Dead Sea

by Debbie Cassidy

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Other books by Debbie Cassidy

  About the Author

  Copyright © 2019, Debbie Cassidy

  All Rights Reserved

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, duplicated, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior written consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Cover by JMN Art

  Chapter 1

  Maybe it was the fact that everyone in the room was staring at me, or maybe it was the fact that the words coming out of my mouth sounded like something out of a bad science fiction tale, but my hands and face felt as if they were on fire, and the room … The room was way too hot.

  Ignoring the skeptical faces, I forged on. “And then one of the soul eaters turned on the other one and smashed it to pieces.”

  “The soul eaters with the potential souls inside them?” the Sanguinata councilmember asked, her brows so high they were at risk of kissing her hairline.

  “Yes. That’s right. Obviously, I ran while I had the chance. I thought it had glitched out or something, but it chased me and …” My pulse picked up at the memory, at the desperation and fear that had raced through me.

  “And?” she pressed.

  “I thought it was going to kill me.” A lump was forming in my throat, but I swallowed it. Now was not the time for emotion. They needed to hear this. “It etched a message into the ground, a binary code that said … It said, It’s Dad, kill me, kill Genesis.”

  There was a deathly silence in the room. My gaze went to Harker, who was staring at me with an unfathomable expression on her face, and then the alpha of the Carmach pack, who I knew now to be Finn’s father, made a sound of disgust.

  “It’s one thing to spin a tale to hide the fact that you messed up the soul drop, but it’s another to use your dead father to try and add some authenticity to it.”

  What the fuck? I’d known my story would be hard to swallow, but the total disbelief was like a slap in the face.

  “Brendon,” Harker said in soft admonishment. “Echo, there’s no shame in admitting the truth.”

  “The truth?”

  She sighed. “That you stepped off the path on the way to Haven, that you were attacked by the unhallowed. Your wounds were—”

  “Laser wounds. My wounds were laser wounds.”

  “Actually, we weren’t able to confirm that,” she continued, sounding almost sorry about the fact. “The lacerations were more consistent with deep gouges, something that the unhallowed are renowned for.”

  Oh, my God, what the heck was this? “Because the unhallowed did get hold of me. They grabbed me after my father saved me, after he destroyed the soul eater he was speaking from and—”

  “Oh, my goodness, Harker,” Carmach said. “Do we have to listen to any more of this fairy tale? She lost the orb, she lost the candle. Isn’t that enough of a blow?”

  Anger was rising inside me like a tsunami. “I was almost killed out there. I delivered the fucking souls, and I spoke to Death.” I locked gazes with Harker. “He got your letter, and he wrote one back. He told me who he was to you. He saved my life, and he closed Haven. He had no choice. We can’t risk Genesis getting through to wherever the souls go. Death said that—he said we can’t risk it, because otherwise Genesis would be unstoppable.”

  Harker’s expression didn’t shift, and the Sanguinata was shaking her head.

  “Maybe you did deliver the orb,” Harker said. “But you can understand that the rest is hard to swallow.”

  “You don’t have to fucking swallow anything, you just need to have faith in what I’m saying, you need to act. We need to do something, something more to find Genesis. He has my father, and if we find him, then—”

  “Then we kill your father?” Harker cocked her head. “That is what he said, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, he did. But there must be another way. I can talk to him, find out what happened.”

  “Nothing happened,” the Lupinata sneered. “Except that you were attacked by unhallowed. Maybe you do believe what you’re saying? Maybe you hallucinated it while they had you in their grasp. Either way, we’re lucky to have you back, but there’s no denying the loss of the orb and the candle is a huge setback.”

  He wasn’t listening to me, none of them were. And then an awful possibility hit me. Maybe they didn’t want to know the truth. Maybe they wanted to bury their heads in the sand and continue with business as usual, because … because they were scared. They didn’t want to believe, they didn’t want to know, because accepting what I was saying was true would be admitting that the safe little underground world they’d built for themselves was seriously under threat, that the century of relative peace was over, and that Genesis was about to attack with a vengeance.

  I stood and leaned forward, palms flat on the table. “He has a plan. He has a plan, and he’s making moves, and we need to counter. We need to stop hiding, and we need to get out there and find him. We need to end him.”

  “That’s the Keep’s job,” Harker said coolly. “They scout, and they haven’t found him. There’s nothing we can do.”

  That was it. She was done. The dismissal was in her tone and in the shutting down of her face.

  But I wasn’t finished. “Then let me go. Let me go out there with the Draconi and search.”

  “No,” Harker said firmly. “Guardians belong with the Hive. I’m glad you’re safe, Echo, but you need to focus on preparing for your trip to the sea dwellers’ realm. You’re due to leave in a couple of days.”

  The urge to scream in her face, to throw a tantrum, was a burning fist in my chest. “That’s it? You’re just going to dismiss everything I said. Even though Lyrian told you exactly the same thing?”

  “Lyrian was distraught when they brought you in. He explained what you projected to him, but there is no way to know if that’s a true reflection of events. Your hallucination could have easily bled into his psyche.”

  Hallucination? What had happened to me was no hallucination. “Fine, then have Deacon read my memories.”

  Harker’s eyes narrowed slightly. She pursed her lips and looked to the Sanguinata female.

  The Sanguinata shook her head. “In this case, it won’t prove a thing. The unhallowed are adept at messing with the minds of their victims.” Her mouth twisted in sympathy. “Unlike my Lupinata councilman, I don’t believe our guardian to be a liar. I’m convinced that she believes her story. It has become a memory to her. I just don’t think the story is true. It’s simply an elaborate tale woven using whatever the unhallowed could find in her mind. They do love to play with their victims.”

  Why wer
e they doing this? Why were they trying to make me look crazy? The anger that had been rising bubbled over.

  “You know what, fuck you. Fuck you all.”

  Probably not the best parting words, not the most mature exit, but like I’d just said, fuck them.

  The door slammed behind me with a satisfying thud.

  I paced the guardian lounge, fists tight, body trembling with indignant rage, tears of frustration burning the back of my eyes.

  “You should have heard them. You should have seen their faces. They think it’s all an elaborate hallucination the unhallowed created in my mind using my existing memories.”

  Micha stepped in front of me and tugged me into his arms. “Breathe it out. Let it go.”

  “How can she?” Lyrian’s voice was a growl that matched the rage bubbling inside me. “They pretty much accused her of lying.”

  Micha smoothed my hair and kissed my crown. “They don’t want to believe.”

  I peered up at his smooth jaw. “Exactly. They don’t want to know, but how the fuck is that conducive to our survival?”

  “The crystal masks the Hive. Genesis can’t find you here,” Micha said softly. “They believe they’re safe regardless of what havoc Genesis wreaks above ground.”

  “A few days ago, he wasn’t able to navigate the dead zone. He found a way. How long before he finds a way to get to us? How long before the Hive is compromised?”

  “She’s right,” Lyrian said. “We’ve put searching for Genesis on a backburner for too long. The Keep needs to rejuvenate their efforts.”

  Wait, what? “You haven’t been searching?” I pulled back from Micha to look up at his beautiful face properly and saw guilt flash across his feral features. “I thought the Keep’s purpose was to search for Genesis. It’s what the council is always harping on about. Do they know you haven’t been looking?”

  Micha and Lyrian exchanged glances.

  “The Keep is about more than a search for Genesis,” Micha said softly. “In fact, the search hasn’t been a priority for several decades. There are other survivors out there. It’s not something the Protectorate want the humans to know. But there are bunkers and tiny strongholds all over. The Keep finds and brings them into the fold. We keep lines of communication open and provide refuge when needed, and in turn, these small communities provide us with shelter when we’re scavenging far from the Keep.”

  I’d known the Keep was responsible for scavenging for dead tech parts and other resources in abandoned malls and factories. They traveled far and wide to find materials that could make our lives underground easier, but their main purpose had always been explained as aerial scouts searching for Genesis. Meeting the other humans topside had revealed the possibility of other survivors, but the fact that there were whole communities out there …Wait, Micha and I had spoken about this when we’d been resting in a pipe, and he’d mentioned nothing about being aware of the existence of other survivors.

  “You lied to me? When we found those humans, you acted like you didn’t know how they could be topside.”

  Micha looked down steadily at me. “You’re the last guardian, and it wasn’t my place to corrupt you with information the council may not want you to know. Only a select few guardians were ever told the truth about topside. I needed to keep quiet about that.”

  But he’d been able to fill me in on the population control because that was something he knew all guardians were made aware of, except Harker had never spoken to me about it. It was as if the loss of the other potentials had changed the rules, and now they were determined to keep me in the dark until they were forced to tell me stuff. But I was done playing that game. I’d almost died twice, and I was damned if I’d let there be a third time. Information was survival.

  “Echo?” Micha asked. “You pissed at me?”

  I rested my forehead on his pectoral. “No. You did what you had to, and you were honest with me about everything else. I’m not pissed at you; I’m pissed at this fucked-up situation. I’m sick of being treated like a pawn. Go here, do this. Oh, you almost died, but you must be hallucinating how the fuck it happened.”

  The anger surged back up, and Lyrian placed a hand on my shoulder, and it began to ebb immediately.

  “I don’t know whether to be grateful or hate you guys for being able to calm me down so easily.” I broke away from them, walked over to the sofa, and sat down. “So, there are humans out there?”

  “Yes,” Lyrian said. He took the seat opposite me, his huge frame eating up the space. “But these humans are the result of either Draconi and human liaisons or Shedim and human liaisons. They have those genes in their DNA.”

  “You mean like Harker suspects I do?”

  “Yes, except you also have the potential gene.”

  The results on those tests hadn’t come back yet, but if what they were saying was true, then … was I even human? What about Bry and Gem? Neither had the potential gene—it seemed to have skipped them—but they must have the other genes.

  “The humans in the Hive were meant to be purebred,” Lyrian continued in his smooth, mellow tone. “The plan was to have enough potentials in the mix to protect the purebreds. The human hybrids were refused entry to the Hive.”

  His words sank in slowly, pushing past the anger that was still simmering in my veins. “What? They turned them away?”

  Lyrian blew out a breath. “The Hive was the Winged’s brainchild. It was their plan B to save humanity, and by humanity, they meant those with no supernatural ability, those with no nephilim blood. That was the purpose of the Hive. It was an ark and the abominations, as they called the hybrids, weren’t given admission.”

  “The Winged were meant to protect the humans,” Micha continued. “But Genesis killed most of the Winged in the war. Only a handful, like Bane, remain. But unlike Bane, they work at the Keep, needing to be free to fly. You know the Arcana were almost wiped out too, except for thirteen who took residence in the Hive, and who we now know died to activate the crystal.

  “The nephilim took over the mantle of protectors. The ones chosen to enter the Hive were lucky, the rest were left topside to fend for themselves. The location of the Hive was always kept top-secret. Only our mother, her mates, and a select number of Draconi know where it is.”

  There were people out there. People like me? Humans who were tainted with otherworld DNA, and the council had left them to rot all because they wanted to save what they deemed to be humanity.

  “This is wrong.” I looked from Micha to Lyrian. “If the tests show I’m a hybrid, does that mean I have no humanity? Who gets to decide when a human loses his or her humanity? This is … it’s way off.”

  “It’s the same as the conservation humans did in the old days,” Micha explained. “They kept certain species in captivity in carefully created, tailored environments to protect them and prevent them from going extinct.”

  “But they didn’t try to stop natural evolution. Who says that this … what I am … isn’t meant to be the path humanity needs to take in order to survive? Maybe the humanity the Winged were so eager to preserve was meant to go extinct. Maybe humans were meant to become … more.” A cynical thought filled my mind. “But then I suppose the nephilim and many otherworlders would lose a valued food source.”

  From the looks on their faces, I’d hit the nail on the head.

  Humans were cattle. Even now, even in this place. They bled to feed the Sanguinata, and if they’d remained topside, they’d probably have been eaten by the Draconi who still followed the old ways.

  “There has to be a balance,” Micha said. “Genesis isn’t natural, and the effects of his reign are not evolution.”

  Lyrian was watching me with a shrewd expression. “I don’t need Emory’s results to know that you’re not human, Echo. I sensed it the first time we met—it wasn’t just the potential power inside you that made you different, it was the fact I felt no hunger for you. The Draconi were forbidden from eating humans over a century ago, but the p
rimal hunger is still there. It’s something we fight, but it never stirred around you.”

  “You’re saying you never got the urge to eat me?”

  A stab of his desire shot through my mind, but then a wall came down between us, leaving me stunned. What the hell had that been?

  But Micha was talking. “I knew you were different when we first touched. When we shook hands, and I felt the warmth of your skin against mine. I knew.”

  We’d established I was different, but that didn’t help with the immediate issue of my father being in Genesis’s grasp, and yeah, I was like a Sanguinata with a blood bag over this one. There would be no dropping it.

  “We have to do something. Genesis has my father, and I need to save him. I need to convince the council that I’m telling the truth.”

  “And so we bring them proof.” The voice came from the doorway. Emory stood on the threshold dressed casually in yoga pants and a T-shirt, his usual workout garb. Damp tendrils of hair stuck to his forehead, and dark patches on his shirt told me he’d just come from the training room.

  He sauntered in. “I heard what happened in the meeting with the council. Deacon interrupted my workout to fill me in, which he would never normally do because he knows how essential it is for me to beat the shit out of a punching bag every day. He was barred from the meeting but got the details from Valina, the head of the House of Torrent. She desperately wants Deacon’s cock.” He threw himself into the nearest seat, sprawling in it like a lazy lion.

  Emory didn’t curse. He didn’t speak so casually, and on closer inspection, it was obvious what was happening. Emory’s eyes were lighter than usual—the twilight shade edged in gold. Gideon was close to the surface. Not in control fully but affecting Emory regardless.