Lost

by Dean Murray

  "Who the hell are you?"

  Despite the pain competing for my attention, I felt my lips pull back in a smile.

  "I thought that we'd already established that, Nicolas. What was it that your boss called me? A worthless pawn?"

  "No, you're not Isaac Nazir. I fought Isaac Nazir and trounced him soundly."

  "What's the matter, worried that Carson showed me stuff that he never trusted you enough to pass on to you?"

  The flare of power and rage out of Nicolas was white-hot. It wasn't the kind of demonstration you expected out of a hybrid on his last legs, it was the kind of thing that only the most powerful dominants ever produced. My beast should have responded with a burst of energy of his own, but he didn't. It was more evidence that I didn't have much left to give.

  My beast was too far gone to care about posturing, all he cared about was trying to survive.

  "There was nothing that Carson didn't show me. I was his prize pupil. I was the one he wanted his daughter to marry. The old fool had no idea who he was dealing with until it was too late."

  As Nicolas charged in towards me with a roar, I experienced another of those moments when everything slowed down and I became hyper-aware of my surroundings. Celeste looked worried, Jax looked scared, and Onyx looked concerned. None of them had expected for me to last this long, but I couldn't hold that against Celeste. I hadn't expected to last this long either.

  My beast was lethargic, as though his attention was directed elsewhere, or maybe he was just making peace with what was coming.

  The fight could still go either way, but I was nearly out of tricks, and Nicolas' anger seemed to be giving him the strength he needed to move like he was fresh and uninjured. Time sped back up to normal speed and Nicolas was now less than two steps away from me.

  His claws moved towards me impossibly fast, and once again I blocked and stepped forward. It was obvious that my training and reflexes had let me down. It was the same attack that Nicolas had just finished trumping.

  It was the end…only it wasn't. Instead of parrying his blow to the outside, I'd parried it to the inside, which meant that his own arm was in the way of any follow-up attack he could launch and his chest and side were completely exposed.

  I stabbed him in the chest, puncturing his lung. I would have preferred a straight shot at his heart, but I'd opened up the wrong side of his body for that. It was a vicious, debilitating attack nonetheless, but it wasn't enough to stop him from bringing his arm back around and slamming his elbow into the side of my head.

  He knocked me back on my heels and then before I could recover, he wrapped me up in a giant bear hug and lifted me off of my feet. It was the last thing I would have expected out of someone like Nicolas. It was the attack of an enraged bruiser rather than the slick technique of a professional killer, but that didn't stop it from being effective.

  Even assuming that I could have matched his strength, I didn't have the leverage that I would have needed to break free of him. My hands were trapped between us, pinned by a combination of our bodies and his vicelike grip around my upper arms.

  I tried to get my talons into play. I was cutting him up, but I couldn't get to anything important. He was bleeding so fast that I knew he didn't have much longer, but I could feel one of his hands digging into my back in an attempt to sever my spinal cord.

  He was having a hard time getting past all of the ribs and vertebrae, but it was only a matter of time. I was betting that he'd succeed in paralyzing me before he bled to death.

  I happened to be looking at Onyx as I struggled in a vain attempt to free myself. I could see the worry and concern disappear, replaced instead by satisfaction as my struggles started to weaken. Just when I was on the point of giving up, I felt Nicolas weaken as the cumulative blood loss finally started to catch up with him. It was a very slight change, but it was all I needed to get one hand just enough free to sink it into his chest.

  I'd missed his heart again, too low this time, but I hadn't expected anything different. The important thing was that I could feel his arms relaxing even further.

  From where he was standing Onyx shouldn't have been able to see what had happened, but something tipped him off. Maybe it was a change in Nicolas' posture, or maybe it was something in my expression, but he knew as soon as I did when the balance finally shifted irrevocably towards me.

  The burning sheet of pain as Onyx used his power on me was all the worse because I hadn't been expecting it. Onyx apparently wasn't willing to stand by and see Nicolas killed, not when he had the ability to save someone that he viewed as being a useful tool.

  I yelled again. The agony was too intense for me to hold it inside. Nicolas tightened his grip on me in an attempt to finish me off even faster, but all that did was drive my claws more deeply into his chest.

  A tiny, hysterical part of me wanted to tell him not to bother. I'd managed to endure several seconds, maybe even as much as a minute, of Onyx's ability before, but my reserves were already gone this time. I was at the end of my strength, had been for the last quarter of the fight, and I could feel the end approaching.

  Just before I felt my heart beat for the last time I started hallucinating. The pain didn't exactly disappear, but it morphed into something else. My core still burned with the same terrible fire, but there was a different, more pleasant, cooling fire burning in my arms and legs.

  It started in my claws, which was odd—there aren't any kind of nerve endings there—and spread. About the time my heart stopped beating, I sank my talons into Nicolas' thighs. I couldn't have said why I chose to do that right then.

  Maybe it was a simple desire to make sure that I took Nicolas with me. Maybe it was something else, an instinct operating on the subconscious level where my beast preferred to spend most of his time.

  Either way, by the time the fire moved up to my knees and elbows I was craving it the way that I normally craved air. I had a fleeting thought that my brain must be approaching the point of running out of oxygen, but I didn't mind, not if that was the price to feel this good.

  There was something wrong with that thought, but I was having a hard time reasoning around the drumming in my ears. I wasn't wrong because I was willing to die, although that was wrong too. There was something else. I wasn't supposed to feel good. I should have still been in pain, exquisite pain that exceeded anything else I'd ever felt, but I wasn't.

  I opened my eyes back up to check, but Onyx still had the same slightly pinched expression around his eyes. He was still using his ability on me, but it wasn't affecting me anymore.

  No, that wasn't quite it. I could still feel the pain out in the very furthest reaches of my body, but it didn't matter anymore. It was so dwarfed by everything else I was feeling that there wasn't any room left over to experience it at the same time.

  The cooling, healing fire had been steadily growing, but now it stopped. It was still washing up my arms and legs, but it had reached a point of stability where the fire in was equal to the fire that was being expended to contain the pain.

  I wanted more fire, wanted it more than anything else I'd ever wanted. I…reached…for more fire and felt it just beyond the tips of my claws. I pulled and felt it come in faster and faster.

  About that time I realized what the drumming was. My heart had started back up. Just as incredibly, I felt strong. I was bursting with strength and vitality. It demanded that I do something with it.

  I broke free of Nicolas' hold with ridiculous ease, but dropping to the ground pulled my talons free of him and the amount of fire lapping into my body dropped by half.

  I tried to pull even more in through my claws, but a split second after that I felt the source of the healing fire flicker and go out. I didn't realize what had actually happened until Nicolas turned into dead weight in my arms.

  He was dead. I'd…sucked him dry like some kind of vampire. It should have been revolting, but I still felt too good for feelings of disgust to stick. Besides, I suddenly had a much more pressi
ng concern.

  There wasn't any more good fire entering my body, but the pain was still there, still eating away at my reserves. Based on the rate at which it was being consumed I had a very short period of time before the pain was going to grow back to the point where it would overwhelm me.

  I wasn't going to waste that opportunity. I was less than ten feet away from Onyx's dais. I covered that distance in two long bounds and slammed the claws on my right hand into his shoulder before he could process the fact that his ability had failed him for the first time.

  He was strong, possibly even strong enough to have pushed up out of his chair despite my best efforts under normal circumstances. These weren't normal circumstances though, not even close. I could have easily held him there pinned in his chair, but I chose to let him up.

  My store of healing fire was nearly gone, so I reached through my claws and started new tendrils racing up my arm. It was intoxicating, so much so that I didn't manage to get my arm up in time to block the punch that Onyx threw directly into my chest.

  I felt his claws enter my heart, and then felt the muscle contract, tearing itself against the bitter, deadly edges of something that didn't belong there. I should have been panicking, but I merely reached up and pulled his hand out of my chest.

  The energy I was siphoning from his body raced into the ruin he'd made and I could feel the flesh knitting back together. I could even feel the blood being replaced. When I looked down there wasn't even a scar there.

  Onyx tried to slash me again, but I was ready this time. I blocked his attack with my left hand and then ended him with a single slash across his neck.

  I didn't want to kill him that way. Every part of me hungered to drain him dry in the exact same way that I'd drained Nicolas, but the sheer strength of the desire told me that would be a bad idea. I'd never been addicted to anything before, and I didn't want to start now, didn't want to turn into someone that killed solely for the high it gave me.

  I turned around to face the rest of the room and saw chaos. Half of Onyx's remaining men had charged the dais and the other half were engaged in a lopsided battle against Celeste, Jax, and the rest of Celeste's people.

  The dominants were clearly better fighters, but they were giving way against better than three-to-one odds. The submissives were attacking fearlessly. Some of them had already taken dreadful wounds, but others had latched onto arms and legs and even as I watched, one of the hybrids went down as a wolf latched onto his throat.

  The first of Onyx's guys reached me, but I was faster than I'd ever been before. I checked his slash by stabbing him in the arm, and then stepped into him and put my fist into his chest. The second guy reached me while I was still tangled up with the first guy, but I merely stabbed him in the thigh with the talons of my left leg and shoved.

  It shouldn't have been possible to stop a full-grown hybrid like that, not when he was charging and I was stationary, not by using only one leg, but I did. More than just stopping him, I threw him nearly thirty feet.

  I heard an unfamiliar screech just before the third hybrid reached me, and looked down to find that I'd torn long gouges into the concrete of the dais. I grabbed the third guy and threw him into the obscenely heavy throne with enough force to both knock him unconscious and knock the throne down off of the dais.

  The fourth guy arrived too soon after the third guy and managed to stab me in the back. The fire was burning so brightly inside of me that I barely even felt the pain. It wasn't until I turned and backhanded him into the wall that I realized I'd been draining the first guy that entire time.

  "Stop!"

  My yell practically shook the entire house. It was so loud that everyone actually stopped fighting for the briefest of instants.

  "Stop fighting and you will be judged for your crimes. There has been enough killing. You'll all be punished for your crimes, and you may end up being sent out to fight werewolves until you die, but I'll spare anyone I can. No more death."

  Chapter 33

  Isaac Nazir

  Hunt Family Estate

  New Orleans, Louisiana

  Everyone had decided to separate back to their respective corners rather than continuing to fight. I probably would have gotten more resistance from Celeste's people except for the fact that the pause in the hostilities had given them a chance to see the butcher's bill. Two of them hadn't survived the night and about half of the wolves who were left were going to spend at least a couple of days in bed.

  I asked Celeste to send the least injured of her people for cages, but she told me that there was a massive steel and concrete vault on the other end of the house. When I ordered Onyx's guys to follow one of her wolves to the vault I expected them to make a break for it, but none of them did.

  It was about then that I happened to look down and see the sheer amount of light I was giving off. Even Set's queen hadn't glowed that brightly. I didn't look like a mortal being, I looked like some kind of angel.

  If I'd been in their shoes I probably would have been in shock too.

  After the bad guys were all safely locked up, and I'd helped care for Celeste's people, I found an out-of-the-way bedroom that looked like it hadn't been used in a while and collapsed onto the bed. It took a while, but eventually the energy that I'd stolen from Nicolas, Onyx and the other guy dissipated. Some of it seemed to just soak into the air around me, but it felt like the reservoir inside of me was emptying faster than that could account for. It felt like a lot of that energy was going somewhere else, I just didn't have any idea where.

  When the fire was finally all gone, I was exhausted. I wasn't tired physically, but emotionally and mentally I had nothing left to give. Changing back to human form had helped curb the desire to drain someone dry, but it hadn't gone completely away.

  I didn't like looking at people as a kind of metaphysical food source, but right now that was all I saw when I looked at any of them. Somewhere along the line I fell asleep and didn't wake until Celeste opened the door.

  "Are you okay, Isaac? Do you want to be left alone?"

  It was like looking at a new person. She was still Celeste, but her eyes were more guarded and her posture was more submissive.

  "No, please come in."

  I started to scoot over so that she could sit next to me, but when I looked down at the comforter it was covered in blood, none of it mine.

  "I'm sorry, I wasn't thinking. I've ruined the bedspread."

  "It's fine. I was talking to Ash when I saw the blood on the carpets. He's graciously offered to replace anything that needs replacing out of his share of our inheritance."

  "Sorry, I guess I wasn't really myself after everything that happened."

  "Please don't get mad at me, Isaac, but what did happen?"

  Even as I answered her I couldn't meet her eyes.

  "I fed off of them. First Nicolas, then Onyx, then the first of their guys to attack me. It filled me up with what felt like fire. Their…energy healed me and cushioned me from the pain of having Onyx use his ability on me. I'd never felt anything like it before."

  "You must have manifested an ability."

  I shook my head. "That's impossible. Mallory looked at a couple of us in Nevada before we split up. It wasn't necessary since she'd known me as a child, but she confirmed just a few weeks ago that I don't have the potential to manifest an ability."

  "I don't know who Mallory is, or why you think she'd know whether you were capable of manifesting a power, but she was wrong. You manifested an ability, and it's a huge one. You glowed and I saw Onyx all but rip your heart out of your chest. You're unstoppable."

  "No, I wouldn't say that. Hard to kill, yes, but I'm kind of like a variation of Jaclyn Annikov. I'd be useless against a werewolf, and it all only really kicks in once I've stolen quite a bit of energy from someone else."

  "You're shortchanging yourself, Isaac. Nobody short of Alec or Puppeteer would have even a hope of beating you."

  "You'd be surprised. I can think of a couple of
others who could put me down with a little luck or even just the right planning."

  "Once you've had a chance to rest we need to start testing the limits of what you can do. It could be the difference between living and dying. You need to know what you're capable of."

  "No!"

  It wasn't meant for her as much as it was to tell myself that I wasn't going to tap into someone else's life force again, not unless I didn't have any other choice.

  Celeste jumped slightly, which surprised me, but before I could ask what was wrong she continued speaking.

  "Very well. Ash and Kristin have asked if it would be possible for them to come here."

  "What? Of course, why are they even asking?"

  She looked at me like she wasn't sure what language I was speaking. "They asked because it's bad form to just stop by and visit a pack without clearing the trip with the pack's alpha. The only exception is if you're planning on challenging for leadership of the pack or you're with the Coun'hij."

  "The alpha…"

  It all finally clicked. The haze from the fight with Nicolas and Onyx blew away and everything became clear.

  "I'm the alpha. That's why you're being so tentative. You're worried that I'm going to turn into another Onyx."

  "You and I never established who was dominant to whom, Isaac, but it's obvious now that you're dominant to most of the hybrids in North America. I've never seen anything like what you did today. How would you be acting if our positions were reversed?"

  "When you say it like that, I can see why you're worried, but I need you to not change on me, Celeste."

  It was hard to get the reason out, but I knew I needed to tell her now or I might not ever tell her. It was important that at least one person know about the craving to kill again and again.