“He won’t hurt you,” Fallon said, his eyes still closed. “His presence—even in a man’s mind—has that effect.”
A wavering holographic image of an immense shaggy creature appeared in the far corner of the room.
“Hound!” Taylor heard and the gruff voice sounded greatly pleased. “Where are you, pup?”
“On the Island.”
“And Keenan?”
“Here with me. I also have a fellow Reaper here,” Fallon said. “Can you dispense with the terror vibes? He’s feeling the result.”
“I will consider it. Introduce him to me,” the voice demanded.
“Vainshtyr An Fear Liath Mor,” Fallon said. “I present to you Taylor Reynaud. He is an Alpha Reaper.”
“I smell cat,” the Big Gray Man pronounced with a sniff. “What a stench!” There was a low growl. “I hate felines save skinless in a savory stew.”
Fallon laughed, remembering his first conversation with the creature known as the Guardian. “He is Panthera but he now has a Hell-hound queen inside him. One taken from me.”
There was a long sigh. “You are too kind, pup. So? Greet me, pussy boy. I am not getting any younger.”
“Address him as Vainshtyr,” Fallon said in a low whisper. “It means Master.”
“I know who he is,” Taylor said, swallowing. “It is an honor, Vainshtyr.”
“That goes without saying.”
“We need your help,” Fallon said.
“Why else would you call, hound?” An Fear Liath Mor asked. “What can I do you for?”
Fallon sighed. “You’ve been watching TV again.” When there was no answer to his statement, the Alpha got to the point. “Has my mate’s mother found a way to converse with the Martiya?”
There was a long pause then a low growl. “That bitch has no such ability. She is not Rom. Why do you ask of the Spirit of the Night?”
“The hellion now residing within Taylor has denied him the right to his own mate. It is ordering him to take mine.”
“You were right in calling on me, pup,” the Big Gray Man said. “This has the earmark of some powerful being.”
“How is it possible for anyone to manipulate my hellion?” Fallon asked.
“Was it stored before being Transferred from you to the pussy?”
Fallon smiled. The Guardian had decided to show Taylor the rude side of his personality. “Aye. They took my queen a few hours before.”
“Then find the one who may have touched it,” An Fear Liath Mor said. “I cannot say for sure but perhaps that one did some mischief.”
“So whoever this person is knows we would fight to the death to keep our life-mates,” Taylor said.
“Aye, but without a queen, all I have are nestlings,” Fallon reminded him. “They are nowhere near as strong as the queen. As much as I hate to admit it, you might conceivably win in a battle between us.”
“Unfortunately that may be true, hound,” the Big Gray Man said.
“But if he dies, so will his life-mate,” Taylor said.
“Not if the hellion stakes claim on her,” Fallon said. “Keenan has one of my fledglings inside her. The fledgling will recognize the authority of the queen. That’s the only way Keenan would survive.”
“Can what has been wrought be set aright again?” Taylor asked.
“Easily,” An Fear Liath Mor. “Take back your queen hound and keep it this time.”
Fallon locked eyes with Taylor. “He’s not strong enough yet for us to do that. He will only have squigglings at this point.”
“Then hie yourself to a cell and wait until he is ready for you to retrieve your queen,” the Big Gray Man snapped. “But there is a risk in that.”
Both men frowned. “What risk?” Fallon asked.
“The hellion inside your life-mate owes allegiance to yours, hound. It will do what its creator demands. Your lady will come to the pussy boy.”
“The hell she will!” Fallon shouted.
“I won’t accept her,” Taylor said, shaking his head.
“You will have no choice,” the Guardian told him. “As I have already said, it is best you hie yourself to a cell beside the hound’s and wait it out.”
“Then that’s what I’ll do,” Taylor stated.
“A word of caution, pussy boy. Do not come into contact with the hound’s mate. If you do, if you lay eyes upon her, there will be hell to pay. I must go now. Another ward is in need of my assistance.”
“Coim, wait!” Fallon yelled but the creature’s image faded and the air became far less oppressive.
“Coim?”
“That’s his given name,” Fallon explained. “Whatever you do don’t call him that unless he gives you permission to do so.”
“Copy that. We need to get out of here and into a containment cell,” Taylor said, pushing up from the floor. He raked a hand through his hair and tried to contact Laci but there was no answer from her.
But there was from another.
“What the hell are you doing trying to contact Laci Albright?”
Fallon’s head came up. “That’s my fucking woman!” he snarled. He rounded on Taylor. “What the fuck do you think you are…?”
“I was calling Laci,” Taylor snapped, tugging at his hair. “Not your woman.”
“Fallon?” Keenan’s voice was filled with anger.
“It wasn’t me,” Fallon sent to her but he knew immediately that the psychic bond between them was no longer there. He gave Taylor a brutal glower.
“Agent McCullough, it’s Taylor Reynaud,” Taylor said, eyeing the Alpha whose lips were drawn back over his fangs. “We’ve got a situation here.”
“How can you be sending to me?” Keenan demanded. “And in Misha’s voice?”
“That’s part of the situation,” Taylor replied.
“I’m on my way down.”
“No!” Both Reapers bellowed in unison.
“Tell her to stay where she is,” Fallon said. “Order her to!”
“Stay where—” Taylor stopped. “We need to know where she is before I go ordering her to stay there. What if she’s near the containment cells?”
Fallon shot him an annoyed look. “You’re not as mentally restricted as you look. Find out where she is.”
“Agent…”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake!” Fallon snapped. “Call her Keenan!”
Taylor ground his teeth. “Keenan, where are you right now?”
“In the cafeteria.”
“Tell her to go to our quarters and wait there until we send Laci to fetch her,” Fallon said.
“Go to your quarters and stay there,” Taylor said. “I can’t run the risk of seeing you.”
There was silence and both men exchanged looks.
“Keenan?” Fallon tried again and hissed when there was no answer.
“Keenan?” Taylor tried for him.
The silence played out.
“Tell her it’s because of something Lily may have set into motion,” Fallon said.
“Misha says to tell you it’s because of something Lily may have done,” Taylor repeated.
Again there was a long silence. Finally there was an answer.
“I’m not even going to ask,” she said at last. “I’ll be in our quarters until further notice.”
Both men sighed at the same time.
“Tell her to call the nurse’s station and have Laci turn the intercom back on,” Fallon said. “We need them to get us the fuck out of here.”
“Keenan, contact Laci for us, please. She’s at the nurse’s station here in the trauma unit. Ask her to turn the intercom back on,” Taylor instructed. “We need out of lockdown.”
“I hate my mother,” he heard Keenan say before he felt her pull out of his mind.
“Not as much as I do,” Fallon grumbled.
“Tay?”
The sound of Laci’s voice over the intercom made Taylor’s heart ache. “Yeah, babe. We need you to unlock the door.”
“Is everyth
ing copacetic?” That was the Supervisor’s voice.
“No,” Fallon replied. “We need two con cells activated. We’ve got issues.”
“Why does that not surprise me?” they heard the Supervisor ask.
Chapter Six
The carnage surrounding him was to Dixon Coulter as a masterpiece was to a connoisseur of fine art. Blood and flesh and entrails were stuck to the walls and fragments of bone crunched underfoot as he walked slowly and purposefully down the gore-slick corridor. The sour stench of spent life fluids and spilled entrails filled his distended nostrils. It was a full-bodied perfume that made him smile showing red-stained fangs that had yet to retract.
He had a destination in mind and was in no hurry to get there. His quarry wasn’t going anywhere. Let the terror build. Let the bastard breathe for just a little while longer. He couldn’t go anywhere and help would not arrive in time. Dixon had used his powers to make sure no transmissions had left the facility. That all exits were locked and barred so no one could enter.
More importantly, no one could leave.
He chuckled thinking of how stunned the outside guards would be when they learned of the slaughter inside.
“You can run but you can’t hide, asshole,” he called out. “And there is not a fucking thing you can do to stop what’s coming for you.”
Sheik Sharif Hassan had emptied a .9 mil at the naked juggernaut coming toward him. Every bullet had stopped just short of its target and fallen like copper-clad snowflakes to the floor. A thrown knife had frozen in midair, turned slowly and sped back toward its thrower. Hassan had twisted away but the blade had sliced through his upper arm. Fingers wrapped around the gushing wound, the most dangerous and feared man in the world had fled—shrieking like the coward he was.
He chuckled again when the stunned face of the Fiend flitted across his mind.
“What are you?” the Fiend had asked when Dixon opened the titanium doors of the containment cell and strolled toward him with a grin that looked like the rictus of a corpse dead many days.
Dixon could not tell the bastard what he was because he, himself, did not know. The powers he had begun to develop on his twelfth birthday had descended upon him without warning or explanation. They appeared as mysteriously as an overnight pimple and were just as raw to the touch. He discovered he could look at a page of written material and memorize it in the blink of an eye. Not only memorize it but understand it—no matter how complicated or esoteric.
It wasn’t just the sudden ability to memorize massive amounts of information at one sitting. He had total recall and anything he saw he could bring back to mind hours, days, weeks and months later—no matter how intricate. Building plans, schematics, map coordinates were stored into his memory like the melody of a song that gets stuck there. He could bring up the plans and schematics at will.
He suddenly had the ability to learn any language he wanted to speak in a matter of hours and speak it with the correct accent, inflection and grammar as though it was his native tongue.
But there were other powers that were as dark as the night he realized he possessed them. He had feared those powers. Trembled each time his anger got the better of him and he accidentally used his mind to mentally or physically push another person without even touching them. He’d hurt boys on the playground and in the gym when he hadn’t meant to because he had yet to learn to control that one ability. He had to be careful because he knew there were other powers—possibly more lethal ones—lying dormant in his mind.
Before an hour ago, he had not known he could levitate objects and stop them from touching him. He could see the shades of the dead walking the corridors where they had died and knew he could converse with them if he desired. He could now read minds and use his own to influence others, bring them to him, make them put a gun to their head and blow out their brains. With little effort he had disengaged the lock on the containment cell door with focused concentration so he knew he could manipulate inanimate objects. The most surprising ability was that of making himself completely invisible to those around him, walking past guards who never knew he was there until it was too late to do anything about it.
Though he had yet to attempt it, he somehow knew he could send his thoughts as well as his corporeal body over long distances without much effort at all.
He had giggled like a schoolboy when he realized he could levitate his body so that he moved along without his feet touching the floor.
And he could transform into a savage beast.
“How neat is that?” he asked. “What the hell can do that?”
“A Gravelord,” the thing inside him whispered. “That is what I will call you.”
“Gravelord,” he repeated, liking the sound of it.
“I have enhanced the abilities you came into when the Black Ascendency settled upon your shoulders.”
“Cool,” he said, not knowing what the Black Ascendency was or how he came to have it bestowed on him. There would be time to ask questions of the thing inside him.
He was nearing the place where Sheik Sharif Hassan was hiding. He had no need to see the man. He could smell him and his fear.
And hear the wild beating of the man’s thundering heart, the quiet whimpers that were pushing from his constricting throat.
His hands—which now had the strength of twenty men—curled into fists. The flesh was sticky from the blood he had shed, the organs he’d torn out, the bones he had snapped in twain.
The Fiend had been the first to die when the cell door snicked back into its track and Dixon came sauntering out as though off for a morning stroll. Once again in human form, though double in body mass, he had taken hold of the man who had tormented him, showered such terrible pain upon him for months and literally ripped him limb from limb before thrusting a fist into the man’s body to pluck out his intestines. Screams of agony had brought two guards running to the Fiend’s aid. One guard had been lucky. He died of a broken neck. The other—who had done brutal things to Dixon that were worse than physical pain—left the world in a haze of savagery that left the former SEAL covered in gore.
Thirty men later, Dixon stood outside the barricaded doors of an office and smiled. Behind the door was a man who had doled out torture, dismemberment and death as casually as he took a piss each morning. His infamous cruelty had made him a legend in the Islamic world. The power he wielded in the Dhaween was about to come to a screeching halt but not before Dixon dredged from Hassan’s mind the names and locations of other terrorists.
* * * * *
“Who the fuck are you?”
Dixon stilled, shocked to hear the angry voice stabbing through his head.
“Who the fuck are you?” he answered before realizing that had not been the smartest thing to do. He completely shut down his mind yet still felt something buzzing at it, clawing at it, trying to gain entry.
He looked around him but saw no one staring back at him. Just to be on the safe side, he did what he had done in Hassan’s torture palace. He turned himself into a fine wisp of smoke, but unlike at the Dhaween encampment where he had drifted under the door to the locked room where Hassan had hidden, this time he wafted away on the hot Somalian wind.
Floating above the crowds in the bazaar he searched for the likeliest candidate to have mentally shouted at him. The moment he found the culprit, he hovered above him—watching the prick searching for him.
“You’ve a creature inside you, too,” he thought.
He studied the tall, dark man pushing his way through the crowd. Though he didn’t lean that way, he had to admit the man was strikingly good-looking with thick black hair and emerald eyes far too sensuous to be found on a male.
“A mere Reaper,” the creature told Dixon. “Panthera, though. The same as you.”
“But not as powerful?”
“No, not as powerful,” the creature replied. “And as yet without a life-mate thus not as dangerous as one who has a female to protect.”
“Such as me.”
<
br /> “Aye, Gravelord. Such as you.”
“I want my woman,” he told the creature.
“And you shall have her.”
“When?” he demanded.
“Soon.”
Not soon enough to suit him. The mere thought of the lovely woman from his beastly dream made him hard, made him ache, made the beast inside him claw and twist and growl with need. He longed to hold her, touch her, sink deep into her sweet body. He wanted to experience the honey of her kisses, the slide of her silken flesh under his. His heart hurt just thinking of tasting the nectar between her thighs.
But there was one more camp to destroy before the creature would let him leave the hellish heat and stench of Somalia.
“Pirates,” the creature had advised. “Very bad men who prey on travelers and military ships alike. Their leader is almost as bad as was Hassan.”
So there was another dangerous target that needed extinguishing.
“You are doing the goddess’ will,” the creature whispered. “Stand fast, Gravelord. You will have your woman soon.”
Chapter Seven
The Exchange two weeks later
“We’ve got a situation,” the Supervisor told those gathered.
“What kind of situation?” one of the directors asked.
“There is a very powerful balgair wreaking havoc all over the Middle East,” the Supervisor said. “He is going through al-Qaeda, Taliban Hamas and Hezbollah installations like a hot knife through butter. The kill count of terrorist leaders is now over fifty and climbing. Not only is he assassinating the leaders, he is destroying their compounds. And he isn’t just going after terrorists. He annihilated an entire band of Somalian pirates this morning.”
“How do you know he’s a Rogue Reaper?” the same director, Gilbert Charles, asked.
“Darkyn Sorn sensed him,” the Supervisor said then held up his hand to forestall the director asking another disruptive question. “Sorn went to Somalia to capture an asoon puksa causing mischief over there and caught a whiff of the Rogue. He tried to triangulate his whereabouts but the bastard shut down completely, hiding himself from the Prime. That’s how we know he’s powerful and that he’s Reaper.”
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