The Black Dagger Brotherhood (26 page)

I stewed about it. Worried. Stewed some more . . . and then I got the image of the Omega cutting off his finger and putting it into Butch's abdomen.

Actually, I got both the image and the sound of the carrot crack when the Omega did the knife action on himself.

Ew.

Once I tuned in to that, all these scenes came hammering down on my head. As I followed the story, it was fascinating to see how the original scenes of the book morphed. For instance, I'd known that Butch was going to get abducted by the
lessers,
and had seen him and Marissa reuniting in the clinic, but suddenly he was under quarantine and the consequences were much, much more dire. So there weren't huge shifts in content, per se, but more in implication and scope within the world.

The big theme for the book is transformation, and with respect to Butch, I love the parallel tracks of his story. Both good and evil transform him—first when the Omega has at him, and then when the change is brought on him and his vampire nature comes out. It's as if the Lessening Society and the Brotherhood are both fighting for control of his destiny and his soul, and it's not immediately clear who wins. For a while after Butch leaves quarantine, neither he nor the Brothers are sure whether or not he's been turned into a
lesser
or what exactly he's doing when he inhales a slayer.

The thing I like most about where Butch ends up in terms of the world is that he's a significant player in the war, arguably turning the tables on the Omega because he puts the evil directly at risk. The Brothers have been picking off
lessers
for centuries, but Butch is actually degrading the Omega's finite being each time he takes care of business. I think this is a great ending for the cop. It gives him a place where, although he's not purely of the Brotherhood bloodlines, he's an equal participant in the fight to protect the species.

And Butch isn't the only one who changes. Marissa, too, is transformed from a cloistered female of the
glymera
into someone who has her own life.

I think, of all the females, Marissa's probably the one who resonates with me most personally, because I, too, am from a conservative, establishment background and have had to break a few molds and expectations to be who I really am. Her scene in the beginning of
Lover Revealed
(the one that starts on page seven), with her having a panic attack in the bathroom during that party at her brother's, shows clearly the toll of her having lived her life in the
glymera.
She's sublimated so much of herself and borne burdens for which she didn't volunteer for so long, that she's nearing her breaking point.

I get asked a lot whether there are parts of me in the books and whether I take people I know and put them in. Both are a no. I'm very private, and I strictly separate my personal life from my writing life, and additionally, I would hate to think any of my friends or family would feel used. That being said, there are definitely things that happen in the books that I've had personal experience with. For example, as someone who's had panic attacks, Marissa's interlude in that bathroom really resonated with me. I didn't put the scene in because I was revealing something of myself, but I did empathize with my heroine in the way you would when you talk to someone else who's been through what you have.

For Marissa, the real turning point for her as an individual comes when she burns all of her dresses in the backyard. I thought this was a great way to symbolically mark her break with tradition:

I had such a clear image of that fire, with her running around those burning dresses, screaming—it was such a temporal representation of the internal shift she was going through, a wiping clean of the past in preparation for her moving forward.

And man, does she get her act together. One of my favorite scenes in the whole series is when Marissa slaps down her brother and the whole Princeps Council during its vote on mandatory
sehclusion
for unmated females of the aristocracy (which starts on p. 419). Rising to her feet, she asserts her status as head of her bloodline, because she is older than Havers, and votes no, putting an end to the discussion and the restriction. It was a total reversal for her from where she was in that bathroom, no longer under the
glymera's
control, but asserting control over them.

I also like where she ended up. She's perfectly suited for running Safe Place and is making a real contribution to the race that way. Plus it's nice that after years of strife, she and Wrath get to work together—because it gives him a chance to prove to her over and over again that he truly does respect her.

On a side note, when it comes to the females in the series, it's significant that at the end of
Lover Revealed
, the
shellans
all come together in Marissa's office, and Beth gives out the little statues of the owls. It shows a side of the
shellans
that I hadn't been able to work into a book yet—namely that they are, like the Brothers, bonded to one another in a special way.

Back to Butch. At the end of the book, when he's being inducted into the Brotherhood, it's clear that he isn't complete, even with the new role he has in the world:

Without Marissa he is less than zero, and that is true for all the Brothers. Once they bond they are completed, and severing that relationship leads to a breakdown that is irreparable (I'm thinking of Tohr now). Fortunately for Butch, Marissa and he work everything out and are reunited at the end.

Speaking of unions . . . let's talk about sex. Butch made me blush. A lot.

Maybe it was because, of all the Brothers, he tended to talk the most when he was making love. Or maybe it was the way he handled Marissa and her virginity. Or maybe it was just that, quite frankly, I think he's monster hot. Whatever the reason, of all the series so far, I think his book is the hottest of the bunch.

So it makes sense I'd cover the whole sex thing when discussing him.

I get asked in interviews every now and again how I feel about writing “hot” books, and whether I do it to meet the market demands for more and more erotic content. Certainly, over the past five years or so, romance novels have been getting more and more sexual, and the erotic market has grown substantially. Back when I started writing the Brothers, a lot of the now-popular e-pubs were starting to gain momentum, and soon thereafter a number of New York houses developed hotter lines as well. The marketplace was in transition—which was lucky for me.

From the get-go, I knew the Brothers were going to be more sexually explicit than my previous contemporary romances. And I was aware that the series was going to take readers in directions that my other books hadn't (i.e., Rhage's sex addiction, Z's sexual dysfunctions, V's predilections). That being said, I didn't specifically target the erotic market. The Brothers are just very sexual, and the scenes I see of them with their females are hot. In keeping with rule eight (yes, it's the Rice Krispies again), I write what I see in my head. Do I sometimes think,
OMG, I can't believe I just typed that?
Yes! But the thing is, the sex scenes always advance an emotional imperative, and that's why, however graphic they become, I don't feel they are gratuitous.

Take, for example, Rhage being chained down to his bed . . . or when Z services Bella in her needing . . . or Butch and Marissa in the back of the Escalade when she finally feeds from him. All of these scenes are highly erotic, but the dynamic within the relationships changes afterward, either for the worse or the better. I think maybe that's one difference between romance and strict erotica. With romance, sex affects the emotional bonds of the characters and propels those connections forward. With strict erotica, the sexual act or sexual exploration itself is the focus.

Do I think the market will stay as hot as it is? It wouldn't surprise me if it did. Predicting is a dangerous sport, but there seems to be a sustained appetite for books with heat in them. I'm quite certain that subgenres will continue to rise and fall in relative popularity, and that some new ones will come along that we can't begin to guess at. But I think the overall trend of sexuality will probably remain where it is.

And speaking of sexuality . . . now a word on Butch and V.

Where to start.

The first inclination I had that there was going to be a sexual component to their relationship was in
Dark Lover
, when the two of them spent the day together in Darius's guest room. There was something so intimate about the pair of them lying in those beds, drunk, talking. And then they moved into the Pit with each other and became inseparable. To be honest, I was clear from the beginning what V felt toward Butch, and I was also aware that Butch was clueless about it—but I sat on the dynamic, keeping it to myself. I wasn't sure how to handle it. Or how readers would feel about it.

I do that sometimes. I have whole plotlines that happen in the world that I don't put in the books, and I leave them out for a variety of reasons. Most of the time it has to do with story-focus and book-length issues. For instance, the short story in this compendium about Z and Bella and Nalla has been in my mind for about eighteen months now, but there was nowhere I could put it in any of the books.

Sometimes, though, I leave plotlines out because I'm not sure how to deal with them. As I wrote the first three books, there were all these scenes between Butch and V, both on the page and in my head, and they fascinated me. The whole time, I was like . . .
Okay, when's Butch going to tweak to what's doing with his roommate, and what's his reaction going to be to the way V feels about him?

As I kept banging away at the keyboard, the question in my mind was, Do I bring the dynamic out on the page? And if so, when? Eventually I decided to make the leap. The way I saw it, I had already tiptoed into some tricky waters over the course of the first three books, and it went okay—but more important, the story deserved that kind of honesty.

Lover Revealed
was the logical choice for it in terms of timing.

When Butch was abducted at the beginning of his book, the single-minded focus with which V approached the rescue is reminiscent of the way Z went after Bella in
Lover Awakened.
The thing was, though, the obsession could have been explained by him and the cop being best friends. I knew I had to make it clear that things were beyond friends on V's side, and the scene where he comes to see Butch to heal him in quarantine, and catches Butch and Marissa together, was when I exposed the feelings to the reader in V's POV:

It was pretty clear what (or who) he wanted by the description—and it wasn't Marissa. I have to admit I was a little trepidatious. I'd previously hinted at V's “unconventional interests,” but I had always led with the BDSM stuff, not the fact that he'd also been with males. And here he was, a primary hero in the series . . . who's attracted to another primary hero.

Butch is not bisexual. He's never been into men. He is, if I were pushed to define him, a V-sexual, as it were. There's something about his relationship with Vishous that crosses the line on both sides, and to the cop's credit, he doesn't bolt or get freaked out. He's with Marissa, and he's committed to her, and the V thing hasn't made anyone uncomfortable because boundaries are respected.

I have to say, I think the scene of Butch's induction into the Brotherhood, when V bites him, is off-the-chain erotic: