by Jaymin Eve
BROKEN COMPASS
Supernatural Prison World #1
Jaymin Eve
Broken Compass: Supernatural Prison World #1
Copyright © Jaymin Eve 2016
All rights reserved
First published in 2016
Eve, Jaymin
Broken Compass: Supernatural Prison World #1
*1st edition*
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. All characters in this publication other than those clearly in the public domain are fictitious, and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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
Also by Jaymin Eve
A Walker Saga - YA Paranormal Romance series (complete)
First World - #1
Spurn - #2
Crais - #3
Regali - #4
Nephilius - #5
Dronish - #6
Earth - #7
Supernatural Prison Trilogy - NA Urban Fantasy series
Dragon Marked - #1
Dragon Mystics - #2
Dragon Mated - #3
Sinclair Stories
Songbird - Standalone Contemporary Romance
Hive Trilogy
Ash - #1
Anarchy - #2
Annihilate #3
Stay in touch with Jaymin: www.facebook.com/JayminEve.Author
Website: www.jaymineve.com
Mailing list: http://eepurl.com/bQw8Kf
This is for all of you who have been thought of as weak. May others finally see your strength.
May you finally see your own strength.
Catch up on the Supernatural Prison World
There are magically hidden towns around the world which are entirely occupied by supernatural races. There are five races: Shifter, Vampire, Magic User (witch/wizard, sorceress/sorcerer), Fey (Faerie), and Demi-Fey (Ogres, trolls, harpies, gargoyles, mermaids, etc). They all live together in relative peace.
Bordering many of these towns are prisons which house supernatural criminals. These crims are contained there to keep the world, and humans especially, safe from them. Humans do not know about these races, except for the Guilds – specially chosen families who help the supernatural communities acquire things in the human world, and integrate if needed.
Stratford, Connecticut is the supernatural prison town in the USA, controlled by a council of five powerful supes, one from each of the races. Maximus Compass has just become the vampire leader. His brothers (quads) Braxton, Jacob, and Tyson, are the shifter, fey, and magic leaders also.
These quads are newly elected to their leadership role, after having defeated the dragon king in an epic throw-down battle. The king was trying to take over all of the councils around the world. He failed. But there has been much carnage left in his wake.
The quads are pack mates with Jessa Lebron, wolf shifter, and her twin sister, Mischa Lebron.
This is Mischa and Max’s story.
Other terms
True Mate – A fated mateship. Mates will have a physical and mental connection. Only between supernaturals of the same species (i.e shifter and shifter).
Chosen Mate – A mateship which is chosen between supernaturals. Length of time is up to the couple involved. Can be between any of the races, and sometimes even with humans.
Half-Breed – The offspring of supernatural and human mating. They generally have nothing more than some advanced senses. Live normal human lives.
Hybrid – Offspring between two different supernatural races. Vampire and shifter offspring will be a hybrid of both races. Weaker in some ways than full blooded race members.
Dragon Mated – Dragon shifters are not genetic, and cannot be inherited. They are only born when a dragon soul chooses to bond with a supernatural. The two become dragon mated. Very rare, and very powerful beings are dragon shifters.
Maximus Compass
Each night the emptiness claims me and each morning I force myself to awake. Aimlessly, I wander the streets of the human world, feeding to survive. At times I briefly contemplate ending it all, but I refuse to leave my brothers or Jessa.
Speaking of my number one girl, a buzzing illumination indicated I had another text. She was relentless, never letting me wallow in my misery.
Jessa babe: Maximus Compass, where the fuck are you? Seriously, dude, I’m as fat as a house and my eyes are literally falling from my head I’m that tired. Mainly because two babies are kicking the shit out of me every night. I need you to come home. Braxton won’t stop feeding me. I’m starting to waddle. WADDLE.
An actual smile forced its way across my face. She was the one light in my darkness, the reason I was heading in the direction of Stratford. Though I wasn’t sure I could step into the community again. That was the place my mate had … died. I was able to say the word now, but it still burned like the hottest fires of hell. I needed to start accepting what had happened. Truth was, the guilt was killing me. Guilt and pain. I hadn’t protected Cardia. I was too busy trying to save everyone else. My duty should have been to her first, and yet it never was.
I didn’t deserve a true mate, and so the fates, those evil bitches, had taken her from me. I wanted to kill them. But, unfortunately, that was impossible.
My phone buzzed again.
Jessa babe: I’m serious, Max. You need to come home. There’s stuff happening, the shifter bears are planning some sort of coup against Braxton. We need you. The council needs you.
She was pulling out the big guns now, reminding me of my responsibility, of my brothers. I missed those assholes. We had barely been apart since birth, and it was our birthday soon. Twenty-three. And yet I felt like I was a thousand years old. Old and completely done.
I hit her back with a brief text.
On my way.
That was all she needed to know.
Mischa Lebron
Curses were ringing out as I stepped through the front door of the Compass home.
“Are you goddamn kidding me? For shit’s sake! Purple … who needs ten different shades of purple? And what the hell is magenta?”
Hearing a whole lot of swearing was not unusual when popping into the home my twin, Jessa, shared with her dragon shifter mate, Braxton. The first few times it happened I’d taken off at a run, convinced that for anyone to be shouting like that they were either being murdered or going into early labor. She was expecting twins and no one could be sure when they were going to arrive. But now I knew better. Lately, the usual culprit of her ire was when someone ate the last piece of cake.
Never touch a pregnant shifter’s cake. This mantra was now drilled into me, and I was not likely to forget. Of course, this time it was clearly something else. The color purple had her all a tizzy.
I hurried as fast as I could d
own the hall, but with my own impending pregnancy I wasn’t exactly in running shape. Yep, my twin and I had decided we should do everything together, including having our first babies.
“Jess,” I yelled, to let her know I was on my way, before remembering that was pretty much redundant. Bad habit from my human days. She was a wolf shifter, and would have heard me before I even made it across the front porch.
“I’m in the dining room, Misch,” she bellowed back. And then: “What the actual freaking hell? Screw this.”
There was a crash, followed by multiple clatters of small objects as they were seemingly flung across the room. I laughed then, and it was weird to hear something so light and carefree fall from my lips. Lately I had been channeling sad sack in the worst kind of way. I wanted to blame pregnancy hormones, and they definitely had something to do with it, but mostly it was … other stuff.
Trying my best to minimize the waddle, I strode along the small hall and through the living area, which was deserted, and into the next room. Jessa was at her usual spot behind the absolutely breathtaking dining table, a hand-carved masterpiece that should be in a museum or something.
Seriously, I wasn’t sure anyone else in Stratford understood how unique a design and shape it was. In the human world it would go for tens of thousands of dollars, easily. No human could have made it by hand. Only a supernatural would have the strength and fine dexterity skills to do what Braxton Compass had done. My twin’s mate was not only a scary-as-heck dragon shifter, lethal and godlike gorgeous, but he was also an artist. Deep down. You couldn’t make something so beautiful and not have artistry in your soul.
Long, inky black hair – the exact replica of my own – shot everywhere as Jessa’s head flung up. She locked eyes with me. The color was a deep blue that reminded me of a perfectly-cut sapphire. One of the few differences between us was our eyes. Mine were turquoise, closer to green than blue. I made my way around to her side of the table, noticing now that she had a poor book clutched tightly in both of her hands.
She lifted it up and waved it in my face. “This is all your fault. Seriously…” She started mimicking me in a high pitched voice: “‘You need to do something to calm yourself, Jessa.’ So I decided to try something new.”
I finally caught sight of the book cover and a torrent of laughter burst from me. Side-splitting, belly-aching laughter. I tried to catch my breath as I sank down next to her, easing my girth in behind the table. Even as the laughter died off, a huge, beaming smile never left my face. My cheeks were actually hurting.
My twin was pure comedic gold, even when she wasn’t trying to be.
“Where did you get this from?” I asked, prying it out of her iron grip. Smoothing the white cover down on the adult coloring book, I flicked through the pages. Jessa had made an attempt on half a dozen of the pictures but hadn’t gotten more than a few strokes of color into each one.
The title caught my attention again. “Of course you would buy a coloring book titled The Eff Bomb Coloring Book – For adults who need to release some anger.”
Each page contained one large curse word, with some sort of artsy or flowery design around it. I paused on an image in the middle, one which Jessa had started to outline with the now-hated color purple.
“What’s a cockswabbler?” I asked, wrinkling my brow as I tried to work out if that was a real thing or made up.
As the word left my lips, I found myself looking over my shoulder, expecting my mother to magically appear and smack me up the side of the head. Lienda Lebron did not like us ladies cursing, which made life very interesting when she was around Jessa.
My sister laughed. “Dude! I think you need this book more than me. We have to update your vocab. I don’t want to hear ‘gosh golly gee’ out of your mouth one more time.”
I swatted her with the book. “I’ve never said golly gee in my life.”
“Whatever,” Jessa said. “I’m still saying this book is your fault. The coloring made you all Zen and stuff, even with a baby taking up what feels like permanent residence in your uterus and kicking the crap out of you, so I ordered one through the Guilds. I, of course, went for something more interesting than Nature’s Beauty.”
Of course she did. The eff bomb was like her favorite word ever. It was true though, I loved coloring and drawing. I found moments of peace when I was absorbed in my art, and probably wouldn’t have made it through the last few months without that creative outlet.
Jessa clearly hadn’t felt the same way.
“So … seeing the pencils are now strewn across the room, I’m going to guess it wasn’t the relaxing experience you were hoping for.”
She growled, catching me by surprise, but at least I didn’t jump anymore. After spending twenty-plus years hidden in the human world, I’d only known about this supernatural world for a few months, I was slowly getting used to all the weird. Although wrapping my head around the fact that I turned into an animal, a wolf like my sister … was hard. Seriously. Who could say that about themselves?
Jessa lurched to her feet and I followed. Both of us had to push the bench back to free our baby bellies. Even though I was a month or so further along, her rounded bump was almost the same size as mine. With two little ones in there, that wasn’t a big surprise.
“I don’t even understand how you can think this is anything other than stressful. Not only do I have to stay in the lines, but I have no idea what color to choose. Why did I get the hundred and twenty pencil pack? Why?” She threw her hands up. “I give up, you can keep your Zen. I’m going to go and punch the crap out of a Compass or something.”
That would be her relaxing happy place.
“I’m sure we can think of another way for you to relax.”
As the deep voice washed over us, everything about my sister changed. The pinched brow, the stress lines across her face, all of that vanished, to be replaced by something I could only describe as desire and joy. Joy in its purest form.
It was painful to look at, and yet I craved to see it at the same time. Life had been a lot like that lately, a warring inside of me. It was like fire. I loved the flames, the heat and the energy, but I also knew it could hurt me, could burn through the delicate layers of my skin to permanently leave a scar. Funny how the things we crave are often those which could hurt us the most.
Jessa moved then, fast, so much more graceful than she should be in her condition. Braxton was perched in the doorway. He was one of the Compass quads, famous, powerful – newly appointed leaders of the United States supernatural community.
Somehow the quads were born of hybrid parents, Jack – shifter-fey father – and Jo – vampire-sorceress mother, but each had a pure soul of the four different supernatural races. Faerie, vampire, magic user and shifter. The only one they didn’t have a representative in was demi-fey. But we’d recently learned they were really just a branch of the fey, so the boys actually had all the races covered. This made them uniquely powerful. They were the pack my sister had been lucky enough to grow up in.
In the supernatural community, some packs you were born into and some packs you chose. Jessa and the quads had been best friends since they were two, and had formed their own pack. There were no ceremonies or blood exchanges like I’d have guessed, just their inner shifter, vamp, magic user, and fey accepting and bonding with the others.
And now I was one of them. I hadn’t been here quite half a year, and the time had not been smooth or without drama, but somehow they accepted me and my wolf. We were pack.
Standing in the entrance behind Braxton were his brothers. Jacob with his white-blond hair and grass-green eyes was fey. Tyson with auburn hair and beautiful honeysuckle irises was wizard, a magic user. The final of their quartet, the one who was missing, was Maximus, the massive, beautiful, and lethal vampire. With dirty-blond hair, deep rich brown eyes, and tawny skin draped across tight muscles, he was built like a warrior and fought like one too. He was also the one supernatural or “supe” that I tried very hard no
t to think about because we shared a past, and also a soon-to-be-born baby that he knew nothing of.
Jessa reached Braxton and flung herself into his arms. He scooped her up like she weighed nothing. Which to him she probably didn’t. As the two of them went into their usual greeting, involving lots of touching, and hot, hot kisses, the rest of us strode into the living room. I found myself drifting toward Tyson. The mage and I had bonded lately. Something about our shared pain gave us common ground.
He dropped down onto the couch, running a hand through his auburn-tinged hair. It was just starting to get some length back again, but I knew he was thinking about cutting it. The shorter, Mohawk style reminded him of Grace, the healer witch who he couldn’t seem to get out of his mind. She’d magically cut his hair in a fit of anger and now a part of him thought of it as foreplay. Poor dude, he was the male version of me, both of us sticking our damn hands into the fire. Grace was not in Stratford at the moment, she’d had family drama. I’d guess Tyson was about a week from chasing her down. Patience was not his strongest attribute.
I settled in on his right side, Jacob giving us a wave as he hit the stairs, probably to shower and change before we left for dinner. Not that he ever looked like he needed to clean up. The fey was physical perfection; his white-blond hair never had a single strand out of place. It was unnatural and unnerving. No human would ever look like that unless they were a mannequin.
I grinned at Tyson. “So how was king school today?” He turned warm, dark honey eyes on me. It was a color I’d never seen until arriving in Stratford, both melting and mysterious. Sort of like the mage himself.
“King school,” he chuckled. “Still a better title than boring-ass training to be a council leader. It’s going okay. We’re behind the ball from the start, so this is catch up. Today we were at Vanguard again, learning all of the securities, seeing the different wings, trying to get a handle on the next batch of criminals coming in soon.” He reached over and rubbed a hand across my belly.
