Captive of Darkness (Heart of Darkness Book 1)

by Debbie Cassidy

  He tracked the movement. “Iron or lead?”

  I shook my head. “What?”

  “The chain?”

  “I don’t … I don’t know.” The subject change made my head spin.

  “Do you want to live?” he asked softly.

  Yes. Yes, I did, but not by doing what he wanted me to. I hugged myself. “I’m not having relations with you.”

  He stared at me impassively. “You think I want to rut with you?”

  Rut? What? Oh … “Don’t you?”

  He canted his head and raked me up and down with his fiery gaze, and then his lip curled. “I’d probably break you in half.” He sighed through his nose. “If you want to live, then I need to mark you with my scent.” His lips turned down. “Rutting would do the trick just as well I suppose.”

  It was my turn to stare blankly at him, and then his words fully registered. “What? No!”

  “Then take off your clothes. I need to mask your human … aroma.”

  I held up my hands. “Thank you for the offer, but … I think I’m fine.”

  Anger flashed across his face like lightning. “You think you’re fine? You think …” He took a deep breath and then said slowly and patiently, as if speaking to a moron, “If you want to live, then take off your damn clothes and let me mark you. You reek of human; it seeps from your pores and catches the wind. It’s carried to every predator for miles. Be marked or leave and die.”

  I’d told Jeremy that I’d rather die than remain a prisoner in Justice Falls, and in that moment, I’d honestly believed that I wasn’t afraid of death, but now, when faced with the real possibility of my demise, I’d do whatever it took to stay alive.

  I shrugged off my cloak, and horned guy’s shoulders relaxed. My shirt was next. “That’s it. This will have to do, right?”

  My brassiere was plain cotton and opaque, thank God, and my trousers were loose, thick wool. He nodded curtly and bridged the gap between us. His hands cupped my shoulders, and I flinched, expecting the bite of his fingers, then relaxed when it didn’t come. His grip was light, almost gentle. I studied his face quickly—the dip in the bow of his lips; the straight, firm line of his nose; and the thick lashes that fringed downcast eyes. And then he dipped his head to the hollow of my neck and inhaled.

  “Good.” His rumbling voice set my teeth on edge.

  The tip of his nose traced a path across my collarbones and then his tongue went to work along the tops of my breasts, sweeping the top edge of my bra. My skin tingled, and my stomach flipped. Unwelcome sensations, inappropriate and … Oh, God … He licked with long, sure strokes, chest rumbling as if in appreciation of his task, his fingers flexed against my shoulders with each stroke. He turned me this way and that, tasting the nape of my neck and the spot between my shoulder blades. I grit my teeth and squeezed my eyes shut, breathing slow and even through my nose, because no, this did not feel good. No. Gods no.

  He finally stepped away and turned his back on me.

  “Are we done?” My voice cracked.

  “For now.”

  He meant we’d have to do that again? I swallowed the question, not wanting to know the answer just yet.

  “You won’t be able to go home,” he said abruptly. “And I don’t know how long I can keep you alive.” He turned back to me. “You taste …” His throat bobbed. “Too good.” He shook his head as if to clear it of an unwelcome thought. “There is hunger here. Too much hunger, and it will find you eventually. Running from the Silver Riders was a mistake.”

  My pulse skipped. “You know about them?”

  He shrugged. “Everyone knows about them. They ride once a year on the harvest moon. They surpass the sea of souls unscathed and they return with a bounty. Those foolish enough to hunt the riders for that bounty die. Those humans foolish enough to escape the riders, die. Note the running theme of death.”

  “I didn’t escape from the riders. They took my brother, and I followed.”

  He was staring at me in a new way now, with a new kind of interest I couldn’t quite decipher. “You voluntarily entered Nawia?”

  It was my turn to shrug. “I didn’t have a choice. They have someone I care about, and it’s not like I knew what this place was like.”

  “And now that you know what’s down here, if you could turn back time would you do it again?”

  Would I? Would I come after Finn even though I knew there was death hiding in every shadow? How could I not?

  I lifted my chin. “Yes. I’d do it again. But this time I’d bring better weapons.”

  He let out a bark of laughter that tugged at something inside me. “Weapons. Ha. You think your human weapons would stop the Forlorn, the hungry, and the lost? You’re a fool, and you’ll die down here.”

  “Maybe.” The fact was, I would be dead if not for him. An idea fizzed to life in my mind. “But not if you keep me alive.”

  His head whipped round, and then his eyes narrowed to glowing slits. “And why would I want to do that?”

  I licked my lips, confidence blooming in my chest. “I don’t know? Why did you just insist on marking me? Why did you save me from the wolf man? Why are we having this conversation at all?”

  He blinked slowly, and then his lips curled in the predatory smile I recalled from the clearing. “Maybe I fancy having a delicious snack at my disposal, or maybe my balls need release.”

  Once again, my pulse skipped a beat, but I steadied my breath and shook my head. “No. I don’t believe that. You’re different from the others that attacked me. You’re more hu—"

  “Say it, and I’ll rip out your throat.” His tone was soft with lethal intent.

  I snapped my mouth closed.

  He turned away again, shoulders flexing.

  I needed him. This place was insane. I’d never make it alone, but with him by my side … “Look, I don’t know what this place is, or who you people are, but I need to find Finn. I need to get him back from the Silver Riders. Do you know where they might have taken him?”

  “The riders come from the shimmer, and they go back to the shimmer.”

  “The shimmer?”

  He walked over to the pile of furs and lay down as if done with the whole conversation. But I was just getting started.

  “Do you know why they want him? Why they want humans?”

  “There are only two uses for live humans in Nawia, food and rutting. But beyond the shimmer, who knows.”

  His cryptic, unsatisfactory answers grated, and my temper flared like a struck match. “Food? And yet you don’t seem to be in a hurry to eat me.”

  “I’m beginning to regret my decision.” He turned his head toward me, his scorching gaze filled with intention I wasn’t prepared to read.

  My mouth needed a lesson in silence. I composed my thoughts. “This is your world. So, please explain it to me. What is this place, and why have you cut us off from the rest of our world?”

  He threw an arm over his eyes. “Come lie down and get some rest.”

  Lie down? Lie down? Was he serious? I’d had the man I loved stolen by Silver Riders, been attacked by a sea of souls and chased by monsters, and he wanted me to lie down and rest?

  “Answer me, dammit.”

  Silence greeted me thick and final, and then a possibility bloomed in my mind. An idea that was both ridiculous and, bearing in mind his reaction, highly probable.

  “You can’t tell me, can you?”

  His chest stopped moving. He was holding his breath, and my suspicion was confirmed.

  “You can’t tell me because … you don’t know.”

  Chapter Six

  Horned Guy

  You can’t tell me because you don’t know.

  Her words are barbs digging into my mind, and I am moving before I can check myself. My hands are around her throat, and the urge to squeeze the life from her, to see her bleed, is a crimson haze clouding my higher thoughts.

  Stop.

  Don’t.

  Her eyes echo the comm
ands my brain is firing, which are at odds with my primal instinct. She is food, they say. She is flesh to be used, they say. But she is more than that. She has awoken a part of me long silent. A part that I thought dead. A part I’d forgotten existed.

  “Please.” Her voice is a strangled gasp.

  “You talk too much, and it makes me hungry.” I tighten my grip a fraction.

  Her face drains of color and there is an answering twinge in my chest, much like the sensation I sometimes get after a particularly large meal. I release her abruptly.

  She rubs her throat, studying me with wary eyes. “Do you know? Can you educate me?”

  Educate? She has all the words. Tenacious … the word swims up to sit on the tip of my tongue. I bite it back. Too many words for someone used to grunts, growls, and the language of action. But the words continue to poke at my mind, born from a forgotten part of me, useless until now.

  “Maybe we should start from the beginning,” she says. Her smile wavers beneath my glare. “My name is Wynter Ashfall. And you are?”

  “Bored and getting hungrier by the second.” I take a step toward her, wanting to silence her. Wanting her to stop asking all the questions.

  Her brows come down. She is annoyed, and this gives me a stab of satisfaction.

  “I only asked your name.”

  Name … name … I have one. What is it? It’s been so long since it was used.

  She tilts her head to one side, studying my face intently. Damn, this creature is bold. Fragile, human, and yet unafraid to look me in the eyes.

  “Do you even have a name?” she asks.

  “Of course, I have a name.”

  The corner of her mouth tilts slightly. Is she … Is she laughing at me?

  “Well? What is it?” She catches her bottom lip between her teeth, and my manhood twitches in response. “You don’t remember, do you?”

  My body is confused. Food or mate? More mate, it seems. It’s been a while since I rutted, but she is soft and tender, her flesh ripe like a peach, and the beast inside me is feral and far from gentle.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she says.

  The name surges up in my mind, sudden and violent, taking me back a step. It is familiar and warm, and it is mine.

  “Veles,” I say. “My name is Veles.”

  Chapter Seven

  Finn

  Soft sobs drifted up into the damp air, mingling with the moisture that clung to every air particle. We’d been herded into a circle around a fire. The only dry patch of land in this godforsaken boggy wasteland.

  The sobbing woman’s grief was cut off suddenly when a shadow swept to the left of our group, startling everyone but me. But then they were all focused on their internal terror. No one was examining our surroundings. No one seemed to be piecing together what they were seeing, but then none of them had Wynter’s paintings to compare this place to.

  She’d seen this. She’d painted it. This place was her nightmare. It was all our nightmares combined, because, although I’d never seen it like she had, I’d felt it in my dreams, skirting the edges of my subconscious mind just like it probably had for the rest of Justice Falls. This was the place that no one spoke of, that we pretended didn’t exist, and this was what Wynter had tried to save me from.

  Her frightened face flashed before my eyes, her beautiful lips moving in warning, promising me answers as she desperately tried to wrap me in chains. She’d been trying to save me from this fate, whatever it was, and now it was too late. Too late for so many things. Too late to tell her how much she really meant to me. Too late to hold on to her and taste her lips one last time.

  Another swift shadow lunged toward us from the right, but the silver faceless figures moved swiftly to intercept whatever it was. Their steeds prowled around the base of the mound while their riders kept sentry around our motley crew.

  Running wasn’t an option. Two had tried, and their screams of terror had ended in gurgles of pain that had echoed in the clearing like a symphony of horror.

  There were things out there. Strange, twisted things, and these faceless riders were the only ones keeping us alive. For what, was anyone’s guess. They didn’t speak. They carried and herded and shoved and protected. But they’d taken us from our homes against our will.

  “Finn, we have to do something,” Barret, a regular at the inn, whisper-hissed across the flames.

  I shook my head slowly from side to side.

  His jaw clenched. “We can take them. If we work together.”

  “Then what?” I whispered back. “We have no idea where we are or what’s out there. Did you not hear the screams?”

  His teeth flashed white in his dark beard, and I caught a flash of ethereal smoke behind him. A tendril, a finger, caressed the top of his head, and his eyes fluttered like a broken doll. “Rosie is with child. I have to get back to her. I have to try.” His voice was suddenly flat.

  Several others murmured in agreement, but my gaze was on the tendrils of silver smoke drifting behind the townsfolk opposite me. There was a wrongness about it. A malicious intent. It stopped to touch each man and woman, and each time it did, their eyes fluttered strangely, and their faces smoothed out to blank masks.

  Bad, this was bad. “Hey, Silver.” I pulled myself to my feet. “You, Rider!”

  One of the riders turned to stare at me with its blank face.

  “There’s something—"

  Barret erupted out of his seat and slammed into the rider. Someone screamed, and then several other people jumped up to tackle our captors.

  The riders fell back under the attack, defending but not attacking. A sharp crack shot through the air, and the sky directly above us flashed blue. A shield, we’d been under some manner of shield. And then it fell. Warm, wet air hit me in the face, and laughter rose up on the wind. A figure appeared out of the silver fog. A blue-faced, spindly hag with long white teeth that protruded from her mouth like broken piano keys. Her long, dark hair floated about her face as if suspended in water, and a black cloak clung to her frame like an afterthought.

  My bowels turned to water. “Get up. Get back in the circle. Do it now!”

  It was clear now that the circle had been keeping us safe, keeping her, whatever she was, out. But the smoke thing had somehow gotten into their heads; it had used Barret to disrupt the circle by knocking the riders from their posts. This was why two had run. This creature had gotten into their heads. Was that why the riders hadn’t gone after the runners? They’d been protecting the herd. They’d been protecting us.

  Thick tendrils of smoke rushed into the clearing, low to the ground, like silver snakes. They grabbed and tugged, and screams bounced off each other. The blue-faced hag hovered in the darkness, her body nothing but shadow, only her face visible above the ground, eyes like silver pennies.

  “Stop!” I grabbed at two men attacking a rider. “Get back in the circle.”

  A fist met my jaw, sending me stumbling back. Bastard. Stupid, idiotic fool.

  A horn sounded sudden and sharp, and then blue lightning smashed into the men attacking the riders. It lifted the men off their feet and flung them onto their relevant steeds. The riders mounted, and talons gripped the back of my shirt. I didn’t fight. It was this or the silver smoke. This or the wet tearing that accompanied the sounds of feeding.

  No contest.

  A cry of rage followed us as we galloped out of the clearing and into the night.

  Chapter Eight

  “The shimmer is far away,” Veles said. “Through bog and marsh and over mountain. It’s a long trek on steeds and even longer on foot.”

  He adjusted the furs on his bed and lay back down.

  “How long?”

  “Through forest and bog, flatlands and mountain pass.”

  “Yes, but how many days will it take? How much time?”

  He frowned. “Time … a human concept. There is no time, only distance. There is only close and far and in between. Time is not measured here.”

&
nbsp; Oh, God. That didn’t tell me anything. Time to try a different tack. “Fine, I get that, but the riders would have to rest. I mean, they’re carrying humans. They’d rest for the humans’ sake, right?”

  “Yes. They rest long enough to ease the ache of the saddle, because the Forlorn hunt them—they follow, and they attack, eager to steal away the humans for food.” He stared up into the tree, into the gloom above. “Food is scarce in Nawia, and many have adopted a cannibalistic lifestyle.”

  No, not thinking about that statement. “So, the riders can be tracked, they can be found.”

  Silence greeted me.

  I shuffled closer to the furs, needing to see his face. Needing to see the play of contradictory emotions that flitted across his features with every question I posed. “Veles, what is Nawia? What is the shimmer. I don’t understand any of this. I don’t understand how this place could exist.”

  He turned his head to look at me and my confusion was echoed in his golden eyes. “Neither do I.”

  The statement was honest and raw and sincere. He didn’t know. My hunch had been correct. “How long have you been here?”

  “Forever it seems. For as long as I can recall. But …”

  He lapsed into silence, his mouth slightly parted as if questing for the words that would complete his thoughts. Long seconds ticked by and it became apparent that he wasn’t about to finish.

  “But?” I probed.

  His chest rose and fell as if in exasperation at my persistence. “Sometimes I dream of the sun, and in my dream, there is no hunger. But those are just dreams. This is reality. This is all there is. It’s survival of the fittest, and you won’t last a day if you insist on your foolish quest to save your friend.”

  “Maybe I won’t make it alone, but with you by my side …”

  “No.”

  Panic spiked my blood. “You have to help me.”

  “I don’t have to do anything.”

  Anger replaced the panic and my nails bit into my palm. Time was slipping away, whether they measured it or not, and I was wasting more trying to reason with … with whatever Veles was. Finn was out there, headed to a place called the shimmer, and yes, there were monsters out there, but staying here and hiding wasn’t an option either. I had to do something. Veles could have killed me ten times over. He could have taken me by force, but he hadn’t harmed me even though I’d seen the bloodlust in his eyes more than once. It was a long shot, and if I was wrong, then I’d be walking to my death. But I had to try.