Dark Redemption

by Aja James

  It was as if every cell in his body had finally come alive, resuscitated by the electricity that crackled between them, the live wires of their insatiable, voracious need and desire for each other.

  He tasted her sweetness on his tongue, tasted and smelled himself in her mouth, on her lips. He felt the wetness and heat of her, the soft, pillowy lips, the nubile, strong muscle of her tongue, the neat rows of her teeth, the fragile silk of her skin.

  Everything he felt, tasted, absorbed, as if for the very first time. And it was indeed the very first time, unbeknownst to even himself, for he’d never been purposely given or taken any pleasure in the entirety of his long existence.

  Now, he submerged himself in it, surrounded himself with it.

  He lost and found himself in Clara.

  She pulled his still tumid sex to her intimate folds and closed herself around the head of him.

  She hadn’t lied. She was dripping wet and blazingly hot from her own orgasms, and he eased inch by inch into her tight channel, pulled inexorably by her powerful core muscles, deeper and deeper inside until he could go no further, pushing up against her cervix.

  “Oh God,” she sighed into his mouth, biting down on his lower lip, as she pumped her hips urgently against him, rubbing him against that hard knot that felt so, so good, deep inside where no one had ever reached before.

  Instinctively, he knew what she wanted, what she was reaching desperately for, and he angled his hips higher to go even deeper.

  He held her hips steady as he took control, slowly thrusting the thick, steely length of his shaft in and out, higher and deeper, plowing through her vaginal canal over and over again to push with increasing pressure against her cervix, until she started to shake from head to toe, her entire body seizing up in a tight coil before releasing finally in unending tidal waves of rapture.

  She buried her face in his throat as she came apart, muffling the keening cries of her full-bodied orgasm. He felt her bite his neck hard, breaking the skin, and he growled huskily in response, digging his fingers into her juicy ass, holding her tight as he continued to pump thickly in and out of her, extending and multiplying her ecstasy until she was all but sobbing in his arms, a puddle of electrified nerves and steaming flesh.

  Passion. Life. Joy. She was all the best feelings Eli could imagine in one package, simply bursting with it.

  And now she’d drawn him into her inescapable gravity so that he felt all of these things too. More than just the euphoria sizzling in his blood, the burning pleasure in his sex, the electrifying bee stings of bliss in his skin, he finally found where he was meant to be and who he was meant to be with inside her body.

  Somewhere he belonged. Where he understood his connection to the universe, and the meaning therein.

  “Come, Eli, now!” she managed to command hoarsely, her own hands clawing into his glutes as she bit him again.

  He released on a roughened moan in a torrent of fiery sparks and hot, gushing seed, flooding her womb in nourishing waves.

  He took her mouth again as he came, shuddering and gasping against her lips, their gusty breaths fusing, their pounding hearts in sync, clutching each other so closely neither knew where one ended and the other began.

  “Eli,” she breathed into the notch at his throat and placed a tender kiss there.

  He felt it everywhere, an incandescent warmth that spread from her lips into his skin, his blood, filling the dark voids inside with soothing heat.

  He touched the area between his ribs beneath his left pectoral where there used to be a thin, barely-there two-inch scratch. He rubbed the area of his chest beneath which beat the organ of his heart.

  Strangely, for the first time, it felt whole. As if a piece had been carved out but now was filled anew. Filled to the brim by Clara’s love.

  That organ clenched in pain at the thought, reminding him that he didn’t deserve it.

  He didn’t deserve her.

  Just a little while longer, his mind sent out to the universe at large. Let me feel this just a little while longer.

  Finally, they slept, he, still inside her; she, still wrapped around him.

  Eli wished fervently before sinking into a deep sleep that he would never awake from this beautiful, impossible dream.

  Toward the end of third millennium BC. Ancient Egypt.

  Caked in gore with blood oozing fresh from multiple severe wounds on his body, the shadow warrior surveyed the thousands upon thousands of dead bodies strewn around him, piled on top of each other, soaking the desert dunes in the fallen’s blood.

  Of the one hundred shadow warriors he’d led into battle, only he remained standing, all of his men disintegrated into black ashes, swept to and fro in the mild sand storm that swirled at his feet.

  For what?

  For what did they lose their lives and take so many more humans with them to violent, gruesome deaths?

  Ostensibly, they were fighting for Mentuhotep II, who intended to reunite Upper and Lower Egypt. But, really, the shadow warrior was merely doing his Mistress’s bidding to please her new conqueror of the moment.

  Through the unbreakable Bond of her blood in his, his body obeyed her every will, even as his mind recoiled and fractured, shattered into confusing fragments of loyalty and betrayal, lust and disgust, devotion and derision.

  Anunit had spent the past few hundred years after the Great War and the Purge of the aftermath going from one civilization to another, allying herself with the most powerful warlords and rulers, then just as quickly turning against them to ally herself with their enemies.

  She’d sent him and his shadow warriors to suppress the Pure Ones’ Rebellion, then turn back around and fight against their own Kind, helping the humans burn the Ivory Palace to the ground, eliminating all of the Dark Queen Ashlu’s allies, including the Anatolians that the shadow warrior’s sire had led.

  He himself had executed his sire in the end, fulfilling the destiny of his House.

  He hadn’t hesitated to do her bidding, only once disobeying her orders, over the centuries that he’d served at her side—to save the lives of Princess Ishtar’s offspring because he’d given his promise to the younger sister, and he was a male of his word.

  For what?

  For what did he risk his life in combat, for what did he bleed?

  So much death and destruction. Endless violence to beget more violence.

  Although this was the life he’d been trained for, born for, there had always been an overarching purpose to the military campaigns, surgical strikes and covert missions the shadow warriors had been called upon to complete. When Queen Ashlu ruled the empire, they had conquered and enforced peace and stability on her behalf.

  But Anunit was not her mother.

  The moment an empire or state stabilized with peace, and Anunit could not stir up more trouble, she moved on to the next barbarian to harden into a conqueror; enable the next jealous son to overtake a throne.

  She never wanted to stop and rule, though she’d had plenty of opportunities to do so; she only wanted to destroy.

  Now, only a few dozen of his warriors remained from the hundreds at the height of their power.

  Confused and agitated by his inner turmoil, not comprehending his own emotions, the shadow warrior sought out his Mistress for answers.

  And also to take her blood, for he was weak from his injuries and on the verge of collapsing.

  She was not in the chambers that the Pharaoh had bequeathed her, the better to visit her whenever he pleased; nor was she in any of the public halls or bathing pools.

  The shadow warrior clenched his jaw.

  There was only one other place she could be: toying with her Pure prisoner in the bowels of the palace.

  “So you have returned victorious,” her voice floated to him in echoes across the cavernous space even before he saw her as he descended the steep, winding steps to her secret chambers, his blood leaving blackened footprints on the stone floor as he walked.

  “I
would not call losing most of my soldiers a victory,” he returned, something like anger seething in his tone. A vein pulsed in his temple from his effort to subdue the wrath building within him.

  “No matter,” she dismissed immediately. “I have you, the greatest shadow warrior of all time. You can always train more soldiers for our armies.”

  He stopped a few yards away from the center of the underground hall that was lit by two torches on each side, illuminating Anunit and her prisoner—the Blood Slave and rebel leader she’d captured at the end of the Great Siege.

  The prisoner was strung up by chains secured from the ceiling and hammered into the ground, his naked body stretched out between them. He was conscious, and his eyes were open, though they could no longer see.

  Four vampire guards stood in the shadows around them, prepared to use force should the prisoner attempt escape again, as he’d done every few weeks since he’d come into her possession.

  Presently, Anunit was painstakingly cutting into the prisoner’s veins with a five-inch dagger. She’d apparently finished with his left arm, which dripped with rivulets of blood, and was now working on his chest.

  She cut deeply enough that the wounds took at least two days to heal, even for a full-strength Pure or Dark one, let alone the weak and wounded. In any case, she never let the wounds heal completely, for she always cut new ones into the prisoner’s flesh before they could.

  “Did you want something?” she asked idly when the shadow warrior remained silent, not bothering to look up from her meticulous “work” to regard him, like a master sculptor whittling away at her greatest creation.

  “Why do you continue to torture him?”

  It was not what the warrior meant to say, but the question came out anyway. He truly didn’t understand Anunit’s morbid fascination and unmitigated hatred for the Pure One. She’d held him for hundreds of years already, carved his flesh over thousands of hours, among other grotesque things she did to him, and yet she never seemed to tire of it.

  “Why not end his life if you despise him?”

  She smiled and moved to the prisoner’s ribs, one hand clawing down his stomach to his groin to grip his sex in a vicious vise. Though the prisoner made no sounds, he jerked when she clutched him, and a pained breath of fury sifted out through his nose.

  “I do not despise him,” she murmured, all but purring.

  “I’m starting to appreciate why my sister was so obsessed with him. He is quite magnificent in his own way,” she spared the shadow warrior a glance, “but not as beautiful as you, of course, my Enlil. I am simply trying to take back what my sister stole from me, but her Claim on him is proving remarkably stubborn.”

  “Look at this,” she gave the prisoner’s sex another brutal tug and twist, squeezing him roughly harder and harder, until the prisoner’s breaths came out in short bursts, and his eyes shut against the agony and humiliation.

  “Nothing,” she bit out, a rare flare of frustration making her eyes glow red. “It refuses to stand for me. It obeys only her, no matter what I do. His blood, too, obeys only her. Even though she’s forsaken him for centuries already.”

  She snaked up the prisoner’s body and pressed herself against him to whisper in his ear, as she dragged her dragger in a long, bloody line down his abdomen, beyond his navel, to his groin.

  “Maybe I should just cut it off,” she hissed, increasing the pressure of the blade upon the prisoner’s sex, brutally digging the sharp tip into the dorsal vein.

  “Which will it be? The phallus, the balls, or both? If you submit to me, Blood Slave, I’ll let you keep them. If you don’t, I might just feed them to the Pharaoh’s jackals for supper. Hmm?”

  “Fuck you,” the prisoner gritted out and spat into her face.

  She bared her long fangs, dripping with saliva at his audacity and hissed in vengeful fury.

  Then, just as suddenly, she eased, taking a step back from him, giving his scrotum a hard yank and a vicious squeeze.

  “I love it when you’re feisty,” she cooed, thoroughly enjoying the prisoner’s defiance. “I’ll have to reward you for it later.”

  Finally, she turned to the shadow warrior, who’d been watching the whole exchange in silence.

  “What is it you really came here for, my Enlil?” she said silkily, wiping the prisoner’s spittle from her face with one hand and sucking it off her fingers with relish. “Do you need blood? Have you finally ended your ridiculous abstinence and come to me for sex?”

  She approached him like a beautiful snake, her body sinfully curvaceous.

  “You will heal so much faster if you take both, you know,” she invited huskily, cupping her barely covered breasts with her hands and moving them lower, squeezing her thighs together needfully.

  “You are aroused,” he noted emotionlessly, eyeing her serpentine grace.

  “Yessss,” she hissed. “I am drenched with it.”

  “Because you hurt the slave,” he stated, recognizing the source of her stimulation.

  In his time with her, she’d become more and more violent in their couplings. He had endured it because it gave her pleasure, and her release, in turn, gave him strength, such was the Bond they shared. But at some point, his pride no longer accepted her sadistic demands on his body; her blood was all he took now, and only when he desperately needed it to survive.

  Whatever feelings that used to stir in his chest at the sight of her, that used to long for her touch, time and experience had stifled their growth until he knew only the obligation of her blood in his.

  She sighed, as if disappointed with him, turning her back when she was two feet away.

  “Why do I have the feeling you’re going to deny me again,” she said with annoyance. “What did you come for, Enlil? Out with it.”

  “That is not my name,” he uttered so low she almost didn’t hear.

  She whipped back around to face him, cocking her head a bit to regard him curiously. It seemed her loyal henchman was in a strange, unfathomable mood.

  “You don’t have a name, you told me so yourself,” she reminded him. “Your title is Enlil Naram-Anu, so I will call you such.”

  He looked into her dark eyes with their glowing red centers for long, silent moments.

  “I am not ‘beloved of Anu’,” he said finally. “I never have been. That is not my name.”

  She merely stared at him, uncaring.

  Was he punishing her by withholding his sex because she didn’t love him? Because she took other males into her body? She’d never deceived him in the way she regarded him. And he’d never had any choice in being hers.

  She always took what she wanted. He was what she wanted. So she took him.

  And now she owned him.

  “I am leaving,” he told her flatly.

  She did not misunderstand his meaning. A corner of her lips quirked in derision, even as her pulse sped furiously in her throat.

  “You can’t leave me. You depend on me for survival. You’ll go mad or starve without my blood.”

  “Then so be it,” he replied stoically, turning around to depart.

  “Enlil.”

  He paused with his back facing her.

  “When you go insane with bloodlust and pain, when your body becomes a wreckage of a shell that your soul refuses, it will be too late to come crawling back to me.”

  He walked away from her.

  “You’ll regret this!” she screeched behind him.

  He kept walking, fighting her command of his blood, his body, staining the ground and then the sands beneath his feet as he bled away her control of him.

  But he was too strong to die. Too powerful to be killed. As long as he lived, he would always return to her, enslaved by her powers over him and, by extension, his men.

  And yes, she always made sure he paid dearly for his futile disobedience.

  Over time, he learned to extend the duration of his leave, from years to decades to centuries. He learned to supplement the nourishment he needed
with human blood and souls, taken usually from his defeated foes.

  But while he prevented his physical being from unraveling through such means, he could not save his soul and mind from nihilistic darkness. He believed in nothing, cared for nothing, was connected to nothing.

  Even his men were gradually taken away from him. As soon as he trained a new shadow warrior, Anunit inducted him into her mind-controlled army. Until finally, his own soldiers obeyed only the Mistress, though she gave him the illusion that he still held command.

  After almost four thousand years, the shadow warrior wandered to a small island in the Pacific, off the east coast of Asia, the “Land of the Rising Sun.” Far away from the Mistress, who continued to hold her base on the Western continents.

  There, he did the only thing he knew how to do: war and killing—he became an assassin for hire at an exorbitant fee.

  He learned how to monetize his rare talents, his unsurpassable skills. Eventually, out of loneliness or hereditary predisposition, he set up a school in the shadow arts at an abandoned shrine on the outskirts of Edo Castle, taking in orphaned or discarded boys that were left on his doorstep.

  When there were no other options in life, when you had only two choices—to die or to fight—the people who chose to fight became particularly adept at it. He taught these boys how to control their bodies and use them as lethal weapons to fight for a place in their merciless world.

  The shadow warrior survived without interference from his Mistress for hundreds of years, living off human cattle, their blood, souls, and even sex. For a number of years, he was a frequent visitor at Edo Castle, a favorite among the Shogun’s concubines. Locals wove stories around the existence of an exotic, beautiful, deadly creature who sucked the blood of women in exchange for sating their lustful appetites.

  But no matter what he did, the shadow warrior felt nothing inside. His body felt no pain or pleasure or any of the nuances in between. His heart felt no desire. His soul felt no warmth.

  Until one night, he came upon a small boy waiting for him in front of his shrine.

  At first, the boy looked just like any other. Lost and alone. Unwanted. Unloved.