Cloak of Deceit: An Alex Moore Novel

by Gwen Mitchell

  After my last few breakups had left me raw and too depressed to pick up the mess I’d made of my life, Mom had insisted I start going to therapy. “Sweetie, when it comes to men, you’re just a little mixed up.”

  Yeah. Sandwiched between two slabs of concrete, waiting to die for the second time in a week, I could see her point. When it came to men, I was more than just a little mixed up. Thanks to just the last two, I’d gotten killed, held captive, attacked, imprisoned, betrayed, tricked, coerced, captured and now…

  “For fucks’s sake!” I screamed again. “Let me out of here!”

  Thump. Thump.

  I could feel a drain hole near the middle of the floor, covered by a metal grate. It was around waist level, and I could reach down to brush my fingers over it. I tried stretching my legs out to the side along one wall, which put the drain about chest height. But no matter what angle I tried, that’s the best I could do.

  At only four inches wide, I didn’t really think it was going to get me out of there, but trying gave me something to do. When the alternative is going completely insane, anything will work. In the end, it only added to my frustration, and my hopelessness, and the knowledge I had done this to myself.

  I was the one who was mixed up.

  It wasn’t my fault I was a psychic, that I’d always known there was something different about me, that I’d always chafed at the bonds of being who my mother wanted me to be. No, it wasn’t my fault for being born. But everything else …it was me who always went for the most dangerous guy I could find. It was me who followed Cody into the bowels of a bondage club. It was me who went with Julian in that alleyway. It was me who ran out on my own with no direction, no safety net, and no clue what was waiting for me just around the corner.

  Now I was all I had, and I was disgusted with myself.

  “If I ever get out of here, I’m gonna kick my own ass,” I muttered, then decided it was best to stop talking before I started arguing with myself. I wasn’t ready to go completely off the deep end yet. But I was closer than I wanted to admit, trapped in the dark silence. It already felt like I didn’t exist.

  There’s no way to tell how much time passed in a cycle of fits of rage, bargaining, despair, and finally exhaustion. My stomach burned like the pits of hell. The flames licked all the way up my throat, leaving my mouth ashy. My muscles grew sore and stiff. Hours? Days? It felt like an eternity and a half.

  I was sleeping fitfully when I felt the vibrating rumble in the floor. I burst awake, and directly into tears, thinking, this is it. The ceiling was going to squash me flat.

  The Lex Press — just as I’d imagined.

  Instead, it grated against the walls as it lifted away from me. A draft of air hit my skin. I finally completed the push up I’d been trying to do all along, and rolled onto my back like a sack of bones. I was lethargic, dehydrated, so thirsty.

  A beam of light cut through the blackness, just a tiny slit. I blinked and rubbed my eyes as they adjusted to the idea of working again. Then it was too bright, and I had to turn my face away. My head throbbed as the sounds of an electric motor and the world outside filled my ears. I tucked my head under my arms, squeezing my eyes shut, all of my senses blasted by the return to reality.

  “Come on, Girl,” a gruff voice called out. “Unless you want to stay in there. I can lower it back down.”

  I hissed and skittered towards the voice, not caring what awaited me on the other end of the blinding light. If I stayed, I was already dead. Rough hands manhandled me up to my feet, but I collapsed.

  “I told him it was too long.” The guard, who was another Undead, picked me up and tossed me over his shoulder.

  I couldn’t figure out why I was so weak. My mind was screaming at me, Now! Now’s your chance! Run for it! But my body wasn’t able to respond. My head ached. My arms and legs were stiff. I couldn’t visualize anything, couldn’t muster enough strength to focus my psychic powers. I’d exhausted them trying to break myself out. The tears came again when he tossed me onto something soft. I rubbed at my eyes furiously.

  “Cryin’ ain’t gonna do you any good.” The guard pulled my hands away from my face. I blinked up at his blurry silhouette as cold metal slid around my wrists. “I’ve been warned about you. Though I doubt you could do much of anything just now.”

  He was right. I couldn’t do anything but lay propped up on the couch and wait for my senses to come back online after some-odd hours of total deprivation. We were in a sparsely furnished room. It had a cement floor, white walls, and no windows. There were two doors. One led back to my own personal hell — the Lex Press. Which meant the other was the exit.

  My eyes darted back to the guard. He had to be a guard. He obviously wasn’t there to set me free. He might have been there to make me wish I was in the Lex Press. He stood with his back to me at the kitchenette across the way, probably preparing some implement of torture to get me to roll over on Julian. A beat-down couch, a table, and two chairs littered the space between us. It didn’t look like a torture chamber.

  Then the scent of warming blood filled my nostrils. My body jerked, my muscles surging with tension. The flames in my stomach clawed their way up my throat. I leapt to my feet and froze in place, caught between rationale and instinct.

  The guard faced me, his sharp jaw jutting out, his beady eyes intently focused on mine. The heat in my stomach plummeted into my groin almost painfully, making drops of sweat break out on my skin.

  The guard laughed.

  He had a really stupid laugh. I wanted to rip his head off. I wanted to bathe in his blood, or fuck his brains out, or maybe both. Apparently I had a choice right now between sex or violence. Tough decision. Option A was completely debasing and so not happening. Option B could get me killed. I was weakened, cuffed, and inexperienced, and he was a fully-armed trained killer.

  Feminine wiles it is, then.

  My lip curled as he came closer.

  “Don’t be gettin’ any ideas.” He reached for his gun. “I don’t want to have to put you down.”

  I was already in motion. I sprang at him faster than my mind could register, and slammed into him before he’d even lifted his gun out of the holster. There wasn’t a flicker of hesitation anywhere in my being. My body, my instincts, my thirst had taken over. I threw my cuffed wrists over his head and jumped on him, my mouth assaulting his.

  There was a split second where I thought he might break my neck, but he gripped my ass instead. He tasted like stale bread, but it didn’t matter.

  Hunt. Feed.

  Primal needs rose up in me, with no cares for my moral qualms, or even the principle of not sleeping with the enemy. All they knew was the uncontrollable response my prey was having to my body, to my needs. My aching fangs slid into my mouth. I licked the side of his neck.

  He shuddered and crushed me against him. “It’s like that, is it?”

  I whimpered, scraping my fangs over his jugular. He had no heartbeat, but I could almost taste the rusty sweetness I knew lay just under his skin. I nipped at him. He grunted as he turned us around and slid me up on the countertop.

  “You’re a very bad girl, aren’t you?” His tongue glided along my jaw as his fingers dug into my thighs. His hot, steamy breath rasped into my ear. “I’ll give you mine if you give me yours.”

  My stomach cramped, even as warmth pooled where he pressed against me. The scent of the heated blood in the air was intoxicating, but I knew it was even better directly from the source. I needed it. I jerked him closer using the cuffs and sank my fangs into him with a feral growl.

  My world shrank down to the crimson heat in my mouth, buffeting my senses. God it felt good, like the first drink of cold water after a five-mile run, only minus the chest pains and nausea. Every drop that slid over my parched, swollen tongue, coated my throat with liquid sustenance, and brought me strength. In just a few swallows I felt more alert.

  And more aware of the guard’s hands as they clumsily massaged my breasts.

&n
bsp; I kept drinking, and he didn’t try to stop me. So, I pulled every ounce of strength I could from him. No longer burning with thirst, I felt calmer, more balanced. I reached for my psychic center, for the only thing that might save me: the Grigori.

  When the voices were still faint and faraway I mentally screamed at them, Hey, over here! I felt a ribbon of whispers approach. They slid into my mind, a brush of wet velvet. This time, I tried not to be afraid as they swirled around me.

  Help me, I thought. Outwardly, I whimpered as the guard pulled away, forcing me to unclamp my jaw from his flesh. I growled again.

  “You wanna get rough?” he said through gritted teeth. I let him go.

  He pinned my arms above my head and plundered the taste of his own blood from my mouth. He reached down between us and fumbled with the button of my jeans.

  Help me, damn it!

  The whispering spiked to a rush of static, blasting my ears from the inside, and then they hushed. They spoke to me, and for the first time, I listened. They didn’t use words, weren’t really speaking. It was something else. Another sense I barely understood how to use. It translated into thoughts, all in microseconds that felt like hours.

  I listened, and learned how to swell my consciousness, to expand it across the room like a creeping shadow, a swath of liquid darkness. Under their guidance, I cast tendrils of it out at greater and greater distances. I reached out past the room, past the building, seeking a connection, seeking the collective.

  I focused the rest of my attention on wrapping myself around Leo’s mind. We knew Leo now, as he tried to yank my pants down my hips.

  Leo Harper Junior.

  I knew everything I needed to know about him. I had nothing to be afraid of anymore.

  The whispers weren’t oppressive now that I’d stopped fighting them. They were nurturing. A wealth of knowledge on tap for instant download. Through me, they penetrated Leo’s mind, and guided me through the process, explained my own powers and limits. I learned more in two minutes connected with them than I had in a week of blocking them out.

  Fucking hindsight.

  I wrapped my legs around Leo and squeezed, preventing my clothes from coming off. He grunted his disapproval, but I captured his mouth again. This kiss was mine. I read him like a book, and used the insight to turn his own weak desires against him. He was a tough guy on the outside, but really a spineless bully. I saw his whole life like the below-average twenty-nine years it had been. The fifty-eight years of un-life that followed hadn’t been any better. It had been a long time since Leo received any female attention. The collective tugged on his vulnerabilities, enhanced his darker emotions to give me an edge — his loneliness, his doubt, his frustration with the opposite sex.

  He kept a firm grasp on my thighs and we fell to the floor. I straddled his hips and lifted my cuffed wrists back over his head.

  “Undo these, baby.” I rubbed against him, while pushing on him mentally.

  Not too forceful, the voices tutored, just a gentle suggestion.

  Leo resisted us. His fear of punishment for disobeying orders was strong. He wasn’t supposed to let me out. He wasn’t supposed to touch me.

  “Can’t,” he rasped, grinding insistently. His thoughts flushed with alarm. So I kissed him. I made it everything Leo wanted — coaxing, powerful. He relaxed underneath me, and his panic eased as he reached up to fondle my chest.

  “I’m going to need my hands for this,” I purred, then nipped his ear. Just a gentle suggestion. I coupled it with a wiggle of my hips. Leo growled impatiently and sat up to cram his hands down the back of my pants. I let out a small yelp of pain when his nails bit my skin. That was enough.

  Leo flew back against the floor and cracked his head on the cement. He went rigid below me. He didn’t move, except for his eyes darting back and forth.

  I smiled. Three cheers for the wild card!

  I climbed to my feet and stood over Leo’s prone figure. Aided by the collective, it was easy to keep him pinned there. I rummaged through his pockets, glancing at his face every few seconds as he watched me.

  “Sorry, Leo.” I jangled the keys in the air. “But you did fall for the oldest trick in the book.”

  His eyes went so wide with anger I could see the yellow-tinged whites of them.

  “I know exactly how you feel.” I tried several keys in the cuffs. I had enough rage pent up from the Lex Press to crush him flat.

  I sighed as the right key finally slid home in the lock, and pondered what to do with Leo as I massaged my wrists. With the collective guiding me, we reached into Leo’s mind. We covered his consciousness with our veil of inky darkness until it didn’t even know itself.

  Ask it the question, they whispered.

  Without words, I did. We sifted through Leo’s mind like looking through a flipbook of his memories. While part of my psyche was reaching as far as it could to form an external link with the collective so they could pinpoint my location, the part still inside the building wanted out. I needed an escape route, and Leo was my map.

  My concentration broke when I felt another presence cross one of my psychic tendrils. The presence was close and mightily pissed off.

  “Derek,” I said under my breath. My connection to the collective disengaged, like someone had just turned off a lamp. Snap! Gone.

  Leo lunged for me.

  I toppled over the nearest chair, and we rolled to the ground together, but he ended up on top. I tried to use my power as we struggled, but I was too distracted by the giant ball of fury I could feel just beyond the walls. I was too panicked, too afraid, and still too damn weak.

  “You idiot, Harper! I told you to put the collar on her!” Derek roared, bursting through the door.

  Leo pinned my wrists to the ground as Derek’s monstrous black boots strode towards us.

  I pinched my eyes shut as he closed in, but I heard the click of a gun.

  “Goodnight Miss Moore.”

  Then…nothing.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Pain.

  What I felt can’t be put into words, except to say that pain is a place, a state of being, and I lived there. Even the act of acknowledging the pain was agony. When you’re suffering like that, every second lasts an eternity. Just when I thought I would go mad from it, it would lessen just enough to let me go on. I would sink into misery again, and then slight relief would find me. On and on the cycle went.

  Very slowly, I clawed my way up from the seventieth layer of hell. The Lex Press was a spa day in comparison. When my brain had recovered enough to start reaching into my surroundings for information, sound came first. I still couldn’t feel my body, or clear the dried blood from my throat, or even stare at the backs of my own eyelids. But I could hear.

  I caught voices at regular intervals, at least two of them: one low and gritty, one faint and soft. Trying to make out what they were saying was just too exhausting. I faded into the white fog of pain.

  Voices again. No, just one voice. Loud and angry, rising in irregular intervals. On the phone? I knew it was Derek by the heavy tread of his boots as he paced the floor. And I knew I was lying on a floor too. I could feel something cold and hard and flat beneath me.

  The thirst finally woke me. The inferno in my stomach faded to an ache in my muscles and a tingling of my nerve endings. When I listened, I heard no voices, but the gentle hum of a motor behind the wall. Somewhere, a sink was dripping, taunting me.

  Drip, drip, splash. Drip, drip, splash.

  I opened my eyes.

  Yep, concrete floor. I lay against the back wall of an unlit room, about the same square footage as the Lex Press. A shudder ran through me. I tried to roll to my back, but couldn’t. As the numbness in my body wore off, I realized why. One arm twisted behind me, yanked up at an unnatural angle by heavy manacles, blatantly dislocated from the socket at the shoulder. The other arm was tucked underneath me, also chained. My muscle control returned slowly, and along with it, more pain. Still nothing compared to the t
orture I’d endured as my brain pieced itself back together.

  That bastard shot me in the head.

  I wanted to scream with rage, but it came out a pathetic, “Ungh.”

  The lights overhead buzzed before shooting on in a blinding flash.

  I rattled my chains, but each movement pulled on my disjointed arm, sending shocks of lightning reverberating down my body, so I held still. I heard the jangle of keys, and then a metal door across from me opened. I blinked, forcing my eyes to adjust to the light, ignoring the squeezing feeling in my head.

  Derek’s dark outline filled the doorway. I would have known those linebacker shoulders anywhere. I was trying to come up with an appropriately hateful insult when he reached over and flipped a switch on the wall.

  My words mutated into a grunt as the chain attached to my arm went slack. The arm swung down and slapped the cement beside me like a dead fish. I groaned and sat up, but then Derek hit another button and both chains yanked up and out. I had no choice but to stand, though my legs were wobbly at best.

  “Welcome back, Miss Moore. How was your nap?”

  I managed enough gusto to lift my head and glare at him. All three of him.

  Derek flashed me a morbid grin, evidently very pleased with himself. “I don’t think we’ll be having anymore slip-ups like that, so don’t worry, I shouldn’t have to shoot you again.”

  “That’s comforting,” I rasped. Using my voice made my head feel like it was in a vise.

  “I want you to be comfortable.”

  “What else do you want?” Another thing about pain — it renders you incapable of bullshit.

  He laughed, a sharp cold burst, and then his mouth clapped shut. “I want to discuss my plans for you, if you’re ready to listen.”