Vindicta (The Liquidator Wars Book 1)

by Kindra Sowder

  Calyx turned away from the doors and took off down the hallway to ready herself to make her way to the school during the daylight. It would mean using the protective clothing that they sometimes used in battle, which Brynn would frown upon severely, but not more than her friend’s betrayal. That thought caused her to pause at the head of the stairs and turn back slightly to look toward the guards over her shoulder. She turned back around and watched as servants and guards moved around the mansion and sighed again.

  “Could you really do this?” she asked herself in a whisper. “Can you move against your friend and leader?”

  The simple answer was yes.

  ***

  Brynn stood in her closet and thought about what Calyx had said for a moment, the words ringing in her head as if Calyx was saying them over and over again. With her hands on her hips, she looked over her wardrobe, still fuming as she thought of her friend’s accusation. That her judgment was off which, to Brynn, was an insult to her very house. The only person she had ever failed in her life was her younger sister Gwenyth, and that saddened her, but her sister pulled away from her at every turn. She was even secretive these days, so Brynn did what she could to keep the house safe, and if that meant moving the Liquidator male right next door to keep a better eye on him then so be it.

  With resolve, she said to herself, “I made the right decision. She’s wrong.”

  But the words still rang in her ears. She shook her head and reached for a crimson tank top, which was much more comfortable than the leather halter she had worn to see Leo. Even his own proclamation still made her head spin. That one with the blood of angel would be the one she would mate, but it would not be Leo himself, which had saddened him. There was only one other, though not full-blooded, that was close to her. And they shared a wall.

  She was attracted to him, to say the least, his broad chest and deep voice only making her body burn from the inside out as she made her way to the door and opened it, turning to the guards outside the door next to hers.

  “I would like to speak with the Liquidator. You can leave us, and I will get you when I am finished,” Brynn ordered as she came to stand in front of them, looking up into their faces as they stared down at her. She didn’t mind being short. Had always been. But what she did mind was being looked down on.

  “Now!” she shouted when they didn’t move.

  “Yes, Daughter of Electi,” the older vampire stated as he pulled, the younger male away.

  She watched as they walked down the hallway and took sentry at the very end with their backs toward where she stood. With a deep and steadying breath to slow her heartbeat, she grabbed the doorknob and twisted it, slipping into the man’s room without a knock or pronouncement. What greeted her when she entered was what she hadn’t been expecting.

  Creed walked out of the bathroom with only a plush white towel that hung low on his hips, his hair wet, and droplets of glistening water dripping down his chest. His skin was as bronze as ever, and even more delectable now that it was clean of the blood and filth that had previously covered him. Desire curled in her gut and caused her muscles to coil with brilliant tension. His eyebrows raised an inch in amusement as he took in her presence, the crimson tank top doing nothing to hide that fact that she had been aroused at the sight of him.

  “What pleasure do I owe this visit, Daughter of Electi?” he questioned after clearing his throat. “I was under the impression I wasn’t allowed visitors.”

  She crossed her arms over her chest and made a conscious effort not to look at anything but the man’s face which, she had to admit, nearly made her swoon all on its own. It was hard but beautiful, and elegant even with the stubble that littered his jaw.

  “I spoke with Leo tonight,” she replied.

  Creed chuckled and ran his hand through his wet hair. “Ah, the Angel. I know who he is. The bisexual.”

  The words rolled off of his tongue deliciously, and Brynn had to reel herself in.

  “He told me, Creed. Well, what he knew. And what he saw. I’m not certain what to think of it anymore. I’ve become…”

  “Confused?”

  She moved to the other side of the room and inspected a photo hanging on the wall of a young woman, her own mother that passed when she was only a teenaged vampire. She was beautiful. Long blonde hair, the same both daughters possessed, and those same crimson eyes that Brynn inherited.

  “Yes, if you must know.”

  “What’s so confusing about what he divulged to you, Daughter of Electi?”

  He was a lot closer to her than he had been and she felt the heat radiating off of him on her back, causing a heat of her own to lick up her very center like a fire. Her body turned on instinct, her chest brushed up against him, a hiss leaving his lips as he stared down at her with the same fire that moved through her body in his eyes.

  Creed took a step toward her, and she took a step back, the entire length of her spine meeting the golden wall behind her. Her breathing was erratic, and her body was entirely engulfed in the flames of the desire she felt for the male in front of her and the scent of his arousal wafted off of him like smoke that tickled her nostrils, only fanning those flames. He reached up and traced his finger along her jaw line, the contact causing a shiver of anticipation to roll through her.

  “See, Brynn, it is very clear that you need me to fight this war, and not just for my blood,” he whispered.

  He leaned down toward her but paused as if asking permission. With one final shudder, she closed the distance between them, her lips crashing into his as her arms encircled his neck and she pressed the length of her body against him.

  ***

  The taste of her intoxicated him as he pulled her closer to him, but even with them pressed together she wasn’t close enough. Creed’s hand traveled up the outside of Brynn’s red tank top and grazed over her breasts, her nipples hardening underneath his touch.

  She moaned, and he couldn’t stop himself from pushing her up against the wall and, when he pulled away from her just an inch to grip her ass to lift her up, he saw those crimson eyes flash a bright and pale blue. The Sapphire Eye, a gift he knew she possessed so she could see the Quaji she collected, didn’t much matter to him as much as it had his father, but he wasn’t concerned with that at the moment. He just needed to be closer to her and as close as he could get.

  Her hands wove through his hair as his lips pressed against her throat, a guttural growl moving up from within his throat to penetrate the air. The vampire in him began to surface as she writhed against him, but he held back as best he could. He was confident, despite the rumors, that Brynn was as pure as they came even though she loved to partake in battle. He nibbled at her throat, his own fangs throbbing as the need to puncture that gorgeous flesh of hers attempted to overwhelm him, and his arousal became even more apparent.

  When her nails dug into his flesh, he growled against her lips. Her body stiffened against his and confusion overtook him, the unadulterated lust he had sensed and smelled in the air disappearing like a vacuum had been turned on in the room. Her breathing picked up as if she was in a panic and she pushed against him.

  “Put me down,” she said. He pulled away from her, and there were tears in her eyes then. He opened his mouth to apologize, for what he had no idea, but she stopped him. “Put me down, Creed.”

  He did as she asked and watched as she paced for all of a moment and then turned to leave the room, pausing before her hand met the metal doorknob. She hesitated, and he had an inclination as to why, but he noticed her muscles stiffen as she stood there, thinking.

  “Brynn?” he asked as confusion and concern flooded through him like a floodgate had been opened.

  She turned her head slightly to look at him, closed her eyes, and turned away from him and opened the door.

  “I’m sorry.”

  And with that she walked out and shut the door behind her, leaving Creed alone and wanting for so much more than she had just given him. He wanted her to love him
and the thought that she may not be able to terrified him to his very core.

  ***

  Natalia hummed as she dusted the shelves that lined her own secret closet. The door was made of six-inch thick industrial steel, and it blended in seamlessly with the stainless steel walls of the central laboratory, where Brynn stored the precious Quaji as well as the Zoo.

  The closet, which was, in fact, her own private laboratory, had been constructed by her first Warrior Graduate Student lover Actaeon. He had taken her in there once in the way that a man takes a woman, her back against the wall and her legs wrapped around his hips as he thrust into her.

  She would always be fond of her secret room because of that memory.

  She had known in advance that whoever contracted the secret room would have to die for her surreptitious activities to remain hidden, so she arranged for Actaeon’s heart to be pierced through with an arrow during a military hunting practice. No one ever figured out how the good-looking young man had found himself hit by ‘friendly fire’ during a training exercise.

  But Natalia knew because she had put an arrow through the unfortunate young man’s heart.

  One of the great secrets of the Electi was that any issue of their royalty whether it is piss, shit or blood was carried away, examined, and buried privately. The fact that it could contain live cells with their DNA meant that extra precautions must be taken to assure that no enemy could clone either of them.

  The monthly discharge from the sacred wombs of the Daughters of the Electi, Brynn, and Gwenyth, was the most important issue of all because it contained their unfertilized eggs. Though often released ruptured or dissolved because of the peculiar antigens of the Vampire royalty, sometimes the ovum would be passed intact.

  As a trusted employee of the Daughters, they never questioned her obsession to procure this intimate material related to the future procreation of themselves. Going through it was a painstaking process that took Natalia countless hours, but it had paid off.

  Lovingly, she pulled up the delicate silver chain that always rested between her ample breasts, and inserted the tiny silver key on it into a small opening in the wall.

  As soon as the key was placed in the lock, a drawer silently moved toward her from the stainless steel wall, and blue tinted vapors of liquid nitrogen rose upward. Impatiently, Natalia waved it away to look upon her prize with her mind’s eye: a row of short test tubes capped with blue stoppers.

  There were only five of them. Gwenyth was young yet, and few of her unfertilized ovum survived to be harvested. But Brynn, Daughter, and Leader of the Electi was another story.

  For an instant, so as not to endanger them, Natalia brought them to the light. To her enhanced perceptions they each looked like supernovas, with a glowing center and ringed with a pearlescent corona of other cells.

  “Power,” she whispered, without realizing she’d spoken aloud.

  Whether or not the Electi knew it, they were not in charge of their own destiny. Natalia had taken that power from them. Regardless of Brynn or Gwenyth’s decisions to wed or not wed, have children or not, she, Natalia, had the raw materials to continue their line however she saw fit.

  The possibilities were endless. She could even clone the Daughters of the Electi if she so desired. Impregnate herself with their offspring. Mix their DNA with that of dragons.

  She sighed and gently, reverently, replaced the vials, wary that she was taking too much time.

  She smiled with deep satisfaction musing that regardless of how things appeared, she was in actuality the most powerful being of them all.

  They just didn’t know it yet.

  ***

  It was just dark enough to venture out to the Poetry Garden, and Brynn, feeling disturbed at her earlier altercation with Calyx, was headed to one of her favorite places to reflect upon things and find solace.

  This time of year the garden was filled with calla lilies and dinner plate hibiscus. There were climbing roses also, white and fragrant, that had climbed the eleven-foot tall stone walls to form a sort of bower over the ornately carved benches.

  One of the benches had been a gift from Tarren on her last birthday, and he had made her close her eyes as he led her through the grounds and to her favorite meditation spot. She remembered how lighthearted she had felt. It seemed like all of them had been lighthearted a year ago.

  The bench that Tarren had painstakingly made with his own hands, hoping that Brynn would love it, included her name ‘Brynn’ carved in ornate lettering and the inscription, “Fortissimus antique Pugnator Pulcherrima Filia Electi,” ‘Strongest Warrior and Fairest Daughter of the Electi.’

  She sat down on it and threw her arm over the back, looking up at the night sky. She could hear the distant sound of traffic but the birdsong in the gardens drowned it out. She couldn’t understand why she felt a rift had grown between her and Calyx lately. She knew Calyx hadn’t liked being left behind when she and the twins had gone to seek information from Leo.

  She also was perceptive enough to know that the issues she and Calyx were having centered somehow around Creed.

  Was Calyx jealous? The effect Creed had seemed to have on her stymied Brynn, but surely Calyx knew that she would never put anything before her loyalty to the Electi and her pledge to defend their clan.

  She heard a rustling in the bushes to the side of the opening into the Poetry Garden. Was someone spying on her? Swiftly she jumped up, her jeweled dirk in her hand.

  What charged through the opening was not human or vampire.

  The black god was huge, with mangled black hair, and glowing eyes--four of them to be exact as it was two-headed. It snarled and leaped upon her so quickly that she reacted automatically, quickly, driving her blade deeply into its eyes as the blood spurted all over her.

  Brynn managed to put out three of the eyes, but the one she missed proved her undoing and the hellhound quickly planted its dagger-like teeth into the flesh of her small shoulder.

  Ignoring the searing pain radiating from the wound, Brynn placed both hands on the blade, lowered it as far down as she was able and slit the animal’s soft underbelly open, the cut so deep that its entrails cascaded onto her boots.

  At last, it let go, wobbling sideways and then seemingly disappearing into thin air.

  Brynn realized that the left side of her shirt was saturated with blood. Immediately, her head began to swim, and she stumbled forward, determined not to lose consciousness.

  She cursed herself for having left her cell phone in her room.

  As she made her way resolutely to the back entrance of the manse, shouting at intervals for the guard, she was shocked to see Gwenyth and Ryder emerging from the high-hedged entrance of the Labyrinth.

  Both of them looked shocked to see her, and both ran toward her immediately. Gwenyth screamed her name.

  “Hellhound,” was all she could say before she fainted. Her last frantic thought was that she was glad she hadn’t looked directly into its eyes.

  Legend had it that whoever looked directly into the eyes of a hellhound would die.

  ***

  The guard joined them, even though they had begun eating the evening meal. It was at Brynn’s insistence that her Guard was always served before any of the Elect members of the Electi took their evening meal.

  Once inside, Bayn had insisted that he carry Brynn to her chambers, though she was still unconscious and bleeding copiously. Calyx, white faced with her lips pressed together grimly, met the group at the doorway to Brynn’s chambers where a hospital style gurney had been set up with small drainage ports on the side to drain off blood.

  Most of them, particularly Bayn and Tarren, had lain on the same gurney after one battle or another as they waited to heal. But never Brynn. Brynn always had seemed to defy the odds. Even when she was injured severely, her vampire body appeared to rally and heal her in a quick fashion.

  Something was wrong this time. Very wrong.

  Natalia burst through the group, nearly knocking
Ryder and Tarren off their feet in her rush to get close to Brynn.

  Her eyes were hooded, but her voice trembled as she caressed the side of Brynn’s face.

  “She is dying,” she whispered. “This creature was enchanted, and its bite is lethal even to vampires. How the Liquidators gained such an ally, I cannot imagine.”

  Calyx, usually calm and in control, lost it.

  “Shut up, old woman,” she railed at Natalia. “Do something. She is still breathing. Earn your keep.”

  Natalia turned toward Calyx.

  “This is not of my doing, you impertinent pixie,” she spat. “Keep a civil tongue in your head or I will make sure you have no tongue at all.”

  As Calyx continued to fume, her chest heaving, she said, this time sounding like a wailing child, tears rolling down her cheeks, “Please do something. Heal her, please. I can feel her slipping away.”

  Natalia seemed to hesitate then as she started to speak again as part of the Guard burst into the room.

  “The Third Quadrant on the north side of the manse had been breached. We have the Liquidators at bay for now, but we need the Elite Guard, the Royal Archers, and our Warrior Queen.”

  Tarren, who was Brynn’s First Lieutenant, turned. He was officially in charge due to Brynn’s incapacitation.

  “Take the Orange Squadron and hit them back hard,” he roared. “Use the Lightning Nets if you must and fry their asses. Tell the others we are coming.”

  The others had been so distracted that it was a shock when the Guard turned, unblocking their view, and they suddenly saw both Natalia and Creed standing in the doorway. No one had even realized Natalia had left the room until that very moment.

  Both Bayn and Tarren drew their swords. Calyx whipped out her bagh naka and got in a striking position.

  “What the fuck, Natalia?” Bayn shouted, saying aloud what the others were thinking. “What the Hell is he doing here? Have you lost your fucking mind?”

  Natalia was very matter of fact as she quickly pulled Creed forward toward the gurney by his wrist chains. Creed looked determined as he strode toward Brynn’s still body.