Dark Obsession

by Aja James

  But now, in the middle of the day, with Annie at summer school, they could delay the conversation no longer.

  “What should we do?” Clara asked the most obvious question, the one they both must have thought to themselves countless times over the past eighteen hours.

  Her husband was silent for a long while, one of his arms curved snugly around her, the other reaching across to hold her hand as they sat side by side on the loveseat in their humble loft.

  “I have never wanted to choose sides,” he finally said. “But we cannot afford to stay on the sidelines.”

  Clara shook her head, agreeing with him completely.

  “If what the Dark King said is true, that Medusa is still after you, we wouldn’t be safe by ourselves any more.”

  “I can protect—”

  “I know you can, Eli,” she interrupted fiercely. “But at what cost? I don’t ever want to go through the pain of losing you again. I can’t! Even if you protect me and Annie, who will protect you? It’s you Medusa holds a grudge with. It’s you she wants.”

  He gazed deeply into her eyes for long moments, and then he murmured, “Clara, if what Ramses said is true, that you and Annie are also…”

  “More reason to learn the truth about what we are, don’t you think?” she persuaded. “Surround ourselves with people who know? Who can help us?”

  “I don’t trust him,” Eli growled. “I sense that he told us truths. But there is more he’s not telling us. He is very old, Clara. Perhaps even older than I am.”

  “And yet you are both gorgeous hunks who look to be in your twenties,” she said brightly, trying to lighten the mood, “while I’m just a human marching resolutely toward my thirties and beyond, acquiring wrinkles and gray hairs and cellulite as I go along.”

  Instead of making him smile, her words had the opposite effect, for when he wasn’t concerned for her safety, he worried about her mortality. Clara’s and Annie’s both.

  He was a being who could live indefinitely, and given how powerful Eli was, he had a high likelihood of doing so. But she and Annie were mortals who had a hundred years at best, if modern medicine worked its magic. That was but a fleeting moment in the timeframe of a Dark One who had already existed over four millennia.

  “Eli…” she soothed, seeing his sadness. “I didn’t mean…”

  “You are more than human,” he said resolutely. “I won’t let you go, Clara. I cannot ever let you go.”

  “Let’s not borrow trouble,” she responded briskly. “I’m still in my twenties! Very spritely. Lots of time yet to figure things out. Maybe if we join the Dark King, we’ll find more information about who we might be. Besides, Ryu is one of the Chosen. Surely we should take this opportunity to be closer to him?”

  Eli could not argue on this point. He’d do anything, grasp at any straws, to find a way to be closer to his son.

  A son he’d tried to kill twice. Whose mother he did succeed in killing.

  The why’s didn’t matter. He didn’t offer excuses. He didn’t expect Ryu’s forgiveness. His only hope was that over time, his son would hate him a little bit less.

  He didn’t deserve more.

  “You do deserve more, Eli,” Clara said softly, reading his mind. “Whatever reservations we might have about the Dark King, surely we should take this chance to know Ryu better? Even if you don’t fight for Ramses, the proximity of being at the Cove will enable you to see Ryu more.”

  “He does not reside there with his family,” Eli argued, though from the tone of his voice, Clara could tell that his resolve was weakening.

  He was daring to hope that he and Ryu might forge some sort of connection, if not relationship.

  “Perhaps they should,” Clara said. “If I understand correctly from Ava, Medusa might be after her too, and worse yet—after their son Kane. After all, Ava is the only human whose DNA bonded with Pure or Dark genes successfully. She is neither Pure, Dark nor human now. She has none of your limitations and many of your strengths, like rapid healing and anti-aging.”

  Eli’s eyes flared for a moment, but the glint in them almost immediately subsided.

  Clara knew what he was thinking.

  “I can try to take the serum too, Eli. Ava’s using her blood to find a cure for her father’s illness, but I know she’s researching deeper into her state of being. Trying to discover what made her blood accept the serum while all other experiments before her failed. We have plenty of time for that.”

  She turned to sit fully astride his lap, looping her arms around his neck.

  “Don’t worry, my Eli. I’ll never leave you. Not even death can come between us.”

  He cupped her face between his hands and kissed her fiercely then.

  Hungrily. Desperately.

  He never wanted to fight again. He was a blade that didn’t want to cut. But for Clara and Annie, he’d do anything.

  He’d become the fearsome killer he once was to keep them safe.

  *** *** *** ***

  Just because they got Mated didn’t mean they’d get a honeymoon.

  The next day began the same way the past few days began—at the ass-crack of dawn with the screech of giant eagles and hurricane-force gales of flapping wings.

  It wasn’t like they’d slept much the night before, Ariel reflected sourly as she pulled on her clothes. She and Maximus had been too preoccupied with a marathon of rutting, fucking and scorching hot loving.

  He’d had her so many times in so many ways she was amazed she could wiggle so much as a pinky finger this morning.

  But, hey, she’d taken him back just as ferociously, clawing him up and biting him down and using him so well he still sported deep bruises today even after drinking his fill of her blood in between and during their raunchy exertions.

  Animals knew how to party hearty!

  It was the best of both worlds to have the primitive, undiluted lust firing her blood while having the sensitive body of a human to fully enjoy physicality to the max.

  They’d done it a few rounds in their animal forms too, but it wasn’t nearly as nice. Expedient, not euphoric. But sometimes they just had the urge, so they simply indulged it.

  It was so freeing to do exactly what they felt like, exactly when they wanted.

  Ariel slanted a covetous look at Maximus’s back as he also got dressed. A few of her claw and bite marks still meandered across his tawny skin like little feline tracks in the desert sand, from his broad shoulders to the deep groove of his spine to his magnificent tight ass.

  He caught her looking and gave her a hard stare, one that said, stop fucking me with your eyes, woman, if you don’t want me to put on a show in front of our feathered friends.

  Hmm. She was pretty bold and up for anything, but she wasn’t quite ready for exhibitionism. Rhys, for one, would never let her hear the end of it.

  With a bite of her lower lip, she turned away to avoid getting caught up in more of the irresistible temptation that was Mad Max.

  She debated for a moment whether clothes were absolutely necessary, since their training would likely require them to be in their animal forms the entire time. But, the prospect of dangling naked from giant-eagle talons with her tender bits getting frostbitten from the icy flight to the training grounds didn’t much appeal. So clothes it was.

  Soon enough, they arrived at the designated location of torture, a valley this time at the base of the mountain.

  Much to Ariel’s delight, they had different trainers today. Rhys and Leti were still the leads, but Azad and Cassandra were nowhere in sight.

  Hmph. As it should be.

  And then she got serious fast.

  Because one of the trainers was the biggest badass of them all—the Tiger King.

  *** *** *** ***

  Though he seemed to be one of the trainers, the Tiger King mostly observed for half of the day, only exerting himself to teach some techniques to Ariel in panther form.

  He hadn’t once sparred with Maximus.

&nbs
p; “No, like this,” Rhys was telling Maximus, spreading one giant eagle wing out of his shoulder blades, followed by the other.

  “You have to concentrate. You have to feel the limb growing or turning into what you want. Don’t get stuck on what it currently is.”

  Maximus concentrated on his hand, willing it to turn into a tiger paw.

  Only Lesser Beasts had this ability, he learned. Those who were mostly animal could only transform their whole selves, not individual parts of themselves.

  But there were restrictions for Lesser Beasts as well. They couldn’t turn their head into the animal’s while maintaining a humanoid torso, for example. They could only turn the head into a mix between animal and humanoid, retaining animal eyes in a human face.

  And, as the males crudely joked while the females rolled their eyes, they couldn’t suddenly and disproportionately enlarge their reproductive parts either.

  Of course, the males argued, that was because their parts were extremely well endowed to begin with. No point in making them obscenely monstrous, sending the females fleeing rather than flocking.

  Leti had muttered something about Rhys’s chicken pecker beneath her breath, and how she was sure he could use some augmentation.

  He’d lobbed back at her something along the lines of, “wouldn’t you like to see for yourself the treasures you can only guess at.”

  Really, the two of them should just hump each other for a year or two and get it over with.

  Despite Maximus’s considerable focus, his hand did not turn into a claw. Nor could he grow a tiger tail from his vampire ass.

  Meanwhile, Rhys sprouted wings and turned his hands and feet into talons. His eyes also sharpened into eagle eyes, and when he came at Maximus in this form, he was more agile and much more deadly.

  Maximus took one beating after another, the eagle-man’s talons shredding his clothes and skin, the massive wings knocking him into boulders heels over head.

  Just when he wanted to slap the metaphorical mat of the boxing ring to signal his defeat, Goya leapt into the fray in his giant tiger form to deflect Rhys’s latest attack.

  With incredible flexibility and precision, he leapt up far higher than Maximus thought possible, grabbed a chunk of Rhys’s right wing between his teeth and hurled him against the nearest rock bed with a seemingly careless flick of his head.

  Rhys made contact with a groan but quickly rolled to his feet, his right wing hunched while his left spread out for balance.

  “Ah, come on,” he grouched, “that was a sneak attack.”

  Goya growled and rolled his head, a clear signal for, if you think you can take me in a frontal attack, come and get it.

  Rhys flapped his right wing a couple of times, testing its strength. Then, with almost blinding speed, he charged Goya in his humanoid form, wings tensed behind him the way eagles did when they dove like a bullet from the sky to snare their prey—

  Only to transform in a flash into the giant eagle at the moment of impact, digging his talons around the tiger’s shoulders.

  Again, with a strength and flexibility Maximus could have sworn was impossible, Goya curled his massive body into a tight ball, got his teeth around one of the eagle’s legs, and used Rhys’s momentum to flip the bird to the ground in the equivalent of a backward body slam.

  The eagle’s stupefied expression while he lay heaving on his back, his wings molting feathers left and right, would have been funny except for the awkward fold of his right wing.

  Uncaring of his audience, Rhys transformed back into a naked humanoid male and rasped, holding his right arm stiffly against his side, “Well, that’s about all the humiliation I can handle for one day. I hope you were watching closely, Max. That was the perfect example of why a Lesser Beast would almost always lose a fair fight with the real deal.”

  Leti came over and threw some clothes down at Rhys while she stood with her back to him, shielding him from view.

  “Goya is the strongest and fiercest fighter. Everyone knows that. He’s not King for nothing,” she said quietly.

  Rhys quirked a corner of his mouth up.

  Another male might have taken umbrage at her remark, thinking she was disparaging his battle prowess. But Rhys knew that it was her way of saying he didn’t lose the skirmish because he wasn’t strong; it was simply that he had been up against nigh impossible odds.

  “Come on, we need to bind that arm,” Leti said brusquely.

  She pulled him up with a firm grasp, then let go so fast he almost fell on his ass again.

  Just when Rhys wondered how they were going to get back to the plateau when he was probably grounded for the time being, Apolla brought reinforcements.

  She and Kayne descended upon the valley, ready to carry the injured and weary back to their enclave. It sure beat the non-aerially-inclined having to climb all the way back up the mountain on foot after a long, hard day of training.

  After a couple of trips, the eagles were ready to take Maximus and Ariel, but Maximus told her to go on without him with a flick of his head. She grinned down at him as Kayne lifted her off the ground and gave him two thumbs up.

  Go get’em, tiger! He could hear her encouraging him through their connection.

  He wanted to learn as much as he could from Goya one-on-one, even though he knew he was in for an even more brutal beating than the one he’d taken from his other trainers all day. It’d be worth it if he could train himself to move half as fast as the Tiger King did.

  Besides, this was his…

  Maximus’s thoughts shied away from the term father.

  The word connoted an emotional connection that was still tenuous at best. Every time Maximus thought about how he came to exist, what Mistress Circe, the vampire bitch who’d borne him, had done, he wanted to retch, to purge his memories of the ugliness he’d witnessed firsthand as a boy.

  Goya didn’t have to tolerate his existence. The Tiger King could have killed him as a weakling vampire boy or when he’d first discovered this place, especially when Maximus still reeked of his vampire mother, the animal in him having been dormant for so long.

  It never ceased to amaze Maximus the gentleness and acceptance the Tiger King had always shown him, despite Goya’s own considerable pain.

  He gazed directly into the Tiger King’s eyes and inclined his head.

  Goya sat tall on his haunches and held his gaze, accepting the gratitude and esteem he’d tried to convey.

  This was in his dreams, Maximus realized.

  The soaring backdrop of snow-capped mountains. A blustery wind churning through the cloudless sky. Barren tundra that was somehow beautiful in their starkness extending for miles around him. An orange sun sinking slowly below a distant horizon.

  And the ice blue eyes of a magnificent white tiger staring steadily back at him.

  Cub.

  He heard that thought again in his head.

  Before the Tiger King’s eyes flashed and his furry maw curved in a feline smile.

  Maximus didn’t need to hear more thoughts to interpret that look.

  He was about to get his ass handed to him by the big boss himself.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “You look like shit.”

  Yup, that’s what he felt like too. Good to know the inside and outside matched.

  Maximus didn’t make it back to the plateau until well after midnight.

  Not only did Goya beat the stuffing out of him in training, he also made Maximus climb the mountain afterwards as an added bonus. Thankfully, it was a hell of a lot easier in his giant tiger form on four massive paws than his vampire form on two legs.

  Despite all that, he’d never felt so alive!

  Especially since, in the last skirmish between him and the Tiger King, the outcome had been a draw. He was getting the hang of this.

  And even though he was a Lesser Beast, he was almost as strong as Goya. Added to his ability to shift parts of himself (which, thank the Dark Goddess he’d finally figured out how to do, no
thing like pressure to make him scramble up the learning curve), the next time he took on the Tiger King, it might just be an even match.

  After arriving back at the enclave, Maximus had gone directly to the hot springs to wash away the blood and grime and just pass out against a rock while he let the soothing water soak away the tension in his muscles.

  Then, he stopped by the fire pit to scrounge whatever scraps that were left from supper, barely chewing as he gobbled up meat and fat.

  Now, in the private cave he shared with Ariel, he dove for the pile of furs on the stone ground, and the female who was naked and soft within them.

  “Maybe you should sit out tomorrow,” Ariel said as she held his head in her lap, with him lying face down upon the furs, his arms loosely cradling her hips.

  “I’m not sure you’re healing fast enough to take this amount of beating day after day.”

  Maximus grunted an incoherent response, too exhausted to form words.

  In truth, he was healing faster than he ever had before. If that wasn’t the case, he couldn’t possibly have survived the last couple of days.

  The Mating with Ariel, alone, would have drained him of strength for at least a week. He shouldn’t have been able to get up from the high-endurance fuckathon much less take beating after beating in grueling training.

  Perhaps it was the raw animal power within him, now fully unleashed. Or perhaps it was Ariel. As much as she drained and wrung every drop of strength out of him with her insatiable demands on his body, the sex and her blood also reenergized him.

  Maybe that’s what he needed now, he thought, his penis immediately hardening in agreement.

  Her chuckle above him sounded like a feline chuff, as if she knew exactly what he was thinking. Which she likely did.

  “You can’t even roll over and you want to do the nasty?” she teased, stroking her fingers through his short black hair.

  “Want you,” he muttered into the juncture of her thighs and wrapped his arms more tightly around her.

  She shifted out of his grasp and pushed him onto his back, straddling his stomach.