Black Wings: A Dark Romance

by Winter Fox

  Although I knew now, that was only because he was an incubus. Finely tuned to seduce and manipulate me.

  Halfway along the corridor which led to my room, I crossed the hallway, and placed a hand on the latch of the tall, arched window. I hesitated for only a moment, before twisting the lock and swinging the pane of glass outward. Leaning out over the thick, stone sill, I assessed the drop to the ground. It must have been twelve meters down. The fall would either kill me, or break every bone in my body.

  Either way, this wasn’t my escape route.

  I quietly closed the window, hoping I hadn’t been noticed, and continued down the hallway, toward my room.

  When I got inside the room, I felt tears start to wet my cheeks as the panic rose within me. I was going to have an attack, and I didn’t think there was very much I could do about it. I’d just been raped by a demon, and I was going to be raped again and again by other demons, until I was dead.

  Bile rose in the back of my throat, and I staggered to the bathroom on wobbly, baby-deer legs. I just managed to sink to my knees in front of the toilet; before the hot vomit spilled forward, and spattered the white porcelain before me. I gagged and retched for at least ten minutes, until my stomach was so empty it hurt.

  When I finally stopped ejecting the contents of my stomach, I rested my forehead against the cool seat and desperately tried to take deep, calming breaths.

  “Daisy?” Emma’s voice was soft, and concerned.

  I tried to answer, but I was exhausted: from the sickness, from the earlier abuse, and from the subsiding panic attack symptoms. Instead, I kept my forehead pressed against the toilet seat, and squeezed my eyes closed, as though I could make everything that had happened to me over the last few days disappear.

  “Come on. Let’s get you onto the bed.” Emma spoke more firmly this time as she hooked her hands underneath my arms, and with surprising strength, tugged me to my feet.

  When I was sitting on the bed with a glass of water in my hand, Emma sat down on the chair by the vanity. She studied me worriedly.

  “Are you feeling a little better?”

  I nodded as I sipped at the water; trying to wash down the taste of my sickness.

  “How badly did he hurt you?” Emma’s eyes were wide with concern.

  This time I shook my head—she didn’t understand what had happened.

  “He didn’t hurt me,” I said softly. “He showed me what he is.”

  Emma crinkled her unblemished brow. “What do you mean, Daisy?”

  I stared at her, wondering if she’d ever seen him in his less-than human form.

  “He has wings, Emma. Huge, fucking black wings.” I wanted to be sick all over again, as I said it.

  Her eyes were wide with surprise now. “He actually showed you his incubus form? I mean, he never loses control like that.”

  I shook my head bitterly, as I recalled his sneering tone when he mocked the way I’d lost my own control, with him. “I don’t think he lost control, Emma. I think he just wanted me to know that I was being raped by a monster.”

  Emma narrowed her eyes thoughtfully. “I’ve worked for Adonis for over eight years now. He’s trained almost twenty women while I’ve lived here, and not one of those women has ever seen his wings. He has complete control of whether or not he shows his true shape to a woman.”

  I shrugged. “Well, he obviously wanted to freak the shit out of me.”

  And it worked.

  “I don’t think so, Daisy. I’ve heard him say that he chooses not to show his wings to the girls. If he showed you, then I believe he lost control with you. If I had to bet, I’d say it has something to do with your aura not fading.”

  I looked down at myself as though I could see my aura. “I bet it’s faded now,” I murmured.

  Emma stood up. “May I?”

  Genuinely curious this time, I held my arm out to the witch. “You may.”

  Emma wrapped her fingers lightly around my arm, and frowned in concentration. I waited patiently to hear what she would say.

  When she pulled her hand back from my arm, Emma looked equally as astonished as she had the last time that she’d checked my aura.

  “How are you doing this, Daisy?”

  “Is my aura brighter again?” I asked curiously.

  “I think you know it is.” Emma watched my face carefully.

  I sighed. “Emma, I honestly didn’t even believe in auras, witches, or incubi until about an hour ago. I don’t even know what color my aura is.”

  “Well that’s the strange thing. It’s not just one color,” she said slowly.

  I was still totally lost. I shrugged in confusion.

  Emma seemed to realize how puzzled I was. “Okay, so Adonis’ aura is a kind of steely blue-gray color. But, when he absorbs a woman’s aura, a small part of his aura will change to her color for a while. It’s almost as though his aura is digesting hers.”

  Urgh. I shuddered.

  Emma continued as though she hadn’t noticed my disgust. “Your aura is quite unusual, Daisy. It’s like the color of a moonstone. It’s pearly white; with a hint of pale blues and greens running through it. But, when I checked just now, a part of it is unmistakably the color of Adonis’ aura.”

  Now she had my attention. “So, I’m digesting his aura?”

  Emma’s voice dropped to a whisper. “I think you might be. But, Daisy, if he knows that you’re a threat to him, he’ll kill you. He’ll have no choice.”

  My blood ran cold as I thought of the two women Adonis had confessed to killing in the past. Was I destined to become number three? My internal dragon seemed delighted by this new piece of information, however. Her head lifted, and she emitted a low rumbling sound from deep within her belly.

  I sensed she wanted to hunt.

  Emma’s voice brought my focus back to her. “Adonis has asked me to check on your aura every morning, and every night. Of course, I’ve been lying to him so far, and I will carry on telling him that your aura dims when he feeds on you.”

  I smiled gratefully at the witch. “Why would you do that for me?”

  She returned my smile. “Because I hate him. I hate all incubi, and you are an innocent. You don’t deserve this, Daisy. None of the women who come here deserve what happens to them.”

  A sudden thought occurred to me. “Why do they do it?”

  Emma looked confused. “Do what?”

  “Well, let’s be honest, when Adonis turns on the charm, I pretty much find that my body just becomes absolute mush. Physically, I can’t resist him, even though mentally, I want to kill him. Why don’t they just charm women into bed, and only use them once or twice so they don’t damage the girl’s aura too badly?”

  Understanding dawned on Emma’s face. “That was how they used to do things. But there are two flaws in that plan. Firstly, they have no idea if another incubus has used the same girl. Auras don’t grow back, so if a girl is unlucky enough to have been with more than one incubus, then she might wind up dead without them realizing what they’re doing.”

  I nodded my understanding.

  Emma continued explaining. “Incubi like to have sex with young, beautiful women, so they’re very likely to go for the same girls. It was getting increasingly difficult to explain away hundreds of young, healthy girls dying for no medical reason.”

  That made total sense. Clearly the incubi were incredibly smart at keeping themselves under the radar—I would never have believed in their existence up until an hour ago. I trembled again as I recalled the image of Adonis buried inside my body, with his black wings arching over me.

  Emma rescued me from the memory. “Secondly, because of the end of the succubus bloodlines, the incubi need human women to have their children. So that they can continue their species. Yes, even today there are women who die in childbirth; but not so very often. It would attract way too much attention if such a high percentage of women were to die—in a first world country, with an extremely high survival rate—during birth.
”

  That made complete sense. “So, the incubi decided to go underground and create whore houses that would feed their sick desires, and provide them with little boys and girls to carry on their genes.”

  “Not girls,” Emma interrupted me. “Only boys. Who are always born incubi.”

  “So, they never have baby girls?” I asked. Curious, despite my fear.

  Emma shook her head. “No. Succubus women used to be able to birth either male incubi or succubi girls. But the last succubus died over three-hundred years ago.”

  “So, this shit has been going on for three-hundred years?” I asked in horror.

  “For the first two-hundred years, the incubi just used any woman they wanted. But, a hundred years ago the ruling incubus, Charles Olympus, passed a law that would confine all sexual activity to houses full of trained slaves. Only slaves were allowed to be made pregnant, after they were auctioned off, once they were almost at the end of their lives. I hear it’s very profitable for Charles.”

  I had stopped listening three sentences ago. That name made every hair on my body stand on end—as though I had been struck by lightning. My mind raced back to the night my father was killed by his friend, and business partner.

  Charles Olympus? Surely it couldn’t be the same man. He was old, but not a hundred years old. Unless?

  “Emma, how long can an incubus live for?”

  She thought about this for a moment, before replying. “A long time. Usually around two to three hundred years.”

  The feeling of sickness rushed back with a vengeance. I was thankful that I was already sitting down. If I hadn’t been, I thought I might have collapsed. Could the man who killed my father also be the man ultimately responsible for my ending up here? I almost didn’t ask the next question that found its way to my lips. But I couldn’t hold it back. I had to know.

  “What does Charles Olympus look like?”

  Emma looked a little surprised by my question. “Err, he looks about fifty-five. Although he carries himself more like he’s thirty—but that’s common in incubi. I think he’s around two-hundred years old. He’s tall, with gray hair, and a very pinched face that makes him look mean. Oh, and he only has one eye.”

  The eye which I hadn’t taken.

  It was him. My father’s murderer was part of this secret society in which I now found myself. My dragon gave a low, angry rumble as she considered how close we were going to get to this man. How we could take our revenge for the things that he had done to my family.

  But Emma hadn’t finished yet. She continued speaking. “You will probably get to meet him soon enough. After all, he is Adonis’ father.”

  My kidnapper was the son of the man who killed my father.

  My mind had been a tangled mess before. Now, I couldn’t even begin to start unravelling the thoughts that assaulted me.

  But with a cold clarity, one certainty began to make itself known among all of the other thoughts, and feelings. A certainty that I had found myself in the position to make the world a better place. I could remove the evil of these two men—this father and son. I could wipe them from the face of this earth. Stopping them from ever hurting anyone else again.

  I was going to kill them both.

  Chapter Sixteen

  I was dreaming. Although the proper term for what I was experiencing was probably nightmaring. I was back in the orphanage where I was sent after my father’s death. I remembered everything about being taken there by the two men who had accompanied Charles to my home on the night that he killed my father.

  The men handed me over to a stern-faced woman, who gripped tightly hold of my small hand; before dragging me up the creaky, wooden stairs. Then I was bathed and put to bed in a dormitory alongside sixteen other orphaned children, for the night.

  I was six-years old: alone, scared, and I had just watched my father be killed by his “friend.” There was no way that I could sleep. I lay in the uncomfortable bed for endless hours, crying quietly to myself.

  As a child, it had never occurred to me how strange it was for an orphanage to accept a lone child in the middle of the night. As an adult, I had often wondered why that woman had taken me from Charles Olympus’s men, without asking a single goddammed question.

  The only conclusion I could come to was that she was as corrupt as Charles, and his henchmen. And, from that moment on I was a doomed child. Destined to remain trapped within the very worst of the care system. I didn’t stay at that first orphanage for very long, only a matter of months.

  Nobody ever explained what was going to happen to me, and I was too afraid to ask.

  The second children’s home I was moved to, kept me for seven years, and it was seven years of misery. The women who worked at the orphanage were cruel; they liked to hit, and they also seemed to like watching us cry.

  But the women were so much easier to cope with than the male staff. I made a friend in my second orphanage—her name was Kim, and she was three years older than I was. When I was twelve and Kim was fifteen, I woke up from one of my usual nightmares about my father’s death.

  Kim usually slept in the bed next to mine, but tonight her bedclothes were thrown back, and she was nowhere to be seen. My first thought was that perhaps she had gone to the bathroom. But, after fifteen minutes had passed, with no sign of her, I knew that wasn’t where she was.

  She finally came back into the dormitory around an hour after I woke, and I was shocked to see that she was crying, and pressing her fingers against a purplish bruise below her left eye.

  “What happened?” I whispered, wide eyed, and fearful.

  Kim climbed quickly into her bed, after firing a fearful glance over her shoulder, toward the door. She burrowed beneath the blanket, and wiped her tear-stained face with the back of her hand.

  She turned haunted eyes on me, and kept shaking her head over and over, as she spoke.

  “Don’t let Thomas take you anywhere, Cara. He’ll hurt you, and he’ll make you do horrible things.”

  Part of me wanted to know what those horrible things were. But a bigger part of me knew that I really, really didn’t. I nodded my head to let her know that I understood what she was telling me; then I burrowed beneath my own blanket to try and find sleep again.

  When I woke up in the morning, Kim was gone, and I never saw her again.

  A couple of years later, when I was thirteen, I learned a little bit more about the horrible things that Thomas liked to make the girls in his care do. I woke up one night as I felt the weight of a person settling on the side of my bed. When I opened my eyes, and realized that it was Thomas, I panicked, and tried to scream. His large hand pressed down over my mouth.

  “Shh. You’ll get into so much trouble if you make a single sound,” he whispered in my ear.

  His threat was enough to make my body stiffen, and my voice disappear. But he hadn’t asked me to go anywhere with him, so maybe I was going to be okay, I reasoned. When his hand began to snake across my hip, running up and over my stomach, I sucked in a fearful breath of air, but stayed still.

  “Good girl,” he murmured, as his hand reached my small breast. He cupped his fingers over the tiny mound, and squeezed gently.

  I was old enough to know that this was seriously wrong, and that I wanted it to stop. My paralysis broke, and I screamed loudly, before shoving him so hard that he fell off the bed with a thud.

  It took just a few seconds for the dormitory to erupt in chaos, as all of the other unwanted and unloved children were woken by the struggle. The door flew open, and Mavis—the orphanage manager—came barreling into the room. Her round face was red and perspiring, and her eyes narrowed in anger when she saw me standing over Thomas as he pulled himself to his feet.

  “Cara, what did you do?” Mavis snapped.

  “I didn’t do anything,” I said quietly.

  Thomas finally got back to his feet, just in time to issue me with a backhanded slap to the face. He hit me hard enough to make me see stars.

 
; “Thomas, enough.” Mavis placed her hands on her wide hips.

  “Cara, if I ever have you disturbing the other children like this again, the consequences will be severe. Do you understand me?”

  I had no idea how the hell I could be in the wrong. But I had little choice except to nod sullenly to Mavis. As Thomas pushed past me, the words he whispered into my ear made my blood run cold.

  “Next time you’ll keep your mouth shut, you little bitch.”

  And, just like that, I knew where Kim had gone. And, I knew that I had no choice either. There wouldn’t be a next time. There couldn’t be a next time.

  By the next morning, I had run.

  I had nowhere to go, and nobody to rely on. I had never met any of my mother’s family—I didn’t even know if she’d had any, and my father had always told me that he had no one else. That it was just us.

  Learning to be a street rat at thirteen-years old, was tough, and there were so many times I regretted leaving the orphanage. I spent the next four years of my life mostly cold, hungry, and completely fucking terrified. I was robbed, beaten, and almost raped; all before I made it to eighteen-years old.

  It was only when I was seventeen, that I walked into a bar in a small town, and found a way change my destiny. It was a blazing hot summers day, and I needed to escape from the searing heat. I had been sitting on the sidewalk for three hours, relying on the coins which kind passers-by had dropped into my bowl.

  I sauntered into the bar—I had grown cocky by then—and asked the woman behind the counter for a beer. She only paused for a split-second to assess my age, before pouring the pint. My years on the streets had given my eyes a hardness that you wouldn’t expect from a youngster, and I had known that she would probably serve me.

  My eyes landed on a poster behind the bar, as she passed me my change. The poster read “help wanted” and I took my chance.

  “You looking for bar help?” I asked casually. I figured I had nothing to lose.

  “As it happens, I am,” she answered. She narrowed her eyes in scrutiny—really sizing me up.