The Book of Broken Creatures: (A Broken Creatures Novel, Book 1)

by A L Hart

  I didn’t hold it against her.

  My only goal right now was one thing. Get Ophelia out of that compound. I didn’t like shoving Danny down as second priority, but the morbid part of me reasoned that Ethan was already dead, which meant Danny sadness didn’t triumph Ophelia’s torture.

  Vincent assessed the two of us briefly, then those uncanny, knowledgeable eyes slid towards the rear of the lounge, the hall, down to the office. The door was closed, Danny having yet to move from his brother’s body.

  If the vampire scented the death in that room, he didn’t speak of it, only took out a handkerchief, cleared his throat into it, and returned his gaze to mine. They both dressed impeccably as always. Vincent in one of his embroidered, satin suits a shade of blackberry, tailored specifically for his slimmer physique and Elise in a cream midi-dress, the cotton belt looped around her middle delicately.

  Jera and I on the other hand . . .

  I still wore the black turtle neck which was flayed at the sleeves, torso, back, everywhere Ophelia’s lightning had struck when I’d embraced her and tears where it’d gotten caught in the compound’s barbed wires and where my wings had erupted. Jera’s own white blouse was flayed from her spat with the agents, the long, layered skirt torn at the seams. Soot I hadn’t noticed before smeared her cheeks. I was sure we were a sight to behold in comparison.

  “Where’s the other one?” Vincent asked gently as he always did when both twins weren’t present.

  “That’s what we wanted to talk about,” I said.

  Knowing instantly crossed the couple’s gazes.

  I recapped what’d happened, leaving nothing out and emphasizing all of the areas where I’d gone wrong. It wouldn’t happen again. Even if I had to burn the mistakes to my memory until there was no canvas left for anything useless.

  Vincent regarded me deeply, stripping me down to see how I truly felt on the circumstance. I didn’t bother throwing up a defense, only looked into his dark eyes full on.

  “I see,” he said. “Then you are interested in the other route. The faery.”

  I nodded.

  “Peter tells me she is the owner of a club out in Wichita,” Jera said.

  “Indeed she is. I’ve not been myself as that particular scene holds no interest for me.”

  “But you are knowledgeable enough to tell me this much—what games does she deploy?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  Jera splayed her hands atop the table and leaned forward. “There is no faery anywhere who does no specialize in games. Schemes. They each have their own brand of mischief, a theme, if you will. What does her club function under—serving emotion cocktails, private immortal organ harvesting, pedigree breeding and trafficking?”

  “Ah,” Vincent sat back, eyes now roving over the darkened shop.

  Elise cast him one concerned look then gazed back to Jera. “No one knows. All who’ve been there, upon their return they’re not entirely sure what fuels the faery’s club. What her game is, as you say. It could very well be one of those things you’ve mentioned—or all of them.”

  Rather than turn as concerned as I felt, Jera sat back with a spark of intrigue in her eyes. “And what was the name of this female?”

  “As I’m sure you know, it is almost impossible to come by the fae’s name. They’d sooner bite off their tongue than speak it.”

  “Why’s that?” I asked, feeling the weight of their immortal, all-knowing gazes on me.

  “If you have the fae’s name they become slave to you and your kin, if you wish it.”

  “But didn’t you say they were susceptible to iron and arguably clinically insane?” When she nodded, I asked, “Does that mean the fae have three prices—a weakness to iron, bouts of insanity and the possibility of becoming someone’s slave?”

  Jera shrugged. “The first fae to ever cross the gateway connecting our worlds tried to cheat, trick the realm and evade paying a price. As a result, any faery who crosses into the human world is charged with three prices.”

  Why would anyone want to come to our world so badly when the consequences were so constraining? What was so wrong with their own world?

  “Most call her Niv,” Vincent offered.

  I stored the name away. “You said if she offers her direct help the price she demands will be higher than if she dispatched someone else to help us. Do we get a choice in the matter?”

  “I cannot say,” Vincent said apologetically. “What occurs within this club tends to stay in the club. The regular clientele are very reticent, their experiences kept clandestine from the public. The photo I showed you may not be how the woman looks at all, but could be nothing more than a glamor she cast upon herself when it was taken.”

  I frowned. “That sounds—”

  “Annoying,” Jera sighed. “As are all faery. Does she have any family?”

  Vincent frowned. “Not from what my sources tell me. Why?”

  “They tend to be vengeful when you off their kin.”

  Elise startled, fingertips pressed to her chest in disbelief. “For what reason would you kill her?”

  Jera’s gaze was that of thorns when she regarded the other succubus. “Humans have my sister and are torturing her as we speak. If that faery wishes to play games, she will learn quickly what morale I lack when she finds herself with an arm or two missing and an iron rod replacing her spine.”

  Vincent and Elise stared at Jera with point-blank horror, but some part of me had gotten used to Jera’s freely distributed death threats, or I was too numb to care.

  Would I object should Jera actually act on the absurd promise? Likely. But for now, we could only work with what we had and currently, we had Vincent and Elise and their connections.

  “V-very well,” Vincent sputtered, clearing his throat into his handkerchief again before tucking it away. He opened the briefcase that seemed to follow him everywhere, pulled from it a sheet of paper and pen, then scrawled an address across it.

  When he slid it my way, he said sternly, “You must dress appropriately. If you’ve a dress, wear it. And if you have a suit, Mister Peter, press it. And here—” He lifted his hat from his head and propped it atop my own. “You are a man of business, after all. You’ll want to present yourself with as much class as possible, show you have something to offer. That is, if the bouncer identifies you as human—which are strictly prohibited from the premises unless under certain circumstances.”

  The fedora cast a shadow over the already dark shop, and Jera snorted up at it before pushing it down farther on my head.

  “Luckily,” she purred. “My dearest human here recently purchased just such a suit.”

  Right, the one I’d gotten from Sears in an attempt to reconcile her mood. Right before we’d run into HB. I’d tossed the thing in the closet to be forgotten.

  “Then if you ask me,” Vincent chirped as he rose, offering his arm to his wife. “Things are starting to look up.” I pretended his gaze didn’t flicker towards the office door.

  “And please let us know how it goes,” Elise insisted. “And if we can be of any other service, do not hesitate to call again.”

  When we finished saying our thanks, goodbyes, and were once again alone in the dark, I noticed Jera’s hand still perched on the hat, pressing it down to the point my hair curtained my sight.

  She turned my head towards her and asked in the quiet air, “How are you?”

  The question took me completely off guard. Not even the ice barring my emotion was prepared for the piercing inquiry. My heart leapt in its cage, though, arguably, that could have been because of the way the woman beside me regarded me.

  It wasn’t white hot rage.

  It wasn’t smoldering desire.

  It wasn’t even nurturing concern.

  It was more potent. Fierce. As if she was looking not at me, but that chunk of ice expanding as the hours went on.

  “I’m ready,” I answered. “I don’t care what the faery asks of me.”

  She huffed,
but there was something soft in it, something even softer in the way her hand drifted down through my curls before tightening at a lock near my nape. “You are not indestructible. Do not let that heart of yours lead you to behave as if you are.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said sourly. “I’ll try not to get your life source killed.”

  “Good. And?”

  “And?”

  “Is there not something else that foolish heart wants to do?”

  “Go press that suit in the closet?”

  With a roll of her eyes, she shove the tip of the hat over my eyes and rose from the booth. “We cannot leave the pesky human here in the shop with a corpse.”

  Glaring, I righted the hat and glanced to the office door. I didn’t know what to do with Danny. How could I turn him over to the cops when they would start asking questions? What if they found out about Ethan? That was a whole other can of worms I didn’t want to open just yet.

  Maybe he had some family I could leave him with, and the corpse, we could deal with that when we returned. After all, should the authorities find the dead boy and should they put him through an autopsy, it wasn’t as if it would come back with any signs leading to homicide. The way Ethan had died was entirely normal. There was no dark energy left in him for HB to track back to us. It was a bitter victory there.

  “How long?”

  I glanced up at Jera. Her arms were crossed over her chest, but her eyes were steady with patience.

  “How long what?” I asked.

  “Before you conclude you did not do this.”

  “Forever—because I did do it.”

  “You gave that boy all you had. You even reduced the tumor. What happened after does not fall on you.”

  “He was in my care.”

  “It was likely an aneurysm. The brain is a delicate organ. It was your first attempt. You failed, but you also learned. Don’t be a sponge which only soaks up the bad. Acknowledge the good.”

  I acknowledged it. But sometimes the bad screamed louder. And sometimes, the good didn’t make a sound at all.

  “I can’t take him to the police,” I diverted. “They’ll swarm this place if Danny talks.”

  “You’re going about this all wrong. You cannot take him to the authorities at all. Ever. They’ll want to examine his brother’s carcass and the last thing we want to do is turn over a body with traces of dark energy.”

  “There isn’t any—”

  “That you can sense. Dark energy never truly leaves its host. It simply becomes inert, therefore you’re unable to sense it. HB’s devices can, and you must understand the stark truth here: they do not merely eliminate humans infected with dark energy—they eliminate those related to them, all the same.”

  The only reason they hadn’t killed Anisah, then, was because she needed her to lead them to Kyda. Did that mean her remaining relatives had already been killed?

  “Why?” What was the point in the extended cruelty?

  “They know immortals are made strictly through breeding, so they believe those who are afflicted with dark energy had an immortal ancestor somewhere down in their lineage. They will want to take out the bloodline until they reach its immortal source. They don’t know the substance is airborne for the same reason you can’t detect it unless it’s infecting a host: just like Lia’s gift, the dark energy expresses itself differently when in its gaseous state. HB doesn’t even know where the dark energy comes from.”

  That sounded unlikely. Unless, “They don’t know about your world?”

  Jera shook her head. “Not many do. The majority of the immortals who populate your earth were born here, their ancestors ranging back by centuries.”

  “But don’t the immortals wonder why they have their prices—why they’re susceptible to sunlight, why they’re trapped in a bond with something as little as a kiss?”

  “When you mention the price to an immortal, many believe it is nothing more than a characteristic in which their kind were born with. As it goes, when faced with a sea of unknowns, some pursue the actual truth while others—most—fill that sea with theories, myths, any light to leave that void a little less dark. Even if the light is but a lie.”

  I frowned. For such knowledge to be lost to even those whose lives were eternal could only mean one thing. No immortal had crossed between our worlds to tell them otherwise for a long, long time. Until Jera and Ophelia had come here.

  And if for centuries no one had crossed our worlds, then how long had the cracks between the realms existed, expanded? How long had dark energy been here? Why did it only begin affecting humans five years ago?

  “If I can’t take him to the authorities, then we—I—have to find his closest relative. They’re going to want to know he’s alive, where he’s been living.”

  “And what’s to stop them from going to the policemen?”

  I shrugged. “Nothing. But we can’t hide him here.” Speaking of hide: “And Ethan’s . . . body?”

  “I will burn it.” At my petrified look, she said, “It’s the safest route for Danny, Peter. If you want to protect him, you have to erase any evidence that suggests he was related to someone with dark energy. Be grateful they didn’t find the boys sooner or they’d both be dead in that sorry little shack.”

  I knew her reasoning was sound, but none of this was right. The dead boy in my office. The shattered heart curled up next to him. The state of the coffeeshop. The state of me.

  So how—how could I be grateful for anything . . . when the world around me was, once again, becoming so dark?

  *****

  In the office, Danny lay against Ethan’s body, his eyes wide open, red streaks marring his dried cheeks. His arms were curled around the dog and his brother, his hair unkempt and limp.

  “Danny,” I whispered, closing the door behind me.

  His gaze was glassy, unfocused.

  “Danny, we have to go—”

  “What’re you gonna do with him?”

  My lips thinned.

  He wiped a hand over his raw cheek and looked at me straight. “I want to know. What’s going to happen with him?”

  I fisted my hands at my side. I couldn’t tell him the truth of what Jera had gone out into the alley to do, the bag she had prepared for the boy’s body, the flames she would consume it with.

  “Bury him,” I lied. There wasn’t much I could protect him from, but the truth, the brutal treatment of his brother’s corpse, I could.

  “Will there be a funeral?”

  I hesitated. If he told whoever took him in about his brother—which he inevitably would—they would want a funeral and a body to complete it.

  “We gave Mom and Dad a funeral—the three of us,” he whispered, inching to the ledge of the desk, where he took the dog into his arms before sliding off. “I know how to do it.”

  I studied him, not wanting to ask the next part. “Do what?”

  “Dig a hole, bury them.”

  My chest twisted around the jagged ice. Fists clenched tighter. He’d dug their graves; how had his parents died? “We can handle it. You’ve been through enough.”

  His bottom lip trembled. He swallowed and held the dog closer. “And me—” Voice broken, sob falling free. “Where do you want me to go, boss?”

  Your fault, Peter. Deal with it.

  “Do you have any family? Aunts, uncles?” When he shook his head and wiped his eyes on his shoulders, I forced myself to continue. “Cousins? Grandpa, grandma?”

  For a while, those watery eyes simply stayed planted on the floors as his face screwed up in thought. When he found a suitable person, he warbled out, “I think Sister Abby’s still alive; Mom said the bad ones live forever.”

  “Sister Abby?”

  “She ran our orphanage out in Virginia.”

  That was all I needed to hear. The vestige of information I hadn’t known I’d been waiting to hear until I was suddenly kneeling and pulling the boy and his moppy dog close to me. I found his eyes through his tears and hoped he
could find mine through my remorse as I swore, “If you want to stay with me, you can, and I promise you, kid, I will always be here.”

  He blinked once and I watched those tears fall, his eye lashes sheened by them, golden gaze ablaze, and I knew what he was doing without him saying. It was the same thing I’d done to Natalie that night I’d found out Mom’s organs had finally shut down completely. The night she’d stood in the hospital room with me. I’d found myself stepping back into that special-made plain of isolation, where others existed apart from me, where walls of stained glass erected, separated, distorting the outside world until the kaleidoscope of colors had blended to gray.

  It’s going to be okay, she’d promised. But then Camille had come in behind her, hadn’t she?

  Oh, Peter, I heard. I’m so sorry. If you need anything, you know you can always call us.

  Their kindness had been muted, because I’d already allowed that last wall to erect. And they didn’t know how to get through it, didn’t know what words to use.

  When death strikes, there isn’t much others can do when they see you and bear witness to that massive person-sized hole in your chest. So they revert to what their heart and mind tell them to. Their intentions were good, but they weren’t where you were. That glass room of isolation was made for you alone—because you yourself had built it.

  I wasn’t going to allow this boy whose life had hardly begun to put up that last wall. Not when I knew how to stop it.

  “Do you hear me, Danny? I’m never leaving your side. And neither is this mop—Tathri. He needs you. We need you.”

  He cried harder, held the dog closer.

  “If you don’t feed him, who will?”

  “I’ll feed him,” he cried.

  “And he needs to be walked or he’ll pee all over the place.”

  “I’ll walk him,” he choked out.

  “And who’s going to annoy that mean lady, Jera? Who’s going to give Ophelia her morning hugs? Who’s going to whip me into shape when I’m slacking?”

  When he all but threw his arms around me, I caught the concerningly sticky dog before he hit the floor with one arm, the other wrapping around Danny’s small frame as it shook under the rainstorm he released. Letting the dog go, I wrapped both arms around him.