Black Dagger Brotherhood Cheat Sheet (Part 4)

To celebrate the release of Lover Avenged by J. R. Ward, Decadence has put together an awesome round-up of what we know so far about the world of the Black Dagger Brotherhood. (Warning: The cheat sheets contain spoilers to previous books in the series.) Lover Avenged is out today.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Twitter: #rehv |  (Update) Lover Avenged reviews: By Kat, By Wandergurl, By Decadence

Black Dagger Brotherhood: Butch O’Neal aka Dhestroyer, descended of Wrath, son of Wrath, aka Brian O’Neal

The defining moment of Butch’s life was the day he saw his 15-year old sister Janie get into a car with a group of boys and didn’t tell his parents she was breaking the rules. She was later found raped and murdered. Up to that point, Butch had been treated different to the rest of the family and frequently beaten by his father, but since then he was blamed for what happened to Janie and virtually ostracised. He was 12 years old. Years later, he found out that the reason his father stopped hitting him after Janie’s death was that the old man believed Butch had killed Janie by sending her away with those boys as revenge for the beatings, and didn’t want to give Butch an excuse to kill any more of his children.

Butch went on to become a homicide detective, but didn’t completely belong on the police force either. He didn’t always follow the rules and was well known to rough up the suspects. His life had a definite use-by date: he frequently got wasted on Scotch, had done coke, had empty, meaningless sex, and his job was wearing him down to death. Butch was eventually canned for breaking the nose of a senator’s son who had tried to rape Beth Randall, a young journalist he admired for being gorgeous without using her looks to get ahead.

He was with Beth when her transition was about to start, but took her to Wrath, believing him to be Beth’s dealer. After an initial conflict with the Brotherhood, he was allowed to stay because Vishous had seen him in a dream and took responsibility for him. That night he met Marissa, who made him feel like his slate was wiped clean by being around her purity. Marissa had just divorced Wrath after realising that he would never want her and that he had already fallen for Beth, so Butch’s almost reverent attentions were very welcome.

His life began to improve. He worked out, started dressing in designer threads and became tight with V and Rhage, but because he was human he never completely belonged with the Brotherhood or Marissa either. Instead of being able to protect people, he was kept on the sidelines while his new friends fought and Marissa refused to see him. His life was in limbo—he couldn’t go back (not that there was much to go back to), but as a human, he couldn’t go forward.

One night at ZeroSum, the Reverend notices that Butch kept turning down his girls and offers him someone out of the ordinary to take his mind off his troubles. Butch was about to turn this one down as well until he saw her. ZeroSum’s head of security, Xhex, has the musculature of a male with hair to suit, and small breasts. She looks like she’d make him hurt enough to forget the new life he is trapped in and the female he couldn’t have and he feels self-destructive enough to accept what she offers.

On the way back to the Escalade that night, he interrupts a bunch of lessers terrorising a male, but is captured when their backups arrived. The fore-lesser tortures him for info on the Brotherhood, but he gives them nothing. The Omega cuts off the tip of his own finger and implants it in Butch’s stomach before wiping his memory, in the hopes that he would unknowingly lead the Omega to the Brothers.

V finds Butch and, under the Scribe Virgin’s advice, removes the Omega’s finger with his glowing hand. V then has him quarantined at Havers’s clinic, where he hovers his glowing hand over the wound and also sends Marissa to help Butch recover.

It is impossible to talk about Butch without mentioning V. They bonded over the Boston Red Sox and setting up the compound’s security system with Rhage before moving into the compound’s gatehouse. Maybe some of the closeness comes from Butch being V’s responsibility because he was the one who said Butch had to stay with the Brotherhood (on some not-completely-sexual-but-not-completely-unsexual level a sub to V’s dom?).

Butch never treated V as different from the others, and V respects strength and those who help others. Butch stood up to the Brotherhood the night he met them, despite being the undisputed underdog, and was fired from the police force for disregarding the rules that protect the perp.

So while V, who has kept himself separate from others for so long, has become attached to Butch, Butch is getting closer to Marissa, who hadn’t been aware he’d gone to see her earlier. V happens to see them on a monitor and feels jealous of their closeness in comparison to the hardcore meaningless sex he has.

Marissa’s brother, Havers, also sees Marissa getting too close to Butch and ejects him from the clinic at the first opportunity (where he moves into V’s penthouse while V tries to find out if Butch is evil). Havers also tells off Marissa, and she tells her brother that she would be honoured to be mated to Butch.

At the next Princeps Council meeting an anonymous motion is submitted, using Bella’s kidnapping and Wellsie’s murder (her poor cousin Sarelle wasn’t mentioned, strangely enough) as justification for locking away all unmated females so that their only contact with the world comes via a male relative who has the right to admit or deny whenever he feels like it. Although Marissa had been mated to Wrath, everyone knows  she wasn’t really his shellan, so she is the only member of the Princeps Council who would be affected by the motion.

Immediately after the meeting, Havers throws Marissa out of his house and washes his hands of her. With only half an hour until dawn, she materialises to the Brotherhood compound, humiliated and hoping Wrath would take pity on her. Beth welcomes her and Wrath extends an indefinite invitation to stay.

Butch returns to the mansion and his relationship with Marissa develops further until she needs to feed. Butch offers himself, but is turned down because she would drain him. She goes to feed from Rehvenge while Butch meets V for a drink at ZeroSum after walking in on V having sex with a bound female.

When the Reverend arrives, Butch instinctively attacks, smelling Marissa on him. When V and Butch leave, they find some lessers and Butch instinctively inhales one, but starts smelling like a lesser again and worries that the Omega made him evil.

Marissa returns to the mansion to find Butch drunk and bruised. She tends to him and they have sex, but it doesn’t live up to her expectations (whose first time did?). When she dresses the next evening, all of her clothes remind her of her old life, trapped in the glymera’s contempt, so she burns them in the backyard and is saved from burning by Wrath.

Butch is overwhelmed and tells V that he wants out, even if it means V has to kill him. V tells him that they can find out if Butch has any vampire blood in him and Butch decides to go ahead with it. Marissa doesn’t want him to because there is a high risk that Butch would not survive the investigation, and when they learn that Butch is actually descended from Wrath’s line, Marissa wants him to forgo the transition for the same reason. He gives in to her, but after he explains about his family and never having anywhere to belong before he met her, she realises that he needs to go through the transition or he’d never be happy.

After the transition, he goes through the change and becomes as big as a Brother, but the rule is that his mother must be a Chosen.

The dream V had of Butch comes true when V gets drunk, strips to his glowing skin, and before Butch can stop him, jumps off his balcony penthouse. Partway down, he dematerialises and embraces Butch. When Butch wonders why he feels soothed when V’s glowing skin should burn him, The Scribe Virgin appears and tells them it’s because Butch is the Dhestroyer and he and V are two halves of a whole.

Once Marissa finds out that Butch intends to fight for the race, she leaves him and focuses on the Safe Place, her new house and female vampire refuge.

The Princeps Council meets to vote on the mandatory sehclusion motion and Marissa informs them that, as the eldest of her bloodline, she rather than Havers holds her family’s vote, which she cast against the motion, preventing it from being taken further.

Butch, V and Rhage disrupt the meeting to tell the leahdyre that Lash was busted dealing drugs. Outside, the Omega tells Butch that he is the Omega’s son and to find his family because blood is important.

Butch realises that he has a hero complex because he wants to be forgiven for what happened to Janie.

Marissa conveniently comes to the conclusion that she left Butch for pretty much the same reason that Havers kicked her out and that she should go back to Butch, moments before the other shellans arrive to tell her basically the same thing.

Butch is inducted into the Brotherhood, but the event is hollow without Marissa. He returns to find Marissa waiting at the mansion for him. She proposes and they are mated immediately.

The Omega, Lessening Society and Lash

The Omega is the Scribe Virgin’s brother and was not given the gift of creation. Out of jealousy over this gift, he takes humans (serial killers, sociopaths, etc.) and inducts them into the Lessening Society (the members are called lessers). The heart is removed and placed into a jar and the recruit gets some sort of infusion from the Omega. From then on, they don’t eat or sleep and can’t get it up, so that nothing distracts the lessers from the Omega’s mission.

Lessers are identified by their last initial—e.g. David Ormond would be Mr. O.

There is usually a leader known as the fore-lesser, who commands the troops and gets a few extra powers, such as the ability to paralyse other lessers, but in return the fore-lesser is the Omega’s special little bitch. So power in the organisation is a double-edged sword because no one wants the Omega’s attention.

The longer a lesser has been in the society, the paler he becomes. A veteran has albino-white skin, pale eyes and white-blonde hair. They all stink of baby powder.

The conventional method of killing lessers is stabbing them through the heart, which causes the essence of the Omega that kept them animated to return to the Omega; however, the Dhestroyer is able to inhale the lesser and the Omega’s essence, which theoretically would lead to the Omega being consumed, one lesser at a time.

So once he worked out that he had potentially brought about his own demise, the Omega went back 25 years in the past and impregnated a vampire female, who died delivering his spawn. The young was then adopted by an aristocrat family and raised as a vampire.

Lash seemed to have a lot of behavioural problems growing up and basically thought he was better than everyone else because his father was the Princeps Council leahdyre and the family was loaded, but any time he actually faced trouble he folded like laundry. He specifically targeted John Matthew for being mute and raised by humans, as well as his cousin Qhuinn for having mismatched eyes, and was suspended from the Brotherhood’s training program for dealing drugs.

After his transition he returned with a military-style makeover and a new attitude. To paraphrase John Matthew, his whole bearing told you he didn’t feel the need to pose anymore because he now had what it took to back himself up. Instead of being a mostly verbal pain in the arse, he became a physical threat to John, especially when his work at Havers’s clinic gave him access to John’s file and details of his rape. He threatened to spread the word (and prevent John from ever being respected by vampire society) but when he tried to rape John, Qhuinn slit his throat.

Lash was taken to Havers’s clinic immediately, but the lessers found him and took him to the Omega. The Omega suffocated Lash, removed the vampire heart and blood, which he replaced with his own fist and blood.

Instead of feeding from female vampires, Lash now feeds from lessers. He still gets to eat and have sex, but unlike vampires, he can walk in the sun. He unknowingly picked up an underage girl at a bar and used her sexually (I don’t care that it was a random bar pickup, I’m still calling it: Lash is a dud lay!) and since he left her feeling dirty and unsatisfied, she ratted him out to the cops. Lash was arrested and taken to a holding cell where he met some gangbangers who might make good recruits.

He also killed his vampire parents and had his old house looted. He also sent lessers out to other glymera households to kill the vampires and doggen (servants) and pillage the valuables, which will be very useful to the society because it’s hard to keep track of funds with so many changes in leadership.

John Matthew saw Lash as he was returning to his father, but isn’t sure that he hadn’t hallucinated, so the Brotherhood still believes Lash gave up the glymera under torture before dying.

Lash called a meeting and declared himself king of the lessers, while the fore-lesser seems relegated to right-hand man and Lash’s personal bitch.

The Safe Place

Having Havers evict her from his home shortly before dawn and the threat of the mandatory sehclusion order (which would make unmated females unrecognised as an individual by society—all contact must be made via a male relative who has the right to grant and deny as he sees fit) made Marissa realise that unmated females have nowhere to go in an emergency, and given their sensitivity to the sun, this could easily mean the death of these females.

She sold a necklace and used the proceeds to buy a house in which she was planning to live, but inspired by a young patient at Havers’ clinic and her mother, she instead turned it into a shelter for females and their young who have no place to go. Many of these females are victims of abuse who had no other options.

Marissa sought Mary’s advice on setting up the shelter, given her work at the suicide hotline and Mary also acts as a counsellor. Jane regularly makes rounds there as well, as many of the females are more comfortable with a female doctor. Havers also refers cases of abuse to the shelter, but they have no other contact; however, Marissa’s discussions with Butch (who has seen his share of abuse as a homicide detective) about the shelter has brought them even closer.