Out Of The Darkness

by Calle J. Brookes

  Other Titles

  By

  Calle J. Brookes

  Paranormal

  The Blood King

  Awakening the Demon’s Queen

  The Healer’s Heart

  Once Wolf Bitten

  Live or Die

  The Seer’s Strength

  The Warrior’s Woman

  The Wolf’s Redemption

  A Warrior’s Quest

  The Wolf God & His Mate

  Romantic Suspense

  Watching

  Wanting

  Second Chances

  Hunting

  Running

  Calle J. Brookes is first and foremost a fiction writer. She enjoys crafting paranormal romance and romantic suspense. She reads almost every genre except horror. She spends most of her time juggling family life and writing, while reminding herself that she can’t spend all of her time in the worlds found within books. Calle J. loves to be contacted by her readers via email and at www.CalleJBrookes.com.

  For my very own hero. Thank you for always believing in me.

  OUT OF DARKNESS

  Calle J. Brookes

  Springs Valley, Indiana

  The Lost River Literary name and imprint are the sole properties of independent publishers Calle J. Brookes and B.G. Lashbrooks. They cannot be reproduced or used in any manner; nor can any of their publications or designs be used without expressed written permission.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, or locations, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  Copyright © 2014 Calle J. Brookes

  Cover by B.G. Lashbrooks

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN-10: 1940937051

  ISBN-13: 978-1-940937-05-2

  OUT OF DARKNESS

  A DARDANOS, CO NOVEL

  Chapter 1

  You buried your dead. You moved on. You tried to pretend there was more in this life than your miserable existence. Damned hard to do when you were close to immortal.

  As he plunged the sword he’d carried for more decades than he could remember into the dirt at his feet he wondered yet again when that miserable fact would end.

  He’d tried a time or two in his weakest moments to do it himself, but had failed.

  There were only a handful of ways a Dardaptoan could die. Beheading was one—beheading killed damn-near all Kinds—and blood loss. Blood infection. Flames. Those were the main ways. And starvation. Starvation was the worst way to die, your cells crying out for the blood they so desperately needed. He’d experienced that agony firsthand. And that had been one way he’d not been willing to try at all.

  Only by the curse of the goddess had he lived. If he’d been luckier, he’d have been the one to die instead of his brother. Or his sister.

  They’d been collateral damage in a war his people hadn’t known they were fighting.

  Would that it had been him; without his brother and sister he had nothing.

  These boys surrounding him understood that. He had nothing to give and nothing to lose.

  Only a bare sense of loyalty to his name, to the ones who’d come before him, even had him in this damned mountain town still.

  That and the fact that men he’d once considered friends had decreed that he kept himself confined in the walls of the hotel, the gardens. He was no longer free.

  His own people had robbed him of that.

  Did they even understand what that meant to him?

  Had it not been for her, he would have shown them. But for her, he would be long gone of this place.

  He looked at the boy before him. Less than thirty years, a single percentage of a Dardaptoan lifespan. Yet the arrogance was there, the belief the young male had that he mattered more than the head of the House of Black.

  The original outcast.

  The boy was probably right about that.

  Nalik’s house numbers were dwindling—death and despair eating away at his family the way maggots did a piece of meat.

  How could he blame the males of his House for taking their females and leaving, forging out to find their own ways, or melding themselves into their females’ family Houses?

  It was what he would do in their same positions, with a leader like him. Now. Once he would have challenged the Equan for the right to guide his people.

  “Death comes when you are not ready, no matter how you may think you are prepared to meet it; in a war such as this no one is ready. Swords will do us little good. Think you the demons will use swords? No, they’ll use magics and weapons the kinds we do not know. They and the others—the whatever Kinds are coming—will look at these pitiful toothpicks, these traditions, you cling to as toys. Jokes. Decorations to be hung on their walls the way the Jareth Equan hangs Lupoiux coats upon his own hall walls. Because that will be all that is left of you when it is over.”

  “What are you suggesting then, Black? That we do nothing?” the leader of the youth demanded. Nalik stared at him, trying to remember just who had sired the little whelp.

  He wore black tied around his waist.

  Nalik should know him. He was ultimately responsible for the whelp, after all. He should at least care enough to know the youth’s name.

  But he didn’t. What did that say about him?

  “I’m suggesting no such thing, because doing nothing yields nothing, but doing something will also yield nothing. All you can do, boy, is pray to the goddess—damned cold bitch that she is—that you and yours survive what is to come.” Nalik spit on the earth, then pulled his sword free. He wiped the mud from the blade and slipped it back to the scabbard. Kept his back to the boy.

  What did such youth matter?

  If this war was to come, like the seers predicted, then the boy would probably be dead within the next two years.

  A blink for him.

  “Protect your family, protect your House, protect your people, and hope to hell you don’t die in the process. That is all you can do.”

  “And pray we don’t screw it up like you have?” Disgust was in the boy’s words now, and had Nalik been any other kind of man, the boy would be down in the dirt, with a few less teeth.

  As it was Nalik just walked away.

  A passivist carrying the sword of a killer. Tasked with training the very ones he was supposed to protect to enter battles they had no hope of winning.

  If he had still possessed a soul that knowledge would have eaten away at it. As it was it both saddened and disgusted him.

  Almost seven hundred years now he’d walked this world, seeking to protect his people. And that had brought him nothing but loss.

  Her grotto called to him, as it always did when he was hurting.

  It had since his first night back in Dardanos, He’d spotted her humming as she did something as humble as digging in the blood-scarred earth.

  Why did he torture himself thusly?

  He knew she waited before he even parted the large hibiscus leaves that separated the grotto from the rest of the resort’s gardens. Large rocks, native to the area, had been hewn into crude benches, and through the decades weathered into smooth private nooks perfect for lovers.

  Or for young women more at home with their own thoughts than in large crowds, even when those crowds were her family. A quiet, unassuming woman who was kind to everyone whose path she crossed. Who was always carrying some sort of flowers. Who sang to those plants every single day. Good, kind, sweet—the opposite of everything he was.

  Cassandra.

  She waited there, like he knew she wou
ld. He always knew where the girl was. A blessing and a curse from the goddess he despised.

  What type of deity would curse a person of her own Kind to live the hell he had?

  Did. Did live is a better way to put it.

  The goddess had given him to mate one of the very people he was sworn to hate and despise. How was that what was best for him?

  It for damned sure wasn’t good for the woman barely out of her girlhood.

  It was a sadistic torture—the kind only mirrored in the records of the most forgotten Greek or Roman myths. His goddess was supposed to be better than that.

  He watched the woman-girl for several moments, feeling like the nightmare of the night she had to know existed.

  He had spoken less than a handful of words to Cassandra in more than a year.

  He’d touched her not a single time.

  And he almost prayed that he never would.

  If he did, all resolve he now possessed would be gone. Leaving nothing but the monster he knew her grandfather had made him behind.

  ***

  Cass knew he was there. She always knew when she wasn’t alone; that was a gift she had long taken for granted. She’d been maybe twelve or thirteen before she realized that others didn’t have the same talent. Her cousin and best friend Jade maybe, but that was all. Jade was just as different as Cass knew she was. Becca probably could, but Cass had never asked.

  This man watched her a lot. More than any others, though she knew that many of the Dardaptoans found her worth watching.

  She was one of them, after all. A Taniss, one of the most reviled creatures on Earth to these people. It didn’t matter that she had never hurt any of them. Or that she had nothing to do with the company that had been built on their blood and pain. It didn’t matter that the whole idea of it horrified every bit of her soul.

  She was a Taniss, and that was enough for them.

  Someone had thrown mud at her the day before. Mud and rocks. And called her filth.

  How was she supposed to deal with that? She hurt for the people her grandfather had harmed, how could she expect them to treat her with respect when she lived in their world now?

  She wanted to go home, to her own room—the one she had grown up in. The one with her father and Claudette and the rest of their family nearby. Her sister was in this place and several of her cousins, but her greenhouses, her gardens, called to her.

  She’d spent years developing the plants and seeds in those buildings. And it had been months since she’d been allowed to spend more than an hour every few months or so in the gardens she’d been building since she was thirteen years old.

  Her father and family thought she’d be safer in this strange place with her sister and her brother-in-law than in her own home.

  She understood that. Theoretically. It was why she hadn’t insisted on going home.

  Someone had placed a price tag on her head; on hers, her sisters, her cousins, even the children. And she could never understand or forget that.

  She could live without her plants—though it almost hurt her to think about it—but she couldn’t live with the idea of losing anyone else she loved.

  Especially her sister or her cousins. Her best friends.

  And until her brother-in-law Rydere figured out who threatened them all, Cass would just content herself as much as she could with the hotel gardens. They had been well tended before she came to Dardanos, and the gardens housed several strains of plants she had never seen before. Plants that she had spent the last year studying under the tutelage of the Dardanos head gardener Uruses. He was wise in the ways of Dardaptoan plants, and he’d freely shared. She’d spent her time tending and loving, every spare moment that she could.

  When she especially needed soothing the way only plants could she came here.

  It was actually a horrible piece of ground—or it had been a year ago. The tiny patch of land right next to the water was where her cousin Josey had nearly died. No one had told her exactly what had happened, but from the moment Cass had been brought to this place she had known that her cousin’s blood had seeped into the dirt. And the dirt cried from the pain Josey had known.

  Cass would never seek to explain how she knew that. It was just something she knew and something she accepted.

  She was doing her best to remove the scar upon the land. To erase the poison of violence from this little place.

  She tapped some soil around the roots of a tiny plant she’d been nurturing for weeks, then dipped her dirty hands into the cool waters of the small pool. She swooshed her fingers around, idly drawing shapes in the water.

  A quick look around told her that no one else was about; except the leader of the Black House. He was usually in the gardens this time of night.

  Unwinding from the brutal military maneuvers he was training the Dardaptoan and Lupoiux wolves in. She shivered.

  She’d never understood those who made their ways in war.

  Still, whenever he was in the gardens, there was an odd peace about the place that she had found she needed some times. And no one bothered her when he was out there. And he had seen her swim before.

  She couldn’t see or hear anyone else out there now. She would slip into the pool and wash the dirt off of her skin.

  She wore her swimsuit, a modest blue one, under her short and tank top. She’d left the pool where Josey and Jade had been relaxing a few hours earlier and skipped going to her room, choosing her plants instead.

  They’d upset her with the talk of war that was coming. She’d felt so helpless, and she’d been able to hear the sounds of Equan Black’s army in the courtyard outside the private swimming pool.

  It had made it all so real.

  People would probably die, people she knew. And possibly some she loved. How was she supposed to ever understand that?

  She slipped into the water, hoping to somehow erase the very idea of war from her soul.

  Chapter 2

  He watched her, like he had so many times before. Why was she so drawn to the dirt? He’d never seen a human with such a need for plants as his little Rajni. Was it just because of that bastard Leo Taniss’s experiments? Had he done something to this girl when she was just a babe, like he had the Lycurgus Equa? What?

  If he had that man in his hands he wouldn’t hesitate to kill him. That the man had not faced the Dardaptoan justice he had deserved would always gall him. The old bastard had killed himself two days after his punishment was decreed, robbing the Dardaptoan people of what they had deserved.

  “You can go back inside, Mr. Black. I have nothing more to say to you.”

  Mr. Black. Like he was some common human. Was that how she saw him? A stranger or a passing acquaintance? Someone insignificant to her life?

  Did she even realize who—and what—she was to him?

  He hadn’t claimed her, and never would. But didn’t this girl realize that she was now everything to him?

  No. Of course she didn’t. How could she? He had never told anyone, least of all her. And he never would. What could he offer her, truly? A scarred male, inside and out. And she was so, so young. How could he ask her to tie herself to him for the rest of their days? Yes, her cousins of the same age were quite happy with their mates—Barlaam and Matthuin made sure of that—but those males were different than he.

  He would hurt her. The darkness in him ensured that was an inevitability. And he would die before he let that happen.

  But he would also not sit back and watch her do something so stupid again. He might not agree with her brother-in-law in all things, but on one thing he did. Her safety.

  “Did you once again forget the dhar’s warning? No one, especially females, is to be in the gardens this late at night.”

  She did not look at him. Ignored him as she swam through the waters.

  “Girl...Cassandra.” Her name was beautiful, and suited her well. She was definitely the most beautiful of the Taniss females, though all were extremely comely for humans and once-humans. But
this girl...was it just because of who she was to him? Was he just fated to find her beautiful? Alluring?

  As it was he wanted nothing more than to pull her into his arms or lay her out on the soft grass there next to the grotto and show her the ways that a real male had of pleasing a woman. Or to jump in the water with her and pull that modest suit from her body and show her how much he burned for her.

  So damned hot he could almost smell the ash.

  And despite his insults, she was full grown, with all the shape of a female designed to tempt a male.

  He’d found her cousin Mallory and Aodhan rolling around near this very spot months ago. How he’d looked at his friend with derision for his weaknesses.

  And then he’d turned and saw her. Digging in the dirt, of all things. Looking soft, young, vulnerable. Delectable.

  Prey.

  When had he stopped viewing humans as what they were? Was it because of her?

  He’d spent the last thirty years despising her Kind, yet in the months since she’d come into the Dardanos fold, he had felt himself softening towards her. Thinking about her. Dreaming of her.

  It took every bit of strength he possessed not to just take her and say the hell with it.

  To hell with all of them.

  Only the knowledge that she was his Rajni kept him from her.

  Because the one human he would die before hurting was her.

  Finally she raised her head from where she floated and looked at him with the green eyes the same color as her grandfather’s. Cruel trick of the three fates, that. Give his female the same eyes as the nightmare in his night. Had he pissed off those bitches somehow? That had to be the answer.

  “Do you smell that?” Fear was in her words, and for a moment he thought it was him she feared.

  And then he scented it, too.

  “Inside. Go to your brother-in-law, now. Forest fire, from the east. Go!”