The Black Dagger Brotherhood (28 page)

V turns and thrusts the still-red metal slice into the sand, and I'm struck by how strong he is. His shoulders are roped with muscle, and so are his forearms.

As he waits, he releases a stream of smoke from his lips and taps the hand-rolled on the edge of a black ashtray.

I am uneasy around him. I always have been. It makes me sad.

 

I stare at him as he takes the blade from the sand and wipes it with a thick cloth. The metal stretch is irregular in shape and consistency, clearly in the process of being birthed. He examines it, tilting it around, and as he frowns the tattoos on his temple move closer to his eye. Putting the hammer down, he brings his glowing hand back to the blade and clasps it. Light flares, pulling sharp shadows out of the softer candlelight, and a hissing sound sizzles into the air.

When he removes his hand the blade is brilliant orange, and he lays it down on the anvil. Picking up the hammer, he strikes the hot metal over and over again, the clanging sound ringing in my ears.

 

Vishous hits the nascent blade with his glowing hand again and then repeats the banging. After a while he thrusts the metal slice back into the sand and finishes his cigarette.

While he stabs out the hand-rolled, I feel as though I'm intruding and also not getting the job I came to do done. As the silence continues, I think of all the questions I could ask him, like . . . how does he feel about Jane being a ghost? Is he worried that he can't have children? How are things with his mother? What's it like for him to be committed to one person in particular? Does he miss his BDSM lifestyle? Or is he still practicing it with Jane? And what about Butch? Has their relationship changed?

Only thing is, I know that the answers would not be forthcoming, and the silences that follow each inquiry would be deeper and deeper.

I watch him work the blade, alternating the heat and the pounding, until he's evidently satisfied and puts the dagger on the oak table. I wonder for a moment if now isn't when the interview will really start . . . except he just stands up and goes to some smaller lengths of metal rodding that are in the corner. He's going to start another blade, I realize.

I leave his workshop to the sound of the hiss as his hand comes into contact with metal. I go more slowly than I came, maybe because I'm hoping he'll have a change of heart and come after me and at least . . . well, what would he do? Nothing really. A union between the two of us is my aspiration, not his inclination.

As I meander along, the empty mug and wrinkled napkin in my hand, I find myself truly and honestly depressed. Relationships require effort, sure. But you need to have one in the first place in order to work on them. V and I have never clicked, and I'm beginning to realize we never will. And it's not that I don't like him. Far from it.

To me, V is like diamond. You can be impressed and captivated by him and want to stare at him for hours, but he will never reach out and welcome you. As with him, a diamond exists not to be shiny and sparkly or because of who bought it to put on someone's hand—those functions are simply by-products of the results of the incredible pressure inflicted upon its molecules. All that brilliance comes from its—and his—hardness.

And both will also be around long after all of us are gone.

 

Vishous, son of the Scribe Virgin, falls in love with Dr. Jane Whitcomb, the human surgeon who saves his life after he is shot by a
lesser
.

 

God, where to start.

Vishous was, hands down, the single worst writing experience of my life. Getting his story on paper was a miserable exercise in torture and was the first and thus far only time I have ever thought to myself,
I don't want to go to work
.

The whys are complicated, and I'll share three of them.

First of all, each of the Brothers is a separate entity in my head, and they've all had their own way of expressing themselves and their story: Wrath is very dictatorial, very blunt, and I have to race to keep up with him. Rhage is always a cutup—even when the serious parts come rolling through, there's a goofy sidebar going on. Zsadist is reserved and suspicious and chilly, but we've always gotten along. Butch is a total party—with a lot of sex talk thrown in.

V? Vishous is and has always been—and excuse me for being blunt—a prick. A self-contained, defensive prick who doesn't like me.

Putting his story on the page was a nightmare. Every single word was a struggle, particularly when it came to his first draft—most of the time I felt as if I were having to pry the sentences from bedrock using a kiddie hammer and a salad fork.

See, for me, drafting is really a two-part enterprise. The pictures that I have in my head guide the story, but I also need to hear and smell and sense what's going on while I'm doing the writing. What this usually means is that I step into the shitkickers of the Brothers or the stillies of their
shellans
and go through the scenes as if I were living the events through whoever's POV I'm in. To do this, I play the scenes backward and forward, like you would a DVD, and just record, record, record on the page until I feel as though I've captured as much as I can.

Vishous gave me next to nothing to work with, because I couldn't get behind his eyes at all. The scenes that were in POVs other than his were fine, but his? Nothing doing. I could watch, but only from afar—and as a lot of the book is from his perspective, I felt like banging my head against the keyboard.

Look . . . yes, this is fiction. Yes, it's all in my mind. Except, believe it or not, if I can't get into a POV deeply, I feel like I'm making stuff up—and that isn't a happy place. Honestly, I'm not that bright—I'm not going to get it right if I just guess. I have to be inside a person to do things right, and having the V-door slammed in my face was the root of most of my misery.

Things did break eventually, though. More on that in a little bit.

The second reason
Lover Unbound
was a hard book to write was that there was content in it that made me nervous, because I wasn't sure whether the market would bear it. Two things in particular worried me: Bisexuality and BDSM (bondage, dominance, sadomasochism) are topics that not everyone is comfortable with even in terms of subplots, much less when they involve the hero of a book. But that wasn't the full extent of it. In addition, V had been partially castrated and had forcibly taken a male after he'd won his first fight in the war camp.

The thing was, V's complex sexual nature colored a lot of his life—including his relationships with Butch and Jane. In order to show him properly, I felt like I had to present all sides of him.

In the first draft of
Lover Unbound
, I played things so conservatively that the book was flat. I went very light on the bondage scene with him and Jane right before he lets her go, and I didn't put anything about him and Butch in at all.

In the process, I totally violated my own rule number two
(Write Out Loud)
. And, big surprise, the result was something that was about as appealing as a dead sunfish on a summer dock—nothing moved and it stank. I stewed and hemmed and hawed for a week or so, just tinkering with scenes involving John Matthew and Phury. In my heart I knew I had to jump off the cliff and stretch some boundaries, but I was exhausted and uninspired from the effort of trying unsuccessfully to drag V's POV out of him.

Talking to my editor was what got me off my ass and back in the game. She and I discussed the things that were weighing on me, and she was like, “Go for it—just get it all in there and let's see how it plays out on the page.”

She was, as usual, right. In fact, the message she gave me that day was the message she's always given me since way back in the
Dark Lover
era: “Push it all the way, go as far as you can, and we can evaluate later.”

When I went back into the manuscript, I was one hundred percent committed to balls-to-the-walling it—and was surprised that there were really only three scenes that I markedly changed. Two were with Butch and V, with the newer content beginning on pages 209 and 369 respectively, and then I added the scene with V in the war camp that starts on page 287.

The rest of the alterations or additions were relatively minor, but changed the tone of the Butch/V interactions entirely—proving that a little goes a long way. Take, for example, the opening pages of chapter thirteen (p. 135). Butch and V are in bed together, and V is healing Butch after the cop did his business with a lesser. If you read through the second, third, fourth, and fifth paragraphs of my first draft, you'll note that V is admitting to himself he needs soothing in the form of another warm body next to his. It's not Butch's body specifically, however, and there is no mention of anything sexual. It's purely a comfort thing:

What I added in the second draft were these two paragraphs:

Much more honest about what was really going on. Much better. Could have gone even farther, but it was enough—so much so that it required me to add the few sentences that followed, to clarify for the reader that Jane was the object of V's desire now.