The Black Dagger Brotherhood (25 page)

 

We count it down, and this time we're coordinated. As we rise to our feet and watch the rocket shoot to the heavens, I can feel that he's about to say something.

 

Butch goes back, gets another rocket, and explains to me the ins and outs of its construction. This one is about the same size as the Lag and is painted black with silver bands. We go about shooting it off, and he's funny and charming and irreverent, and you'd be hard-pressed to imagine that just minutes before he'd shared something so deeply personal. I assume the serious conversating is done for the night, yet when we launch number three, he returns to the subject of Vishous—as if the rocket's flaring rise and parachuted fall creates a special zone for talk.

 

Butch sets up our last rocket, and this is my favorite of all of them. It's the biggest and has David Ortiz's Sox uniform and the words Big Papi painted on the side. We do our countdown and I press the button . . . and there's the whiz and fizzle as what Butch built goes barreling up to the sky. As I watch the glow at the tip rise, I see that this one is going really high. At its apex, it becomes the only star in the cloudy night sky.

 

We stand side by side as the parachute comes out and the rocket drifts back to earth and into the rose garden. As it floats down, swinging gently from side to side, the glow at its tip tells us its location relative to the house . . . and abruptly I know without asking the reason why he likes to aim them toward the mansion. With all the security lights, he could easily find them anywhere on the grounds. But Butch likes home . . . and he wants to send these models he spends hours working on back to where he loves and needs to be. After having been without a family or a place in the world for so long, now he has his parachute, his slow, easy ride after a blistering meteoric rise . . . and it's the people in that mansion.

 

Butch O'Neal finds his true destiny as a vampire and a Brother while falling in love with Marissa, a beautiful aristocrat.

 

Butch O'Neal had me from the moment I first saw him in Dark Lover, when he's investigating Darius's bomb scene. This description of him is from Beth's point of view, and what I liked so much about him was how he tackled his gum:

Butch's aggression was palpable, and in my opinion that's hot. And my attraction to him only deepened when he arrested Billy Riddle, the young guy who attacked Beth on her way home from work. Here, Billy, who maintained Beth “wanted it,” is facedown on the floor in his hospital room, and Butch is reading the kid his Miranda rights while cuffing him:

Butch O'Neal was absolutely my kind of guy—a hard-ass renegade who, although he didn't always follow the rules, had his own code of honor.

Plus he's a Red Sox fan, too, so there you go.

The heroes in the Brotherhood books are not perfect, not by a long shot: For example, Wrath almost kills Butch in
Dark Lover
, and Rhage had a sex addiction, and Zsadist was a misogynistic sociopath before he met Bella, and Phury's got a drug problem. The thing is, however, they have heroic qualities in addition to these faults, and that's what makes them attractive.

I write alpha males. Always have. The Brothers, though, are ALPHA males, if that makes sense. Maybe part of it is me getting in touch with rule two (
Write Out Loud
) such that everything in the BDB books is pushed as far as it can go, including the heroes and their actions. But most of it is golden rule eight (
Listen to Your Rice Krispies).
The Brothers in my head are just over-the-top, hyperaggressive, and, in my opinion, utterly compelling.

Butch fits right in with the other heroes in the series: He's got a god-awful past that has shaped who he is, as well as a complex interweave of faults and virtues. With respect to his early years, some of the details of it come out in the scene when he finally tells Marissa a little about his background (
LR
, pp. 322—326.) It's been clear all along that he's driven to self-destruction by his sister's abduction and murder and that he's a cop with a razor edge because of what he sees as his culpability in that crime. As he tells Marissa about his drug use and the violence in his life and the fact that he's always felt alienated from everyone around him, it brings into focus how critical the Brothers and their world are to him as a person—the mansion is the only place he's ever felt comfortable in, and he doesn't want to be on the fringes of the Brotherhood's world as an outsider. (When you think of John and Beth, Butch is very similar to them in this regard. All three have always sensed that there is something that separates them from the humans around them, but they are unaware of the why of it all.)

From a character standpoint, I was aware that for Butch the need to belong and be true to an inner self he could only guess at were key aspects of his makeup. And from a story perspective, I knew two things about him: He was going to end up with Marissa and his and V's destinies were inextricably intertwined. In my mind, Marissa was the perfect heroine for him, refined, ladylike, incredibly beautiful—someone he can put on a pedestal and revere and worship. As for him and V . . . well, more on that later.

As I mentioned before, Butch and Marissa's love story was originally going to be a major subplot in
Lover Eternal,
but they demanded so much attention that I cut out their scenes and put them aside. When I got to the end of drafting
Lover Awakened
, my editor and I touched base about what book was next. I wanted to do Butch, but she felt it was better to stick with the Brothers that were vampires, and I agreed—which meant the next in line was Vishous (because at that point Tohr was gone, John Matthew hadn't been through his transition, and Phury couldn't have his book come after Bella had given birth).

Trouble was, when I started to outline V, I realized something that I had known since
Dark Lover:
There was no way you could do Vishous's book before Butch's. V's relationship with the cop, and the emotions he felt for the human, were what opened him up emotionally so that he could fall in love. Additionally, in order for him to be vulnerable to someone else, he needed to come to terms with his feelings for Butch and I couldn't see all that happening in one book for a couple of reasons. First, I try to show as much as I can (as opposed to telling)—so V's book would have been full of scenes between him and Butch, especially in the beginning—which would be dangerous, because that kind of plotting runs the risk of being seriously misbalanced (i.e., a ton of scenes of Butch/V, V/Butch, Vishous and Butch . . . then suddenly switching to scenes of female/V, Vishous/female, Vishous and female). Further, with Butch unattached romantically, Vishous wouldn't be able to let him go sufficiently to find love with someone else—to really get V bonded with his heroine, Butch needed to be happy and committed with Marissa.

I tried to do V, though. Gave it my best shot.

The outline didn't work.

After a couple of weeks of banging my head, I followed rule eight (
Rice Krispies)
and called up my editor in classic Houston-we-have-a-problem style. When I explained to her what the issues were, she understood and agreed. Which is only one of the billion reasons I worship her: She gets how it is with me and the Brothers.

So Butch was up next. And, boy, talk about your corkscrews.

When I started to outline him, I had no clue about the Destroyer Prophecy or the transformative role the cop was going to play in the war with the Lessening Society. I thought that the thrust of the book was going to be about the ancestor regression and Butch having the change jump-started on him.

Ah . . . no.

After I took the scenes I had already written concerning him and Marissa falling in love, and sketched out the other things I saw in my head, it was clear something was missing. The book just wasn't as big as I sensed it was.