Copyright
Damon © 2017
Shiloh Walker
Cover Design © Shiloh Walker, Angela Waters
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.
Several characters are “tuckerizations.” Reference. The personas, representations, etc of these characters are entirely fictitious and should not be construed as real.
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Chapter One
"Oh, Damon. Your face…your poor face." The breathy, little girl voice, sweeter than sugar, really didn’t fit the insane woman who’d just spoken to me.
I’ve have long since grown used to that voice—and her violent tendencies—and didn't bat an eyelash as she bent over me and stroked a hand down my cheek. Annette, local ruler of the cat clan, ruler of all she surveyed — except me — and batshit crazy psychopath, caught my chin and lifted my face upright.
For a moment, her face faded in and out of focus. The touch of her hand under my chin had bones grinding together. I didn’t make a sound.
Blinking my one good eye, I focused on her face until it stopped swimming in and out. The other eye was still swollen shut, although it was healing bit by bit.
I was the perfect punching bag for a lunatic.
I was big and strong and I healed fast.
In another few minutes, the bruises and bloody wounds would be gone and once I showered, nobody would be the wiser.
Save for me.
Even Annette would forget.
“Does it hurt?" She stared at me solemnly, her lips puckered, touched with a soft, pale pink that matched the negligee she’d pulled on earlier. Even the splattering of blood on her lower lip was echoed in the blood spray on the pink silk.
My blood.
Again.
“Damon, does it hurt?” She stroked a hand down my cheek.
Yes, bitch. It hurts. Mentally, I told her exactly what she wanted to hear—the truth. Out loud, I said, "I'm fine, Lady."
After all, she’d done the beating, but she hadn’t been trying to punish me.
I had just been handy.
If she’d wanted to hurt me, either I’d be unconscious—or she’d be dead. Because one of these days, I would get fed up and just kill her.
So I just went with the neutral response.
I was fine.
She hadn’t done any lasting damage and I could already feel a dozen, stinging aches where the bones were knitting together, that odd itch was skin was closing itself up.
An odd, avid light gleamed in her eyes as she stroked a hand back across my scalp. “Are you sure?”
It was almost like she wanted me to say something—wanted me to tell her yeah, I was hurting. Or yeah, I was pissed.
But that would defeat the purpose.
I have taken this beating for a reason and that reason was currently standing on the far side of the room, his head hanging low.
The kid’s luck was running out and I didn’t know how much longer I’d be able to delay things.
But I’d managed to do it one more time.
Of course, I’d done it at the expense of somebody else’s neck.
I wasn’t sorry, though.
“I’m fine, Lady.”
“Wonderful.” She beamed at me, but the smile was lost to ice a moment later. “Where is Leon?" She strode over to the makeup table that took up the southeastern corner of her quarters. Since she was no longer leaning over me, I pushed up onto my elbow. It sent a lance of pain through me but I shoved it aside, fully aware that she was still watching me.
Those curious eyes, bright as a child’s, but oddly lifeless, like a doll’s, studied me as I leaned against the soft, pale pink wall at my back. Her rooms looked like they’d been designed to resemble a five-year-old girl’s birthday cake. Pink. Pink. Pink.
It was the color of my nightmares anymore. Not because I was afraid of her, but because sooner or later, I was afraid of what I’d find in here with her. Like today.
My shoulder screamed at me and I moved over to the center column in the middle of the room, bracing the injured part against it. A few seconds later, with lights pinwheeling across my vision, I had my shoulder set back into place.
She had dislocated it, but now that I had it back in place, it would heal up fast enough.
“Leon?” Annette asked again.
Turning, I met her eyes in the mirror just in time to see her lick my blood from her lips. “He’s gone, Lady. Doing his damnedest to stay that way, too.”
“But you will find him, won’t you, Damon?” She reached for a brush, stroking the silken blonde curls back from her face as she stared at me in the mirror.
Annette seem to have forgotten the kid. Doyle lingered near the fireplace, arms wrapped around himself, head hanging low—and his eyes pools of seething hate that locked on her head.
Just stay quiet, I willed him. Stay quiet.
“I can find him,” I assured her, moving closer so I’d fill her field of vision.
Doyle Hansen, her brother’s kid—her brother’s orphan—should have been living under her roof and if she was any kind of decent, she would have been taking care of him. But her idea of taking care was teaching a child the right way to break a bone. You want a clean break, so it will heal again. Then you can break it again. Our soldiers don’t serve us well if they can’t fight.
I’d taken the kid off her hands one night years ago. It hadn’t been long after his dad had died and what he’d needed was somebody to pay him some attention. That had happened, but the somebody had been Annette and the attention had been a fist to his mouth when he’d had a tantrum. He’d been just a runt of a thing, only days after losing his only parent and she belted him. If he’d been human, it would have killed him. Instead, she laid him up in the medical ward for days.
Shifter kids aren’t all that strong anyway and he’d ended up sick on top of things, alone there in the medical ward.
So I’d taken him. I’d been there for him for ten years.
I’d hope she’d forget about him.
But somebody had pointed him out to her a couple of months ago, mentioned that he looked nothing like his father and he was looking more and more like her side of the family with his blond hair and blue eyes.
She’d been dismayed, then delighted.
When will he change, do you think?
We could look amazing together, that boy and I…ruling this city.
Yes. It was always about her.
Her eyes took on a far-off look and I took advantage of it to give Doyle a dark look. He read it well, very well and in seconds, he was gone.
As the door whispered shut, I eased away from her. It was never a good idea to stay too close. Her appetites were too voracious, be they for blood or sex. She’d had blood from me. I wasn’t inclined to fuck her, too.
“Lady, should I deal with this issue?”
She blinked, lashes falling down to shield her blue eyes.
When she looked back at me, h
er fractured sanity had returned and she gave me a brilliant smile.
“Together, Damon. We’ll deal with it together. I love to watch you work.”
Chapter Two
I love to watch you work.
Those words had echoed through my head for too long last night.
A cougar by the name of Leon was now dead and the shirt I wore had his blood on it. His blood, my blood.
I’d found him, as promised.
But he hadn’t come in easy.
As I’d dragged him in to face her, I’d still been bleeding from the claw marks he’d dug into my chest when he tried to rip my spine out—from the front. I’d been ready to leave and clean up, but the crazy woman had insisted I stay. She wanted everybody to see what happened when they defied her.
He’d been killed in front of the Lair, with me on display so the half the fucking Clan knew what who would hunt them down.
I’d gotten wary looks from the time I’d come into Easy Orlando. Shit like this over the years had only added to it.
Flexing my hands, I let the claws slide out for the first time in twenty-four hours. What I wanted to do was shift. I wanted to go run, take to the trees outside of here and lose my skin, run long enough to lose the filth that seemed to work deep inside me the longer I was around her.
I love to watch you work.
Letting myself into the small house I called my own, I leaned back against the door. I went to drag a hand down my face, but the smell of blood there made me stop. “A bath,” I muttered. “I need a fucking bath.”
A shower, then a bath. Maybe if I soaked in the water long enough, the stain would come off.
Off in the house, I could hear Doyle’s breathing. The kid wasn’t asleep. He’d heard me come in, too. His senses had started to kick into overdrive the past few months. He’d hit his spike soon—that adrenaline and hormone surge that brought about the full change in a shapeshifter youth.
When it was over, if he survived, he’d grown into a man to be reckoned with.
Annette, the monster, would want to take him.
He appeared in the doorway and we stared at each other.
“You are never going to wise up, are you?”
“She made you kill again,” Doyle said in response.
“Made me kill…” I laughed softly. “Doyle, I am a killer. You are about to become a killer. You’ll be a good one. What I hope is that you don’t end up a batshit crazy one.”
The unspoken words hung between us. Like her.
“You killed somebody because she said so!” He flung the words at me, an accusation.
Yeah, they stung. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t been the one execute Leon in the end. I actually would have better if I’d been the one to do it. A clean kill didn’t bother me when the person deserved it.
The words stung because I felt raw inside. Raw and scraped out, hollow. Leon was a sick bastard who’d needed to die, but seeing one monster torture another monster didn’t do anything to lessen the sickness that was eating this clan alive.
“If you want to get technical, she killed him. I just hunted the piece of shit down and brought him in,” I said, keeping my tone dry. It never did any good to let somebody see they’d gotten a dig in.
His jaw clenched but after a few seconds, he just shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. You still took him in to get slaughtered—not all of that blood is yours. That means you took him in to get killed then you stood by and watched.”
“Yeah. I did.” This was the crux of my guilt—I’d stood by and watched as she got her rocks off killing somebody. Leon had needed to die, but Annette had enjoyed killing him too much.
Annette liked to kill.
Annette liked to kill anything.
She’d kill an innocent bystander for the hell out of it if she could do it without fear of any sort of reprisal. Before the Charter had gone into effect, she’d done it fairly often.
She still did, truth be told. She was just more…selective.
But she was also the Alpha of the strongest shapeshifting faction in the southern states, and one of the strongest in the northern hemisphere. That afforded her more protection than I liked to admit.
“If she’d told you to kill him, you would have. You’ve killed for her before.” He jutted his chin out at me, a challenge that could get him killed if he’d already been through his spike.
“Yeah,” I said, holding Doyle’s eyes as I shoved off the door. “I would have killed him. That’s part of the job, kid. I’m an enforcer and it’s not like we live in a world of fairy tales and unicorns. I’ve been gone a lot the past few weeks, remember that? Told you I had a job to work on? We had a few girls go missing down near the trenches.”
Doyle’s eyes flickered.
The trenches were just this side of no-man’s land—get past there and you ended up close to vamp territory.
I’d hoped I’d find something that would point to the bloodsuckers.
It wasn’t like any of them were above grabbing somebody they thought was a runaway and having fun with them for a few weeks, then letting them go with a shitload of money and apologies for the misunderstanding.
One of the biggest vampire houses in in the southern region had been sanctioned for such problems twice in the past five years. Not that it would stop House Whittier.
As a rule, our kind didn’t like the dead. They were soulless, evil bastards and manipulators of the highest order and they’d keep on trolling the trenches, and anywhere else, they might find vulnerable types.
The trenches tended to be where people with little money and even fewer options like to hang out. Humans might have called it redneck central. I just called the place trouble.
Three girls, just barely old enough to be holding a job, had been working at a strip joint there.
Three girls disappeared from the same dive bar in under six months.
Nobody would have thought anything of it, except two of the girls shared an apartment with a third and she’d reported the second disappearance. She’d reported it to her local enforcer but it had been brushed off.
She’d started digging around on her own then, asking questions.
She discovered a third, then a fourth disappearance and contacted two other enforcers.
One of them had said something to me.
I’d been on my way to talk to her when she was killed.
Her body had still been warm when I found her.
It pissed me off.
Leon should have left her alone.
“You want to know what I’ve been up the past few weeks, Doyle?” I gestured to the shirt I wore, the one stinking of Leon’s blood. “That shifter she killed as I stood by and watched? Why don’t you ask about all the girls he killed? At least five innocent girls, barely older than you, are dead thanks to him.”
Doyle’s throat worked. His eyes fell away. “You…that’s the job…you said you found a problem down in the trenches. Said he wasn’t paying his tithe.”
“Oh, he wasn’t.” Smirking, I turned away from him and stripped away my shirt. I wasn’t going to even try to wash the blood out. I’d still smell it, even if I soaked it in bleach for a week. “But Annette cares more about money than a couple of kids who didn’t have any parents, anybody to speak for them.”
Striding past him, I tossed the shirt into the trash can in the kitchen. I’d deal with it later. Bath first.
Exhaustion hammered at me.
“Damon, wait…”
“No. I want a fucking bath and a nap. And I want you to stop taunting her.” Shoving inside, I went to push the door closed, but Doyle came up and slammed a hand against the door, surprising strength in the movement.
“Would you just…damn it, I’m sorry!” he shouted, his voice cracking. “She just…I wasn’t going to beat up on some kid just to make her happy and that’s what she wanted. Is that what you think I should have done?”
“No.” I looked
back at him over my shoulder. “I think you did exactly what you should have done. But you need to understand that you’re baiting a tiger. You made your point with the kid, you should have let it go. Instead, you told her that you would rather die than start training with her enforcers.”
“I would.” He jutted up his chin.
“I am one of her enforcers.” I jabbed a thumb at my chest. “You should have said you’d think about it and then let me know. I would have handled it. I’ve been handling her for you for years. I’ve been trying to teach you the same. Instead, I had to pick a fight with her to distract her so she wouldn’t knock your stupid ass on the ground. You see that beating I took? That would have been you if Chang hadn’t gotten word to me that she had you in her quarters, Doyle. You’ve got to learn to start thinking.”
He stared at me with big, angry eyes—scared eyes.
Guilt kicked me in the ass while a sly voice whispered, You don’t have to stay. Nobody can make you. Leave. Chang will come with you. You could even take the kid.
The bitch of it all?
I could. Nobody could hide like Chang and me.
Nothing held me here. Chang’s loyalties were to me, just as mine were to him. The only other thing that bound me here was the kid and soon he’d spike, then he’d been a force to contend with Annette on his own—assuming he survived. Assuming he didn’t die in the power struggles that would start once people figured out just what he’d become…shit.
I loved the kid. He deserved better than whatever his evil hellspawn aunt had in mind for him.
Take him. You two can walk away.
Even if Annette decided to come after me, it would be the last mistake she ever made.
Killing her would be…simple. It would be a relief, even.
And it wouldn’t happen.
Chang and I had come here well over a decade ago, several months apart. Chang had received…information that we’d eventually find what we sought here. So far, nothing had turned up, but we were patient.
We watched.
We waited.
Sooner or later, the answers we needed would emerge.
I couldn’t leave.
Damon Page 1
