by Ashley West
Table of Contents
Title Page
Free Paranormal Romance
Prequel One: Remnants
Prequel Two: Interrupted
Chapter One: Begin
Chapter Two: Stall
Chapter Three: Engage
Chapter Four: Choose
Chapter Five: Escape
Chapter Six: Decide
Chapter Seven: Plan
Chapter Eight: Freeze
Chapter Nine: Soften
Chapter Ten: Debate
Chapter Eleven: Shatter
Chapter Twelve: Hurt
Chapter Thirteen: Fight
Chapter Fourteen: Begin Again
About the Author
Publishers Notes
The Arrival
Ashley West
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Prequel One: Remnants
“Another.” A gruff command, barked out, clearly by someone who was used to giving orders and having them followed. The man in question didn’t even look at the person he was speaking to. Just set his glass down on the bar with a hard thunk, fingers gripping the glass for a moment before he let go.
The young woman who tended the bar glared at him, but she was used to this. Everyone was. If a week ever went by when Sorrin Descenta wasn’t in there drinking his way through their stores of spirits, then something would have happened to him. He was there all the time, at least three or four times in a week, sitting at the bar glowering at anyone who dared to speak to him for more than a second.
The bartender was allowed to ask for his drink order when he arrived and then tell him how much he owed at the end of the night. Other than that, Sorrin never wanted to hear from her.
And she’d tried. Making small talk was technically a part of her job. All the standard fare—“How are you tonight?” and “Anything new going on?”—was just met with stony silence and a sharp eyed glare.
She’d been frightened at first, sure that Sorrin was going to cause some kind of trouble or try to hurt her, but the more he came in, the more she saw the truth. He was angry, but not at the world in general. He was more just sad than anything, and even his glares seemed to lack the right heat when she saw them enough times. It was some sort of reflex, as far as she could tell, and it made her feel sorry for him.
He’d been through something terrible, but keeping people at bay wasn’t the way to go about it. All it would do was make sure you never stopped being lonely and sad.
Sorrin didn’t share that opinion, of course.
In his mind, being alone was the only option that made sense. When you let people get too close, you just got hurt. That was the lesson he’d been taught in the most brutal and painful of ways. If it had been possible to erect a large energy shield around himself to keep people at bay, he would have, but it was impossible to get the kind of clearance needed for something like that without there being a battle.
Sorrin was sick to death of battles.
He was also sick of this planet. Dovarah was not his home, but then, as far as he knew, his home had been destroyed. Dovarah was the last place he’d been stationed before everything he knew in the world had collapsed around him, and he’d barely had the energy and wherewithal to eat, let alone move to another place.
At least he had this bar. It was dingy and always crowded, the haze of smoke from pipes filling the air with the sweet, warm scent of spiced tobacco. Music droned on from a box in the corner, but no one danced. It wasn’t that kind of place.
No, it was the kind of place that mothers warned their daughters not to wander into alone and chided their sons for going to. It was the kind of place that fathers went after a long day of being bound to the same woman, when they needed their eyes to wander a bit. It was a place for thugs and the refuse of society, and Sorrin supposed he fit right in at the moment.
In the corner of the bar, there were two men who kept looking at him. Their eyes would slide over his body up to his face and then dart away, as if trying not to be caught at it. Unfortunately for them, Sorrin was a warrior. Or he had been at one point, and even though he no longer considered himself in service to his government in that way, his skills hadn’t diminished, and he was keenly aware of everyone in the bar at that moment.
They knew who he was. He was sure of that. These days there were very few people who didn't know who Sorrin was. A disgraced warrior by his own hands, a failure, a wreck, a shell, a 'poor thing'. People he had never met before spoke of him in the streets, in cantinas and markets, telling his story and either cursing him for the part he played in it or pitying him for the outcome. Sorrin wanted neither their condemnation nor their pity, but he wasn't in any position to say anything. He deserved their condemnation at the very least.
"That's him," one of the two whispered to the other. "Has to be."
"Is not," the other insisted. "What would he be doing here?"
"How should I know? Maybe he fancied a drink and didn't want to be seen?"
"He's doing a bad job of that then, if you recognized him, blind as you are."
"Oh, go hang yourself in a pit, Kithar. That's him, and I'm telling you. Terrible what happened, isn't it? You've heard about it, right? The way the Camadors slaughtered all of The Fair Queen's men?"
Sorrin inhaled sharply, keeping his gaze lowered and on his glass. He'd heard different accounts of what'd happened to him and his fellow warriors, but hearing the name, the common name anyway, of the woman he had served and gone into battle for, the woman he had ultimately failed, was like a kick in the stomach. Sorrin hadn't seen her since the day he'd removed himself from her service.
"Fair Queen?" the other one asked. "Who's that?"
"Well, she's not really a queen. That side of Kalogo hasn't had a queen in forever and an age. Senator, she is, and a high one at that. High enough that her men called her their queen. Pretty as a Schelrian sunrise, too."
"Makes sense with the same, I guess, then."
The one doing the explaining nodded his head. "Anyway, her warriors, personal band of fighters sworn to defend her and the rest of the people, were some of the best there's ever been. Top marks in all fighting classes. Hand to hand, weapons, long range. Some of 'em were supposed to even have core powers."
Sorrin didn't need to glance over to see the look on the face of the one doing the listening. Core powers were rare enough that hearing someone had them was always a shock. On some planets, they were nothing but a myth, something mocked as a remnant of the days of old when people believed in magic over tech and tried to turn dull metals into precious ones with potions and prayers.
But they were very much real, Sorrin knew that first hand. His second in the warrior band had them, the ability to reach within herself, draw power from her core, and manifest shields around herself or anyone close enough to her. It was always impressive to see, but in the end, even her core powers hadn't been enough to save them. Core powers could be anything. He'd known people who could summon flames or electricity and had heard tales of a man who could freeze things with just a touch. So few were they that the powers were still classified as rare and unknown, and now, thanks to him, many of the people who'd been able to use them were gone.
It always did come back to that, didn't it?
In his spiral of shameful thoughts, he'd missed some of the conversation being had about him. They'd moved on from talk of core powers and moved into discussing the final battle.
"Was the Camadors, of course," the one who seemed to know everything was
explaining. "Showed up in one of those floating cities of theirs and started raining down terror. The Fair Queen wasn't about to let that stand, so she sent her best. Only..."
The other one looked on with wide eyes. "Only what?" he asked.
The gossip gestured to Sorrin, who kept his head down. "Well, look at him. If that's who I think it is, he was the best the Queen had to throw at those Camador bastards, and look. What d'you see?"
"A man?"
"A broken man."
He couldn't refute that.
"So they lost?"
The one in the know shook his head. "Saying they lost is like saying a sand worm in your shoe is annoying. They were slaughtered. The Camadors are all pretty faces at first, but they're deadly. Queen's Men never stood a chance. Now he's all that's left."
That wasn't strictly true. There had been others who'd escaped, others who had managed to drag themselves broken and bleeding from the Camadors' clutches back to their homes. Of course, with them defeated, the Camadors had free reign. They didn't destroy the city of Gollen Par, but they came very close to it. Homes were burned, people were killed, and families were torn apart.
He could still remember the glow of flames over the river, the way the air had been alive with screams and embers, heavy with smoke. Every few minutes something else caught fire, sometimes silently, sometimes with a bang crash bang that Sorrin had been able to feel in his bones.
The Senate building had burned the brightest, situated on the hilltop so it overlooked the rest of the city, the large crystal on the top of it cracked and blackened in the night as the fire raged.
That night was the worst Sorrin had ever lived through, and every day he wished that he hadn't lived through it at all. He wished that he'd been able to do something to end his life that night. That he could have perished beside his comrades or his sister and father, or any of the countless others who had suffered for his failure.
In the end, though, he had survived. He'd patched himself up and then fled before he'd even had time to heal. The resulting infection hadn't been enough to kill him either, though he'd hoped.
It stood to reason, then, that there was a reason he was still alive. A purpose he needed to fulfill. Something still left undone.
At this point in his life, scarred and angry as he was, Sorrin liked to think that it was his bitterness keeping him alive. His need for revenge that allowed him to continue to draw breath. Until he saw the Camadors destroyed for what they'd done to his people, his family, his friends, he wouldn't be able to rest.
Sorrin turned his attention away from the two in the corner. Nothing they said had any bearing on him anymore, and he didn't want to hear the rest of their conversation. What he wanted was another drink and then to make his way to the little hovel he was renting in the city so he could sleep.
He was going to feel the drinks from this night in the morning, but that wouldn't keep him down for long. Nothing really did.
Just as he was considering ordering something else, that hair raising feeling of someone standing behind him ran down his back, and he turned quickly, not even the alcohol he'd consumed able to keep his natural instincts from taking over.
Not sure what or who he'd been expecting, Sorrin was surprised to see the two men from the corner standing there, looking like they weren't sure what to say. Maybe they just wanted to see him up close. Maybe they wanted to ask about what had happened. Some kind of bet riding on his responses, more than likely. Sorrin glared. He wasn't in the mood to be a spectacle tonight.
He opened his mouth to tell them to go away, when the one who'd had all the information held up a hand. Sorrin waited.
"We don't wanna bother you," he said, and from the way his friend winced, it was clear at least one of them realized it was too late for that. "We just thought, uh. That we'd buy you a drink."
Sorrin arched an eyebrow and looked from one of them to the other, unsure. "Why?" he asked, voice gravelly and blunt. "I don't need your pity."
The other one hurried to shake his head. "It's not pity," he said fervently. "Stars, no. Not our business to pity you, and we thought..." He trailed off with a shrug, glancing at his friend for help.
"We thought you deserved it," he said.
"Why?" Sorrin asked again, unsure of what they were even trying to say. "I deserve nothing."
"We don't agree. And we'd like to buy you a drink either way."
Sorrin glanced between the two of them, eyes narrowed like he was looking for deception. At the first hint of a joke or of them trying to pass off their pity as something else, he would send them away and tell them where they could shove it. But all he saw there was genuine openness and it was startling. Slowly, he relented. "Okay, then."
They both grinned and then stepped up to the bar, each of them taking one of the empty stools on either side of Sorrin. They sat down and flagged down the barmaid, ordering three pints of the special that night.
It was fancier than what Sorrin had been drinking before, but he gave a mental shrug. Who was he to argue?
"You are him, right?" the other one said, and he was definitely staring.
Sorrin sighed. "Want to make sure you're not buying a drink for the wrong washed up warrior?"
"Nah. Just. Figured you'd be older."
"Why?" He seemed to be asking that question a lot lately.
"Don't know. You just. Seem too young to be this..."
He didn't have to finish the thought for Sorrin to get what he meant. Sorrin seemed too young to be this broken. And that was probably true. At twenty-nine years, he wasn't one of the younger warriors, but he certainly wasn't one of the older ones either. His kind lived a long time, and there were warrior's in Senator Halphia's service that were nearly three times Sorrin's age. And they still were every bit as fierce as they were when they joined up, more than likely.
What they meant, of course, was that his was too young to consider his career over. Most warriors his age would bounce back from failure and go on to try again, try harder. They wouldn't have resigned from service, they would have let their anger fuel them to new heights.
Sorrin didn't work that way. In his mind, he was done. There was nothing more he could offer to the Fair Queen. His failure had nearly crippled the entire city, and no matter how many people told him it wasn't his fault, Sorrin couldn't shake the feeling of guilt and the burden of responsibility that weighed on him.
But he wasn't finished. No one needed to know that he planned to exact revenge or die trying. They'd call him obsessive and say he needed to go see a Mind Mender. He didn't need that. What he needed was to see the Camadors dead. It wouldn't bring back the people he'd failed, but it would go a long way towards making him feel like there had been some justice in the matter.
His two impromptu companions were still talking, seemingly not dissuaded by the fact that Sorrin was hardly saying anything to them at all.
"Well of course they're still out there," one of them said. "We'd have heard if they were dead."
"But it's been years."
"They're still out there," Sorrin interjected. "They're just lying in wait."
"For what?"
"For me."
The two exchanged glances around his body. "Are you...sure? They're just...waiting for you?"
Sorrin shook his head. "Not like that. They don't know they're waiting for me, but they are. One day, they're going to strike against someone else. That's how they operate. And when they do, I'll be ready."
They exchanged another look, but Sorrin didn't care. They could think whatever they wanted about him and his plans. But this was what kept the fires burning in him, and what made sure he got up every morning. Nothing was going to keep him from killing them all and making sure that everyone they'd killed was avenged.
Nothing.
Prequel Two: Interrupted
The heat of mid-May was in full swing, but that couldn’t stop the smile on Abby’s face as she stood up from her seat to the sound of thunderous applause and made her
way up to the podium. The black cap and gown didn’t help matters, and she could feel the sweat gathering at the small of her back and under her breasts, but her smile didn’t dim. Her head held high, mortarboard affixed perfectly to her head, her chin length red hair arranged just as perfectly under it.
Where most people in the gathered crowd wore simply the black gown, decorated with lapels emblazoned with the school’s logo, Abby had more than her fair share of additions. A cord for being in the chamber choir, the stole that signified her major (Business Administration), a row of pins, one each from the school clubs she’d joined, and of course a cord for making the Dean’s List.
It was the end of the year, graduation, the very last thing she would do at this school (of course with the exception of whatever she contributed as an alumni), and she stood at the podium with her head held high.
Out of all the students in her class, she had been chosen to deliver a speech, and it was a point of pride with her.
Abigail Warren had always been popular. All through middle and high school, she’d had friends and no trouble making new ones. She wasn’t popular like people saw on television, rude to those who weren’t in her friend group and full of herself, rather she gained her popularity from being the exact opposite. She was kind to nearly everyone she met, offering her help when it was needed, and even when it wasn’t. No matter the situation, she managed to do what she could, saving dances and fundraisers, and on one memorable occasion, baking seven dozen cookies in one night to rescue a bake sale that would have otherwise had to be canceled.
Her teachers viewed her as a model student. Always eager to speak up in class, to tutor others or go to tutoring herself if it was something she didn’t understand. She didn’t cause trouble or seek out attention, and her assignments were turned in on time without fail. All of her comments on her report cards through middle and high school said the same sorts of things: “A joy to have in class” and “Abby is a bright girl with amazing potential” and “I expect great things from Abby in the future”.
