by Lola StVil
THE NORU: BOOK II
The Last Akon
By-Lola StVil
© Lola StVil 2014
This book is dedicated to the AR’s, (Advance Readers). You guys argue with me, send me threatening emails, and hire snipers to shoot at me. In short-you keep me writing for my life and I am better for it. Thank you for the continuous support.
This book is also dedicated to the Tics (addicted readers).
You bribe me to write faster with bacon and candy; that’s how I know you love me. I hope it was worth the wait.
XO
Lola
QUICK REFERENCE GUIDE:
Akon- Highest-ranking demon (Currently only one remains)
Guardians- Most powerful angels
Noru- Children of the Guardians
Para-High ranking Angel (second however to the Noru)
Port- A Frisbee like device that transports from one place to the next
BOOK I
DIANA MASON (AKA RUIN)
From childhood’s hour I have not been
As others were—I have not seen
As others saw—I could not bring
My passions from a common spring—
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow—I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone—
And all I lov’d—I lov’d alone…
-- Edgar Allan Poe
Table Of Contents
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
Chapter Twenty
Free Preview
CHAPTER ONE: SICK
You ever kissed a guy so he’ll shut the hell up? Well, that’s the only reason my tongue is venturing down Kill’s throat right now. But as soon as our lips part, he’s back to talking about his favorite pastime—Silver.
“Next time I’m in battle with that asshole, I’m gonna take him apart,” the super demon vows.
Doubt it.
“Really, what did you ever see in that piece of crap?” he asks.
“You wanna have sex or you wanna talk?” I ask rudely.
“What’s your damn problem?” he snaps.
“I didn’t come here to talk about Silver. You wanna take him out in battle then do that and stop bitching about it.”
“Why are you being such a—”
“Do you really want to finish that sentence?” I warn him.
“Fine. No more talk about Silver,” he replies.
“Whatever, I’m taking off,” I say as I put my jacket on and head for the door.
“Who said you could leave?” the leader asks.
“Kill, on the battlefield, I do what you say. This isn’t the battlefield. And you’re just some demon I pass the time with. Try and remember that.”
“You know, you have a real attitude problem.”
“Blow me,” I reply as I slam the door shut behind me.
I head down the hallway of the crappy hotel and out onto the street. The reason for my foul mood isn’t just because of Kill. Ever since the night at the cabin with Silver, I’ve been pissed at just about everyone. And who is at the top of my list?
Me.
How could I do something so stupid? How could I start to care for someone? Had I not learned from the last time? What the hell was I thinking? I let Silver slither his way into my head. And now he’s my only thought.
I’m in love with him. In other words, I’m sick. That’s exactly what it means to be in love. Love is the disease of the weak. I don’t know how I contracted it but I did, and now I’m acting like a clueless human girl.
Even if love weren’t a sickness Omnis invented, things between Silver and me wouldn’t work. Silver has a girl. And I mean, a girl. Her name is Pryor. She’s like twelve years old or something. She’s short, has red hair, and an attitude so positive, you want to drive a dull butter knife though her skull and twist.
Silver’s thoughts are never far away from Pryor. We’d be in the midst of the most intimate acts, and I knew the redhead was on his mind. I can’t tell you the number of times I thought of taking a hatchet to that girl.
In the end it didn’t matter because he got mad at me and took off. Normally I couldn’t care less if a guy takes off. In fact, I encourage them to be as far away as possible once I’m done with them. But Silver is different…
I was relieved when he left—in the beginning. I thought I could be rid of this sickness. Yet his absence only made me want him more. It’s months later and I am more in love with him than I was before. He made no attempt to reach out to me. I stayed away from him too. Yet, I’d find myself flying across the world hoping to run into him.
Then out of nowhere he texted me. Once his name appeared on my cell, my disease progressed to dangerous levels. I had crazy thoughts that I could not control, thoughts about us being happy with each other.
Beyond stupid, I know. But that’s what the illness does: It takes away your ability to think straight. How could Silver and I possibly be happy together when he refuses to give into who he really is inside?
Technically he’s half demon and half angel but really, there is no such thing as half demon. That’s propaganda bullshit. Aaden Case (AKA Silver) is a demon. Period.
Does he admit that? No. He likes to walk the line and be just this side of evil. I tried to help him see who he really was but he just kept fighting me.
So, we stopped communicating altogether. Then out of nowhere, he summons me to him. When I get there, I find that he has called me over to help save the life of the tacky redhead.
Seriously.
And what do I do?
Help him.
The next time I see him, it’s in a battlefield. I don’t kill him. But we both know it doesn’t mean I won’t try in the future. In fact, I can almost guarantee we will be face-to-face again, and I will not allow my feelings to cloud my judgment.
A few yards away I hear an animal growl. I look over and spot a member of my team--a winged beast with fangs and blood dripping between his teeth.
“Manic, where have you been?” I ask.
He transforms back into his demon form.
“I found a nice little angel, who made a decent snack.” He grins as he licks the angel blood off his fingers.
“Classy,” I reply.
“Hey, gather Kill and the rest of the team. You won’t believe who’s been captured!” he says.
“Who?” I ask.
When he tells me, my mind is racing. I’m thinking a million thoughts all at once.
“They’re holding him until the angels are willing to make a trade,” Manic informs me.
“What do they want in exchange?”
He tells me and I am speechless.
“Yeah, I know. The angels will never agree to that,” my teammate adds.
“How long are they giving the angels to decide if they want to make a trade?”
“Three days, then they kill him.”
Three days!
“Can you believe they got him? I wonder how they are going to torture him? I hope it’s something that can peel skin. I love the scent of freshly peeled flesh,” Manic says.
<
br /> “How long have they had him?” I ask.
“Nearly two days; I’m sure he’s just scraps on the floor by now.” Manic laughs as I take off into the sky. Manic calls after me but I don’t turn around. I head straight to him. I don’t know what I’m going to say. I just know I need to see him face-to-face.
********
An hour later, I walk into the cave and see the prisoner. His arms are spread out, held at his bedside by reinforced steel shackles. They are laced with a mixture called Quden. Quden makes it nearly impossible for anyone to break free. It doesn’t matter how much he struggles, the prisoner will not get free, without help.
They have really worked the prisoner over. His left eye is swollen shut. There’s a deep gash on his cheek and his lip has been split open. His shirt is tattered and reveals even more serious injuries. He’s been stabbed in the rib cage. Blood oozes out slowly from his side and congeals on the ground below. A patch of flesh from his thigh has been burned off and a bone protrudes out of his right leg. His face is pale and gaunt. He does not have long to live.
“Did you come to finish me off or her?” he asks.
I turn my attention to the moaning “lump” on the floor a few feet away. She’s a human who tried to cheat some demons in a card game. She’s in worse shape than the prisoner. Every once in a while she can be heard moaning and softly pleading for her life.
“The human has learned her lesson, you can let her go,” the prisoner says.
I look him over. His wings have an impressive span. His dark intense eyes remind me of someone…
Even in shackles, and near death, I can see the prisoner’s allure. He studies me just as closely as I study him.
“He told me about you,” the prisoner says.
“Really, who?” I ask.
“You know who,” he counters.
“What did he say?”
“He said that you are powerful, talented…broken.”
“Well, he was wrong. There is nothing broken about me,” I reply firmly.
“So you had the perfect life when you were human? So perfect that you gave away your soul to become evil and join the other Kasters?” he asks.
“I became what I was meant to be.”
“Things could have turned out differently for you,” he lies.
“No, there was only one path for me…”
“You could have stopped at being a demon. But you went past that and became a Kaster. Malakaro sought you out and you allowed him to make you into this super-powered demon. It didn’t have to go down that way.”
“Malakaro didn’t seek me out. I came looking for him. All my life I was looking for evil,” I inform him.
“Why?”
“You of all people are asking me that?” I reply.
“Darkness is usually something you learn. Who taught you?” he asks.
“I learned about darkness and cruelty from the master: Omnis.”
“Tell me about it,” he offers.
I don’t know why I give in to his demand but I do.
“My human name was Diana Mason. I lived in a small city in upstate New York called Coopersville. I lived there with my mother and grandmother. My mom never told me who my dad was and I never asked. I figured screw him if he didn’t want to be part of our family. We were fine by ourselves. And we were; we really were.
“The town talked about us all the time because we were strange. We would go downtown in our PJ’s just because we didn’t feel like putting on street clothes. We’d wear tiaras to the grocery store and call each other names like “princess sparkle.”
“As I grew up, the craziness didn’t stop. My mom and Nana found ways to make everything far more fun than it should have been. We were studying Native American history in school and so they read up on it too. Soon we were up on the roof doing a rain dance. Nana would wake us up at 3am because she wanted us to see the first snowfall.
When my first boyfriend dumped me, they let me make a voodoo doll of him with cookie dough and place it in the oven. We “beheaded” a million ex-boyfriend chocolate chip cookies.
“They called us the triplets because we were always together. We’d go barefoot on long road trips in the car and sing loudly to the music on the radio. My Nana would moon cop cars, flirt with guys in the car lane next to us, and fake heart attacks so the cute waiter would have to give her mouth-to-mouth. We had very little in terms of money but we had…everything.
“Then one day, Nana said she felt achy. We thought she had come down with the flu or something but we were wrong. Soon she couldn’t even make it to the bathroom by herself. She was having trouble breathing and she would shake a lot.
“We took her to a doctor. They had her tested for Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s, and a slew of other things. They couldn’t find out what was wrong with her. All they could tell us was that she would most likely get worse.
“It got so bad; she would soil herself and not even know it. She’d rage at us for no reason and physically fight us. She’d walk out into traffic, burn herself on the stove, and cry for no reason at all. Things got worse, just like the doctors said it would. Soon she was confined to bed because the simple act of sitting up caused her so much pain she’d beg for us to end her life.
“Omnis was killing the woman I loved, slowly. I couldn’t understand why he didn’t just kill her quickly. Why had he tortured her? Why had he let her suffer so much?
“Eventually my mom couldn’t take it anymore. We placed Nana in a shit hole of a nursing home. It was subpar in every way. The staff was incompetent, overworked, and didn’t give a damn. The facility was dirty, cramped, and barely legally habitable. But it was the only thing we could afford.
“Her first night there, Nana caused so much chaos they had to sedate her. The next morning we came to see her and she told my mom she would never forgive us for putting her in the home.
“A few weeks later, one of the nurses, who was supposed to be watching her, parked her in a wheelchair in the hallway by the window. She left her there to gossip with the other nurses. She called out over and over again but the nurse assumed she was just acting out as usual. But she wasn’t. She was calling out because she was in pain.
“By the time the nurse came around to see what Nana wanted, she was dead. She died alone in the hallway of some rat-infested shit hole. And the only reason they even remembered she was there was because they could smell her rotting corpse.
“My mom never forgave herself for sending Nana there. I tried to make it better, but nothing I did worked. My mom fell into a deep depression. Meanwhile I tried to figure out why things had happened the way they did. I drove myself crazy wondering why Omnis let my Nana die so horribly.
“That question ruled over my life. I looked for answers from philosophy books, religious leaders, and even fortune-tellers. I could not find the answer to my question.
“Then what was left of my world was taken when I came home and found my mom floating in a tub of red water. The blood looked too red to be real. It reminded me of ‘movie’ blood. But it was real. She had taken her life and left me alone.
“I locked myself away and cried for months. I didn’t care about anything anymore. I didn’t even think about the question anymore. I had to live with the fact that I would never know why Omnis did what he did to my family. But I was wrong; I would find the answer from a boy whose name I would never know.
“I watched him from my window. He had curly brown hair and wore a baseball cap. He noticed a smaller kid go by on a bike. He pushed the little kid off the bike and down to the ground. The bike owner cried out as the bully hopped on the bike and pedaled away.
“‘That’s my bike! Why are you taking it from me?’ the little boy yelled.
“And the bully replied, “Because I can.”
“And just like that, it all became clear. Omnis took my family away, tortured Nana, and let Mom kill herself because he could.
“It all began to make sense. I had assumed that Omnis cared
about us, that we had somehow mattered to him since he created us. Childish thinking. The truth was so much simpler than that. Omnis made us on a whim. We are here because we are. There is no deeper meaning. We don’t matter to Omnis. And that’s okay because Omnis no longer mattered to me.
“From then on, I knew I had to live my life doing whatever I wanted. I didn’t have to think about right or wrong because right and wrong doesn’t matter. What’s right is whatever you can get away with. If you want to gut someone who has pissed you off, then find the right blade and gut them. Simple.”
