Hunt the Darkness (Order of the Blade Book 11)

by Stephanie Rowe

  “Hey.” Ryland walked over to him, the dragon scales on his arms sliding in and out of view, indicating just how on edge Ryland was. “You will not lead the Order. You may be Dante’s son, but you have nothing of his talent or skill. You’re just a kid.” He looked at Gabe. “Team meeting tonight. Be there.” He glared at Drew again, then turned away. He shifted into his dragon form and took off over the trees, his massive wings beating with a lazy, but powerful rhythm.

  “Bastard.” Drew watched Ryland fly away, and then looked over at Gabe. “No one else gets it, but you do. What are we going to do to rebuild the Order?”

  Gabe slowly shook his head. “You’re doing nothing. I’m going to the team meeting—”

  There was a sudden roar of an engine, explosively loud. Both Calydons whirled toward the twelve-foot stone wall at the back of Dante’s property just as a massive, gleaming Harley crested the top of the wall. It landed easily on the grass, churning up dirt as it raced across the manicured lawn toward them.

  The brands on Gabe’s arms burned, and he immediately called forth his weapons with a crack and a flash of black light. Instantly, a steel hook sword appeared in each hand, exact replicas of the brands on his arms. Drew might have twenty-one brands on his forearms and twenty-one weapons to call, but Gabe needed only his hook swords.

  He was brilliant with them, and he knew it.

  Gabe’s fingers tightened around his weapons as the motorcycle skidded to a stop inches from him. He didn’t bother to flinch, but Drew leapt back several feet. The rider’s face was hidden behind a black helmet with a shadowed face shield, but his shoulders were huge and muscled. Black leather gloves encased his fingers where they were wrapped around the handlebars. He gave off an aura of pure menace, the kind of intelligent, ruthless menace that meant the intruder wasn’t rogue.

  As the rider pulled off the helmet, Gabe raised his weapons, the brands on his arms burning with the need to attack.

  He didn’t. One of Dante’s rules was to never strike prematurely, a lesson Gabe had learned long, long ago, the hard way.

  So, he waited.

  But he was ready.

  Chapter 6

  It was almost midnight.

  Less than an hour until Sophie had to report to Lucien’s quarters.

  And she still hadn’t figured out how to save herself. Every option she thought of resulted in him using Maria to force Sophie’s compliance. Their only chance was escape…but leaving the demon realm was impossible. Over the last two hundred years, they’d tried. Many, many times. There were only ways in, not out.

  They were trapped.

  Nowhere to go.

  No way to defend themselves.

  At the mercy of a creature that had none.

  “Hey.” Rikker, the foreman of the night’s hunt in the Graveyard of the Damned snapped at her, jerking her attention back to the present. “Focus.”

  “Sorry.” Sophie braced her palms on one of the large, blackened rocks that littered the Graveyard of the Damned, pausing to take a deep breath and try to calm her nerves. Her feet were hot from walking over the steaming lava rock, and her lungs were seared from inhaling the heat.

  Every night for two hundred years, when the lava receded enough to navigate, she had been brought down here to tap into her magical affinity for jewels to search for the legendary stone that would free the demons from their realm.

  Working with jewels was her respite. Despite the creepiness of the graveyard and the extreme heat, being here grounded her and strengthened her, even though a part of her always feared she would find the jewel that would turn the demons loose in the earth realm. For that reason, she always counted the minutes until each hunt was over and she could walk away, knowing the earth was still safe for another day.

  Tonight was different.

  Tonight, she wanted to stay down here in the heat forever, because when she left, she was out of time.

  When she left, Lucien would begin the process of figuring out how to make her stay corporeal when he touched her. What would he come up with? She knew there was no limit to what the depraved leader of the demons would do, not just to her, but to anyone he thought would motivate her. With each passing moment, her fear was growing. Maria wasn’t safe. He would use her to force Sophie’s compliance. And what if he did succeed in keeping her corporeal? What if the moment with the hair wasn’t a fluke? What if he succeeded in being able to have sex with her?

  Dear God. Her stomach lurched and real fear thudded deep in her belly. For the centuries she’d been trapped here, she’d worked hard to protect others, but she’d never had to worry about her own safety. Now, everything had changed. For the first time since those days of her early arrival, she was scared. Really scared.

  She looked up at the purple roof of the cavern. It stretched above her like an endless sky of clouds and sunlight…which, of course, was a lie. No sun had ever made it down here. The roof was getting lighter now, almost lavender, indicating that the lava would start to flow soon, forcing her and the demon excavators to retreat until the next recession.

  “Keep moving.”

  She glanced over her shoulder at Rikker. His horns weren’t as large as Lucien’s, but the way they curved back from his head into razor sharp points of blackness was daunting enough. His muscles were huge, and his face was lean and angular. Unlike Lucien, who always dressed to dominate, Rikker was wearing leather pants and black boots. His only claim to his demonhood was the leather vest that adorned his naked torso, showcasing the scars that crisscrossed his flesh, the results of the battles he’d fought to surge to the top of the food chain. He wanted no one to forget what he’d earned, to forget how deadly he was. There was no softness in his face, no humanity in his voice. He was an iron-muscled machine, focused only on forcing her to track down the jewel that was responsible for the invisible net that kept the demons from crossing over into the earth realm.

  Legend spoke of a spurned woman thousands of years past who had been brought to the demon realm by their leader at the time. Apparently, she’d loved him, but he’d betrayed her by making her his sex slave while he shared his bed with dozens of other women. Furious and bitter, the woman had cast a curse upon the demon realm, severing them from the human world so they could never again cross over and tempt women into their hell. She’d anchored the invisible net in a jewel that she’d buried deep in the Graveyard of the Damned. Demons had been searching the fields for the centuries since then, and found nothing, which is why they’d wanted Sophie so long ago, hoping her natural affinity for jewels would give them the break they’d wanted.

  So far, she hadn’t delivered, but there was nothing anyone could do about it, since they couldn’t touch her…until now.

  Rikker moved closer, and she stiffened, stepping away from his unexpected approach. He never bothered to come close to her. Like all demons, he was driven by lust, and since she couldn’t satisfy that, he endured her presence only because she was their best hope to find the jewels that had bound them to their world so many thousands of years ago.

  “I’m moving,” she said, hopping over a pool of swirling melted rock. Across the plains were thousands of graves, the eternal resting place of those who had been possessed by the demons and dragged into demon hell, their bodies and souls forever trapped even after the demons had moved on.

  She felt something pulse under her foot, indicating a possible jewel. She knelt down, running her hands over the spot. Her fingers tingled, and her heart started to rush with excitement. As much as she didn’t want to free the demons, she could never contain her excitement about jewels. She craved them so deeply in her soul that she suspected that she needed them simply to live. She never felt as alive as she did when she found a new stone and her fingers closed around its hard, beautiful surface.

  Rikker was beside her in a moment, jamming his staff into the ground. The dirt cracked in a violent snap, revealing a six-inch crevice. She immediately dissolved, slipping into the opening as she hunted for the jewe
l. She tumbled through the pores in the rocks, until she found it. It was black and rough, an ugly stone to the uninformed, but she sensed its beauty immediately. She swept around it, encircling it in her being, sliding through its porous gaps. The stone immediately dissolved, each particle latching into a part of her. Cradling it with warmth and love, she sped toward the surface.

  She burst free, reclaiming her human form as she escaped, her hands taking shape first as the stone solidified in her palms. She knelt, oblivious to the hot lava steaming beneath her knees, watching with pure joy as the precious rock hardened.

  “What is it?” Rikker knelt beside her, peering at the stone he didn’t dare touch, knowing all too well that she would dissolve it instinctively if she felt it was in danger. Her first moments of connection with a stone were so close that it became a part of her, taking on her same attributes of dissolving when a demon tried to make physical contact.

  “I don’t know.” She rubbed her thumbs over the outside edge, asking to be granted access. She felt the stone warm in her palms, and then it gently cracked open, the two halves sliding apart to reveal a kingdom of faint purple and silver crystals. “Oh…” she whispered. “Thank you. You’re so beautiful.”

  The stone pulsed with life, and she smiled, her heart aching for the beauty of what she held in her hand. She knew that Rikker would take it shortly, claiming it as one of the resources of the kingdom, but for this first moment, it was simply hers. She filled her heart with love and poured it out through her palms, infusing the stone with the warmth and strength it would need to protect itself once the demons took ownership.

  “Is that it?” Rikker asked, his eagerness obvious.

  “No.” She didn’t need to ask the stone. She could feel its energy was pure and untainted. It was not holding the magic of a spell that held the demons captive. It was pure beauty on its own, formed by centuries of abuse by the lava fields and the decay and rot of this graveyard. She held it up, letting it sparkle. “Can you feel the beauty in it, Rikker?” she whispered reverently. “I wish that just one time, you could feel beauty in your soul instead of all the darkness that haunts you.”

  He didn’t answer, and after a moment, she glanced over at him. He wasn’t watching the stone. He was watching her face, and he had an expression she’d never seen before. It was raw and unmasked, a yearning so powerful that her heart stopped. For a split second, she felt an answering yearning, a deep, relentless desire for a man, not him, but for another man, to look at her that way, as if she were his world, and he saw only beauty in her soul, and that he would stop the world from spinning, if it would help her.

  Then Rikker’s face shifted from raw wonder back to his customary haunted and lethal visage. His shift jerked her back into the present, and the reality that the man beside her was a demon, a creature of the night who cared about nothing but satisfying his own need for lust, death, and freedom. The creature beside her might resemble a man, but there was nothing humane about him, no softness that would fill her heart with the kind of warmth that she craved so badly, the kind of connection that she found only with the jewels for those brief moments.

  Disappointment flooded her, and she bit her lip, startled by the depth of sudden longing for a man who would stand by her side, a man she could trust. She had vague memories of a bond she’d had like that once before, of a boy she’d loved, but the memories of her earth life were faint, distant, and faded, as if they’d been stolen from her along with the life she’d once had. She had brief flashes of people she thought might be her parents, of betrayal, of loss, of fear, but they were unclear, drifting through her mind like an elusive wisp she could never quite pin down. She wasn’t sure she’d even had a bond like that with a boy. Maybe it was just her imagination.

  Not that it mattered what had once been.

  This was her life now, and she had to figure out how to survive it. Resolutely, she lifted her chin, summoning the same fierce strength that had kept her going all these years.

  Then, to her surprise, Rikker reached toward her, and she realized he was trying to touch her. Her ring finger tingled, and her cheek dissolved before he could make contact.

  He froze, his fingers hovering where her jaw had been. “Why do you hide from me?”

  Her heart started to pound. “What do you mean?”

  “Lucien touched you. He touched your hair.” The wonder on his face was long gone, replaced by a dark, hateful scowl. “I spend day after day with you in this hellhole, and I never get to touch you.” He moved closer. “I watch the sway of your hips as you leap across the rivers. I imagine what your breasts would feel like in my hands when you lean over and they sway. I fantasize about what your lips taste like, and I jerk off every fucking night at the thought of what it would be like to be inside you.”

  Sophie froze, her heart hammering in her chest. Rikker had always been a safe zone. He’d never tried to touch her. Ever. Her stomach churned at the idea of him masturbating to the thought of her. “Why are you saying this?”

  He reached for her hair, and it dissolved before he could touch it. “Because Lucien touched you. He touched your hair. That means it’s possible. I want to be the man who does it.” As he spoke, he lunged for her.

  She yelped and dissolved, startled by how fast he’d moved. She didn’t usually contemplate what a predator he was, but his sudden attack was a visceral reminder of how vulnerable she could be to him if she couldn’t dissolve. She reformed several feet away, but she hadn’t even finished taking shape when he moved again, lunging for her so quickly she didn’t even see his hands move. She just felt their energy directed toward her. “Stop it!”

  This time, she reformed further away, as far as she could manage to go, but she had just taken shape when she felt something move at her from behind. She looked down as her chest dissolved and a clawed hand pushed through the hole, fingers grasping the empty space where her breast had been only moments ago.

  She spun around to see one of the other excavation demons standing behind her. He was a digger, a laborer, one she didn’t even know by name, but he was looking at her as if his only mission in life was to consume her very soul. “Stop it!” She backed up, holding out her hands, as if that could stop him, then felt her hip dissolve as another hand tried to grope her.

  She whirled around and saw that she was surrounded on all sides. Eleven demons, their horns twisted and sharp curving from their head, their long, blackened fingernails turning human-shaped hands into grotesque abominations. Their faces, though in the visage of men, were dark with venom and the utter void of humanity. The scent of putrid waste and sulfur filled the air, a smell she recognized from the times when she’d retrieved an exhausted woman from a demon’s bedchamber after a marathon session of sex. It was the odor of demon lust, and rancid sex, of wanting so intense that it awoke in their bodies the ancient rituals of mating.

  Never in her life had it been directed toward her, and now she was surrounded on all sides. “Nothing has changed,” she said, trying to keep her voice even. “You can’t have me. No one can.”

  “Lucien touched you,” one of the demons said. “He touched your hair.”

  “I heard it was as soft as it looks. Softer. Spun gold,” another said, his eyes dark and scary as he fixated on her hair.

  Rikker held up his hand, and the demons fell silent. “Mine,” he said softly. “I’ve been waiting for you for years, Sophie. Mine.”

  She met his gaze, and fear trapped thick in her throat. His expression was that of a man who’d claimed his woman, a predator who had identified his prey in a hunt that would never end. Suddenly, the protective shield that had kept her safe all these years was gone. She was in more danger than the new arrivals, who were selected by only one demon and claimed by him. Some of the demons even treated their women decently, and no female had ever complained about the quality of the sex, even if it did get a little rough sometimes.

  But this was different. She’d been a temptation for so long, and she’d neve
r realized how her presence had been such a tease. She’d been a temptation to their most base desires, a lure dangling before them that they could never have, creating a driving want that had been building all this time, amassing its force with greater and greater urgency…and now they believed they had a chance to take what they’d been deprived of for so long. She could see in the eyes of all the ones around her that not a single one would stop until they had her, until they’d found a way to force her to stay corporeal, the way Lucien had done.

  The terrifying thing was that Lucien’s momentary success meant that it was actually possible that these demons could force her to stay corporeal long enough for them to do whatever they wanted. She wasn’t safe. Lucien knew it, and now, so did every single demon in the kingdom. They would try everything until they found out what the secret was, until they figured out how to take her, and then, they would unleash years and years of pent-up lust onto her.

  She met Rikker’s gaze. “He didn’t touch me,” she lied. “The rumor is wrong.” She held out her hand to him, in an invitation, as if she had nothing to hide. “Try it. Everything is still the same.” She managed to keep her voice steady, fighting to hide the fear that demons were so good at sensing.

  Rikker broke free from the circle that ringed her and strode forward, his muscles rippling as the other demons shifted position to close the empty space he’d left behind. She lifted her chin as he came to a stop in front of her. His black eyes bore down on her, brimming with lust so thick that her skin tingled with the need to escape.

  She didn’t bother to try to hold her form, letting him see how his want triggered her defenses.

  But this time, instead of a stoic, reserved mask, his face twisted in anger. “No,” he snapped, lunging for her wrist, which dissolved before he could reach it. “I won’t play this game anymore.”