Chapter 9 Vishous, son of the Bloodletter
Vishous, son of the Bloodletter
As I go down the steps to the basement, I put a hand on the uneven, whitewashed wall.
There’s a banister, but it’s set low, and in my high heels, I want to help my balance out more at the sternum level, rather than down at my hip.
The going is slow and I can’t decide whether that’s a mercy or a torture.
When I bottom out, I don’t remember which way to head.
There are choices, left, right, straight-ahead, and every direction looks the same.
The stone walls and short, raftered ceiling are white, the poured cement floor is nautical gray.
Everything is sparkling clean, nothing like the clutter in my own basement.
I’d almost question my life choices, but then again, I don’t have Fritz in my life.
Fuck AI. We need the brilliant minds of today to work on cloning that doggen.
Oh who am I kidding. I know which way to go.
I take the right-hand turn, and pass by storage rooms that are empty as move-out day, the doors sometimes closed, sometimes open, the spaces all the same: square, squat-ceiling’d, power-washed. Vacated. I even go by the nuclear fallout section where it’s all right angles and lead walls.
And then I swear I feel the heat.
I don’t. That’s not possible. But my skin prickles and I have a hot flash.
When I come up to the steel door, it’s the only one that’s painted red, and I guess it’s a warning that there’s flame inside? Or maybe the chromatic alarm is a be-careful with who’s in there.
Curling a little fist, I knuckle up and feel ridiculous. And that I’m making a mistake. He doesn’t want to see me—
There’s a click and the slab of metal creaks open. The fact that the hinges are not well-oiled checks out. They’re no doubt the only ones on the property that make any noises.
Now I really do feel a blast of something you could cook a pie with.
As the interior is revealed, the black candles check out, so too does the rap that stomps around in the background.
The forge is a circular, stone enclosure, vented through a massive ceiling hood.
Flames jump and hiss as if resentful of their containment, yellow and orange spirits that are as restless as the warrior that sits on the far side, his back to the wall, his aggression facing forward.
Directed at anyone who disturbs him.
Me.
You.
Vishous is sharpening a blade, running a whetstone up and down the black steel that’s pointed straight out from his…
OMG. I literally can’t finish typing that.
Let me paint the picture. His knees are spread wide, so there’s an absolutely unavoidable eroticism in the way he’s sitting and what he’s doing as he goes up and down that shank with the pointy end.
I have a thought he’s doing this on purpose, just to throw me off.
But I immediately disregard that hypothesis.
His mere presence throws me, and he knows that. He doesn’t need any additives or preservatives as they say.
Vishous is 100% organically overwhelming—
The exhale of Turkish smoke that comes out of his mouth curls up to obscure his diamond eyes. As he stays silent, I dub in various hi-how’re-yas.
Fancy meeting you here. Spoken in that arching tone with that arching brow.
You’re late. Spoken in a dark tone with a head-on stare.
Get the fuck out. Spoken in a flat, disinterested tone.
You bore me—
No, he wouldn’t go that route. Too obvious.
“Hi?” I say. “I mean…hello.”
God. I’m socially incompetent on a good night, but this is a nightmare. And while I stand on the far side of his fire, feeling like an absolute idiot, I think about how much I love my job for so many reasons—chief among which is the fact that it means I get to spend ten hours a day by myself.
This is every cocktail party I’ve ever been to happening all at once.
So how can I be J. R. Ward at all these public events, you might ask?
I don’t have a fucking clue. I’m riddled with phobias: *cough*airplaneselevatorsbridgesheightsetcadnauseam*cough*.
But for some reason, the most common one—public speaking—escaped me.
Maybe it’s because I’ve made my quota with all the others?
Oh, but I also don’t have trypophobia.
Fear of little holes—
Squirrel. Sorry.
As my heart does messy push-ups in my chest, another exhale in front of V’s face dissipates so that both the goatee and the tats at his temple are fully visible in the flicker of flames.
And given that he’s still not talking, I pray that my brain will think of something coherent to fill the silence, but this is faulty reasoning.
No combination of syllables will unlock the awkward in this situation.
“I think I’ll just go.”
I point my thumb over my shoulder, you know, just in case he doesn’t remember where the door is or how it’s used—
“This is Wrath’s dagger.”
As he looks back down at the weapon, I clear my throat. “Is it?”
There’s another rasp as he passes the stone down the blade. “Made this particular one for him back in nineteen eighty-seven.”
I think back to what I was doing in that year.
Graduating from Northfield Mt. Hermon, on my way to Smith College, nineteen years old because my bday is in the spring.
I still had all my teeth back then, and I suppose it’s a sad commentary on how much dental work I’ve had over the years that I measure eras in my life based on where I was in the restoration process.
“I mark each one of the handles.” He holds the weapon up and tilts his head to inspect the base of the hilt. “With the year.”
“Any particular reason you’re buffing that blade up?”
“Nah. Just passing time.”
Such a lie. I know that Wrath is going to go out in the war again. “No one is better at metallurgy than you.”
“You’re right.” He goes back to the sharpening. “That’s why I do the job.”
More silence.
Goddamn, this reminds me of writing his book.
Lover Unbound was one of the worst writing experiences of my career.
I felt like each word I typed was a stone I hauled into a retaining wall—and if you’ve seen how I’m built, there’s no gun show anywhere on me.
It was exhausting work that never satisfied, and there are reasons for that.
Reasons that V knows and has never forgiven me for.
Life goes on, though.
As my brain goes into all kinds of gymnastics, I decide he engineered this encounter. He could have avoided the whole thing simply by not showing up. But he wanted me to see him so I could once again tangle around everything that didn’t happen, a carousel I ride whenever we’re together.
And yet I put him in every book, it seems. Or at least most of them.
V wipes the blade on the side of his leather-clad thigh and then inspects what he’s been working on.
He clearly finds whatever he’s done acceptable and puts the weapon down on a velvet pad he’d unfolded beside the bench.
Then he takes the stub of the hand-rolled between his lips and flicks it into the fire.
He looks at me again. And I brace myself all over once more—
His gloved hand reaches behind himself, and then reemerges with a fresh cigarette. For a hot minute, I figure he’ll light it by putting his whole damned face into the flames, but nah. He flicks a red Bic and does the duty all regular.
As he exhales, he talks through the compression of his lungs. “Anytime you like.”
“I’m sorry?”
“You can come and go, anytime you like.”
I’m not exactly sure what he’s talking about, but hey, at least if I can’t have any kind of back-and-forth here, I’m guaranteed an escape from this hot workspace. And a welcome-back, apparently?
I’m not sure I believe the latter and decide he’s talking about the Brotherhood at large.
When he reaches to the opposite side and picks up another dagger, I wonder whose it is—
“Tohr’s.”
“Oh, ah, I’m going to see him next.”
And thank God for the proverbial palate cleanser after this tension.
“You know where to find him,” V remarks.
As the rasping sound cuts through old-school Biggie Smalls, I think of that iconic song, “Hypnotize,” and the scene from Dark Lover of V and the boys getting into his Escalade.
Worship me, gentlemen. And I might let you play with buttons.
V’s early years in the War Camp were downright brutal.
And then there’s been the agony of his visions, that only ever spell the deaths of those he loves.
There was also his mahmen, the Scribe Virgin, who’s always put the “queen bitch” in “complicated.” But there have been good things for him, too. Doc Jane, of course.
Now Allhan, who lived through his transition, thank God.
Or Lassiter, as it were.
Allhan is the son V never wanted, and the fact that the Brother backdoor’d into the parenting thing is the only way it could have happened.
An orphan, abandoned in the human world by his parents, ended up at Luchas House—and had some serious computer skills.
V took Allhan in at F.T. H.Q., and the kid worked his ass off.
All hours, all the time—to the point where V started to feed him, and eventually took him home so he knew the kid was getting some sleep.
Pretty quick, that became a habit on both sides.
I don’t know when exactly V realized the young was his, but I’m guessing it had to do with a creeping sense of anxiety that eventually had to be acknowledged.
The transition is hard on everybody who has to go through it, and the suffering isn’t contained to the pretrans at hand.
The parents worry so much, the risks for when adulthood comes knocking as bad as the ones on the birthing bed.
I’ll bet you that was the hook that made V see what was obvious to everybody else—
“Don’t think you know me.”
“If you’re reading my mind, then you know exactly how much I do.”
The glower is obvious, but whatever curses are going through his head he keeps to himself.
It’s okay. I can dub them in—because this is, of course, the root of our problem.
He’s used to being the one who knows everything, and not just because he’s the smartest guy in every room he walks into.
He sees into the future, the finale to everybody’s season known to him, the fade-to-black haunting him so that he can’t look into the face of any of his Brothers or their mates, or the fighters or the young, without being fully aware of how it ends for them.
Put like that, of course he keeps himself a little apart.
You want to talk about an attachment disorder?
You see fate spool out, each person’s individual timeline a different rope tied to a separate and distinct sinking anchor, every day and night that passes another tug on that iron-clad connection, another pull, another drag.
Closer and closer the graves come for the ones he loves, and you think he’s going to get any closer to that grief than he has to? When he knows the loss that’s coming?
He holds himself apart because it’s a survival mechanism.
And meanwhile: Tug. Tug. Tug…
That’s really what mortality is, each of us waking up to a new dawn we can’t control, our own endings approaching inexorably, the measurements of minutes and hours and days and seasons a human conception that marks a universal entropy.
Thank God we have the minutia of our lives or we’d be paralyzed by the fact that we’re all going to end up gone someday.
Youth is not wasted on the young. Those blinders are a gift.
And you know, people say that they see me in Vishous. All my friends, when they read him on the page, tell me that I’m him—and maybe on the surface that’s true enough. I mean, the cursing, for sure. But they’re wrong about the real why.
He hates me because he and I both see the endings of them all.
I know how the Brotherhood series ends.
When Wrath showed up and brought me his world, he started by giving me the first ten books.
In the succeeding twenty years, there have been many, many more over and above them, so many stories, so many destinies, so many loves and losses.
Laughter and joy, too. He opened the door to the whole world of Caldwell, NY, and people have been walking through it ever since.
But yes, at this point, I know what happens when the lights go out for the last time, when the final meal is cleaned up, and the last syllable is spoken, and the door is closed on all these people we love and care about so much.
This knowledge is what unites V and I, and also what tears us apart. Sure, the lie is part of it, but he enjoys feeling invincible and superior. That’s his armor against the trauma he’s not so much lived through as locked away behind his intelligence.
His own LBD with diamonds and sunglasses.
But I’m one level past him because, of all the visions he’s ever had, he cannot see his own future, and he hates that I have something of his that he cannot possess.
He would like to know how it happens for him, actually. Control freak that he is. But he hasn’t been given that option, and I’m not fucking with the rules. Besides, it wouldn’t make him happy—
Annnnnd okay, this is getting weird. Although like the whole concept of my Rice Krispies and this interview thing isn’t already out there.
I offer him a little wave. He glowers at me in response—because even though he isn’t reading my mind, he knows damn well I’m in the mood for retrospection and remembrance, and he can guess exactly where I’ve gone in my head.
Or maybe he’s already there because it’s all he can think about if he sees me.
I turn away from him and step over the threshold. The ironic thing is that Z is my favorite hero, but Vishous is the one I’ve always wanted the most.
I guess I’ve always had a thing for pricks.
“I love you so much,” I whisper as I walk away. “True.”