The Innocents

by Riley LaShea

  “How am I supposed to trust you?” he asked. “How do I know you won’t just have your guys turn around and kill me once I’ve done what you want?”

  “You don’t.” She didn’t even hesitate. “I think that makes it exciting, don’t you?”

  Slade thought it made him an idiot for even considering it. Prison might be a shithole, but it was pretty unlikely death would be any better. Not his. Not after the life he’d lived.

  “You’re running out of time.”

  Yeah, Slade got that far better than she did. He was running out of time, he’d been running out, and the clock just kept tickin’ while he was completely clueless as to what to do about it.

  “What do you think you’re going to do?” He finally heard the oncoming footsteps, each and every one dragging the floor to disrupt their sleep and make mornings that much harder. “Just carry me out of here?”

  “Not just,” she said. “But it will be the end result.”

  “Of what?”

  “Make a decision, Slade.”

  “First tell me what you’re gonna -”

  “Make a decision.”

  “Fine. Okay.” Slade realized he would never figure anything out if he got shivved by a right pissed convict the next day. Accepting that out was safer for him than in, he whirled as the shuffle of the guard halted outside his cell.

  “What the bloody hell?” The guard’s eyes were so filled with the redhead, he didn’t even notice Crue dead in his bunk.

  Before he could say another word, the woman was at the door. Hand passing through the bars, she touched the guard’s cheek, and he lost his will to question, before she grabbed the back of his neck, slamming his face into an upright with enough force Slade flinched at the sound of breaking bone.

  With a firm push, the cell door fell off its hinges, crashing against the railing outside, and, knowing the guards would come running at the sound, Slade had no chance to reconsider. Stumbling to the open doorway, he watched the deraph climb onto the railing and plummet the three stories to the ground floor, landing behind the first guard who came to see about the noise. Snapping the guard’s neck with a twist, the redhead pulled the bludgeon from his belt, accelerating to a nonhuman speed to reach the second guard, who just had time to pull his gun before the deraph yanked his head back and shoved the bludgeon down his throat.

  Sickened watching the man choke on the stick’s thick end, Slade flinched when the deraph chopped the guard’s throat with her hand and one broken point of the bludgeon jutted through his skin.

  Attentive gazes and a few enthusiastic shouts following him down the line of cages, Slade made it to the stairs. Before he could take the first step down, the redhead turned back, leaping the two stories to the landing below him, like she wasn’t wearing fuck-me heels, before lunging up to Slade and pulling him to an inexplicable stop when it was time for the greatest urgency.

  “What are you doing?” he demanded as the cries for blood turned to catcalls around them. “They’re going to pin me with this.”

  And they would. It didn’t matter how many witnesses saw it happen. No one in charge was going to believe a redhead with curves to kill offed two guards, his cell mate, and jumped two stories to bust him out of prison.

  “Why do you care?” she returned. “You won’t be here.”

  “How are we supposed to get out now?” Slade could hear the guards on their way, the buzz of the doors as they passed through each sector.

  “Would you like me to kill them too?” the redhead casually asked, and, sirens on the walls starting to scream, it hit Slade, what he had done. He had made a deal with the devil. A devil in heels with great tits.

  Ceiling breaking apart overhead, it felt like the wrath of God as debris rained down upon him, and, glancing up, Slade saw a brawny man looking in before he was tossed into the air like a rag doll and caught in massive hands that hauled him upward through the ceiling and out the roof.

  Redhead emerging a moment later, the sound of a helicopter came toward them at incredible speed, and, tucked beneath the brawny man’s arm like an American football, Slade closed his eyes as he was carried in the chopper’s direction, clenching his teeth against the urge to scream when he felt the jolt of a leap and empty air all around them.

  The clack of heels on metal interspersing with gunfire, Slade didn’t open his eyes again until he felt a firm seat at his back and the shots at last faded away.

  “Congratulations.” The redhead sat calmly across from him, earphones placed over her perfect hair blocking out the sound of the blades, which were rendering Slade nearly deaf. “You’re a free man.”

  Sweating and shaking, Slade tried to feel good about that, reaching around for something to hold onto when it felt as if he might collapse right off the seat.

  “If you had this way out,” he questioned, “why did you have to kill the guards?”

  “How else would I have gotten them to sound the alarm so the team would know when to come?” she said. “Plus, I just really like killing people. Which reminds me...”

  When she nodded to the brawny man, he came at Slade so fast, Slade didn’t have time to react. Pushed onto his back, he tried to fight, but the man’s knees pinning his arms to the seat, one hand held his mouth wide, as the other dug a pair of pliers from his pocket.

  “A lot of people have been disregarding my orders lately.” The redhead sounded bored as the brawny man grasped Slade’s favorite tooth, and, with a single wrench of the pliers, ripped it free. Blood spurting, Slade covered his mouth when the brawny man let him up, choking as the man handed the tooth over to the woman and she held it up to watch it sparkle in the moonlight that came through the window.

  “Let this be your one warning,” she said. “This time when I specifically tell you someone is off-limits, she had better not end up with a gaping hole in her chest.”

  Realizing just what kind of association he’d gotten himself into, Slade looked to the helicopter door, wondering if they would let him just throw it open and take the easy way out. Not that it would make a lot of difference. Whether he took his chances on the chopper or went for a dive, it was gonna be a long way down.

  35

  Shadowmen. The natural enemy of night demons for thousands of years, and Cain, or Lilith, had crawled right into bed with them. Of course, as Haydn recalled, neither ever had much hesitation in crawling into bed with anyone.

  It had been naïve, thinking she could keep her clan safe once she knew from whom the real orders came. If she had been too preoccupied, too wrapped up in Delaney - not all that hard to fathom - they could have easily been followed back. A single false step, and Lilith could have discovered the place Haydn had managed to conceal from her for two and half centuries and her will would be done.

  It almost always was.

  “What’s the big news?” Gijon led the pack into the room.

  Sofa letting out a huff of distress as he dropped onto the cushion at one end and Auris fell into his lap, they seemed to think they were there for a good time. Haydn could hardly expect anything else. Until the past year, there had, after all, been little else for them.

  “Last night, Delaney and I were followed by shadowmen.” She found no reason to delay the revelation once they were all settled into the room. It wouldn’t change anything. Except, possibly, for the worse. She had delayed before, and it gave the hunters a chance to take Raquel, to kill Samuel.

  Haydn knew what she saw, and what it meant for them. Since she climbed out of bed with Delaney, she’d been adding up the details, and they always came to the same result. Over the past years, Slade had discovered more and more effective means of tracking them on the ground. Despite the success of those means, they had managed to survive because they still had their own natural abilities, which meant even the hunters who could find them couldn’t catch them. Fruitful means of tracking on the market, plus enemies they couldn’t see, however, added up to a problem she wasn’t sure had a solution.

  “Wha
t’s that?” Salem asked.

  Haydn had forgotten, again, how young they all were. The oldest sired two hundred years after shadowmen went extinct, they had never lived under the threat of them, had never known true competition for their place in the design. As long as they’d been alive, there had been no natural predators. Aside from the hunters, they had lived as a largely uncontested species.

  “They’re an ancient race,” Haydn said. “They roamed the Earth with the earliest of humans, and survived until the early 1500s. It’s believed they all died off in the Great Scourge.”

  “And what’s that?”

  Eyes closing, for a moment Haydn missed Samuel, as much as she could miss him given how little she’d actually let herself know him. She did feel she knew enough to be quite certain he had taken the time to learn the high points of his history.

  “After the three great plagues,” she told them, “humans went into a panic. They had to have something to blame. It couldn’t possibly be anything as simple as fleas and rats and their own squalid conditions. So, they cast the blame on daemonry, going in pursuit of those creatures of purportedly supernatural origins. They succeeded in the destruction of many.”

  “So, what does that mean for us?” Auris asked.

  “Shadowmen are extremely dangerous. Even to us,” Haydn preempted any boasts about strength and skill. Strength and skill would serve them little against an intangible enemy. “They are our natural foe, with good reason. Shadowmen meld seamlessly with the darkness, impossible to distinguish. If they get a hold of you, there will be nothing to fight. You will be rendered completely powerless.”

  “And you think they’re after us?” Gijon questioned.

  Evidence pointing to yes, Haydn could only speculate, and she wished she didn’t have to. Only once had she fallen into the embrace of a shadowman, a stupid mistake. Back then, all daemonry knew to carry an eternal flame, a small, constant source of light, so as never to walk in absolute darkness. She’d been careless.

  Then, she had escaped only because she could go somewhere the shadow couldn’t - the sky - which was no longer a refuge and had never been for her clan.

  “I think, had they not been in hibernation, or a suspended state of existence, or wherever they’ve been for five hundred years, they would have been more competent last night, and I never would have heard them. If they had followed Delaney and I back, I can’t say what they would have done.”

  “I don’t understand,” Auris said. “Do you think they are working with the hunters? I mean, is that even possible? How could they have…?”

  “That’s something else I need to tell you,” Haydn uttered. She had spent a lot of time over the past hours thinking about that too. When she believed she could protect them, that she had used every means at her disposal, she felt no need to tell them more. Shadowmen today, though, who knew what might come tomorrow? It changed everything. “The hunters haven’t been working on their own. They’re taking their orders from Lilith.”

  “Lilith?” Layla was first to reply, and Haydn was grateful to see Samuel’s mentorship had extended at least that much knowledge of her history to her.

  “I find it hard to believe Garcia would -” Gijon started.

  “I don’t think he knew,” Haydn returned, “but what they have done, the information about our innocents, it all came from Lilith.”

  “Lilith? Why would Lilith be interested in us?” Auris looked as counter-fascinated as Haydn always feared she would be.

  “She has her reasons.”

  “Wait.” Shifting forward to study Haydn more closely, Gijon jolted Auris in his lap. “Lilith was your former? That’s who you cut ties with?

  “Why would you have cut your ties to Lilith?” Auris asked.

  Haydn would have liked to have told her she would have done the same, that any of them would have, given the way circumstances in the household were changing, but it wasn’t true. Her clan did as she did, because they wanted her respect. Were they Lilith’s, they would do as Lilith did, would accept what Lilith accepted.

  “With the shadowmen out there…” Haydn wasn’t going to rehash her history. She didn’t have to tell them everything. She only needed them to know the war had changed, both the enemy and the weapons far more powerful. “Every time you go to the mainland, you will be at great risk. You will have to be considerably more vigilant. Go only when absolutely necessary, and, until I can figure out how to make eternal flames again, in daylight if possible.”

  “Daylight?” Auris practically swore the word.

  “So, we’re prisoners too now?” Gijon uttered, and mouth opening to refute the point, Haydn acknowledged it did sound very much that way.

  “It’s only temporary,” she said. “Until we figure out something else.” Until she figured out how many shadowmen were around, if they were only in Dublin, or had been deployed all over the Northern Atlantic. “They can’t cross water.” At least, not on their own. Any type of vessel to which to cling, though, and the physics changed in the shadowmen’s favor. “So we have some time.”

  “Why don’t we just go after Lilith?” Auris questioned, and, though it was preferable to hear her sound something other than reverent when she said Lilith’s name, it was also a fool’s errand. “If she wants to kill us, we’ll kill her first.”

  “Her clan outnumbers us ten to one,” Haydn said. “It will hardly be a fight.”

  “So, we’ll make more,” Gijon stated. “Even up our numbers.”

  “We can’t just start turning people to build an army.”

  “Why not?” he asked, and there was no legitimate reason. It was one way of putting an end to the lunacy Lilith started. It was what Lilith would do. Which may have been why Haydn’s instinct was to so firmly object.

  “We can start with the innocents,” Auris suggested, and, glancing up to find Gijon in obvious agreement, Haydn’s skin prickled.

  “No.”

  “It makes sense,” Gijon said. “That takes care of two problems at once.”

  “It will only make more innocents,” Haydn reminded them. “Lilith will just find them again.”

  “She won’t be around to find anything,” Cassius declared.

  “Yeah.”

  “I said no.” Proposal catching fire amongst them, Haydn tried to douse the flames, but it did nothing to extinguish her smoldering anger. “If we build an army and start a war, it will be no time before humans start to take notice.”

  “If they come for us, we’ll kill them too,” Indigo said, and Haydn could no longer endure their staggering ignorance.

  “The Crusades, the Inquisition, The Great Scourge,” she declared. “When humans have come for us in great number, we have died in great number. Yes, we are strong and, yes, we are fast. We can wipe out entire towns, but not entire towns with a thousand bayonets or automatic weapons. That’s it.” Too incensed to finish, she motioned them from the room. “If you don’t need to eat, don’t go anywhere. I’ll let you know when I figure something out.”

  Rising with scowls, not well concealed, her indirect sires filtered out of the room. They weren’t used to be spoken to that way. So long they had been lucky, Haydn never had cause to pull rank. She wanted to tell them what Lilith would do to anyone in her household who dared look at her that way, to remind them they had been given choice in their sirings, a choice granted few of their kind, herself included.

  Lingering behind the others, Auris and Gijon rose to their feet, but approached warily, as if they weren’t sure which they could trust, their two-century-old familiarity or the new obscurity of everything.

  “These shadowmen,” Auris uttered, “there’s nothing we can do about them?”

  There had to be something, Haydn knew. Humans, after all, had found a way to vanquish them. It was going to take time, though, substantially more information, and light, kilowatts and kilowatts of light.

  “They won’t be the last.”

  There was that too. As much as she wanted to believe the
re was a limit as to how far Lilith would go to get what she wanted, the fact that she or Cain had somehow uncovered and revived a species dead for half a millennium was pretty much incontrovertible proof there wasn’t.

  “Listen.” The soft request drew Haydn’s gaze to Auris. “We know you want this to work out for everyone, but how realistic is that?”

  It wasn’t realistic. Not at all.

  “We’ll be careful,” Gijon added. “We’ll do what you ask, but this can’t be the answer. Our innocents will eventually die. We’ll be trapped forever.”

  And then there would be more. More innocents. More of Lilith’s plots and snares to try to untangle. Somehow, someway, Lilith would get what she wanted. They were only buying time.

  “It’s been a difficult few days.” Auris gave up on the impossible conversation to brush against Haydn, and Haydn’s body lurched at the hand that slid over her breast. “Why don’t you let us take the edge off?”

  Strong, eager form pressing closer, Gijon’s hand curved around her hip, and Haydn wanted it, the kind of release they could always give her. She wanted to forget everything, everyone, for a while, to utterly, uninhibitedly let go.

  She wanted her brain to concur with the rest of her body.

  Unable to forget that Auris and Gijon were the first to champion turning the innocents into sires without their consent, when Haydn had given them both so much time to decide if an eternity with her was what they really wanted, she couldn’t pretend part of her trembling wasn’t fury.

  Pulling away as Auris’ lips tried to meet hers, Haydn stopped Gijon’s hand as it slipped inside her waistband.

  “I’m not in the mood,” she said, and, amazingly enough, she wasn’t.

  Not for them.

  She never would have guessed, in the beginning, the second floor would come to feel like enemy territory.

  Taking a breath at the doorway of the dining room, it occurred to Delaney she should have come at a different time. Getting them separately might have been easier. Of course, getting them separately meant she would have to do this six times. Well, five if she doubled up Vicar Bryce and Rupert, but that was still five times more than she wanted.