by Colleen Vanderlinden
Published by Building Block Studios, LLC
Detroit, Michigan, 2015
© 2015 Colleen Vanderlinden
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, email the author at [email protected].
Contents
Books by Colleen Vanderlinden
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Epilogue
Letter from the Author
About the Author
Books by
Colleen Vanderlinden
The Hidden: Soulhunter Series
Guardian
Betrayer
The Hidden Series
Book One: Lost Girl
Book Two: Broken
Book Three: Home
Book Four: Strife
Book Five: Nether
Hidden Series Novellas
Forever Night
Earth Bound
The Copper Falls Series
Shadow Witch Rising
Shadow Sworn
* * *
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Prologue
Hesiod, Theogony 211
(Greek epic 8th or 7th Century B.C.) :
"And Nyx (Night) bare hateful Moros (Doom) and black Ker (Violent Death) and Thanatos (Death), and she bare Hypnos (Sleep) and the tribe of Oneiroi (Dreams). And again the goddess murky Nyx, though she lay with none, bare Momos (Blame) and painful Oizys (Misery), and the Hesperides . . . Also she bare the Moirai (Fates) and the ruthless Keres (Death-Guardians) . . . Also deadly Nyx bare Nemesis (Envy) to afflict mortal men, and after her, Apate (Deceit) and Philotes (Friendship) and hateful Geras (Old Age) and hard-hearted Eris (Strife)."
Nyx the Creator
(As told to the Fates by Nyx, Darkness Be Her Name)
How little the living know of Me,
From whom the beginning and all things arose.
I am unknowable.
I lay with none, yet gave Breath to all.
Aether, beloved Son of My Flesh. My only.
Nether, created to balance Aether.
And Nether and Aether together
created children, planets, stars.
Life requires balance, and so I created Death.
Hades, God of Death, to judge.
Furies, also named Erinyes, to punish.
Guardians, also named Keres, to escort the dead.
The Fates, also named Moirai, to observe and remember.
Balance.
Life and Death.
Good and Evil.
Happiness and Malaise.
Married forever, never one without the other.
My creations.
My design.
Existence.
Without balance, existence crumbles
Until there is only Me,
For, should everything else end, I will remain
And I shall create anew.
Chapter One
The soul of Boqin Chen ran from me, darting through stall after stall in the Silk Street Market in Beijing. A few minutes past, I had almost had him, when he had ducked into a narrow stall selling silk and cotton fabrics. This one knew enough about my abilities to know how to work against them. A crowded place like this one, full of people, made it so that the more useful of my powers, the ability to rematerialize in a different place, was nullified. Disappearing and reappearing among the shoppers would only cause panic and confusion, and, while that did not really matter overmuch to me, I disliked drawing attention to myself. I would save that handy little trick for when I would actually benefit from it.
So he stuck to the crowded areas, and I followed him, stalking quickly on foot like a mere mortal while he played his games.
I was beginning to lose my patience.
We had been playing this particular game for over an hour. In addition to what I already knew about Chen, it was all just giving me more reason to look forward to sticking my dagger into him.
Repeatedly, perhaps.
My phone vibrated in my jeans pocket again, and I suppressed my irritated sigh. It would wait.
Chen, like too many other souls I had dealt with of late, was on his way to developing a corporeal form. I now knew that a few of my own sisters, the other Guardians (who I had assumed dead) were partially behind the effort to raise an army of undead to use against my friend, my Queen, the Goddess of Death. She had no shortage of enemies, and we had learned that there was a concerted effort now being made to overthrow her. My sisters had been working with someone, or perhaps several someones, to use the very souls under Mollis’s domain against her.
Undeath was an efficient way to do it; they fed the still-beating heart of a human to a soul. If they did that three times, the soul would have a fully capable, ridiculously strong, endlessly hungry living form. And, in the process, they created three new souls; those of the humans they’d murdered. Those souls were never given a chance to make their way to Mollis to be judged.
All of it weakened my Queen, and our enemies knew it.
I caught sight of Chen again, ducking into a stall off of the main thoroughfare. He caught my eye, grinned in a rather cocky manner. I stalked toward him. The shopkeeper saw me coming, and started selling me on his wares immediately, a fragrant array of spices that gave his stall a pleasant, warm aroma. I ignored him, eyes on that which I hunted. If I moved quickly enough, I could get a hand on Chen and rematerialize us elsewhere to finish what I needed to do.
Humans tended to panic when I stabbed at what looked like thin air with my Netherblade. I had learned that lesson the hard way countless years ago. It was best to do any stabbing that was required in private. And there was always stabbing required.
I made my move, sweeping my hand out while the shopkeeper continued chattering on, and Chen dodged to the side and did something I had never seen a soul do before: he stood in the same place as the shopkeeper, using the human’s body as a shield against me.
She shopkeeper shivered and began rubbing his arms.
“Cold all of a sudden,” he muttered.
I stared at the soul of Chen, whose face, to my sight, was like a transparent layer over the face of the shopkeeper. While the shopkeeper shivered and muttered, Chen grinned. It was an infamous grin, and I had to admit that, knowing that, I only found his smiling more disconcerting. Most of the souls I was hunting for Mollis were murderers. Serial murderers. Some had also been serial rapists, and usually they had murdered their victims as well.
Chen, though… Chen was different. In his day, he had been known as “The Happy Sadist.” Torture, unspeakable pain and suffering. That had been his thing, and during his lifetime, he had abducted and tortured twenty-two people. Every one of his victims had lived, an
d he had set them free once he’d bored of them. Every one of them lived to tell the tale of the terrifying man who grinned while torturing them. The authorities had never caught up with him, and Chen had died, finally, of a heart attack. I had collected his soul in the first place. I was not at all happy to be doing it again.
“Did you just get cold? Must be a rain coming,” the shopkeeper said to me, shivering slightly.
“Perhaps moving around a bit would help,” I said in Mandarin, and the shopkeeper nodded, started pacing. The second Chen was exposed, I gave up on being subtle and not confusing the humans. I leapt forward, got a hold of Chen’s arm, and rematerialized him in the next second to an empty stretch of alley in one of Beijing’s red light districts. Most of these establishments were not open this early in the morning.
The second Chen and I reappeared, I plunged my Netherblade into the back of his neck, with no small amount of pleasure. He screeched, and struggled, and, thankfully, weakened.
One human heart. This one had begun his transition to undeath but thankfully would not be around to complete it. I was beginning to learn what the various stages of undeath felt like. During the past month, I had continued my work for Mollis in secret. There was a traitor in my friend’s own family, and to attempt to draw them out, Mollis had exiled me. To the rest of the world, she and I were now enemies. The hope was that her traitor would eventually approach me, attempt to draw me to work with them against her. So we waited, and we played this game in which publicly we were at war, but behind the scenes, we were perhaps closer than we had ever been. Her mate, Nain, knew about our ruse, as did Brennan.
The only real complication (besides losing my home and the regard of many of the city’s supernaturals, who now treated me as a pariah now that word had spread of the split between Mollis and I) was that I could no longer simply turn these lost souls over to Mollis’s family in the Netherwoods. I was no longer allowed there. And that meant that the souls could not just be locked up to await their judgment.
In the end, what Mollis and I had come up with was that I would collect a soul and take it to an abandoned church in Detroit. Mollis was always able to feel when I had collected one, and she would meet me at the church as soon as she possibly could. Usually, it was mere minutes. She would work at the soul, and, finally, judge them, punish them, and send them to where they would spend eternity. We had to do all of this circumventing the Furies, Mollis’s family. Right now, they were our primary suspects. Mollis understandably wanted more proof of their betrayal before destroying them. They were her family. Her aunt, and her own mother. She had come to love them, to cherish the connection she had to them.
But we both knew that the second we found evidence that they’d betrayed her, Mollis would destroy them. And her fury would be absolute.
So Chen had been helped by someone. Souls were not able to murder on their own, not until they reached full undeath.
“Who helped you?” I asked as he screamed, as my dagger leached the meager life he’d attained from him.
He lunged at me, and I raised my knee, catching him squarely between the legs. As he doubled over, I kicked out, landing a solid kick to his face, and he flew back, crashing into the cinder block wall behind him.
Of course, that only pushed my blade, which was still lodged between his shoulder blades, deeper. He screamed, and I was the only one who could hear it.
I stalked toward him, a cold smile of my own on my face. “I wonder if this is how your victims felt, Chen. Helpless as they screamed while you hurt them. How does it feel?”
I hauled him up, drew the second Netherblade I’d claimed from one of my traitorous sisters, and plunged it into his lower back.
I had not believed it was possible for him to scream any louder than he had been. I was wrong.
“Who was helping you, Chen?” I asked again. “All you have to do is answer, and I will start removing daggers.”
He spit an expletive at me, then continued to scream.
“Very well. If you think this hurts, just wait a few minutes. It only gets worse,” I promised him as I wrapped the thin chain that I used to bind the souls around his wrists and behind his back. Now, he would be unable to move without my assistance. No more running. No more hiding. No more using humans as shields.
There were few things I liked less than cowardice. And those who victimized others were always cowards at heart. That was something I had grown absolutely certain of in the thousands of years since I had come into existence.
I stood and watched him suffer, and it soon became clear that he either could not or would not talk to me. I shrugged, took his arm in my hand, and focused. It was time for me to go home, anyway.
We reappeared in a vacant church on Detroit’s east side. The former Catholic church had been one of the many victims of the Detroit Archdiocese church closings that had begun in the 1980s. The building remained empty all these years later. Scrappers had long since taken anything of value, from the stained glass windows to the copper downspouts. Even the pews were gone.
This was where the souls I found were handed over to my Queen.
These souls were not going through the typical capture, waiting, judging, punishment process most souls went through. We could not simply just put them into a Nether prison, not when Mollis’s relatives, the other Furies, were our prime suspects in who had betrayed her by releasing the souls in the first place. Not when they could talk, and tell someone about me. Not when we were unsure they would stay imprisoned for long, since they were obviously among her betrayer’s pet souls.
No, there would be special consideration given to this soul by the Goddess of Death herself.
I let go of Chen, knowing he was unable to go anywhere. His screams had quieted, mostly because he was becoming weaker by the second. If my daggers remained in him much longer, he would be unable to stand. Eventually, he would lose even the ability to see.
Well. That would not do. He had to be able to talk and scream for my Queen, at the very least.
I walked over to him and tugged one of my daggers out of his lower back. It pulled out reluctantly, a wet sound accompanying it that I found comforting. One of the familiar sounds of my line of work.
He swore at me again, and I ignored him, pacing back and forth nearby. I looked around. The stone walls of the church wore graffiti, and the floor was littered with debris. Garbage, mostly. There were charred remains of a small fire. Someone had likely sheltered here during the winter.
My phone vibrated again, and I took a breath as I dug it out of my pocket.
“I am working,” I said before the person on the other end had a chance to say anything. “You know this, because I already told you I was working today.”
“Well thanks, but I don’t care,” Artemis’s voice said over the line. I glanced at my phone in surprise. Yes, it was Brennan’s number.
“Why are you calling me? Where is Brennan?” I asked her.
“My imbecile of a grandson got himself shot during one of those raids his department does. I thought you might want to know.”
I felt my stomach turn over, came to my senses and decided to ignore it. He was immortal. He was fine. “How is he?”
“He is home, and resting. He was shot twice in the back. Luckily, I was able to get Asclepius to heal him quickly.” She paused. “It was stupid, telling him he was immortal now. He has become careless.”
“Careless is not a word I would use to describe him,” I said.
“Says you. He is reckless with his safety. He can’t keep doing this.”
“He is immortal,” I murmured, keeping my eyes on Chen.
“You don’t know that. You assume that. There is no guarantee that he will live if he gets himself shot up.” Artemis’s voice rose a bit.
“He is your grandson. He was mated to Mollis. Asclepius has now healed him at least twice.”
“And none of that is a guarantee. I keep trying to tell him that, but he takes your word over mine. Would you please reitera
te to him that it is a theory and not fact? He has no business walking around as if he can’t die.” I did not answer, and she paused for a moment. “If he was still mated to Mollis, then yes. He would be immortal and I would not be worried. They broke their bond, and he weakened because of it. He is not all he should be. You know this.”
“He is not lacking in any way,” I argued, still watching Chen, but not seeing him.
“While your loyalty is touching, Guardian, loyalty won’t save him if your little theory is wrong.”
“Your blood, Mollis’s blood, Asclepius’s healing. It is enough,” I said softly.
She sighed. “It is likely enough. I know. He has had Molly’s blood, and that alone offers a protection I still do not understand. But we don’t know for sure, and I am not in a hurry to see another of my descendants die. Losing his mother was hard enough, even though I did not know her. I knew of her. I checked in on her when I was able. It still hurt.” She paused, and then, more quietly: “I hate to lose them.”
Her voice thickened at the end, and I bowed my head. She still mourned her brother, Apollo. Of course. We had lost so many, I was beginning to lose track of who we still needed to mourn.
“Artemis, I will speak with him. I promise,” I said, trying to soothe her. “You do know he has no intention of dying?”
“I know that. But we never do intend for it to happen, do we?”
At that moment, Mollis appeared with a “pop” in a spot to my left. I nodded at her, and she nodded back, then turned her gaze to Chen, who started crying.
Crying. For the love of Hades, he was pathetic.
“I know. I will stop by later. I need to finish this up first. All right?”
“Thank you. I will cook dinner, then.”
I made a face at the phone as I ended the call. Artemis’s cooking was its own form of torture.
Betrayer (Hidden Book 7) Page 1
