by D. N. Hoxa
Pain Seeker
The New Orleans Shade - Book 1
D.N. Hoxa
Contents
Also by D.N. Hoxa
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Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Also by D.N. Hoxa
Copyright © 2021 by D.N. Hoxa
This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of
America. Any reproduction or other unauthorized use of the material or
artwork herein is prohibited. This is a work of fiction. Names,
characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s
imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons,
living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales, is entirely
coincidental.
Created with Vellum
Also by D.N. Hoxa
The New York Shade Series (Completed)
Magic Thief
Stolen Magic
Immoral Magic
Alpha Magic
The Marked Series (Completed)
Blood and Fire
Deadly Secrets
Death Marked
Winter Wayne Series (Completed)
Bone Witch
Bone Coven
Bone Magic
Bone Spell
Bone Prison
Bone Fairy
Scarlet Jones Series (Completed)
Storm Witch
Storm Power
Storm Legacy
Storm Secrets
Storm Vengeance
Storm Dragon
Victoria Brigham Series (Completed)
Wolf Witch
Wolf Uncovered
Wolf Unleashed
Wolf’s Rise
Starlight Series (Completed)
Assassin
Villain
Sinner
Savior
Morta Fox Series (Completed)
Heartbeat
Reclaimed
Unchanged
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Chapter 1
Mace
The smell of blood and burned leather was comforting. If I could smell it, it meant I was still alive, even though I couldn’t feel most of my limbs. Soon, the numbness would fade, and the pain would begin before it ended. The cycle never changed. I relied on it.
“Commander!” Chastin called, stopping me in my tracks.
He could see that I was no longer walking, but he still ran all the way to me. The plaques of his silver armor still shone underneath all the splatters of blood from the battle. By the time he stopped in front of me, he was out of breath.
“Yes, Chastin?” I said, urging him to speak faster so I could go to my room and take off my armor. Take off my guilt, focus on the pain.
“Hold on a moment,” he said, looking behind him, at the men who were hurrying our way, too, pushing a half-broken carriage in front of them. It was a miracle the three wheels weren’t getting stuck in the mud. The snow had all but melted, and the ground was still wet with it.
“What is this?” I asked when I realized that there was a person lying in the carriage, so dirty and bundled up that it resembled garbage. If it wasn’t for the hair shining under the light of the torches around us, I wouldn’t have noticed a difference.
Chastin grinned, excitement sparking in his eyes. “You need to see this.”
“Commander,” the three soldiers behind the carriage said, bowing their heads.
I stepped closer. “What have you there?” Unsheathing my sword, I raised it and with the tip of the blade I pushed away some of the white hair, searching for a face.
“An elf.” The soldier in the middle spit out the word like it disgusted him, but I had already seen the white hair and the pointed ears of the elf. The woman elf.
She was lying in the carriage, covered in dirt, as if she’d been buried, then pulled back out of the ground again. But her chest rose and fell steadily, evenly. She was not dead.
“We found her when we were cleaning up the field. We don’t know who she is, but we thought maybe you wanted to interrogate her. Or kill her yourself,” Chastin said, then smiled sneakily, giving the soldiers a quick look. “Or, you know, have some good ole fun with her.”
The soldiers laughed.
I went a bit closer to the carriage, pushing the hair away from the woman’s face completely. I couldn’t even see her skin. There was dirt all over her. How long had it been since I’d seen an elf from so close up, so peaceful, so uninterested in taking my life?
I couldn’t remember.
“Did she have any weapons on her? Any armor?” I asked because all I could see now was a dress that reached her ankles, and if I had to guess, it had once been white. There were no shoes on her, no jewelry, no mark of any kind.
“Nothing,” the soldier in the middle said. “This is exactly how we found her. We thought she was dead, but she’s still breathing. I don’t know why she hasn’t woken up yet—there are no wounds on her.”
I stepped back, sheathing my sword, my mind buzzing with aimless anger. This was a complication I didn’t need. Had the battle not been enough? We’d been attacked by the elves closer to our grounds than ever before, and I’d already lost five good men.
“So, what do you wanna do with her?” Chastin pushed. “You could also give her to us, you know. We could show her a good time.”
Again, all four of them laughed, and one of the soldiers slipped his bloody hand under the woman’s dress and cupped her breast. I felt as disgusted as he sounded minutes ago, when he told me what she was.
I didn’t realize I’d moved and only saw that his hand was in mine the next second, my sword in the other, ready to cut it off. The soldier looked at me like he saw death instead of my face before his eyes. He tried to lean away, but I didn’t let go of his hand. Instead, I pulled him closer.
“We are not savages. We do not rape women—elf or otherwise.”
We were fae. We had honor still. We had dignity.
I hoped to the gods we did.
“But—” the soldier said, but I didn’t let him finish. I pushed him back and watched him fall to the ground on his back. He didn’t get up again, only continued to stare at his lap.
“No buts. Nobody is to touch this woman,” I said, loud enough for the other soldiers who were around us to hear. And I looked at Chastin, my second-in-command. His eyes gleamed, like always, and even if it pained me to admit it, I didn’t trust him. He couldn’t be trusted with simpler truths. This—I would trust him with even less. Chastin would go against my word, and he would make sure I never found out, too. He had power over the soldiers who were given to me, more so than I did
. He had their respect, maybe even their friendship. All I had was their fear, and when that was the only thing that stopped someone from stabbing you in the back, it was only a matter of time before they did.
“Then nobody will,” Chastin said with a nod, but it wasn’t good enough.
“Take her to my chamber. Chain her there. I’ll question her when she wakes up. Then, I’ll kill her.”
I’d had a lifetime of selling lies for truths. I did it so well, I believed everything I said myself. That’s how I knew that the soldiers wouldn’t doubt me. I looked at the woman in the carriage once more. She still slept. What would it be like for her when she woke up?
“Commander! Your meal is served. Come, let’s celebrate,” a woman called from behind me.
Yuna smiled when I turned to her, her icy eyes searching every bit of my body for injuries. I’d been injured in the fight but not much. I would definitely survive.
“I’ll be right there,” I told her and stayed put while she went back to the small castle I had been living in for the past year. I needed to see that the soldiers were doing what I told them to do first. They would never disobey a direct order from me, but my eyes needed to see before they believed. So, I watched them push the carriage behind Yuna, whispering under their breaths.
“What a waste of flesh,” one of them said.
“We are not savages,” the other mocked. “Easy for him to say.”
“Hush. He can hear you,” said their friend, and then they were too far away for me to hear. Such a relief.
“I doubt she’s going to know something useful,” Chastin said, and he was no longer smiling. He wasn’t happy with my decision about the elf. “Keeping her as a slave for long has cost—and we can’t afford to feed another mouth.”
“We lost five men today,” I reminded him. Five mouths less. “What did they lose?”
“Twelve,” Chastin said, looking ahead at the darkness.
The night did a good job of hiding the ugliness of the battlefield we’d left behind. I
Even in daylight, it was too far to see with the naked eye, down the hill that marked the beginning of the Shade we lived in, but by morning, all the bodies would be gone. All the blood would be sucked into the ground.
But seventeen lives would still be lost.
How much more of this would Gaena endure before it killed us all?
“Double the guards. Search the perimeter every half hour,” I told Chastin. “If they come for us again, we need to be prepared.”
“Yes, Commander,” Chastin said with a nod and turned around to go back to the battlefield.
“That man’s a snake. I don’t understand why you haven’t killed him yet,” Trinam called from behind me.
With a sigh, I turned around and walked toward him.
“He was appointed to me by my father. Killing him is the quickest way to make sure I won’t see another day outside of the Winter castle’s vaulted chambers for a long time,” I said to my best friend.
“Yes, well, it would be completely worth it to see the look on his face when life passed him by,” Trinam said, still staring at Chastin as he retreated, a look of disgust on his face.
“You wouldn’t say that if the Winter King was your father, my friend. Have you eaten?” He’d already taken off his armor and cleaned his face.
“No, I was waiting for you. Why your chamber? She’s an elf,” he said as we made our way farther up the hill and to the castle, where Yuna and the staff my father had sent here with me had served the food. We’d already had dinner once, before the battle, and it was almost midnight, but after all the energy we’d spent in the fight, we all needed food.
“They’ll rape her if she’s anywhere else.”
The castle was at the very top of the hill, surrounded by smaller barracks and barns and a glasshouse, where all my soldiers and staff slept and worked when we weren’t in the battlefield. I’d come here with five hundred and twenty people. I was now down to four hundred and eighty-two.
It was the nature of the life we led here, in Gaena. Our world was plagued by war for over a thousand years. The fae and the elven had the same ancestors, but nature had done what it always did, and we’d evolved differently.
We, the fae, had magic. It was fueled by the weather—a season for every kingdom in our side of the world. There used to be four fae Courts, before the elves burned the Spring Court down to the ground and killed every Spring fae they got their hands on. Now, only three Courts remained—Winter, Summer, and Autumn.
But all eleven elf Houses that governed their lands still stood strong. They didn’t have magic like we did, but they were resistant to it. Not much magic could get through whatever protection their skin offered—but swords never failed. The war went on, and it probably would for another thousand years.
Or until Gaena put a stop to it by killing all of us.
“And you want to be the one to rape her instead?” Trinam said with a laugh, bringing me to the present.
My stomach twisted and turned. We’d grown up together, Trinam and I, and I trusted him in battle with my life, but even he didn’t know what it was like in my head. How could I tell him things that my family—my whole kind—was ashamed of me for?
“I am not a savage,” I repeated. The idea that I needed to even say it was absurd to me, but then again, all my ideas were absurd to him.
We made it to the stairs of what was a castle only by name. It was small and made of light grey stone, and it served its purpose the best way it could. Chastin, my second-in-command, and four other knights lived in there with me. We had our separate chambers, and they were all connected with the dining hall, where we ate and drank every night. There wasn’t much else to do around here, at the border of the Winter Court, where my father had banished me to show me mercy for betraying him. My soldiers were homesick. They didn’t want to be here with me.
I didn’t want to be here with them.
So, we drank the nights away as often as we could. At least the Shade we lived in offered a bit of a better protection because elflands began right where the Winter borders ended.
“I was just messing around. I know you would never rape anyone, least of all an elf,” said Trinam.
There it was—that tone again. Like the word elf was vile, like the gods had cursed it upon creation.
“Despite what people here think, you’re a good guy, Mace. You’ve got a good heart, don’t you? Pure and white and all that shit.” Trinam laughed.
I smiled to indulge him as we entered the dining hall. It was already full of soldiers, sitting around the ten benches in the middle of the large room. The stairs at the end of it led to my chamber, and for a moment, I considered going straight for them. I didn’t need to eat or drink. I didn’t need anything—just to clean up and lie down.
But I was the Commander of my battalion, and I had a responsibility to my people. So, we went to sit at the table on the other side of the round bar, right next to the kitchen.
“I am not good, by any means,” I reminded my friend. Soldiers kept on eating, but they all watched me as I walked to my table, separate from the rest of them. It was set a step higher than the rest of the room for no reason other than to show my status. I was the son of a king, a prince, a commander of a battalion. Why not sit higher than everybody else?
It was fae tradition for the commander to eat alone, but sitting over everyone else was as far as I was willing to let it go. Trinam, even though third in my command, always sat with me. And others—whoever wanted to—could join me. But the soldiers never did—except for Chastin.
“So, what’s the plan? I mean, we knew there would be an attack but this soon? How are we going to respond?” Trinam said when we sat down in front of the still steaming pork on the table. Now that I saw it, I realized just how hungry I was.
“Later,” I said and filled my cup with wine while Yona and one of her servants came to us with the plates. “We’ll talk strategy later, when everyone has settled.”
I grabbed my cup and stood up again, dreading the next few seconds.
Once they saw me standing, the soldiers stopped talking and turned to me.
“Tonight, we lost five good men,” I said, the words scratching my throat on the way out. “Tonight, we mourn their loss and rejoice our survival. Tomorrow, we avenge our dead.”
I raised my cup and so did everyone else.
“Tomorrow!” They all shouted in unison, and we all drank.
There. Now my father would be notified by his spies that I wasn’t neglecting any aspect of my job.
“Tomorrow,” Trinam said, touching his cup to mine. “May every elf who took a fae life today burn in their dreams tonight.” For once, he wasn’t smiling. He wasn’t joking.
For once, I wanted him to.
“Tomorrow,” was all I said.
I reached out with my magic toward the wooden floor, deeper underneath it still, searching for the Shade. It gave me comfort to know that the ground beneath us was alive.
The Shades’ true name was Shadergrits—creatures that existed around the Gateways that connected different realms to each other. The gods created them in the beginning of time to guard those Gateways, but Shades feed on magic, and with time, they grew in power and size. They became safe havens for any creature who had magic in them, in any world. Nobody had ever seen their true form, but they were alive and aware of everything. Shades were the only creatures that could exist in multiple realms at the same time, while they connected them.
