Black Dagger Brotherhood Cheat Sheet (Part 5)

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 now.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Twitter: #rehv |  (Update) Lover Avenged reviews: By Kat, By Wandergurl, By Decadence

Black Dagger Brotherhood: Vishous, son of the Bloodletter

V. My personal fave. I could just rave about how beautiful he is, with his diamond hard heart, absolutely incredible intelligence (not to mention smart mouth), dominant sexuality and uncompromising masculinity, but that wouldn’t get us anywhere except teaching me yet again that my keyboard is not drool-proof (picture Homer Simpson around any non-vegetable based food). So to avoid another costly lesson, I’ll try to just stick to the facts. Vishous is the direct, biological son of the Scribe Virgin, which has been more of a curse than a blessing. The gift she was given allowed for only one single act of creation, which she used in creating the vampires. Her taking on vampire form and reproducing disrupted the balance and has cursed everyone involved. When the Scribe Virgin was shopping for a baby daddy, she decided to pick the most cunning and aggressive male she could find, a warrior known as the Bloodletter. She doesn’t know how, but the Bloodletter knew who she was and what she wanted and cut a deal with her: their son would spend the first 3 years of his life on the Other Side, the next 300 with his father, and the following 300 with his mother. The years before V’s transition sucked. He grew up in a warrior camp under pretty Spartan conditions and often didn’t get enough to eat, unless he was fast and crafty enough to steal from a warrior or got to the leftovers before the other pretrans. His bastard of a father seemed to single him out in front of everyone, which also kept him separate from the others. V was frequently beaten, usually as the result of being set up in damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t situations. He had two comforts: a diary written by Darius, who had lived in the camp before him, and the ideal of a mother who valued and protected him. Another pretrans busted him reading instead of working and threatened to dob him in to his father. During the fight, V had a vision of the pretrans’s death and warned him. His father saw and made V hand over his books (he managed to salvage the diary) to be burned. V decided to stop feeling, because it changed nothing. About a week later, the pretrans died as predicted and others on the scene banded against V. A few weeks after that, V went through his transition and was only given a female to feed from after he confessed to killing the pretrans. To neutralise V as a threat to his authority, the Bloodletter immediately sent V into the ring to fight (typically a newly transitioned male would have a day to recover), with only a broom as a weapon against a spiky ball on a chain. V won the fight and the Bloodletter tried to discredit him when he made to leave without raping the loser. All the anger V had been suppressing rose up and V had sex for the first time in front of the camp to cement his prowess over the other warrior, but the Bloodletter was able to construe V’s immediate retreat as cowardice after all. V threw himself at his father, leading with his glowing hand. As he watched his father start to die, he predicted, “You shall see your end in a wall of fire caused by a pain you know. You will burn until you are nothing but smoke, and be cast upon the wind.” Another soldier pulled V off the Bloodletter before the bastard could be killed. Instead of killing V, the Bloodletter exiled him from the camp, then had the warnings tattooed on his face, hand, groin and thighs. Then the final punishment (possible to the Scribe Virgin as well?) was castration by blunt pliers. V’s whole body glowed and everyone making contact with him turned to dust before the torture could be completed. V travelled Europe and was eventually taken in by a vampire merchant in Italy. One night in Rome, he noticed a young pretrans male whose mother was being attacked by a lesser. He killed the lesser, but not before the mother died. The mother was a fallen Chosen, and V having saved a young with warrior blood brought him to Darius’s attention. Darius introduced V to Wrath and they clicked, since neither of them was interested in having ties to others. Eventually V was inducted into the Brotherhood. He likes his distance from others because he is constantly bombarded with people’s thoughts and uses rap to drown them out. He still has visions, specialising in deaths, only without such useful info as when and where, so he can’t save anyone. His tattooed hand is always gloved and he has to be careful not to allow anyone to come into contact with it. He became famous within the race for his hardcore sexual preferences; some consider it to be a rite of passage to be bound to his table and dominated. Although I would have expected a reasonable degree of intimacy to be involved when you have such total control over what another person sees, hears, feels and does, V keeps his distance from his regulars. The domination is how he releases tension and wears himself down. It has all the intimacy of a workout at the gym. But that’s not to say he isn’t aware of how his brand of sex is experienced by the sub and he definitely doesn’t cross the line. He isn’t cruel or abusive, but he is cold towards them. But then they know the score going in anyway and are free to leave whenever they want. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that, based on his lack of feeling for his subs and how Cormia’s presentation to him left him cold on one hand and the spark of interest he felt at the prospect of fighting Xhex and possibly conquering Jane on the other, V finds submission expedient, but really enjoys the struggle. I think he doesn’t do that with his subs because then he’d have to engage with them more than he is willing to. But V does care for others in his own way. Instead of buying a sports car, he drives an Escalade so that he can drive Rhage home after the beast has been. He sets up security systems for the females his Brothers come into contact with. He makes the black daggers, customised for each Brother. He’s a trained medic. And then there’s this rhythmic rubbing thing he does to calm people down (get your minds out of the gutter, it’s legit). When Butch arrived with a transitioning Beth and was caught getting too close to Marissa, V wanted to kill him, but instead they bonded over their love of the Boston Red Sox and got drunk together. V dreamed of him and told Wrath the human was supposed to stay with them and assumed responsibility for him. They moved into the mansion’s gatehouse and even started finishing each other’s sentences. V respected Butch for not backing down to the Brothers that night, despite or maybe even because Butch would have had his arse handed to him, and became attached to someone for the first time. V thought it was because Butch’s rough edges made everything else in life smoother. There was also a competitive and banter-ish edge to their friendship (again with the struggle). He let his guard down with Butch more than he had with anyone else and this openness started to become a sexual attraction, which Butch seemed to return to a point, but his number one love was for Marissa. But it was through Butch and his relationship with Marissa that V was able to see what real love and intimacy looked like and hated himself for his “shameful depravity”. Also around this time, V’s visions and mindreading dried up beyond a single imperative to feed Butch (this was how V found him after he’d been tortured and infected by the Omega) and he was plagued by a nightmare of being shot in the chest. So the stress of flying blind for the first time in almost 300 years, lack of sleep, almost losing Butch completely, and finally losing Butch to Marissa brought V undone. Out of self-loathing and disgust, he jumped off his penthouse balcony in front of Butch, but materialised back before he would have hit the ground. When he decided not to commit suicide after all, he broke down in Butch’s arms and their roles were reversed. Butch told V that until he was able to look after himself again, Butch had his back. The Scribe Virgin appears to V and tells him that she is his mother and that he will be the Primale (in an interview Ward pronounced this word as Pruh-MAH-lee after I was used to Prime male), sperm donor to the forty Chosen on the Other Side. Despite being pissed at his mother’s neglect when he needed her and his unwillingness to beget young and spend the rest of his existence having vanilla sex with so many strangers, he agrees because the Brotherhood needs members (no pun intended) and the only other eligible male is Phury who is heartbroken over Bella. That night Vishous is shot in the chest after killing a lesser and is taken to a human hospital, where he is operated on by Jane Whitcomb, MD. She is fascinated by his 6-chambered heart and takes lots of photos, hoping to get her patient’s permission to study him. Jane’s boss, Manuel Manello, MD, is pissed to find out that she has an interview for Chief of Staff at another hospital. He wants her to stay because she is the best trauma surgeon and because he is attracted to her. The patient has other ideas. When his friends come to break him out, he tells them that Jane is meant to go with him. Jane was already unwillingly attracted to V and even though she resents being abducted, she puts the Hippocratic Oath first and monitors his condition. The speed of healing, unusual heart and hypnosis convince Jane that V is not human. She tries to learn more about him and he decides to tell her. After all, she’s only there for the weekend and her memory will be scrubbed, so it’s not like some stranger gets to keep his private info. Not to mention he’s drawn to her. So he’s free to let his guard down around her emotionally, too. In a lot of ways, Jane is like a female Butch. She’s a fighter who helps people and is a sarcastic smart arse he banters with, not to mention highly intelligent. She even orders V around for his own good and doesn’t take any crap. Jane can be very warm and compassionate, which is what V needs to help him deal with everything that’s been done to him, but isn’t sappy and doesn’t insult him with pity. They both know how your life can be affected by crappy parents. V realises that his mating instincts have come to the fore and they’re not for Butch. Then she does the one thing guaranteed to go straight to a Brother’s heart: when Phury is hurt in a fight, she repairs the damage and with much more finesse and skill than even V could have managed. Inevitably the time comes for V to let Jane go, but because she is his only shot at love, he takes her to his penthouse at the Commodore and offers his submission, giving himself to her in a way he hasn’t done with anyone before and never would as the Primale. Then he scrubs her. In preparation for the Primale’s mating to a representative of the Chosen, V is introduced to Cormia, who is bound to a platform and wheeled in. V is immediately and ironically put off by her submission, probably because he never realised his mate would be as reluctant as he was to complete the ceremony. In a last ditch effort to exorcise his feelings for Bella, Phury offers to take V’s place as the Primale so V can be with Jane. Unfortunately they don’t have much time together before a lesser kills Jane. Insane with grief, V stages a car accident to explain Jane’s human death and takes her body to the Brotherhood’s tombs to reanimate her, Omega-style. The Scribe Virgin interrupts him and says that Jane would be evil, besides which, there would be no balance. V demands to know what his sacrifice would be and decides to give up his normal, non-glowing, un-inked hand, but is again interrupted by the Scribe Virgin. When the Brothers find Vishous, he still has both hands and a Jane-shaped pile of ash. He is like the living dead until the Scribe Virgin visits him and reunites him with Jane. His cursed glow that was used to heal Butch is also used to give Jane form, so the two people he is closest to don’t need to be protected from his hand. Jane can never be hurt again and, when V dies, she will be able to follow him into the Fade. It’s actually the best solution for them as V would have had to watch Jane age and die otherwise. Jane had set up the interview with the other hospital because she wanted to be in charge and now she is the Brotherhood’s personal physician with enough of the unknown to keep the geneticist in her happy. This ending has come under fire, but there wouldn’t be a HEA if Jane had lived. I personally have made peace with the mixed feelings I had about it because V wouldn’t be happy if Jane could be taken from him. Once V learns that his mother had sacrificed her birds to give him back Jane, he starts bringing birds over to fill her trees again.

Payne

V’s twin sister, who he doesn’t even know exists. Payne never fit in with the Chosen because she was considered too aggressive like her father. At some point the Scribe Virgin placed Payne in stasis, but after seeing how unhappy her actions have made Vishous, she released Payne, whose response was, “Fuck you.” So, clearly, no love lost there.

Dr Manuel Manello

Dr Manello was Jane’s boss and arguably her closest friend until her “death”. A human surgeon, he is strong and bossy and if not for V, he might have made a good match for Jane. Out of respect for Jane, V didn’t kill or hurt Manny when he retrieved pics of his 6-chambered heart from the hospital, but Manny’s mind was strong enough to throw off V’s mind control long enough to ask who V was. V had a vision about him in the form of the word “brother”. Actually the word was a paragraph on its own, so I don’t know if it’s capital B “Brother” or lower case “brother”. I’m not being anal, there is a significant difference, and Ward’s legal background has made her very tricky. Semantics count with her.

Medical quirks

Havers has been trying to create a vampire blood bank, but is unable to keep samples fresh (I have a pet theory on this, BTW). The vampire blood dies off quickly in all of his experiments so far, so it isn’t a viable option for those who, like Havers, don’t want to feed off a vampire of the opposite sex, or operating on patients without an immediate donor on hand. In case anyone is interested, vampires have 6-chambered hearts, but I’m not sure why. Strangely, as Beth and Butch are half-breeds, their hearts still have only 4 chambers, even though their bodies went through the transition and Butch went through the change.