Paradisus (Awakened Book 6)

by Harley Austin

  book six of the Awakened Series,

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  Paradisus

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  Harley Austin’s

  Awakened Series

  book one

  Awakened

  book two

  Dominion

  book three

  Legacy

  book four

  Invictus

  book five

  Interra

  book six

  Paradisus

  book seven

  Deception

  book eight

  Valor

  book nine

  Promethean

  book ten

  Novus

  book eleven

  Meridian

  book twelve

  Ascension

  Awakened Series

  BOOK SIX

  PARADISUS

  HARLEY AUSTIN

  Harley Austin Publishing

  harleyaustin.com

  PARADISUS—Copyright © 2014-2017 Harley Austin. All rights reserved.

  Published by Harley Austin Publishing | HarleyAustin.com

  ISBN Paperback: 978-1-5430-9877-8

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal, and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage the electronic piracy of copyright materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  Version 1.0—RELEASE COPY. This work may be periodically updated by the author/publisher with various corrections, additions and/or deletions to the work without a change of ISBN and without notice, guarantee or warranty of any kind.

  For my beautiful angel;

  the love of my life and the very best friend

  anyone could ever hope to have.

  PARADISUS

  Prologue

  M y name is Ty.

  No, I don’t have a last name, it’s just Ty.

  I don’t have a lot of things at the moment that most people do. I don’t have a car or a home; no driver’s license or credit card—and now, I don’t even have a family. The fact of the matter is, I don’t even exist as far as the government is concerned—any government. People call me an illegal alien. I wasn’t actually born here, so I guess, technically, they’re correct.

  I just turned twenty, but for the past four years I’ve been alone, roaming between the States and the Provinces; a kind of urban nomad.

  Most of the time I’m hungry, moving from town to town, city to city, finding odd jobs where someone will hire me cheap for cash. More than a few times I get offers from people wanting to hire me to spend the night with them. As much as I’d like to, I mean, I could really use the money, that’s not really an option for me. Not with my genes.

  Speaking of genes, I used to be a skinny teen, but the last few years my body has been changing. I don’t work out or pump iron, but lately I sure look like I do. Being hungry most of the time, I guess I look pretty cut. All the running I do probably doesn’t help. I love to run. It helps me work off the nervous energy from all the uncertainty that swirls around my life. It’s that uncertainty that leaves my stomach in knots almost every waking moment of my life. Running helps make those feelings of being homeless and out of control a lot less painful. My favorite part of the day is when I am just waking up. I feel completely relaxed without the knot and nervous tension wrenching within my gut. It’s the only part of the day I feel truly peaceful. But then as I wake and the reality of my life washes back over me, the dull nervous pain of my life starts up all over again. I’ve had people tell me to just get over it. Yea. Easy for them to say. They’re not running in my shoes.

  I don’t exactly look homeless. I try to keep myself cleaned up and put together. It helps me find better jobs. Now and then when I’m working I’ll find a cheap motel to crash in for a few weeks. It makes me feel like I have a little stability in my life. In fact, that’s what I’ve been doing lately. The motel I’m in can get a little rowdy on the weekends. The owner is paying me under the table to fix the place up. I’m not exactly a master handyman, but he seems to like my work. He can be a bit of an ass sometimes, but he keeps putting cash in my pocket, so, for now anyway, I stay.

  When I’m not patching walls or fixing the drains, I’ve been walking to one of the lakes in the middle of downtown. It’s surrounded by office high-rises and condos, but also trees and walkways, benches and on the weekends there’s other things happening, like the free concert they had last weekend. In the afternoons, quite a few people show up to either run or walk; I spend a couple of hours running the paths in the sun and just watching them, wondering what they do or listening in on their conversations from a safe distance. I know they think I can’t hear what they’re saying, but I do.

  The truth is, I really try to stay away from people as much as possible. It’s not that I don’t like people, I do. But, I can’t really make friends. I can’t let others know who or what I am. I’ve tried that a couple of times and it always ends—badly.

  The truth is, I’m on the run. I’m always on the run; always being followed—by someone. Maybe running helps make me feel like I’m actually getting away from them. But it doesn’t matter where I go; eventually, they always seem to find me and then things get really—complicated. Like last year …

  Sofia’s lips were full and enchanting when they were wrapped around mine. She still spoke French like a Parisian even though she’d been living in Montreal for several years. Tall, slender, intelligent, and with an independent spirit, she was barely nineteen with her own apartment and taking classes at the Université de Montréal.

  There was no denying our attraction. I’d been attracted to a few women before through the years, even another guy now and then, but nothing like this. Were my attractions getting stronger the older I got? It sure seemed that way.

  We hadn’t been seeing each other for more than a couple of days before I moved into her small but upscale townhouse. I was really trying to be careful, but I’m not a small guy and the torn condom had sent Sofia into ‘the sleep’. I knew she wouldn’t be out for very long. Less than a week later she had awakened even more beautiful than I could have ever imagined.

  Sofia reborn made an amazing and spirited goddess. She could turn heads with the way she moved and how she carried herself. I sometimes called her Windy, after some old song we’d both heard on the radio. It sure fit her personality, and it made me wonder if the writers of the song had used it to describe someone, a goddess, just like Sofia.

  But for all of her sophistication, culture and elegance, the woman could easily succumb to her more primal instincts. Well, easily for me. I could feel what she wanted, sense what she desired. One didn’t have sex with Sofia, that’s not who she was. I knew that. Sofia made love. I’d tease her, subtly, warmly. She hated it when she wasn’t really in the mood, but then I’d rev our natural attraction with my subtle gestures, a warm empathic touch. She would deliberately resist it a
s long as she could. It was usually my fault, distracting her from her studies. She had a test the next day and she was really fighting what I was doing to her. She knew she couldn’t resist me. And with the mind of a goddess she really didn’t need to be studying either. It was her ploy.

  I had her already panting when she moved over the top of me on the floor of her living room, sliding my black mock turtleneck from me that had been tucked into my unsophisticated black Levis. She liked me in black, and she liked my abs, but Sofia was infatuated with my pecs. I’m broad shouldered and deeply cut. I relieved her of her top while her pout and tongue worked one of my nipples into a short sensitive little spire that always sent my jewels tingling.

  “Ohhh, Sofia,” I whispered, my words accented by the French we both spoke well.

  After Sofia’s accidental awakening, I’d been really extra careful; always using protection. I’d made her a goddess, the last thing I needed was a pregnant one. But for some reason, it didn’t happen. It was like Sofia’s emotions were on fire. Mine were as well. She said she didn’t want anything between us. I knew what she was feeling, I didn’t want anything between us either. The honest truth is, the soft natural smell of Sofia’s skin was driving me unusually wild. I couldn’t resist her feminine scent. My tongue between her thighs had pulled her over the edge of ecstasy, but now with our lips back together, my arms around her slender back and her legs wrapped around mine, Sofia was filling herself with my throbbing hardness. It always felt like I was too big for her, how she felt with me so snug inside her. And I filled her, completely. I could feel what she felt as we made love. When I’m fully extended into her, if I were any longer it might have been too much for her. But it was like we were made for each other.

  We were both glowing with perspiration all over our skin. Our hearts raced and our lips moved hungrily while our bodies moved in a slowly growing rhythm that each of us desperately needed. We didn’t usually make love this way. On the floor, our skin wet, both of us so out of control. Tonight was different somehow. We could both feel it. I didn’t want to just make love to Sofia; there was something deeper, instinctive, even primitive that drove the two of us. The truth is I needed to wholly fuck Sofia right now. Hard. Her foreplay and teasing had brought me to become way overcharged. My groin was already aching. I’m usually coming by now, but for some reason, it was taking a lot longer to build than usual.

  I could feel Sofia building as well. Somehow, she seemed to be controlling my peak. Female empaths. I didn’t know if she was doing it on purpose, but she was calling out now, pulling me closer and closer to her edge.

  “God, Sofia I need to come inside you, now, badly.” I breathed elegant French words against her lips.

  Her back arched; her hips rocked with mine, until suddenly it was too much—both of us exploded with more emotion than either of us had felt in our lives. I buried myself into Sofia and shot hard into her, over and over; God it hurt! But the pain felt so good filling her. I took hold of her ass with my hand to keep my cock completely saddled as she continued to buck and fuck wildly in her own deep release of unbridled ecstasy.

  After long, long moments we finally subsided, the two of us holding each other and feeling the tiny after shocks of our previous quaking release just moments earlier.

  Sofia was panting heavily. I lifted myself from her to look at her wet skin and glowing smile.

  “Je t’aime,” she whispered breathfully, making me smile.

  I was just about to tell her the same, but the ornately carved thick front door of the townhouse apartment suddenly burst open in a shower of splintering burning wood, smoke and flame.

  What the hell?!

  Both of our danger senses rocketed off the chart. They had been going off—but in the heat of the moment with Sofia, neither one of us had taken notice.

  The room started filling with agents; a few had already gotten into the room. Sofia screamed, not understanding what was happening. But I knew. Agents of the Seven; well trained and now weaponized with ionic torches they used like guns. They were more than effective—even against Reborn like us.

  With near instant psionic tendrils I knocked the first wave of them out easily enough, sending them to the floor, their eyes still wide open, just as the second wave was entering the foyer. It was enough time. My own weapon was in the bedroom. Through three wood-stud and sheetrock walls the pistol flew from the bedroom into my hand. My mind merged with the weapon even before it had touched my fingers and shots were ringing out of the barrel even before my hand had fully clasped around the grip. The second wave of armored agents weren’t so lucky as the first. They disintegrated into scattered atoms never to breathe life again. Within seconds of my retributive shots, the apartment burst into a blaze of crisscrossing white-hot plasma bursts. I quickly rolled with Sofia next to me into a corner as the ionic blasts ripped through every wall of the townhome setting damn near everything in the place on fire. The side wall of the building exploded into flame and ash as something really big just slagged the exterior cinderblock into black smoke, dripping lava and falling debris.

  I stopped counting at thirty agents. There were dozens more of them outside and more of them pouring into the building from the backdoor and the now gaping hole in the side of the living room wall.

  A hot blast rocketed past my head, causing me to duck. Agents were now everywhere in the home and outside. Both of us huddled still naked on the floor, I pulled Sofia close to me, my gun pointing here and then there—at anyone who wanted to take their chances.

  “Drop the weapon!” someone ordered. They all targeted theirs at us.

  Sofia’s and my feelings were still tightly entwined. She didn’t know what was happening, and I sure wasn’t going to tell her! There were too many of them. I also wasn’t going to let them hurt her. With dozens of weapons trained on the two of us, all it would have taken were a couple of shots. It was finally over. The Seven had taken my family. Now it was my turn. I could only run so long. I grimaced with the emotional pain; holding her tightly, then let the gun fall to the floor.

  They began to move closer; approaching us cautiously.

  And that was the moment when everything got weird.

  Another blast of hot plasma burst out of the chest of one of the agents who’d begun walking toward us. Suddenly there were more blasts coming through the still standing walls of the apartment. The agents began looking around and communicating on their headsets, asking what was happening. Another wall of the already unstable building burst into flaming rubble of smoke and fire. I couldn’t feel him. But I sure as hell saw him.

  He had a new weapon in each hand and he moved through the smoke and fire-filled rooms like a demon, faster than I’d seen any halfblood move in my life. Agents were falling like flies as bursts of white energy left his guns in a death-blossom shower of hot death.

  I didn’t bother picking up my gun. His were already out and if he wanted me dead, I’d be dead. My mind searched for his, but I couldn’t see him, empathically. He just wasn’t there.

  It was over in a matter of moments. The shooting stopped. Each of the pistols twirled around his fingers before returning to his holsters. The fire was getting bigger and the smoke was thick, but I could see him clearly enough as he walked up to the two of us still prone on the floor.

  Then he started talking to me, his Australian accent think and unmistakable. “That’s another one you’ve found for me. I’ll take her from here. Keep this up Ty, I’ll have to make you my partner.”

  I stood up, with Sofia still in my arms. He motioned me away from her. Sofia’s eyes were wide with fear. Neither one of us were going to let go of the other.

  He frowned at me, folding his arms. “You want to do this the easy way, or the hard way, Ty? You know I can do both,” he said. If I refused or a muscle to stop him he’d take her the hard way. He’d done it before, several times already. The last time he’d sent a hot blast right into my chest; taking out my heart and part of my spine. It took me almost a
week for me to recover from that one.

  “Your choice, mate.” He instantly drew and leveled one of his weapons.

  Sofia was trying to hold onto me. Tears were rolling down my face.

  “You bastard!” I cried at him. Fear gripped me. And I felt myself moving away from Sofia. I couldn't look at her.

  “Mon amour!” she held onto me. But I lifted her hands from my skin and stepped away from her. I slumped against the wall, my back to her, my eyes tightly closed. I wanted to die. But I was too afraid.

  I suddenly couldn’t feel Sofia’s presence anymore. When I opened my eyes again, both of them were gone. The building was ablaze and I could hear sirens in the distance.

  I pounded the wall with my fist and wailed in fear and pain—for Sofia. “NO! God—no.” I cried.

  The sirens were getting closer now. I had to get out. I wanted the building to just fall on me and end my pathetic existence. But then I saw my weapon lying in the soot on the floor. And I was all at once reminded of whom I am, and that I have to keep going.

  The weapon leapt back into my outstretched hand. Still in tears but with a renewed sense of self-preservation, I stepped over the dozens of bodies littering the fire and smoke-filled apartment. I hurriedly collected what few belongings I had into a small black nylon duffle and headed out into the freezing night still wearing nothing but my skin and an unyielding sense of worthlessness—an indelible mark that still haunts me to this day. Am I really such a coward?