Emergence

by Jaliza A. Burwell

  “I get it, Nyssa,” he gritted out, eyes narrowing on me.

  “Do you? Because these favors I’m collecting from you are getting ridiculously high. If this continues, you’ll owe me your damn soul.” I couldn’t stop the evil smile at that thought. “I think I’ll like owning your soul.”

  He sighed and ran a hand through his hair. “Something happened, I have to go.” He eyed the gate, the corners of his mouth dipping down. “Maybe you should wait until I come back. This looks bad.”

  “Not happening,” I said. “I’m not running away and if you really think I shouldn’t go in alone, then you can stay here and help instead of running off on me. Again.”

  “Pack first.”

  I huffed out a huge breath of air, expelling my anger. There was no use to it anyways. He would go, leaving me to do this by myself. I didn’t mind it that much, it was just the principle of it. He promised and now, once again, he was backing out. If I didn’t know him better, I would think he was a wussy.

  “Just wait, I’ll come back.”

  “Just go,” I said. “I’m sure Pops will be glad to show you the way out.”

  “Pops?”

  “Jamal.”

  Slade’s expression darkened for a moment at Jamal’s name. “You call him Pops?”

  I shrugged. “He’s an old man, both on the inside and out.” As a human servant, one of the gifts he was rewarded with was longevity. The bond he formed with the vampire who chose him allowed him to live as long as the vampire. He was forever going to look like a forty-something man despite being more than double that. At least he was a gorgeous forty-something-year-old man.

  I didn’t know Slade’s expression could get any darker, but it did. I reserved my pet names for the few who weren’t on my shit list, and he knew about my little quirk. Slade was Darling, Mr. Sharo was Pumpkin, Celia was Baby-cakes, and Jamal was Pops. The names gave me entertainment to no end, especially when I called them by their new pet name the first time. They learned to get used to it.

  Slade blew out a breath and glanced at the gate. “You should come with me. You can drop me off and wait.”

  “I’ll stay here.”

  “Nyssa. You shouldn’t go through that gate alone.”

  “Just go, Slade.” I made a shooing motion with my right hand. “The longer you take, the more they’ll be pissed with you. Go calm down your damn Alpha and afterward, give him a punch for me. I haven’t even met the guy, and I already hate him. He’s working you into the ground. That should be my job.”

  “Things have been difficult.”

  “Uh-huh. That’s why you look like shit.”

  “Nyssa.” He growled and I had to admit, it was a sexy sound coming from Slade. “Be careful or I might think you actually care.”

  I let out a bark of laughter and patted his arm. And made sure to give his muscles a nice squeeze too. Sometimes my hands had a mind of their own.

  Jamal showed up, his eyes hard, promising to tear Slade apart if he acted up.

  “Is there a problem?” he asked me.

  “Yeah, Slade has to go. Can you bring him back to the entrance?”

  “How will he get where he is going?”

  “He’s a shifter.”

  Jamal pursed his lips and then nodded. “Very well.”

  “And, Pops.”

  He stopped and turned to me, his expression carefully blank.

  “He is here because I invited him.”

  Jamal nodded once and turned away, disappearing through the brush. Slade turned to me briefly, already knowing I wasn’t going to wait for him. I never promised him anything.

  “Nyssa, just don’t do anything stupid.”

  I snorted as he walked away.

  I wasn’t stupid.

  I turned back to the gate and took a couple steps closer, stopping only a few feet away.

  The gate felt so wrong. Dark. Haunted. Even my clients could feel the malice because no one dared to approach it except the idiot who went through.

  “We sent someone in yesterday but they haven’t returned, and we fear something bad happened to him,” Mr. Sharo said, coming to stand beside me.

  “Tori,” I said.

  “Who?” He furrowed his brows in confusion by my response.

  “I met her last week, nice vamp. She’s your master, right?”

  Chuckling, Mr. Sharo shook his head, and I sighed. I’d been guessing for the past three years on who his master was. The servants liked to keep their masters’ identities a secret. Hell, most people didn’t even know when they met a human servant. Mr. Sharo was excellent at not telling anyone, which made him even more important because he could easily infiltrate places vampires couldn’t get into and act as their eyes and ears there.

  I met Mr. Sharo on such an occasion. He had been enjoying women throwing themselves at him while watching a rogue vampire. I had been enjoying a few body shots off a hunk of a man. By the end of the night, I had helped Mr. Sharo take out the rogue. Fun times.

  After another moment of enjoying my frustration, he turned back to the gate and got down to business. That was okay. I was going to find out who he belonged to eventually. I had time. “Any idea what happened to him?”

  “Maybe he just found a nice beach and lost track of time with all the beach babes around.”

  “Do you really believe that?”

  I eyed the gate again. No way in hell was he enjoying beach babes right now. Not with this kind of gate.

  “Not at all.” I sighed and made the short hike back to my car with Mr. Sharo following behind, filling me in with some more information. The gate was well hidden by the surrounding bush about half a mile out from the vampires’ lair. One of the guards stumbled across it when he was having a rendezvous with a human girl. Okay, the human girl stumbled into it. She died. The guard had the unfortunate mishap of witnessing it.

  Humans didn’t have the capabilities to go through gates. Witches, shifters, mages, vamps, magic-users, and any beings able to use energy were able to, but humans didn’t make the VIP list. Human servants like Mr. Sharo did because of the bond between them and their masters, but that was an exception. It was another reason gates were so dangerous. The moment a human body part went through the gate, it dissolved, the cells pulled apart. In this case, the left side of the woman’s head and shoulder took a hit. She never had a chance. It would have been a messy death, but death was never clean. Mr. Sharo didn’t need to get into specifics about what happened to her. I’d seen a few mishaps since taking on this job and I’d seen worse in the Woodlands.

  When I reached my little car, I popped the trunk and then pulled out my trusty duffle bag specific to gates most likely to get me killed. When I knew things were going to get dangerously exciting, I strapped up.

  “Why didn’t you just tear it down instead of sending someone through?” I asked, hiding daggers all along my body.

  He watched me, intrigued with the ten daggers I comfortably hid on my person.

  “Pumpkin?”

  “Huh?” He blinked a couple of times and cleared his throat.

  “Why didn’t you just tear down the gate?”

  “You know vampires. If they can use it, they will, but they want clearance first before they just go through. Wouldn’t be good if they walked right into sunlight.”

  I nodded and smirked as his eyes roamed over my body. I could tell he was turned on. He was young-looking and it was hard to miss how handsome he was with his lean build and sandy brown hair that fell over light green eyes. Of course, he was nearly a hundred and fifty years old.

  I called him Mr. Sharo to remind me of his position as one of the oldest human servants I knew, not that I knew many. Otherwise, I would end up forgetting and fuck him. I was very careful with my involvement with the vampires. If I slept with a human servant, the vampires would begin thinking they owned me.

  “Okay, so you want me to go in, get a feel for the place, and try to find your missing buddy.”

  He nodded.<
br />
  “Have a picture of him?”

  He handed over a small picture of a middle-aged man with blond hair, dark brown eyes, and wide features. He wasn’t a professional hopper; I knew all of them in our area since there were so few of us. The man was probably just a curious employee. Not human, but not vamp. Most likely another servant. The DST was going to be pissed with the vampires when they got my report and learned they didn’t follow protocol.

  “Thanks.”

  I walked back to the gate, stepping carefully over large rocks and logs, my eyes glued to the energetic structure. The closer I got, the heavier the air grew with malicious intent. Something was wrong, wrong enough for me to at least consider that maybe I should turn around. I was eighty percent sure something nasty was on the other side. Maybe I should wait for Slade.

  I shook my head. Hell no. If I waited around for Slade, I’d be here forever.

  This gate was small, sneaky. I’d have to duck just to go through it. People only made devious gates when they want to do something bad, and apparently, they wanted to do it to the vampires. These people had some massive balls. It wasn’t even close to October yet and the full moon was a few days ago so they weren’t going crazy, their beasts trying to come out to play. We women had our times of the month but so did shifters. And female shifters were worse. Twice a month, they went crazy, making them the ultimate bitches.

  When I stopped only inches away, it was actually painful. The energy surrounding the gate prickled along my skin as if trying to burrow inside of me. This was not going to be fun to go through. I was already feeling phantom pains from the angry gate.

  Taking a deep breath, I stepped through. I bit my lip as my body felt like it was being pulled apart. Just when I thought I was going to finally die through some kind of freak gate accident, I came out the other end. My body quickly ignored the phantom pains as I took in the large warehouse-type room and accepted the fact that I wasn’t as alone as I thought.

  Chapter Four

  I remember the first time I smelled it. The stench of death. The acrid taste of blood and pain. The screaming and yelling. I remember a man’s frantic voice telling me to run and never stop. And the brokenness I felt after I listened to that voice.

  —Nyssa’s Journal

  The room was large, the ceiling high enough up to be hidden by the shadows that were all over. A pissed off group of three men turned at my presence. I quickly stopped gaping like a damn fish and straightened out, ready to play. Behind the small group was the lost human servant who had gone through, hanging from a hook, blond hair blocking the rest of his features.

  He did not make it far from the gate. Maybe a trap?

  I swallowed the adrenaline wanting to burst from my body and looked over the three men. Two of them had scowls and glared at me as if that alone would make me turn around and leave. As if. The other one just looked at me, or more like through me. He didn’t really see me. He didn’t care that I was there. He was the one I had to watch out for.

  “Looks like I crashed a private party. I can get out of your hair in a moment, just after I get my buddy there,” I said, rolling my shoulders as an attempt to hold back my excitement to get into a scuffle. I didn’t want to seem too eager about getting into a fight. Cecil once told me that it was “bad form.”

  “Who are you?” the third man asked in a smooth, cultured voice. He didn’t even sound angry at the interruption. He was fricken huge and scruffy. Dark wavy brown hair fell around a square face. Some of it fell over his eyes, but he didn’t bother to move it out of the way, his nearly black eyes looking through the strands to stare. His voice did not match his rough appearance, nor did the smoothness of it go with the wild, primal look in his eyes.

  I could tell by his eyes that he thought he was badass enough to handle someone like me. My instincts went on high alert as I realized he was probably right. Every cell in his body screamed danger. A darkness I recognized swirled around him. He was nothing but an empty dark and lonely void. Something I was a little too familiar with and hated to see in someone considered a bad guy. I didn’t want to be able to relate to a bad guy. And if we were similar, did that mean I could potentially be a bad person too?

  I shrugged, trying to stay relaxed. “Just a taxi service here to pick up that guy you have strung up like a piñata.” I pointed to the body.

  The leader lifted a hand up and ran it through his wavy dark brown hair, his body relaxed and even dismissive. “Do you know him?” he asked, his head tilting to the side as if trying to understand what I was saying. His two scowly friends took a couple steps to the side for more room. This could only go one way and for me, and it wasn’t a good way. Me against three huge men wasn’t something I would bet on.

  Wait. Actually, I would so bet on this fight.

  I smirked. “Nope.” They were not going to get information from me. I wasn’t that dumb.

  My instincts were screaming now, throwing themselves around my brain, warning me to play my cards right. The huge man was waking up the warm darkness I held deep within myself. The same darkness that only ever came out when it knew true trouble was around. Heat spread throughout my veins as it unfurled itself within me. I smiled, accepting its help. I needed it, and that part of me was what I relied on for a long time. There was nothing to be scared about.

  “How about we give him back to you after we are through with him?” the huge guy asked. I would have probably believed him to be a calm gentleman if I hadn’t been able to see the cold, calculating darkness in his narrow eyes.

  The other two men took another couple of steps, trying to surround me. I had their weaknesses pegged the moment they began moving.

  My body shook, anticipating the fight, especially with the huge man.

  “No, I’ll take him with me now.”

  At some unseen sign, the two men pounced. I jumped out of the way of the first one and rammed my elbow into the second one’s stomach. A hand grabbed at my right arm and I back kicked, connecting with something very hard. Sharp pain traveled up my leg from the impact. Their grip on my arm tightened, and I was yanked backward. I twisted around and jammed my fist into a face a few inches higher than me. Good thing I aimed high. Something cracked under the force of my hit, and the guy let go, stumbling backward while holding his nose.

  I smirked and faced the other guy. We went at it for a few moments, dodging hits, until I got a good kick to his temple. He went down hard and wasn’t coming back up. I whirled around before the second guy was able to recover and smashed my foot into his chest, followed by two carefully placed kicks. He dropped, and I finished him off with a kick to the head.

  Had to make sure he stayed down.

  I let out a breath and faced the last man. The boss. The big baddie.

  “Who are you?” he asked. He still stood where he was before, never moving an inch as I took out his cronies. They weren’t even a challenge.

  “I could ask the same thing to you, but truthfully, I don’t care. Give that man to me or turn up like these two jokers.”

  He eyed the two men, then me, really seeing me for the first time. He was quick to dismiss me as female, but now he knew I wasn’t some weak little girl. He needed to reassess.

  I used those few seconds to evaluate him. Around six-four, broad shoulders, dark skin, scruffy, filled the dark sweater he wore beautifully, hinting at the rolling muscles underneath. Predator.

  Probably never smiled in his life.

  He went to say something else, but I just wanted to grab my guy and get the hell away. Before he made a sound, I charged.

  Our fight was not pretty. His style was just like mine: mean. We got down and dirty, and it lasted long enough to fear that his buddies would wake and team up against me.

  I went in for another kick to his family jewels, but he blocked me before slamming me on the ground. Pain went up my spine and stole my breath. His hand went to my stomach, and I grunted with pain as he shot a bolt of energy through my body. Mother trucker wasn’t as
human as I’d hoped.

  Warmth soaked my shirt, telling me I was bleeding. Pushing away the pain, I looked up at him, into his nearly black eyes, and for the first time, I realized he wasn’t as cold and calculating as I originally thought. There was a hint of a different kind of crazy shadowing his eyes. The longer we fought, the more pronounced it became. His lips curled up into a smirk, and I suppressed a shiver. Excitement for a good fight thrummed through me, and unwilling to give up, I smashed my palm into his face to get rid of his stupid little smile.

  When he reeled back, I smirked and used my foot to shove him away. I scrambled to my feet and put some distance between us.

  The world only tilted a little bit. I was so ready for the next round.

  Just as we were about to go at it again, a loud squawking echoed through the space. It was loud and obnoxious enough that it completely broke our focus. We had an awkward moment of looking around to find the source until we realized it came from a coat hanging on the back of a chair near a wall.

  The man sighed, and the fight dropped out of him, his craze dimming down to a spark rather than the inferno that it had been building up to be. He eyed me again with the look of a child who just found their new favorite toy. I wasn’t very happy with that idea. I’d rather be a choking hazard; otherwise, he’d destroy me.

  “You fight like you belong in the Woodlands.”

  I shrugged, keeping my guard up. “I can say the same about you.”

  We stared at one another, each measuring the other’s skills, strengths, weaknesses. We were similar in too many ways, the only difference being that he was the bad guy and I was not.

  After another moment, he sighed and built back up his mask of cold indifference. “This has been fun, but I have to leave. You can have him, he isn’t important.”

  “Are you serious?” He was walking away from me? First Slade and now him?

  The man actually turned his back on me and grabbed his jacket, swinging it over his shoulder like a runway model.

  “Why did you want him?” And where are you going?

  He faced me again. “We didn’t. He fell into our lap.”