The Vampire Legacy
Broken Elites
RITA STRADLING
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, incidents, and places are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locations, or real persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2019 by Rita Stradling
Edited by Stories Matter Editing
Cover Art by Luminescence Covers
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce, distribute, or transmit this book in any form or by any means. For subsidiary rights, please contact the author.
www.ritastradling.com
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
BROKEN ELITES
CHAPTER ONE
Justin
My harsh breaths echoed in my basement cell as I paced in the darkness. The sharp scent of my own body odor hit my nose and made my stomach roil. A small voice in my head whispered that this was just a dream. I was dreaming. I had escaped this hell, but a chill had crept through the soles of my sneakers and taken up residence in my bones. The ache in my legs felt so real, so visceral.
A little ways off, there was the now-familiar clicking sound of the door opening at the top of the stairs, and I only had the time to close my eyes before my cell flooded with light. Even with my eyelids closed, pain pierced through my skull, and when the sound of footsteps clattered down the steps, I forced my eyes open. Immediately, tears blurred my vision. The medic’s hazy figure approached my cell. He raised his hand and tossed several blue and yellow packages through the iron bars. The colorful packets scattered across the floor of my cell with a soft pattering sound.
“I have to shit,” I lied as I took measured steps toward the bars. I didn’t want to alarm him. I was tall and large enough that most people acted as if I was a threat, even when I clearly wasn’t.
The medic cleared his throat and shuffled back, ever so slightly. He pulled at his collar. “I’ll take you to use the facilities just as soon as you eat.” Every time I saw this medic, I attempted to memorize his features. When I got out of here, I wanted to give a detailed description, but he had an unremarkable face. The only thing that stood out about his facial features was his dark unibrow, a feature that could be changed easily. His eyes were a medium-brown. His chin was small, and his nose was medium-sized. He looked like a thousand people and no one at all. It almost seemed deliberate. He stood tall and slammed his foot on the concrete, making a loud smacking sound echo around the basement. “Eat your dinner,” he snapped, “I need to watch you eat at least two of those bars and take you to relieve yourself before I can go home for the night. It’s been a long day.”
He’s had a long day, has he? I had to clench my jaw to stop myself from telling him where he could shove his long day.
I wasn’t hungry, even though I couldn’t remember the last time I ate, but I needed to do whatever it took to convince the man to open my cell.
The guy was slighter and smaller than me by a couple of inches, and as soon as he opened these bars, I’d wrap him in a chokehold. So far, he hadn’t let me out to do anything, including using the restroom.
Or had he?
I didn’t remember leaving my cell or eating anything. It didn’t make any sense, but then, I didn’t remember drinking water while I was in here either. How long had I even been in here? It could have just been a day for all I knew. The grey cement cell spun around me as I concentrated on how much time had passed.
Darkness had a strange way of stretching time, but if I hadn’t eaten or slept or even had so much as a sip of water, then it could have been a day or even hours.
The medic slammed his hand against the bars, waking me from my thoughts. “I said, eat.”
“Sure.” I squatted down and swiped two bars off the cold cement and made a show of checking the plastic over, even though my eyes kept going in and out of focus. From what I could tell, the packages were intact, so I ripped open the plastic and shoved the first bar into my mouth. The packaging proclaimed it was a chocolate protein bar. The consistency was thick and sticky on my molars, but it tasted like a wad of paper. Even though I had no clue when the last time I’d eaten anything was, my throat didn’t want to choke it down. The second meal bar was even harder to eat, and the thickness of the bars made my jaw start to numb.
Actually, my whole face began to numb, and my lips tingled. It felt as if I was chewing a cotton ball instead of food.
“Fuchhh!” I spit the bar out of my mouth.
My legs wobbled under me, feeling like the consistency of noodles. I reached out and grabbed the metal bars and missed. The floor dropped out from under my feet, and my head clanged into the steel bar. Searing pain exploded through my skull, only to fade away into numb oblivion.
I stared across a layer of dust coating the concrete, seeing it in perfect detail. Little dust particles sprayed out and rained down with my every breath, but I couldn’t even feel my face as it lay on the cement. It was as if I had completely retreated into my body, unable to operate it anymore.
The medic’s boots crossed the floor. Metal rattled just above me, and then the bars moved away. He crouched down, coming into my view. The man reached for me, and I knew he was touching my neck, but I couldn’t feel his fingers. He checked his watch and muttered, “Good.”
Fucker.
I wanted to hit him until he lost consciousness and lock him in the cell.
“How are you going to get him upstairs?” A familiar voice echoed through the room, and I felt like screaming in rage. Of course it was him. Of course Sebastian was behind my abduction. Part of me had always known that it was only a matter of time before my cousin killed Mitch and me for looking into his crimes.
The medic sighed. “It’s a process. The subject weighs close to three hundred pounds.”
“I don’t have time for a process. Pick him up and carry him.” Sebastian stepped out of the stairway and onto the cement floor. All I could see of him were a pair of shiny black dress shoes, but I could feel his presence like a malevolent shadow descending over the room. “Why is he still alive? Every moment he’s here is a risk.”
“That’s part of the reason I called you here—”
“You should have killed him already,” Sebastian snapped. “I hope you’re not planning on betraying us.”
“Of course not. The testing doesn’t work on dead flesh,” the medic said in a rush. “We already more than established that with your sister’s body. And, we don’t technically need him alive anymore, but I haven’t found a way to kill him. I’ll explain in the lab
oratory.”
Again I wanted to scream out. Marisa, my cousin, was their first subject. They experimented on her corpse after Sebastian killed her.
The medic moved behind me, he grunted, and then I was being lifted off the floor. I wanted to wring his neck, but all I could do was lie there, limp. My cousin’s face came into view, his features so like my own. Bright blue eyes connected with mine, and I tried to send words through my gaze. I will destroy you, Sebastian. I will take everything you care about away and then bury you.
Sebastian’s eyes narrowed. “Why is he awake?”
“The spell has stopped knocking him all the way out, but it still causes temporary amnesia. He won’t remember this.” With a loud grunt, the man hefted me up and over his shoulder, and then I was looking at his back as we moved through the room, up the staircase, and down a hallway. We entered a laboratory, and I couldn’t help but feel an aching familiarity, like I’d been in this room in a dream. The medic must have drugged me before, repeatedly, and took me up here for his experiments. No wonder I didn’t remember eating or drinking or pissing. My memory wasn’t going in the darkness. It was being spelled with magic.
Terror flooded through me. What else had they done to me that I couldn’t remember?
The medic rolled me down on a table, and I heard the thud of my back and head slamming onto the metal, but I felt nothing. I stared up into a bright, halogen light, that immediately burned my eyes. Both the medic and Sebastian leaned over me and looked down, their features dramatized with harsh shadows. The medic huffed in labored breaths as sweat dripped from his forehead. Their faces couldn’t be more different, one was sculpted and severe, the other had loose features, but the look in their eyes was the same, disinterested and detached as if they were looking at a dead plant specimen rather than a living human trapped in an immobilized body.
The medic reached down and started fiddling with my arm, but I couldn’t see what he was doing. Panic raced through me, and I heard a loud beeping from the machinery beside the bed.
“Ignore that,” the medic said as he moved around the table. “The specimen is scared.”
“Can you get to the point?” Sebastian asked, “I’ll be missed before too much longer.”
“The samples we have from your sister—”
“Stop calling her my sister,” Sebastian growled. “If you need to talk about Marisa, call her Specimen M. This here is Specimen J.”
The medic cleared his throat. “The samples we got from Specimen M were tainted by the DNA from her hybrid mother. We were able to narrow down that your family either descended from a werewolf or a divine genus. Justin Roberts’ body was unresponsive to the werewolf, demigod, angel host, and demonic activation serums. There was no structural change in his DNA—”
“Did you call me down here to tell me that you’re not going to be able to figure out what kind of hybrid I am before the Senior Hunt?” My cousin's voice was cold, and I couldn’t help but wonder if I was about to witness a murder while trapped in my body.
“I would never risk exposing you by calling you here…” the medic said, his voice breathless. “Your cousin…I mean Specimen J has been activated—I’ve activated him. I have the serum ready for you too. I promise everything is on schedule.” He paused for a second before continuing. “But, there’s an issue.”
A clanging sound came from Sebastian’s direction. “I don’t care. Handle it. What I care about are the results. What type of hybrid am I?”
“Werewolf—that’s the closest I was able to narrow it down before those genes mutated. The issue is that Specimen B also has fallen angel genetics from a pre-demonic transitional stage. His fallen angel genes make up fifty-percent of his genetic composition, meaning that his father was a fallen angel.”
“That’s actually ideal. You said that the samples from January Moore are werewolf descendant too,” Sebastian responded, as if he was completely oblivious to everything else the medic was saying. “Did you compare the blood? How close of a genetic match are we?”
“Yes, we compared the samples, and you’re the same species but not related,” the medic said in a rush. “Sir, there’s a much bigger issue… your cousin isn’t only a descendant of werewolves—”
“Honestly, I’m not surprised. Aunt Gina is a Holter and a devious bitch. My father always said that Justin was a big baby to be born prematurely, but she wouldn’t let the HG doctors near her while she was pregnant. My father is going to appreciate this. If Justin is fifty percent, shouldn’t he have been showing signs since he was born?”
“Well, he would have shown signs since puberty, but there lies the issue. I pumped him full of activator, first werewolf, then demonic, then angelic, and finally demi-god. He was showing absolutely no power activation or mutation, and then, last night, we have this.” The medic held out a stiff piece of paper. I saw a peek at a black and white x-ray image but caught no details as the man passed the scan over to Sebastian. Panic was surging through my mind with every word that the medic said. It wasn’t true. They were lying. Yeah, my father and I were very different people, but he was my father.
Sebastian leaned over the image, his mouth tightening into a thin line. “What is that?”
“These are wings. They’re forming inside his body. I’ve found a way to suppress the growth, but they’re still mutating, just slower—”
“You’re suppressing his powers?” Sebastian glared across the table at the man. “I thought that I made it clear that I need to know the extent of his natural powers before we activate mine.”
“The werewolf powers are gone, mutated away by the fallen angel side. Specimen J’s development was happening so rapidly, I tried to kill him…” the medic raised his hand, and light glinted off of a long strip of metal gripped in his fists. My mind only had time to register the word “cleaver,” and then he was bringing the weapon down over my neck. I was sure that this was going to be the last moment of my life, when the medic raised a warped piece of metal clutched in his fist.
“He’s already immortal. There are only specific weapons that can kill him now—the Archangel Sword, which is in our office in Rome, and… well, that doesn’t matter right now. What matters is that I knew that someone had to have been suppressing his powers before I activated them. I analyzed the blood sample from when he first arrived and tested it for possible spell ingredients. There were herbs in his system. I was able to isolate the herbs, and I took it to a local coven, and they were able to replicate the spell.”
“You got outsiders involved in something we do in this lab?” Sebastian paced around the table, and the medic took a step away, like he might bolt, but he stayed, quivering in place.
“I—I…” His breath caught, “I had no choice. Specimen J would have fully developed in days, and then there would have been nothing we could do to contain him. I’ve been able to keep his powers suppressed and the spells have continued to work, but it’s only a matter of time.”
Sebastian halted abruptly, and his eyes traveled far away. He didn’t say anything for a second, and then he muttered, “No. This will work.” He nodded. “I’ve changed my mind about disposing of Specimen J. I’m going to need to know exactly what kind of demon he is and everything known about his breed…”
My eyes snapped open as my head pounded. For a moment, I was sure I was back there, locked in the darkness. But my prison had never smelled like vanilla, and I definitely didn’t have soft arms wrapping around me in the cold, dank cell.
What the hell did I just dream?
“Justin?” January whispered from where her cheek lay on my chest. “Oh, shit. We fell asleep, didn’t we? How late is it?”
I stretched to the side of the bed and fumbled on the nightstand for my phone. When I lit up the screen, the clock read that it was barely midnight. “We’re good. We only slept for maybe an hour, if that,” I whispered, running my hand over her hair, my fingers catching on metal pins and sweaty tangles. We just had the most amazing, earth-shattering, expe
rience together, and then I had to go have that nightmare. I could still feel the bitter cold of my cell in my bones. “I need a shower, and then I’ll head home.”
“Okay,” she whispered into my skin, and I was so relieved when she didn’t ask me to stay.
The last thing I wanted to do in the world right now was to reject her, but I needed to go home. I felt this itching sensation in my back, and even though I was sure it was just paranoia from my nightmares, I needed to inspect my back in detail. I wanted to inspect my father’s face and study all of the features I got from him.
The dream was utter nonsense. I knew that. All I could remember was darkness, stretching on and on, so my mind was creating memories to traumatize me, or some shit like that.
“I guess this means I have to get off you, huh?” January sat up slowly, taking the blanket with her. I could barely see her in the near darkness, only the barest of outlines in the light of my illuminated phone screen, but I could feel her examining me. She could see me perfectly, I realized. Well, she could see my body temperature. Could she see if I was changing into something else?
“Are you okay?” she asked, still sounding half asleep. “You seem upset.”
“I’m fine.” I rolled out of bed, crossed the room and flicked on the light. As bright white illumination filled the space, my heartbeat slowed.
January blinked sleepily from the bed with her hair a tangled mess on her head. I couldn’t help but smile at the sight, and it made a little of the darkness inside of me retreat. “I dreamed I was in the cell again, and I thought I was still in there for a few seconds after I woke up. I needed some light is all. But I really am fine.”
“Okay.” She nodded. “You don’t need to be… fine, I mean. I’m not a lot of the time, and I was only there for a couple of hours. If you ever want to talk about it, Justin…”
“Yeah, but can we not talk about it right now? We’ll talk about it. You’re the only one I want to talk about this shit with, but not right now.”
Broken Elites (The Vampire Legacy Book 3) Page 1