by Mandy Rosko
“Jackson?” Damon asked, still looking at him and waiting patiently for him to respond. “What do you remember?”
Jackson bit his lip, his hands fisting the blankets in frustration. He felt like he was standing in front of a brick wall, and that even though he wanted to get to the other side of it, no matter how much he punched, clawed, and kicked, he could not huff and puff and blow it down.
“Not much,” he finally replied. “Maybe you should be filling me in. You’re leading alpha, right?”
Damon’s wide eyes stayed glued to Jackson’s face as he nodded. Whatever he couldn’t recall, it was clearly upsetting the apple cart.
Damon cleared his throat. “Well, Lord Silus has left the Veturious clan, and he’s taken us with him.”
Jackson’s jaw could have dropped to the floor in the shock he felt.
Damon chuckled, his smile genuine and just plain happy. “Yeah, strange, right? Wiktor doesn’t even know this house is here. We’re free. Or, as free as we can be. Lord Silus pretty much lets us do whatever we want, and the kids spend all their time swimming in the lake.”
Lord Silus was their master now. Do whatever they want. The children swimming in a lake.
Jackson felt ready to cry. God, Connor, if only you could have seen this.
“Jackson, there’s still the problem with the missing omegas,” Damon said, returning to his serious mode.
Jackson nodded. “I’ll stay with you if you’ll let me accompany you on the search.”
“It’s not just that. It’s about Joey, too. You remember him? That omega kid we put in the alpha den?”
Jackson searched his memory. The name and idea of putting an omega in with the alphas, another way to hide them from the sexdriven humans, seemed familiar enough.
He shook his head. “No, I don’t remember him.”
Damon closed his eyes, as though Jackson had just told him the most disappointing bit of news he’d heard all day.
“Christ.”
Chapter Fourteen
Cedric was becoming worse. He could feel it the same way he felt Silus’s eyes on him whenever his back was turned. Always checking to make sure he wasn’t shaking or standing too close to a window he might try to open.
He ’d been a vampire for all of three days, and the last time he saw sunlight, that he’d felt it warming his skin, was the day he’d burned his hand. It was still wrapped, not as heavily as before, as his new vampire healing was at least taking effect, but still, it was taking a while, and the stinging pain never seemed to go away.
The lack of sunlight was making him sweat and shake. Cedric had never been an addict to any of the milder drugs he’d taken back in school, but he’d seen what it had done to friends who’d become dependent on the substances they took, especially when they tried to quit cold turkey.
Maybe that was why he ’d never gone for the heavy stuff. That, and Ben’s constant nagging might’ve had something to do with it.
Cedric tried sunbathing in the moonlight to offset the breakdown in his body. The moon’s glow came from the reflection of sunlight, after all, but it was never enough. Silus had pestered him to wear his sunblock if he was going to moonbathe, but Cedric wanted none of that stuff on his skin if it would come between him and the light.
Even on a full moon night, with no clouds to block the blue light of the moon, Cedric left the yard with a deeper ache in his body than ever before.
There was only one thing this could possibly mean, that despite Silus’s assurances that he was no longer a sun sprite, something still lingered within him that made his body crave the sun.
Silus was deciding to be a stubborn idiot about it. “Impossible. You simply need more time to adjust.”
“Jesus Christ, Silus. Look at me.”
Silus did indeed stop his pacing around their recently cleaned— and refurnished, as the scent of death would not leave much of the furniture—bedchamber to look.
Cedric sat on the bed, already knowing what his lover was seeing. Cedric’s hair was no longer the healthy golden color it used to be but now dull and pale by comparison. He’d lost weight in his muscles, at least twenty pounds these last two days, and his clothes, while not hanging from his body, were definitely looser than they had been. Those things alone were not enough to give the impression of poor health. Anyone could drop some weight and lose the highlights in their hair with the right products, but the heavy bags under Cedric’s eyes, dark in contrast with his pale skin, did. Sometimes he thought he looked damn near skeletal.
Cedric could not sleep. He could barely do more than a catnap each night. Cedric was programed to stay awake during the day so he could get his intake of sunlight, but now that he was a vampire, two separate needs were pulling at him.
He felt like he was being torn apart.
Silus clenched his jaw and inhaled deeply through his nose. “Mitch and Kenneth are still hunting for Varinia—”
“I don’t want that bitch anywhere near me!”
“They have yet to report back with any worthwhile news,” Silus said, though he could not entirely ignore Cedric’s outburst. He went down on his knees in front of him and took Cedric’s hands.
“I would as soon never lay eyes on her again rather than have her back on our land, but she is the only healer we have available to us who might offer some answers.”
“Considering how she threw me into the path of an oncoming, raging wild werewolf just to find out if a sun sprite could survive a vampire transformation, I’d rather not have her around to answer any more questions,” Cedric said.
“I know, but I would rather not risk losing you again, even if it means calling on her aid.”
Christ, why did Silus have to talk like that?
Cedric licked his lips. “What if I am dying?”
Silus’s grip on Cedric’s hands tightened. “You are not.”
“But what if I am? I hate asking you this Silus, believe me, I do. I don’t want to die, but my body still needs the sun. I can feel it. Look what it’s doing to me to be without it.”
Silus did look, and he bent his head in despair. He wrapped his arms around Cedric’s waist and held on tightly, and Cedric held him back.
* * * * If Silus could have, he would have stayed with Cedric for the remainder of the night. The thought of losing his lover again, his lifemate, permanently this time, made him feel very much like Atlas. The weight of the world resting on his shoulders with the pain he felt lodged on his back.
Still, the needs of his nest, small as it was, and mostly made up of angry werewolves, needed to be seen to. Especially with the prisoner they kept.
Silus made his way down to the basement while Cedric attempted to pull more sunlight from the moon outside. The holes had all been patched up or blocked off as best they could at this point, but a carpenter still needed to be called in to properly finish the job, and that could not happen until the wild werewolf they captured was either released or dead.
Until then, the screams of the were they kept downstairs would still be too easily heard by anyone who happened to be conducting business on the property, and Silus could not have that.
For the first two days, they could not get the man to speak, even when Silus had every bit of silver jewelry he owned melted down to form a chain and bracelet set for their captive.
The silver was of decent size, quite actually like something any man might wear beneath his clothes, but the sheer size of the were who was forced to wear them dwarfed the silver considerably. It almost appeared like children’s jewelry to see it on him.
The man still grunted and sweated in considerable pain as they burned his skin, however, and so long as they prevented him from transforming into his wolf shape and ravaging the rest of Silus’s house, he was pleased.
The two days ended, and Silus had offered to remove the bracelets, leaving the chain around his neck in place, if he would at least give them his name.
He had. Apparently his name was Romulus.
Cute, Silus had thought at the time. Whether it was the man’s real name, however, or something he’d come up with himself, Silus did not care.
After that, Silus had left him to the devices of Seth, Ben, and the other angry werewolf guards, none of whom showed any pity at all toward their captive, even when Romulus accused them of being traitors to their kind.
A werewolf with a brother mentality. Wonderful.
Now, however, on the third day, it must have finally sunk into that thick head of his—square shape that it was, and too big for his body, Silus doubted the bone of his skull would serve as anything other than armor. The brothers from his pack would not be returning to rescue him soon enough for his liking, and the brother wolves from the pack he had attacked were not about to release him either.
That was why Silus was here. Romulus had finally decided to speak.
“We were saving them from you filthy vampire fucks,” he said, spitting a great glob of something on the thin carpeting of the basement’s floor, as though he were spitting the word vampire from his mouth. “They’re omegas. They can go into a different pack without the say so of any master if they swear an oath to another alpha wolf.
Silus nodded. “I see.”
He and the other wolves had already suspected as much, but now it was confirmed. The part, however, about omegas leaving with other alphas had him confused. “I was under the impression it was against the werewolf code of loyalty.”
“It is, my lord.” Jackson was the one to speak.
Silus turned sharply. Jackson stood in the doorway. The bandage he’d been wearing since he woke up after the attack had been removed, but Silus had not expected to see him down here during the interrogation.
Neither did he understand the reason behind the blazing hatred in his eyes as he stared at Romulus. The other alphas in the room shared similar looks of disgust. Silus suspected that the only thing keeping them from tearing Romulus apart was the fact that Silus was sitting there.
“An omega wolf can be transferred from one master to another, whether it be a leading alpha and his pack, or a vampire. For other werewolves to do it, sir, alphas in particular, it requires mating with the omegas.”
Silus thought he understood but still needed clarification, seeing as he was not a werewolf himself. “The wild wolves who came here mean to mate with the omegas they stole?”
Jackson nodded. He hadn’t so much as blinked the whole time he started at Romulus. “It forces their loyalties, if their mate is part of an entirely different pack.”
“You piece of shit,” Jackson snarled, turning his attention now to the prisoner. “You didn’t come here to liberate slave weres from an oppressing master. You came here to find omegas to breed with and fuck.”
The entire room seemed to growl at this statement.
“Damon,” Silus said.
Not even their leading alpha would cease glaring at the prisoner in order to address his lord. “Yes, my lord?”
“Come with me. Jackson, be sure no one kills him before discovering where the wild pack went.”
“Yes, my lord.”
Clearly, Jackson caught the real meaning. There were many things a man, a werewolf especially, could live through whilst taking punishment.
With that, Silus stepped out of the basement and went up the stairs. Ben followed them. Seth stayed behind to help with the retribution of his friends.
When the door was shut behind them, Ben, being the loudmouthed idiot that he was, spoke first. “Okay, how can they force omegas to mate with them. I always thought you were all in tune with each other when you made your choice.”
“Indeed,” Silus agreed, “and some of the taken were children. What will they do with them?”
Silus had heard of wild werewolves, untamed beasts that still roamed the lands, swearing loyalty only to themselves and the old ways, killing vampires and freeing enslaved werewolves wherever they could.
In the whole century of his existence, he had never come across any. None had ever dared come so close to Veturious, let alone Silus’s family manor.
Damon wet his lips and crossed his arms. “There are ways around everything, my lord. Yes, both wolves have to make the choice before it can officially happen, but there are ways of forcing it. Stockholm syndrome, for one. Pair an unmated, frightened omega with an alpha who will show just the right amount of kindness, and it has been known to happen. It is also possible to simply force the issue. Not common, or likely, but known to happen, so long as the omega makes the choice.”
Damon suddenly grew very pale, as though he’d thought of something that was making him sick.
“What about the children?” Silus asked.“And what of the omegas that were already mated?”
This time Damon rubbed his face with his hand and shifted his feet.
These were not the actions of an alpha wolf, but of a frightened wolf. Clearly this was upsetting. “The mated omegas, they might let go, or kill, depending on the pack. The children, they will intend to keep until they are of proper age. Or they might simply force them to mate anyway. None were under the age of twelve that were taken, that I’ve seen.”
“Jesus Christ,” Ben muttered.
The idea that there were men out there who had children, possibly with the intention of raping them, was what offended Silus the most. He pointed his finger to the basement door, and the stairs behind it. “Make him tell you where the wolves are going, and find them. Bring those children back here.”
“Understood, my lord.” Damon bounded past him and all but ran down the stairs. With the door briefly open, Silus could hear the distinct grunts of pain, as well as the heavy smack of flesh hitting flesh as someone down there attempted to beat Romulus into submission.
Likely they would all be taking turns.
“When they go, I’m going with them,” Ben said.
Silus looked at him.
“Don’t look at me like that. I’m not asking your permission.”
“I would not necessarily have argued with you. They will need all the support they can get for their hunt. But you are human and not exactly on their level. Are you certain you will be able to keep pace with them without slowing them down?”
“I’m a teleporter. I can keep pace with everything,” Ben said, the glare on his face showing just how offended he was that Silus would doubt him. “Seth will want to go. I don’t want him going without me. I’m only telling you that as a courtesy.”
Silus nodded. “Thank you.”
“And,” Ben continued, a warning in his eyes.“If I come back and Cedric is worse or dead, I will kill you.”
Silus returned the glare. “He is not dying.”
Ben made a small grunting sound.“Just make sure you give him what he needs ’til we figure out what’s wrong with him.”
Silus already knew what was wrong. The problem was that his lover was a sun sprite. Even after the transformation to a vampire, he still had the blood and genetics in him of the species he was at birth.
Cedric didn’t know it, but Silus had called off his men from hunting Varinia. He no longer needed her to spell out what was the matter with his lover. She wouldn’t have the answers Silus required to fix the problem anyway.
He only gave Cedric the impression that he was still searching for her because he wanted to keep Cedric’s hope alive, even as his body continued to fail.
There were now two warring sides to Cedric’s blood.
Which would win, and whether or not Cedric would come out of the battle alive, Silus could not tell.
Chapter Fifteen
“ Did you properly mate with him? You have to remember that much.”
Damon’s testy voice was really starting to get on Jackson’s nerves, and he wasn’t exactly in the mood to deal with that as he wiped blood from his knuckles. Some of it was Romulus’s, and some of it belonged to Jackson from the places where his skin had split from hitting too hard.
“No, I don’t remember that much. I still don’t remember h
im at all.”
No, Jackson had no recollection of this supposed mate he’d taken. He’d never thought a day would come when he would ever bother with such a thing again after what happened with Connor. Now, he’d woken up in some strange dreamland where Silus was their master, they were free from Wiktor Veturious’s rule, and Jackson had, or almost had, taken a mate.
He hated that he could not recall this, but he definitely sensed the loss. It had been the same feeling of emptiness he’d carried for years after Connor had been taken, and for longer after once he’d found out about his death, so he knew Damon’s words to be true.
The worst part was when Jackson had asked for a description of the man he’d mated with, and Jackson had produced the photograph of a cub who could have been no older than sixteen.
He’d nearly fallen on his ass in an effort to get away from the image as a quickly as possible.
“You cannot mean—”
“Calm yourself, friend,” Damon had said. “The picture is old and hasn’t been updated in years. Joey is of age.”
That was hardly cause for Jackson to feel better, but he reluctantly came forward to inspect the picture now that he knew it to be harmless. The boy, Joey, was on his knees, a row of other young alphas similarly positioned beside him. The adult alphas stood behind them for the photo. Even Jackson was pictured in their group to the far right.
He recognized it as something the masters usually kept for their records whenever young alphas were introduced to their new duties as guards.
Hiding an omega in with the alphas. Jackson could hardly believe they’d gotten away with such a farce.
But once he stopped to truly look at the picture, some recollection did come to him. This boy had been born to the pack. He could tell that much. And strangely enough, he recognized the boy from his earlier memories.
Joey must have been no older than four or five years of age when Connor had been sold. Jackson recalled the tears the boy had cried when his mother was taken on that same day. She had been beautiful, but Wiktor’s guests had grown tired of using her. The only reason why Joey had not been taken was because of the fit he’d thrown as the mother had been led away. He’d heard she had killed herself shortly after the transaction.
