by Virna DePaul
By the look on her face right now, she no longer did.
Even as Mahone stared at the Goddess Essenia, sensation and thoughts numbed by drugs immediately flared to life. White-hot pain made him jerk and gasp, while at the same time his mind, his soul, his being—whatever the hell one chose to label his life force—greedily latched on to the feelings that had never been so crystal clear with purpose. He felt the zing of blood pumping through his veins, the crackle of neurons firing in his brain, and the powerful beat of his heart thudding in his chest cavity. Every cell inside him shouted. He lived. He breathed. He existed. At the same time, he was consumed by a heady, life-altering knowledge, one granted to him by the being who’d appeared in his room.
He lived, but only because she permitted it.
He lived, but only because she had the power to sustain life or end it.
He knew she wanted to end it.
Despite everything he and the Para-Ops team had done in the past two months to fulfill the bargain he’d struck with her, he sensed her resolve. Her disappointment. In him. In all of her children.
Growling at the knowledge, he forced his eyes to remain open. He stared despite the light that surrounded her, so intense that most were blind to it unless she chose to reveal herself. Yet again, he was stunned by the power of her visage, one so beautiful and so frightening it made him think of Medusa, the creature with snakes for hair and the ability to turn any man who looked directly at her into stone.
Her soft, melodious laugh drifted toward him. The sound was ethereal. Soothing. Mahone actually felt his wounds healing. Pain ebbed, replaced by a pleasure so intense it made his body shudder in near orgasmic pulses. He threw back his head and groaned, his body arching off the bed so that only his skull and heels made contact with the mattress.
“Medusa was but a myth, Human. Yet another boogeyman created by your kind to fulfill its need for darkness and violence.” Essenia drifted closer to him and waved her hand over his body. The riotous sensations quivering through his muscles ceased until he once more lay in the bed, the sweat on his brow and the dull, medicated pain of his wounds a blessing. “Your wounds are just another manifestation of the inability of my offspring to exist in peace. No matter how I try, no matter the chances I’ve granted, it is always the same.”
Gut clenching with the effort it cost him, Mahone forced himself to sit up. “The team . . .” he gasped. “We accomplished our first mission. We proved humans and Otherborn can work together.”
The being shook her head. “Even your statement highlights the chasm between my children. And your mission? One small victory drowned by a sea of greed and violence. Look what happened to you in the process. Your success cannot make up for centuries of deception and violence.”
“It doesn’t have to,” Mahone reasoned desperately. “The prophecy doesn’t speak of the whole world, nor the whole nation. Only of six. The ability of six, each from different races, to unite with one purpose. To act as one for the greater good of all.”
“Something they have not yet been able to achieve,” she reminded him. “With respect to the dharmire and his mate? I never doubted they would unite. The others?” She laughed again, but this time the sound was rife with rancor. “Give it up, Mahone. They are too caught up in their own agendas. Their own pain.”
Mahone automatically thought of the two Para-Ops team members who posed the greatest challenge, but plowed ahead anyway. “They can come together. They will.”
“Wraith? Dex? You don’t know the darkness inside them, Mahone. Even with the information your men have collected, you have only the barest hint of a clue. No, you made a mistake when you chose them.”
“Wraith has proven herself. She’s put herself in danger time and again. To help others. O’Flare. Me.”
She shook off his arguments with a wave of her hand. “I think it’s best we stop playing this game and start over. Humanity has proven itself unworthy of the gifts I have bestowed upon it. I have come to a decision, but I will make your end painless. You, who have endeavored to serve me, will—”
Enraged, Mahone pulled at the tubes and needles piercing his skin, immediately causing several machines next to the bed to beep in alarm. He stood, swayed on his feet, then steadied himself with one arm braced against the bed. Breathing hard and fighting the nausea that twisted in his gut, he nonetheless forced himself to walk closer to the glowing, celestial being. “It’s not your decision to make,” he rasped. “You are bound by the agreement we made. I have done what you asked of me, and so must you. You—”
He felt her fury in the blast of heat she threw at him, knocking him off his feet and back onto the bed. Then she was upon him, hovering over him, doing what, for lack of a better description, could only be seen as straddling his body. “I created you,” she hissed. “I am required to do nothing. Do you think O’Flare could have rescued you, with Wraith’s help or not, if I hadn’t wanted him to? I am the law and I make the law.”
At her statement, a flash of skepticism ran through him. Just as he had before, when she’d shown herself to him before Caleb’s rescue, he wondered who she answered to. Somehow he knew, even if she made the law, someone or something had the power to veto her decisions. Even now, a tinge of desperation edged her words, telling him that her threats were a way to maintain control, to keep her cover as the most powerful deity so he wouldn’t guess that something else, something darker and more ominous, threatened them. Where his idea of God fit into all this, he couldn’t know. But Essenia wanted Mahone to contradict her, to persuade her to give her children another chance, so that’s what he tried to do.
“You made the law,” Mahone gasped, failing to look away even as blisters began to mark his face. “You laid down your decree. Even you must follow it; otherwise, your word has no worth. Your existence no meaning. Your prophecy is recorded in the mage’s texts, and you sought me out, not the other way around. Now you want to change the rules?”
The heat emanating from her grew more intense. His hospital gown and the sheets twisted around him began to smolder. His already-chapped lips split, and he could suddenly taste his own blood. Maybe he’d been wrong after all. Maybe the Goddess really wasn’t feigning her bad intentions. He forced back an agonized, terror-filled scream, refusing to give her the satisfaction of hearing it.
But then the heat waned as she backed away.
He could see his words had swayed her, so he kept talking, his voice harsh in his parched throat. “You gave me one year to prove that my team can make an impact. We can help your children once again live in peace, despite the darkness that will always be among them and within them. Perfection wasn’t our deal, nor is it demanded by the prophecy. We need only show a tipping of the scales in favor of the goodness of humanity.”
Essenia’s renewed anger flashed through the room once again, and he involuntarily closed his eyes against the horror of it.
He heard her voice reverberate around him. Inside him. “Why do you continue to rally for them? I’ve taken everything away from you, Mahone. Any chance of the life you hoped to spend with Bianca. Yet you fight for your survival. For that of your kindred.”
At the thought of Bianca, another kind of pain shot through him. Why did he fight for the survival of humanity when there were times he himself believed they were lost? Maybe for the very reason Bianca, the vampire Queen and Knox Devereaux’s mother, had been reunited with her husband and why he could accept it.
Hope.
“You question my persistence? Even though you chose me and won’t tell me why? I don’t know what answer you want. All I know is you created us.” Or had some hand in that creation, he thought. “You imbued us with both strengths and weaknesses, but with one strength above all. The ability to learn. To change. To grow. We might not be doing it with the speed you wish, we might have fucked up again and again, but we deserve another chance. Please.”
For several long minutes, she said nothing. Then she waved her hand, silencing the beeping machines
abruptly. She nodded, causing him to shudder in relief.
“Very well. Continue with this game, but the outcome won’t change. Humanity is lost, Mahone. You cling to visions of what could have been, just as I once did.”
“Just hold to our bargain. Let my team show you what they’re capable of.”
“The bargain stands. For now. You have until the end of one year. Then humanity will fall in order to be reborn.”
THREE
PARA-OPS TEAM HEADQUARTERS
QUANTICO, VIRGINIA
It was finally happening.
Wraith’s appearance was changing. In less than a year’s time, she’d be dead.
Almost a month had passed since the Para-Ops team had recovered the vamp antidote, rescued a dozen Otherborn, and returned from Korea to rescue Mahone. Then, of course, she’d survived Caleb’s toxic gas—Essenia wouldn’t want her to miss what came next.
As Wraith stared in the bathroom mirror, she could hear the sounds of the others moving down the hall, packing up their things, getting ready for some well-earned R & R at Knox’s big estate in the Vamp Dome. Felicia and Knox had left the week before to oversee the wedding preparations. Although the rest of the Para-Ops team had stayed behind, they’d barely seen each other. For the past few mornings, she’d heard the roar of Dex’s Harley as he tore out of the compound before dawn, not returning until dark. When the were did return, he glowered at his team members as he grabbed a beer and whatever else he could find in the kitchen, then slammed into his room. Lucy and Caleb had spent the week visiting Mahone in the hospital or seeing family. Wraith had noticed, however, that although they didn’t bother her, one of her team members had always stayed behind when the other was gone.
As if they didn’t trust her to be alone.
Wraith shook her head, an ugly jeer twisting her expression. Apparently, blowing herself up and rushing into a room filled with toxic gas had been too much to take, even when she’d had no other choice. In doing the first, she’d gotten the team inside the North Korean compound that housed the vamp antidote. And in doing the second, she’d saved both Caleb and Mahone. But instead of high-fiving her for her bravery and quick thinking, Lucy and Caleb obviously thought she was suicidal.
The thought instantly sobered her.
If they only knew.
“. . . felines are a menace to you and your children. Their very nature has ensured they’re more animal than not.”
Words drifted toward Wraith from the other room. She left the bathroom and walked up to the TV. The local news was playing, broadcasting the most recent rant by Harry Jenkins, pulpit leader and Otherborn basher. None of the Others, however—not even the vampires—got as much heat from Jenkins as the felines did. Given the fact that a feline betrayed and delivered Wraith into the hands of a sadist, Jenkins’s vendetta against the race shouldn’t have bothered her, but it did. The man was a smallminded bigot who lived to spread misinformation and fear. No matter what her past was, she judged individuals by their actions, not their DNA. At least, she tried.
“. . . are controlled by their urge to fornicate, and they don’t care who it’s with—man, woman, child.”
At Jenkins’s words, Wraith snorted and angrily punched the power button on the TV so the screen went blank. Another second of listening to that stuff, and she’d be tempted to track the man down and make sure he never made such ridiculous statements again. Because racial hatred against one Otherborn race ultimately spread to the others; even if Wraith, as a dead human, wasn’t technically an Otherborn, she’d probably faced more judgment and discrimination than any of them.
She returned to the bathroom, stared into the mirror once more, and considered the havoc Jenkins could wreak if he knew that wraiths, the creatures who’d been granted a second chance at life, and an immortal one at that, came with an expiration date.
In Korea, she hadn’t yet seen any changes, but the possibility had been there. Now she knew it was more than a possibility.
Raising a steady hand to her face, she smoothed a finger over her hairline, where her bluish-hued skin normally met stark white hair. Today, her hair was longer—no longer spiky so much as shaggy—and was showing a hint of color: faint, dark root that no one else would ever notice.
But she saw it. And she knew exactly what it meant.
She was changing, and as much as she wanted to, she couldn’t ignore the timing. Thirty-eight days ago had been the tenth anniversary of her “die day,” or, as most wraiths called it, the day of her transitioning. She was the oldest known wraith in America, and like the few that had come before her, she was about to meet her fate.
It wasn’t until after the War, when they’d begun cohabitating in their compound in Maine, that the wraiths had realized their numbers were dwindling. An odd thing for immortals. One wraith had noted something interesting—that the “ability” for wraiths to die seemed to have only one thing in common: Dying only happened between a wraith’s tenth and eleventh transition year, after a wraith started to regain more and more physical human traits. Of course, when that theory had been developed, Wraith had already abandoned Maine for the familiarity of Los Angeles. She’d still heard the rumors, though. Then she’d seen it for herself—a wraith she’d met only once before, one who was several years older than herself, and thus would have been almost eleven years old in wraith life, dead, lying in the back alley of a Texas bar, blood seeping out of her wounds. She’d accepted the rumors for what they were then—truth.
That had changed in the last few months. The longer she’d spent on the Para-Ops team and with her team members, something had changed inside her.
She’d weakened. Begun to hope. Begun to think maybe the rumors had been wrong . . .
They weren’t, she told herself brutally.
Over the next year, she would gradually lose her immortality. Before the year was up, she would die.
She laughed harshly at her image in the mirror.
It was perfect. Just perfect.
The latest cosmic joke added to the crappy luck that amounted to her doomed existence.
Ten years ago, she awoke with no memory. Then she’d discovered she was a freak. And not just a freak by human standards, but by the whole damn world’s, Otherborn included. Vamps, weres, and mages looked more normal than she did. Unlike her, they ate. Slept. They had heartbeats and observable brain waves and blood.
They were alive. She, on the other hand . . .
She was the walking dead, her outer shell visibly announcing it even as she felt the same emotions everyone else did. The difference was, she couldn’t do anything about them. Not the softer ones anyway. Not when everyone around her either feared her or wanted to use her to increase their bank account, feed their sick, sexual fetishes, or learn the secret to immortality. Who knew being dead could be so handy—for the living, anyway?
When she’d figured that out, she’d wanted to die. She’d tried to kill herself several times only to learn that, while she couldn’t die, she could feel pain. Even worse, when her body had regenerated after a particularly vicious suicide attempt, it had upped the stakes. From then on, a simple touch from someone else was painful. The infliction of a deliberate wound was excruciating agony.
Her body’s way of saying, “Go ahead, try to kill me, I’ll make you pay.”
Apparently, suicidal tendencies were another thing wraiths had in common, because every wraith she’d ever met suffered the same curse. Either that, or pain from touch was a generic punishment for a variety of one’s crimes against the Gods and nature.
She’d sought comfort in the beginning. Companionship. She’d gotten both to some degree, only to be betrayed. It had taken two years of captivity and the threat of Otherborn eradication before she’d learned to put her immortality to good use during the War. After peace had been declared and she’d confirmed that living among other wraiths wasn’t for her, she’d learned to exist alone. To survive. With no place to call home. No one to call family or friend.
&n
bsp; And now, just when she’d become part of a team and had begun to think that maybe, just maybe, she had some purpose for being here, the Goddess Essenia was fucking her over again.
She could actually envision the bitch, an impossibly beautiful creature, dangling Wraith’s immortality in front of her while taunting, “I’m going to take it away, only you won’t know when. Could be today. Could be next month. But before this year is up, it’ll all be over.
“You’ll be over.”
A harsh thump tore Wraith from her thoughts. With a gasp, she pulled her fist back from the mirror, which now sported a long, jagged crack down its center. Pain radiated from her fist, down her arm, and up into her temple. As she watched, several cuts on her hand began fusing together, then disappeared completely.
She’d been pounding on the mirror, she realized, and hadn’t even known it.
Just like the crazy creature she was.
A low moan slipped out of her before she could stifle the sound. Her knees grew rubbery, causing her to grip the sides of the sink to keep upright. She flinched when someone knocked on the door of the adjacent bedroom. Automatically, she turned toward the sound.
“Wraith? Are you okay?”
Caleb. She pressed her lips together, tamping down her foolish urge to run to the door and throw herself into his arms. Ever since she’d helped him get Mahone out of that warehouse, he’d kept his distance from her. But he’d watched her, too. Constantly. Desire continued to heat his gaze whenever he looked at her, and she’d had to work doubly hard to make sure the same desire wasn’t evident in her own eyes. “I . . . I’m fine,” she croaked out.
“Let me in.”
His gruff command was enough to shock her back to her senses. Straightening, she moved into the bedroom and glared at the door. How dare he command her to do anything? Despite riding to his rescue, she hadn’t forgotten how less than a month ago he’d played them all, feeding her information and pretending to find answers that he and Mahone had known all along. “I said I’m fine.”
