Haunted Blade (Colbana Files Book 6)

by J. C. Daniels

  Harsh color turned the dusky gold of his cheeks a deep red and his eyes burned between stormcloud grey and the green-gold of his cat form. The anger inside him burned so hot, it left my skin stinging.

  “You were going on a suicide run,” he said, voice flat.

  “When you’re that broken, that defeated, suicide offers escape,” I replied simply.

  I wasn’t ashamed of what I’d tried to do. It had, at the time, been the one exit I’d had. Too many people don’t understand the sheer, crippling weight of that despair and when there is no outlet, save death, death looks very, very promising.

  Damon dropped his head, shoulders shuddering as he sucked in a gulp of air.

  “You didn’t run.”

  “Fanis found out. Grandmother was not pleased I’d seek such an end.” Laughing hollowly, I looked away. “I was her wretched, dishonorable burden, but I was still her granddaughter and those of her line were not allowed to show such cowardice.”

  “Stop.” He caught my face in his hands and leaned in, pressing his lips to mine fiercely. “I…look, your bitchy humor gets you through things, but just…not right now, okay?”

  I gripped his wrists. “My bitchy humor?”

  “What else do you call it?”

  “Dark? Macabre? Self-effacing?” I shifted my hold from his wrists to his neck and leaned in against him. “But…okay. Ok. I didn’t run, no. She found out. I don’t know how. It wasn’t like I’d told her. I was preparing to leave in the night, ahead of others. Her guard came to my room, took me to her. Rana was there, along with Fanis.”

  And Rathi. Mustn’t forget him.

  “And…” I blew out a hard breath. “My cousin, Rathi. He’s the one who…”

  When I hesitated, Damon took over. “He looked like Doyle. Is he Rana’s son?”

  “No.” Shaking my head, I leaned back once more and met his gaze. “Her nephew—my cousin. His mother was Reshi. I was put in a confinement pit as a punishment. Rathi was one of the ones assigned to provide food and make sure I didn’t escape. Rana told him to release me a few days after they left for the Dominari. And he did. But he—” Fuck. Somehow, my hands had sought his out and I clung to them now, so tight it hurt. “He told me I should thank him for releasing me, then he grabbed me, ripped my clothes off…”

  It was getting hard to breathe, but the words, trapped for so long came pouring out. My teeth chattered, but at the same time, I couldn’t make myself stop speaking. Humiliation and anger burned and I wanted to shut up. But I couldn’t. “He raped me. He held me down, laughed and raped me. When he was done, he rolled away and was sitting there, talking about how at least I had some use. He’d brought food and in a bit, I could thank him again. There were rocks around the pit…for people to throw in at the idiots stupid enough to anger the queen. I grabbed one. Then I hit him. Again, and again…” Voice breaking, I looked at my hands, seeing the blood. “And again. Even when the blood was all over me and I could see bone, I kept hitting him. Then I ran.”

  I closed my eyes and buried my face in my hands, struggling to suck in air. Blood roared in my ears, threatened to deafen me.

  Damon’s hands cupped my head.

  I felt him kiss me gently, despite the fine tremors that wracked him. Rage. It was rage that made him shake. And yet he still kissed me, held me with such gentleness.

  Focusing on that, I tried to block out everything that wasn’t Damon—everything that wasn’t his scent, his strength, the feel of his hands and the heat that flowed from him to warm me.

  But I still felt cold.

  ⸸

  “Who is Fenele?”

  He’d been quiet for an interminable period of time and I ached from how rigidly I sat there. His question spurred me into movement, forcing me off the coffee table and back into motion.

  “Rathi’s mother was…is a twin. Fenele.” I bit it off as I moved closer to the fire. “Siblings, as a rule, aren’t necessarily close among my kind. Fanis certainly didn’t encourage it—she outright discouraged it at times. She pitted one against the other, pushed each to chase their own means to suit hers. But twins…” Lifting a shoulder, I said softly, “Maybe they are different. Fenele was almost fanatical about Reshi. And even more so about Rathi. She was protective of him, coddled him.” I hesitated, trying to figure out how much more to say. “He could do no wrong in her eyes. If any of the teachers came down on him, it enraged her. If any student bested him—and many did—then she came at them even harder. The only ones she didn’t go after was her own twin, and Rana. She’d never dare go after her twin and as for Rana…I think my aunt scared her.” I realized the idea amused me and I almost smiled.

  Feeling Damon’s eyes on me, I shrugged. “She was—is—crazy. But I guess she’s not completely stupid. Anyway, she got to the point to where she wasn’t allowed to offer instruction to children. She was placed with the adults and only with rotations that were on the training fields when the young weren’t.”

  I blew out a shaking breath and closed my eyes. Damon came to me, utterly soundless. But the burning buzz of his anger against my skin alerted me and I opened my eyes a second before he caged me in against the counter at my back.

  “So he grows up to be a spoiled, entitled monster who doesn’t understand that he can’t have whatever he wants…and he put his hands on you.” The words came out in a harsh growl, his eyes glittering with shards of gold as he fought with his own monster. “They did nothing to rein him in and after he hurt you, you killed the sick little fuck.”

  “Yeah.” With a weak smile, I shrugged. “I’m sure you wanted a piece of him, but…”

  “No. He was all yours.” He hugged me tighter while the shivers continued to wrack my body.

  “And now his beloved auntie is here. Let me guess, she thinks you did something wrong.”

  “I imagine so.” My voice cracked and to my horror, I realized I wanted to cry.

  “I’ll hunt her down and rip out her spine. Then I’ll beat her to death with it,” Damon said. “Maybe she’ll get the point then.”

  ⸸

  Rana was alone when Damon and I returned.

  I would take it as a sign that Chang and Scott had decided to trust her, but for two reasons, I knew that wasn’t the case.

  The first reason was I could feel Chang loitering nearby, although the word loiter didn’t really seem to fit him well. He…lounged. Even standing up. He was too elegant to loiter.

  The second reason…well, Scott might eventually come to trust her. I might eventually come to trust her.

  But Chang would sprout rainbow colored feathers and sing sonnets before he’d trust Rana.

  And Damon would turn into a unicorn and shit diamonds.

  Still, he gave her a polite nod when he entered the room, stroking a hand down my back before making his way over to the window. If I knew anything about him—and I did—he had a powerful need for the outdoors just then, and a conflicting need to wrap me up in bubble wrap.

  It was little surprise when he pushed the window open and rested his hips on it, body facing us. He looked calm and relaxed, save for his eyes.

  They were full of turbulence and chaos—and rage.

  As I settled into a seat across from Rana, he rubbed his knuckles down his jaw. “So one of your sisters is in my city.”

  Rana slid him a look. “In the general area, yes. She likely isn’t staying in Orlando. Fen is more…cautious than most.”

  Damon cocked a thick black brow. “Cautious.”

  “She means paranoid,” I said.

  “Gotcha.” A ghost of a smile tugged at his lips but even the idea of me being cautious wasn’t enough to pull him out of his dark mood right now. “So she’s paranoid and crazy.”

  Rana glanced at me and then returned her gaze to Damon. “If you like.” Lips pursed, she studied him for a moment and then asked, “Your man with the golden hair—he is a cougar, yes?”

  “She means Scott.”

  “I know which one of my men is a
cougar,” Damon muttered. “Although why you have to call his hair golden when it’s just brown, I don’t know. What about him?”

  “He is—or was—a soldier. Am I right?” Rana rose from her chair, facing him now.

  I didn’t have to wonder how she’d guessed about Scott’s background. The aneira were a warrior race, after all. Nearly everybody was trained for battle, even though our fighting days were mostly behind us—or rather, their fighting days.

  They weren’t really my people, hadn’t ever been.

  That training showed in how Rana carried herself, her bearing upright and tall—the same military bearing Scott had.

  “He was.” Damon’s gaze skated over her. “Special Forces, before he was bit.”

  “I would think he has known men and women who went into war and came out…changed. Even hardened fighters who simply were not the same person they once were.” Rana turned away from him, moving with unhurried grace to the table where coffee and a pitcher of ice water waited. She poured herself water and sipped. From where I sat, I could just barely make out her profile and her lashes lay low on her cheeks. Her pulse fluttered hard and fast for a moment—I could see it, and faintly, I heard it. “Fen was always hard. But now…she’d broken.”

  “You understand I’m planning on killing her,” Damon said.

  She turned to him, eyes unsmiling. “You can plan all you want. But I’ll be the one to kill her. I must.”

  “Yeah? And why is that?” The expression on his face was still so relaxed, but there was so much frost in his voice, it was about to cause hypothermia.

  Rana didn’t answer immediately and in the few seconds she delayed, I figured it out. “It’s the lemera, isn’t it?”

  Rana’s eyes came my way.

  Damon was still staring at her.

  I didn’t want to settle any sort of pissing contest between them, especially not when it came to Fenele. But this wasn’t just about me. When she didn’t answer right away, I pushed again. “Fenele is controlling the lemera somehow, isn’t she?”

  “As one would control a hungry tiger.” Rana took another sip of her water. “But without one of us there to harness it in some way, it will just keep glutting itself.”

  Damon blinked, lashes lingering over his eyes and I felt the struggle inside him. Finally, he slanted a look at me and I saw the muscle quivering in his cheek. “This…lemera thing…that’s what took out master-level vampires?” His scowl deepened as he looked back at Rana.

  Poor Damon. He had already probably choreographed Fenele’s entire death in his mind.

  “Yes.” Rana didn’t look at him as she drank more water.

  “Exactly what is it?”

  I had no answer for him. As insatiable I’d been for knowledge when I fled the hall, the city, when I’d finally gotten free of the mountains and then left the island, as many books as I’d read, as many hours as I’d spent pouring over websites, devouring information, I’d avoided certain things—the kind that might remind me of the island I’d fled.

  Locals had called the place Dauði Bíðr.

  The rough translation?

  Death waits.

  Not many from the outside world visited the small cluster of islands just south of where my race had settled almost two thousand years earlier.

  The region wasn’t the most welcoming, located in the North Atlantic and cut off from the rest of the world in many ways.

  But the few who did visit would ask about the dark, unappealing crag of rock north of the main group of islands. Questions were brushed aside and the interest anybody expressed was quickly and expertly quashed.

  Nobody wanted any curious tourists wandering that way.

  It wasn’t out of any desire to protect the people who’d taken the island over nearly two millennia earlier, but out of self-defense.

  There was plenty of reason for those in that region to fear the imposing island that for all intents and purposes didn’t look like it would support much in the way of life. People who went there never came back. Pulling up a boat on the shores—where it was even possible—was akin to signing a death warrant.

  Journeying near it wasn’t as risky, but the rocks in the water were treacherous and the current deadly.

  Even in the years since non-humans had been discovered, that bit of land still remained largely isolated. The islands themselves were self-governing, a part of Denmark.

  Denmark, like a number of European countries, was far more welcoming to non-humans. Probably because so many of them had never completely closed their minds off to us.

  Death waits.

  I fought a hysterical giggle that bubbled up my throat, thinking about how I’d hurtled through mountainous terrain, through a frozen forest, convinced they’d come after me…or that it would find me.

  She hadn’t let me run the race that would have ended things, and yet I’d ended up tearing through the mountains anyway.

  Now, here, years later, that bitch Fanis had sent her little pet after me.

  “Kitasa!”

  The sharp sound of my name, spoken as it had been so often during my youth, made me flinch. I jerked upright without even realizing what I’d done, going into the position that had been drilled into me from early childhood, hands linked behind my back, eyes staring at a fixed point on the wall.

  Damon cut between me and Rana.

  “Kit.” He cupped my face in his hands and the heat of his hands felt scorching against my skin. “Look at me. Are you here?”

  Oxygen nearly burned my lungs as I forced myself to breathe.

  “Fuck,” I whispered, trying to twist away.

  He didn’t want to let me go.

  How much of that scared, broken thing was still inside me?

  “You weren’t breathing,” he said, leaning in closer, pressing his lips to my ear, words so quiet, I barely heard. “You were sitting there, staring at nothing and you stopped breathing.”

  I caught the front of his shirt in my hands.

  “Where did you go?”

  Gorge rose up my throat and threatened to choke me. “Back,” I whispered.

  Slowly, he lifted his head, staring into my eyes.

  “I’m here. I’m fine.”

  I wasn’t but he let the lie go and after a moment, he stepped away.

  Rana was standing a few feet away, her hand on the blade at her waist. She looked…uncomfortable, shifting from one foot to the other.

  It pissed me off, almost as bad as it had when I’d first come back to the Lair after my attack and all of Damon’s cats had looked at me like I was nothing but a broken doll.

  It pissed me off, because I was broken—had been, then.

  Was I still?

  The answer scared me.

  “What’s wrong?” I said, my temper snapping, the fury, the fear, the humiliation exploding out of me. “Never expected to see me freak out when I remembered what it was like running away from there?”

  Her chin went up slightly and her eyes blanked.

  “More like I wonder why you still let it haunt you.” She flicked a dismissive hand. “After all, you did get away. Why let it still bother you?”

  I wanted to hit her.

  Closing my hand into a fist, I fought to urge to do just that.

  She’d never let a blow land and would strike back.

  And that…well, it would get ugly after that.

  I’d be willing to take a hit from her if I could land one, but her response would trigger something ugly in Damon and I knew he was just barely holding on.

  “Yes.” Curling my lip, I added, “I got away—covered in my own blood, Rathi’s, the blood of the guards who’d planned to rape me…I swam through those frozen waters you so loved to throw me into for five fucking miles and then I dragged myself onto shore and hid in a fishing shack until a couple of men found me. Why ever am I still bothered by that?”

  Her jaw clenched. The hand she had resting on her blade tightened on it convulsively. She opened, then closed her ja
w. Finally, she shook her head. “As much as I’d love to hear all these maudlin tales, Kit…the lemera isn’t going to wait until you’re in control of yourself. Neither will Fen.”

  And then…she began to talk.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Hot water pounded down on me.

  I could have used up all the hot water the Lair had available and I still wouldn’t have felt warm.

  I could still feel the bracing shock of the ocean, like icy needles cutting into me as I swam.

  I’d left the sword.

  I knew what it was, what it meant. If I took it, Fanis would come after me. So I left it on the shore.

  But when I woke up in the shack, two strange men talking in a language I couldn’t understand, the blade had come to me again. In those early days, I hadn’t learned how to stop that instinctive reaction—how fear called the blade to me.

  They’d seen the blade, seen me, and fallen away, mumbling about dauði bíðr and dís. The wind had blown the door open as they ran away and the ice that had formed on my ragged clothing crunched as I dragged myself over to shut the door.

  Forever, and no time at all, had passed when the door opened again.

  An old woman, that time.

  She spoke to me, but I hadn’t understood it.

  But the blanket, I’d understood that.

  And the food…

  I’d grabbed both and retreated to the corner, staring at her.

  She’d left.

  But she’d come back…the next time with a man younger than her by some years. She’d spoken to him, and he’d spoken to me. It had almost sounded familiar.

  But then he’d been speaking to me in Greek, and the language my people had developed over years of isolation sounded nothing like the language they’d spoken when they’d left their homelands and started north.