Lover Awakened: A Novel of the Black Dagger Brotherhood by J. R. Ward

Author:J. R. Ward [Ward, J. R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Romance, Paranormal, Fiction, Fantasy, General, Fiction - Romance, American Light Romantic Fiction, Vampires, Man-woman relationships, Romance: Gothic, Romance - Fantasy, Love stories, Fantasy fiction, New York (State)
ISBN: 9780451219367
Publisher: Signet
Published: 2006-09-05T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-five

"Apples? What the fuck do I care about apples?" O yelled into his cell phone. He was ready to crack heads, he was so pissed off, and U was nattering on about goddamnfruit ? "I just told you we've got three dead Betas.Three of them."

"But tonight there were fifty bushels of apples bought from four different—"

O had to start pacing around the cabin. It was either that or so help him he was going to hunt down U just to burn off his edge. As soon as O had returned from the Omega he'd gone to the farmhouse, only to find two scorch marks on the lawn as well as the busted-up back door. Looking through a window into the kitchen, he'd seen black blood all over the place and another burn mark on the tile.

Damn it to hell , he thought, picturing the scene again. He knew a Brother had done the work, because given the mess in the kitchen, thelesser who'd been finished off on that floor had been shredded before he'd been stabbed.

Had his wife been with the warrior at the time? Or had the visit been about her family trying to move her stuff out and a Brother had just been guarding them?

Goddamn those Betas. Those three lousy-ass, weak-balled, uselessmotherfuckers of his had gotten themselves killed, so he'd never have answers. And whether his wife had been there not, sure as hell if she were alive she wasn't going back there anytime soon, thanks to the fighting that had gone down. U's bullshit came back into focus. "… the shortest day of the year, December twenty-first, is coming up next week. The winter solstice is—"

"I have an idea," O snapped. "Why don't you cut the calendar crap. I want you to go to that farmhouse and pick up that Explorer those Betas left behind in the woods. Then—"

"Listen to what I'm saying. Apples are used in the solstice ceremony to honor the Scribe Virgin."

Those two words,Scribe andVirgin , got O's attention. "How do you know this?" "I've been around for two hundred years," U said dryly. "The festival hasn't been held for… Christ, I don't know, a century maybe. The apples are supposed to represent the anticipation of spring. Seeds, growth, that kind of renewal shit."

"What type of festival are we talking about?" "In the past hundreds of them gathered, and I guess they did some chanting, some ritual stuff. I don't really know. Anyway, for years we've been monitoring certain buying patterns in the local marketplace during specific times of the year. Apples in December. Raw sugarcane in April. It's been more out of habit than anything else, because those vampires have been so damn quiet."

O leaned back against the cabin's door. "But now their king has ascended. So they're firing up the old ways." "And you've got to love the ISBN system. Much more efficient than just asking around, which is what we used to have to do. As I said before, a huge load of Granny Smith apples has been purchased at various locales.

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