by C. M. Owens
“Can’t just let them do something like this and get away with it,” Thad growls. “More died than necessary because of their distraction last night, and they don’t have to kill our kind to survive.”
Her eyes shift to Roslyn, since Roslyn needs the blood of our kind to survive. It earns a hell of a growl from Thad.
Kya rolls her eyes. “Again, you weren’t in the cages, so you don’t understand how long they’ve been hungry or what they’ve gone through.”
“I was there,” Roslyn reminds her.
Kya’s eyes narrow into slits. “For two years and you cracked like a weak piñata. You chased our kind and dragged them back to hell to save your own ass. You think you’re better than the jinn who are suffering?”
Everyone immediately bristles, and Thad is held back by his girl when he starts to give chase. Kya doesn’t even blink.
“She’s right,” Roslyn says meekly, looking down.
“The fuck she is. You did what you had to in order to survive. Your wolf was in control. The jinn did this to cover their asses. Not just for survival. And they don’t feel a damn bit guilty about it,” Thad roars.
Kya remains unaffected, and she stays in place. “Would everyone feel the same if it had been one of you she had dragged back? Because it was hell there. It was the devil’s ark. There were at least two of every rare species if they could find it—four half demon/human hybrids like us. One was always for testing—like me. One was for their endgame army—like Karma. They needed their warriors strong and ready. The testers were fine to be broken. They were just the key to success for the warrior. Unfortunately for them, not all of us would break.”
Everyone exchanges glances, confused. That’s something we didn’t know.
“You think your wolf girl was the first of her kind? No. There was another. They broke her so they could learn the limits for the next one. They knew all the right buttons to push to find what makes Roslyn tick. It’s how they operate. They own you the second you walk in, and they have patience. The studying of one species could go on for centuries. Then you do-gooders unleashed purgatory a couple of decades ago, and you load up their arsenal with all sorts of lovely new creatures to test and play with.”
“We didn’t fucking open it because we wanted to,” Kimber seethes.
“You can tell she’s been with Slade for a while,” I mumble, running a hand through my hair. “She’s as arrogant as he is.”
Her eyes cut to me, but I’m not scared of her in the least. In fact, I feel ready for any fight she wants to deliver.
“You’re right; I have been with Slade a while. He’s the reason I survived the cages. I figured if he could endure centuries of pain, the betrayal of a brother, and a never-ending future of torment for no greater purpose, than I could continue to survive in the cage next to him. What I went through is child’s play by comparison, and what they went through was nothing but a blip compared to what I endured.” She points to Karma, Kimber, and Roslyn for emphasis.
“Feel better now that you’ve gotten that off your chest?” Kimber snaps. “Feel special for being a bigger victim? Good for you.”
Kya’s eyes narrow, and Dice holds a hand up before her next retort.
“Us do-gooders released all the prisoners from the cages. So shut the fuck up and help my girl, because I don’t give a flying rat’s ass about what you went through. I’m an asshole like that. And selfish. And I really don’t care if that pisses you off either.”
He lifts Karma off the couch. “I won’t let you in, but I will bring her out,” he adds, which has Kya shifting back enough to allow him to pass with Karma in his arms.
She doesn’t say anything, but as soon as Karma is clear of the barrier, Kya’s eyes light up red, and some red aura travels from her eyes to Karma’s.
Karma’s wheezes grow silent, and suddenly she sucks in a sharp breath as all the color she’d lost returns, making her look healthy once more.
“What’d you do?” Dice asks her.
Kya doesn’t speak, but pulls a book out of her pants and holds it up. “This is a journal. Read it when I’m gone. Put up a soundproofing spell. Stay out of our fucking way. And keep a lid on the new one coming, if you know what I mean. The last thing we fucking need is for these people to get ahold of something like that.”
She starts to turn, but Karma grabs her hand, the one still holding the book.
“Thank you,” she whispers hoarsely.
“Save your thanks. Just do what the book tells you. You need to stock up on energy as quickly as possible. You’re not even strong enough to see souls the way you need to. You missed the wolf and apparently you missed the new one too.”
“New one?” I ask immediately.
Kya looks up at me, and that smirk from earlier emerges again. “Yeah. I think you want to sire her. That helps me narrow down the possibilities of what she might be.”
My heart slams into my ribs, and the air gets sucked out of the room.
“Good job on intimidating the hell out of her. Made it easy to be her hero, considering she’s scared to death of you. By the way, she never knew who we were. But your paranoia is even worse than ours, surprisingly enough. And now we have our latest recruit. Well, if she’s as powerful as her soul leads me to believe she will be.”
I’m racing toward her, but she disappears before I can reach her, laughing mockingly before she completely gets lost. My fist slams through the wall, and I curse as the book falls from nowhere and lands to the ground with an audible thud.
“Leah? They have Leah?” Karma asks, seeming renewed as she hops down and grabs the book.
“Apparently,” I growl. “And we pushed her right into their nest.”
“Relax. It sounds like Kya wants her on their team,” Roslyn says from somewhere close by.
“You don’t understand,” Kane tells her, “he wants to sire her. Think of how possessive you are of Thad. Now multiply that by fifty.”
I can actually hear her swallow as I take several long, deep breaths.
“She’s fey,” Karma whispers. “And I missed it.”
Dice hugs her middle while pulling her closer. “You were sick. And your sister is a hashtag-bitch, by the way. Major hashtag-bitch.”
“I’m going for a walk,” I grumble, immediately pushing my way outside. Kya is going to wish she hadn’t shared that last part with me.
Chapter 9
LEAH
“Victor scares me,” I tell Aunt Masie.
“He’s a scary guy,” she says casually, pulling a blanket from overhead as she makes a bed beside mine.
There are too many people in our house tonight, and I think she’s worried about leaving me in the room alone.
“What happened at school today?” she asks, brushing my hair back from my face.
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
She frowns as she looks over at my stack of horror movies and weird relics I’ve found and kept over the years. It’s not as weird as what I’ve seen a lot of people do. I’m not sure why I get singled out.
“People are just monsters in disguise,” she states quietly. “It’s why you don’t trust anyone but family, sweet girl.”
Someone must have told her what they did to me… How that stupid girl made me think we were friends and then… Then helped the Leonard’s humiliate me once again by printing and making my creepy drawings and poems go viral. As if I wasn’t already the freak.
“You trust Victor,” I point out, even though he’s big, scary, and maybe a little crazy.
“Victor is family. Sort of. He’s also a protector. He’s going to help us when the time comes.”
“When what time comes?”
She smiles grimly. “I’ll explain it all one day, my angel. One day.”
Sighing, I relax on the bed. “Will they let momma out soon?”
Her eyes well with tears, and she looks away. “Your mother… She wasn’t made for this. I hate… I hate myself.”
I don’t know wha
t that means, and she doesn’t elaborate before kissing my head.
“But you are stronger than her. Remember that. One day, remember that.”
It’s quiet and creepy in the cabin. Two days ago, there were a few other people, but I haven’t seen any of them since. They were only here briefly. Kya has barely been here either.
But she’s here right now, eating quietly.
“What’s wrong?” I ask her, noticing how her gaze is steadily on the door but she’s not really looking at it.
“I just realized they might not be able to read some of my coding. It was the way I learned to write in the cages. I didn’t have the typical schooling. Everyone wrote in code to keep the guards from understanding what we wrote.”
“And you can’t just call them?” I ask, trying to help.
“No. They’ll trace the call. They have a dark user, and dark users are badass with tech. He’s not just your average dark user either.”
I’m still catching up on all the terms, but that’s an easy one. Kya has been patient and very understanding. She’s also told me all the nightmares I never had before meeting her.
“And you really think they’d kill you? They love Karma and she’s your sister. They’re not going to hurt you.”
“They love Karma for now, but eventually, when they learn what she needs, she’ll be tracking me down for refuge. They’re self-righteous sons of bitches that forget what we are. They’re idealistic and weak when it comes to reality. Most of them have lost their edge and gotten soft. The rest kill our kind for surviving. They even wanted to go after the jinn.”
I don’t mention that I feel the jinn should die as well, considering they caused the entire community to go crazy just so they could take a few fey.
“We’re a species that evolves and grows stronger at rapid rates. That right was taken away a long time ago, but we have it back now. It’s survival of the deadliest. They’re just too blind to see it. The jinn are too deadly and too crazy to tangle with, but they’ll leave the princess and her crew alone, if they leave them alone. If they don’t, they’ll hunt them down, and Karma will be the first they take. She’ll be the easiest target. She doesn’t know how to use her powers yet. They were still grooming her in the cages.”
My heart breaks for her a little on that last bit. She was a prisoner for so long. I can’t even imagine it.
“Enough of that,” she says, looking up at me. “I still have to figure out what you are.”
I groan while grabbing a box of cereal.
“I’m nobody. I’ve already told you this. We even went over my lineage. There isn’t a drop of fey blood in my family. I would have noticed magic getting used.”
“Not all fey use magic. Your soul is too strong to be human. It practically glows. That’s a lot of power. And no human could have the mind capacity to accept this reality as effortlessly as you have. It tends to break their minds when they take in too much of our truths. You’re one of us. You saw what I had to do in order to feed myself, and you didn’t even act afraid. You didn’t judge me. That’s not human. That’s better than the Scooby gang too.”
She stabs at a piece of egg a little harder than necessary.
“Slade will be back today. Maybe he can help me figure it out.”
My blood runs cold in my veins. “The guy who tortured those two guys?” I ask on a rasp whisper.
“It was one torture and one clean kill,” she corrects. “If Slade tortured someone, they deserved it. He’s usually a quick kill kind of guy. Don’t worry. As long as you don’t piss him off, he won’t kill you.”
Gee, that’s encouraging.
“Zee thought I knew Slade. They insisted I was working with all of you. He said Slade had to have known I was there.”
“Doubtful. Slade was in the kill-zone. He tends to tune out everything, but he has a sixth sense if there’s a threat nearby. Which lets me know you don’t mean us any harm. He’d have sensed you and killed you immediately.”
Again, she sucks at putting someone at ease.
“Just don’t tell him Zee wants to sire you. He’ll send you back to them because he won’t deal with the drama of a night stalker chasing his prey.”
That makes swallowing difficult. “Prey?”
“Not food. Well, he’ll hunt you like food, then change you and fuck you like you’re his to keep.”
I’m fairly sure I just turned five shades of red, and it suddenly feels like it’s a blazing inferno in here.
“You blush. That’s a good color on you,” she taunts, grinning. “Does belonging to the night stalker sound like fun? Probably. It’s only fun until you’re immortal though. We like to own things, but we hate being owned. Most sired night stalkers slowly break their bonds so they can kill their sires. It’s a very painful process in the beginning. You can’t kill them until you’ve broken every bond. It’s how the sire keeps their control over you—the bonds. Trust me when I tell you that this is a much better option. Joining us is a better option, I mean.”
I just nod, even though I don’t know what she expects me to do. It’s not like I can actually kill anyone. And I’m not a freaking immortal! Her mojo is wrong on this one.
Before I can come up with some lame comment, the door swings open, and I swallow my tongue as several people filter in. Among them is one I never wanted to see again.
Slade.
His eyes immediately fall on me, and I take in the fact he’s a lot taller than I remembered. And scarier.
His inky black hair is messy, and it covers part of his forehead. Scars are in perfect, downward lines on his left cheek. A few more are on his face too, but he’s still not hideous. He’s not sexy like Zee, but he’s not ugly at all.
He is, however, terrifying the shit out of me with just his cold gaze. Fortunately, he shifts that gaze to Kya. “Any idea what she is?”
Kya shakes her head. “I was hoping you’d help me figure it out. You’re better at examining souls than I am.”
He can do what she does?
He returns his gaze to me, studying me so intensely that I’m worried I’ll burst into flames, but he shrugs. “Nothing like I’ve seen. Could be useful. Could be useless. Keep an eye on her. She’s more than old enough to be turning.”
Twenty-four. Twenty-four and normal.
Kya just nods, and I watch as a blonde purrs—actually purrs like a freaking cat—and runs her hand up Slade’s arm.
“Want company?” she drawls seductively.
He slowly wraps his fingers around her wrist, but his face remains stoic. “All I want is sleep. Touch me again, and I’ll remove anything on your body that has touched mine. Understood?”
The fear that was absent in the room is suddenly on everyone’s faces. The girl whose wrist he’s holding looks white as his eyes flash to silver.
“Sorry,” she whispers hoarsely, and Slade knocks her hand away before casually striding into a room and shutting the door behind him.
The queasy-looking girl comes to drop onto a stool next to Kya, and Kya battles a grin.
“He’s hideous and still he rebuffs me,” the girl growls.
That’s mean to say. He’s not perfect and he’s not devastatingly handsome like all the others seem to be, but he’s not hideous.
Kya snickers softly for a brief second.
“It’s not funny,” the girl hisses. She seriously sounds like a cat.
Everyone else goes back to their business, pretending as though shit didn’t get scary or awkward.
“It wasn’t funny,” Kya agrees. “It was stupid. Slade doesn’t allow anyone to touch him. You know this. Why would you do that?”
The girl looks down. “Eventually he has to let someone touch him again. I’d like to be that someone.”
“Why doesn’t he like being touched?” I ask before I can stop myself. “Is it because he was locked up for so long?”
Both women look at me like I’ve sprouted an extra head. I keep talking out of turn and forgetting my place.
“We don’t know,” Kya finally says. “But sex in the cages was encouraged, so it hasn’t been that long since he was touched. They wanted us to breed, especially him. Most of us had spells on us before going in—to prevent pregnancy. I got lucky. Slade couldn’t use much magic, but he was able to use enough to cast spells as small as that. It’s how we kept from reproducing, and it saved me the trouble of having a child in the rings.”
Yeah… Not touching that one. It’s just too freaky and they act like they’re discussing the weather or something.
“You had sex with him?” Cat girl asks Kya.
Kya’s nose wrinkles. “No. Of course not. He practically helped raise me. He just cast a pregnancy spell on me.”
Cat girl leans back, glancing at the door Slade disappeared behind.
“Since he’s been out,” Kya goes on, “he hasn’t wanted anyone to touch him at all. I was right beside his cage, so I know he never had a problem with it before. Even the slightest graze could get someone punched now.”
“He had sex with me in the cages,” the blonde grumbles. “I was desperate and he was willing. Now we’re out and he won’t touch me, even though he doesn’t exactly have any other options. Who else would touch him?”
She talks about him like he should be thankful she’d even consider sleeping with him.
“If you’re not attracted to him, then why do you want to sleep with him so bad?” I ask, trying to keep the acid out of my tone.
“He’s the most powerful,” she says, acting as though it should be obvious. “I feel safe with him.”
“When he’s not threatening to kill you?” I immediately regret that comment when the girl’s eyes flash to an autumn color and she actually growls at me. Damn.
Kya snorts out a laugh, and she shakes her head as the girl storms away.
“Be glad I’m sitting here or she would have clawed your eyes out.”
Yeah, it’s not smart to piss off the supernatural.
“Sorry,” I mumble.
Kya just laughs lightly while picking up her phone. “Don’t be. It’s the truth. Not even I’m stupid enough to feel safe with Slade. If I ever pissed him off enough, he’d end me without a thought. And my cage was next to his for a really long time. I practically grew up around him. Even though he’s been grown for centuries, he still feels like the closest thing to family I have. Doesn’t mean he wouldn’t rip my throat out if I crossed him.”
