter everywhere.

I keep overlaying the image of him in a wrinkled button-down with a service weapon holstered under his arm and a badge on his belt against what’s with me now.

He’s bigger than he was in the beginning, more muscular, and much taller.

The clothes are certainly fancier, and the bags under the eyes are gone.

Missing also is the existential weariness that was as much a part of him as his skin tone and hair color.

Those hazel eyes are still shrewd under the charm, however there’s a depth now.

It’s as if he’s seven hundred years old even though he looks in his mid-thirties, and this makes me reflect on how vampires are like that.

They don’t age in increments as humans do.

Even half-breeds such as him and Beth look just the same from after their transitions all the way until they hit the proverbial wall right before they die.

Their decline is a free-fall, and given that I’m through menopause and looking at, God willing, forty years of hot flashes in front of me, I think that’s a blessing.

“So what you been up to there,” he says as the Scotch glug-glug-glugs into his glass.

I watch the ice cubes become buoyant once again, and ponder whether vampire livers are heartier than humans’. “Typing. You know me.”

His hazel eyes flip to me and he smiles in that charmer way—and yes, my heart tumbles in my chest, even though I’m very happily married. “Keeps you off the streets, does it.”

“Oh, that’s right. Sure does.”

And given that the only thing I know how to do on “the streets” is take illegal right-hand turns on reds and never, ever use my directional signal, it’s a public service.

Cue the silence.

Jesus. I am way too socially awkward and middle-aged-lady to write these books.

I’m reminded of the time a reader who was covered with very cool tattoos asked how many I had.

I winced and told her, two: One dot on either side of my face at the hinge axis of my jaw.

For the purposes of reconstructing all my teeth.

Yup. That’s me, such a fucking hard-ass.

“I have to know something,” I say.

His eyebrow raises as he puts the Lagavulin back on the counter. That he doesn’t recap the bottle tells me that his second isn’t his last.

“What’s that.”

Not a question, and a closed door if I’ve ever had one in conversation. Good thing I have the master key.

“Do you miss anything. From your old life?”

The short answer is no, of course. Or, fuck no. But life, whether vampire or human, has a way of making even bad things fade, and nostalgia isn’t always tied to fond memories. Because brains are fucked-up fun houses.

He takes a long drink. Immediately replaces the volume in the glass, which is a good inch and a half. Cap stays off.

“My mother died a long time ago.”

“I know, and I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, you would know, wouldn’t ya.” The smile is a ghost, slipping around the banister of his face, not touching his eyes or that frown, disappearing as soon as a glimpse is caught. “You know everything.”

“Not really.”

“Alzheimer’s is a bitch.” He comes back around and sits on the leather sofa. No manspreading for him; he crosses his legs knee on knee, like a gentleman. “I miss the Foosball table, how about that?”

Nice dodge.

“I thought you took it with you?” I glance at the empty spot on the floor where the game always stood. “Didn’t you?”

“Nah. Rhage broke it about a month before we moved out of here to the Wheel.”

Ah, the missing thirty-three years. I don’t have details on a lot of that, but like an archeological dig that yields pottery shards and bones, I’ll put it together over time.

“What about José de la Cruz?” I want to sit down, but the couch is the only place and I don’t think I’m welcome there. “Do you miss him?”

Butch stares off into the middle distance between us.

I wonder if he’s thinking back to those years they served together on the CPD, and I think of a number of times his partner took care of him, worried about him.

I especially remember when José went back to that empty apartment at the end of Dark Lover.

Butch was gone, and José was not surprised.

Didn’t mean the loss wasn’t a stinger.

“He’s still alive, by the way,” Butch says in a conversational tone. “He’s in his seventies. Retired to the Keys with his wife. He’s got grandkids. Things worked out okay for him, and I’m glad about it.”

Once again, time means nothing to the pictures in my head.

They flow backwards into the seventeenth centuries for flashbacks like when I saw Wrath’s parents get slaughtered while he was shoved in that crawl space—or when V was forced by his father, the Bloodletter, to fight in the War Camp.

They go forward, too, into this future era where the Brothers and their fully matured young are currently living.

Straddling the divides of years and decades and centuries is easy for the mind.

It’s a mess if you’re the research assistant to an author who jumps around a lot. (Hi, Nath!)(P.S., He has never forgiven me for putting the date of Qhuinn’s back-of-the-neck tattoo on the page!)

“I’m glad he’s okay,” Butch murmurs. “He’s my one hanging chad as they say, now that my mom is gone.”

I don’t ask about his siblings. I do not bring up his sister who was raped and murdered when he was young. He’s already thinking about them all, especially the latter. I can tell by the silence. And his mind won’t stay there. He’ll leap into the present, and worry about his Brothers. Marissa.

His daughter.

Three…

Two…

One—

He slaps his thigh and smiles up at me. “So about those Sox.”

That’s the signal that he’s done with my pushing. “Best team in baseball.”

“And don’t ya forget it.”

“Never.”

“You talking to all of us?”

“That’s my plan.”

He chuckles as he throws back his glass. “So that’s why V looks like someone shaved his head with a Sawzall.”

I clear my throat. “Well, I guess I’ll just go to the main house.”

“I’ll walk you over.”

“Oh, I know the way—”

But he’s already getting to his feet. Old habits and good manners die hard. Even though we’re perfectly safe up here, there’s no way Brian O’Neal is going to let any woman walk across the pavement in the dark.

Bringing his glass with him, he opens the door wider and stands aside, bowing while he Vanna-Whites the exit.

As I go by him, I smell the Gucci cologne and check out the cuff link that peeks out the sleeve of his beautiful suit jacket.

It’s a miniature bottle of champagne, finely executed with the gold label and top, and the green glass is carved from nephrite, it looks like.

When I’m outside, I put my arms around myself for warmth.

That’s when a drape hits both my shoulders. His jacket. God, it’s warm and smells divine, and I know it’s offered out of gallantry. I’ve always liked that dichotomy about him. The bare-knuckle bar fighter, and the gentleman.

Gentlemale, as it turned out.

“Marissa is a very lucky lady,” I murmur.

“Ha! I’m the lucky one, and you know that damn well.” He looks up to the sky. “I find it weird that you’re not asking about her or what it’s like being a father or the elephant in the room.”

“I’m NOT touching that.”

He chuckles and keeps staring upward. “I like being a dad just fine.”

No, he doesn’t. He hates it. But as we start walking, I let him lie to me because sometimes that’s what friends do. They respect boundaries that are drawn even if they’re stupid or not necessary or flat-out falsities.

“Well?” he prompts as he re-levels his head.

Now he’s focusing on the pines and the maples across the way, the former which are dark green and fluffy-boughed, the latter that flame red and orange.

“I love the fall,” I say.

“Jesus Christ, you’re a pissah, you know that.”

“I didn’t say anything—”

“I worry about Mharta. All the time. She runs with a fast crowd, downtown, in the middle of the fucking war, and I can’t talk to Marissa about it, because I do not want that on her radar—and why didn’t I bring the bottle with me.”

As he glares back at the door to the Pit, I can feel the frustration coming off him in waves, the charge in the air sizzling through me.

“She’s too much like her pops, that girl.” He puts the glass up to his lips and takes a draw of what surely must be a mere wash of alcohol. “Marissa…should have had a kid with a better class of male.”

I stare at him now, at the cut of his jaw, and that busted nose and the hint of the front tooth that he had to get reconstructed. He’s right. His daughter is a lot like him. She does run with a fast crowd. She is not going to listen to anybody about anything.

Unlike him, I know what’s coming.

And my heart breaks. But it’s like when I knew that Wellsie was going to die from the very first book. I had to watch all those scenes with her and Tohr, through Dark Lover and Lover Eternal…knowing what was on the way, lurking in a future story.

“She’s beautiful like her mother.” He exhales in a kind of defeat. “Would that she had me on the outside and Marissa on the inside.”

Mharta does have long, blond hair, just like her mahmen, and also the kind of stunning face that comes with bone structure people pay good money to plastic surgeons to get.

But he’s right. There’s a piece missing on the inside, and what’s filled it is a desperate restlessness that she hides under bravado and is going to get her in trouble.

Her destiny is coming like a freight train.

Butch’s voice is all gravel now: “You’re supposed to tell me it’s going to be all right.”

“It’s going to be all right,” I blurt.

He just shakes his head and starts walking again.

He’s not stupid. He knows the rules, and so do I, and I just feel like crying.

I do that a lot with these books. The crying thing, when I’m alone in my room with the dogs, and I’m typing words out onto a computer screen—except they’re not words, not really.

My fingers are moving over the keyboard, and letters are marching across the page on my monitor in a quick rush, and there is a coherency to it all when I reread.

But none of that is what I’m seeing as draft.

I’m in the movie in my head, watching the people live their lives, hearing their voices, seeing what they see, experiencing what they do, living around them and through them.

And yes, I know that they don’t exist. Not in the flesh-and-blood, touch-them kind of way.

But if we assume the human brain is just a filter for what the five senses feed us from our environment, if all it is, is a processing unit for sensory perception…

then my mind doesn’t know that any of these pictures in it aren’t real.

When these people who exist in my mind hurt, I feel it, too.

And so do you. Or you wouldn’t read, right?

This is our version of virtual reality, with the words being the headset we use to go to different worlds and different places. And it’s magical.

Also a kind of hell.

Butch and I are by the Mercedes and going up the steps, now, and he’s opening the massive front door for me. I enter the vestibule first, but he’s the one who puts his face in the security camera thingy. There’s a moment before the unlocking and I slip his jacket from me and hand it back to him.

“You’ll feel better when you get there,” I say. “You always do.”

“Where-my goin’?”

There’s no reason to answer that. He’s heading directly to midnight mass now.

Even though he’ll be two hours early, even with the travel time.

When he gets to the cathedral, he’s going to sit in the fourth row from the back, with his hands clasped loosely in his lap, and he’s going to stare up at the altar and the figure of Jesus Christ on the cross that hangs high above the place where the priests conduct the services.

And he will wonder why. And he will beg for mercy. And he will ask for forgiveness.

Because he’s wrong about himself. He is a very, very good man, through and through, and he is worthy of Marissa.

He hands me the glass. “Take this in for me.”

“Absolutely.”

It’s the least I can do.

He’s putting the jacket back on and turning away from me as the inner lock springs. Just before the door is opened for me, he pivots back and our eyes meet.

I want to hug him. I lift my hand instead. “See you later?”

It’s a question, but I already know the answer and so does he.

I will see him later. In the books, in the world that he was outside of for a little while before he went down the rabbit hole, met his best friend and roommate, became a member of the troika, and then went through a tremendous transition of his own.

After the Omega got a hold of him.

He crooks that charmer smile of his. “Yeah, I’ll see you later, sweethaht. Take cahr of yahself.”

With a wink, he walks down the stone steps.

And the door to the mansion opens behind me.