by Aja James
Maximus had never seen the like.
The warrior moved like a Pure One. In fact, the warrior was someone he knew.
The missing Elite member—the Paladin.
But no Pure One was that strong or that fast. At least, Maximus had never known anyone with Dalair’s current abilities.
The Paladin had hyper-developed senses, not the Gift of tremendous strength and speed. Not as far as Maximus knew of him in the past.
Now was not the time to puzzle it out. After disposing quickly of two more soldiers who’d come at him with swords and guns, Maximus leapt in, to combat the turned Paladin at Goya’s side.
Maximus had nothing against the Paladin; they’d even fought together a time or two. But he would tear him apart now that the Pure One was one of Medusa’s mind-controlled soldiers, leading an enemy battalion against Maximus’s Kind.
No mercy and no remorse. Such were the rules of war.
Against two royally pissed off giant tigers, the Paladin was pushed back toward the edge of a cliff, his crescent blades the only thing keeping Maximus and Goya at bay.
But just as his heel slid a little off the edge, on the verge of plummeting to a nasty death or at the very least be put out of commission for a good long while, Maximus hesitated in his attack as something caught the corner of his eye.
Ariel.
She was walking toward him purposefully.
That was the first thing his mind registered: she wasn’t running to help.
She was walking purposefully, naked in her human form, and she was toting a rifle in her arms.
Something was off.
But Maximus’s instincts overrode his mind. He only knew he needed to protect his Mate, who was walking toward the enemy with three other soldiers closing in on her.
She didn’t seem to notice them.
She kept her eyes only on him.
Maximus turned away from the fight with the Paladin, leaving Goya to finish him off, and bounded toward Ariel, desperate to reach her before the soldiers did.
Why didn’t she turn her rifle on them and shoot them?! Why didn’t she fight?
Maximus wasn’t going to wait for answers, leaping up to attack one of the soldiers closest to Ariel.
As he did so, she turned toward him, raised the rifle and shot him directly in the chest.
Boom!
Maximus felt like his heart had exploded, as his body convulsed in shock and pain, whatever she’d shot him with paralyzing him instantly so that he dropped to the ground in a stupefied heap.
Perhaps his heart had exploded.
Because as he lay there looking helplessly at the female he loved, she came to stand directly before him, her bare feet close enough to touch his muzzle.
There was no emotion in her golden green eyes.
No warmth. No fire.
Only cold, hard logic.
She pointed the rifle at his chest and fired.
Chapter Fourteen
“It is done.”
At the Paladin’s one-line confirmation, the Creature cut their connection.
Well.
Guess Dalair Al Amirah wasn’t overrated as a warrior-leader after all.
Even though they’d sent almost half of the most seasoned warriors in Medusa’s army to round up the animals, success was by no means guaranteed.
Humans, Dark, and Pure Ones alike, who were possessed by animal spirits were the strongest fighters on earth, one-on-one. Just one of those giant beasts could take out an entire battalion.
If the Paladin hadn’t been strengthened by the serum they’d infused into his DNA, the Creature doubted he could have come out of that mission alive. And yet here he was, reporting on their success.
The Creature wondered whether Lord Wind would win against the strongest animal.
Enlil of Anatolia (now Eli Scott) was one of the most fearsome warriors amongst the Dark Ones across the history of their Kind, after all. He could turn himself into the very air. It would be interesting to pit them against each other just for research purposes.
Real life “Mortal Combat” as it were.
Lord Wind against the Tiger King.
Lord Wind against an amped up Paladin.
The Paladin against Valerius, the Pure Ones’ Protector, the Elite guard with the highest body count.
The Paladin against Tal-Telal, the legendary General who led the Pure Ones to freedom against their Dark oppressors.
The possibilities were endless!
And endlessly gruesome and fascinating.
Bottom line—Medusa wanted the strongest warriors for her mind-controlled army. It was the Creature’s job to procure them for her. Preferably before anyone else could recruit them.
Unfortunately, Enlil was out of the question. And so was Tal-Telal. Medusa herself had tried to recruit her own sister, Ishtar Anshar, the Great White Beast, but that went over real well.
Good thing they finally discovered the hideout of those mysterious animal spirits.
The Creature, for once, had nothing to do with this particular coup. This was all Wan’er. All it did was send in the muscle.
Its estimation of her and fascination with her continued to rise the more it observed her maneuverings.
It turned to her now, the Pure traitor who had been ignoring its presence in her labs since its arrival a few minutes ago, concentrated on her experiments as usual.
“Mission accomplished,” it told her languidly.
“Did your toy soldier get all three species?” she asked without taking her eyes from the specimen under her microscope.
“Yes, of course,” the Creature answered with a sniff.
What did she think it meant when it said “mission accomplished”?
“A snake, a tiger, and an eagle. At least one of each.”
“Alive?”
“One snake, two tigers, one lion and one eagle are alive. There are a scant few others, the rest are dead. But we brought a few that have human base forms in case you needed extra samples. Didn’t bother to collect the stardust and ashes of the ones with Pure and Dark base forms.”
“Hmm. I suppose having some sub-species samples would be helpful.”
She didn’t sound particularly excited one way or the other.
“Any progress with your experiments here?” the Creature inquired, mildly curious.
Her brow knitted with rare frustration.
“The samples your soldier brings back should help,” was all she said.
So, no, not much progress with the experiments, it gathered from that reply.
The Creature considered her with more than a little interest.
She’d lived at the Shield for ten years as handmaiden to the Pure healer, Rain. And yet, she showed no concern, not an iota of feeling, toward the turned Paladin, merely calling him “soldier.”
“I find it intriguing that you don’t feel any attachment to your friends at the Shield. You’ve lived amongst them for years. You’ve lived with Rain for centuries,” it pointed out, sitting casually on the edge of a lab table, to the researcher’s obvious annoyance.
She cast it an irritated glance but didn’t remark on its bad manners. She shrugged, carrying a few cell cultures to the sequencing machine.
“You’ve lived with Medusa for millennia,” she retorted, “Do you care about her?”
It was a good question. The Creature was somewhat stumped to find a ready response.
It had no love for Medusa, this it knew with absolute certainty. But it cared enough to let her live when it could have hastened her end when she was roundly defeated by her sister.
But perhaps it had let her live not because it cared, but because it didn’t want to be directly responsible for ending someone’s life.
Sure, it had set, was setting, and would be setting, terrible wheels in motion that led to the deaths and destruction of numerous people, but it had never snuffed out a life with its own bare hands.
It was a thinker, not a doer. Not the dirty work at least.
It wasn’t a killer.
Was it?
Were you a killer if you didn’t wield the knife yourself? Or pull the trigger? Or light the fuse?
Did it care if it was a killer by an indirect definition?
Or even a direct one?
Hmm. Why was it even pondering this puzzle? It had never asked itself these questions before.
“Well, I’ll leave you to it,” the Creature said as it left the labs, never having answered the researcher’s question.
Not that she seemed to care or marked its departure.
It was already after dark, and since it felt a bit peckish and didn’t have any pressing evil deeds to do, it got in a yellow cab and went to its usual haunt in the Eastern European neighborhood of Brooklyn—Mama Bear’s shop, Dark Dreams.
Upon arrival, it peered through the front window into the brightly lit interior and saw that Benji wasn’t here this time.
But Mama Bear in her true form as Ishtar Anshar was inside with her Mate, Tal-Telal.
And something was wrong.
The blind warrior was standing stiffly, his face turned to the side, his jaw clenched, hands fisted.
She was standing close to him, and her hands reached out to touch him, but hesitated before making contact, even as his body stiffened in anticipation, as if he were bracing himself for pain, not pleasure.
Her face was in profile, so the Creature saw her desperate expression, her pleading eyes. Tal, still blind, as far as the Creature could tell, could not see her at all.
But he must be able to feel her emotions. Hell, the Creature could feel her emotions just looking through the window.
Tal said something, his face still turned away.
Whatever he said made her burst into tears. She stuck her fist in her mouth and bit down on her knuckles as if she were trying to stem the sobs.
She reached out again, her fingertips barely grazing his chest.
He flinched as if she’d burned him and pushed past her, making straight for the shop door.
The Creature leapt back into the shadows just in time when Tal burst through the door, banging it closed behind him.
Without hesitating, Tal moved swiftly down the street, eating up the ground with his long strides.
It was only curiosity, the Creature told itself as it began to follow the ancient warrior at a safe distance. It certainly didn’t care that Tal was hurting, his torment radiating from his person in palpable waves.
He was headed toward the Brighton Beach Boardwalk, the Creature could tell. And when he reached it, he went directly into the sand to the edge of the Bay.
No one else was around. This particular spot was eerily quiet. Deserted.
The Pure warrior looked out sightlessly into the dark night and choppy waters for a long while.
Then, he threw back his head and let out a soul-shattering shout into the sky, the rawness and agony tearing through his vocal cords, breaking his voice.
The Creature felt it to the core of its being. Its heart might be black and shriveled, but whatever heart that was left there twisted and clenched in vicarious pain, filling its nostrils with acid.
There was an infinite amount of anguish in the Pure warrior’s howl. An unfathomable depth to his despair.
The worst of it was, the Creature knew very well what had led to this moment.
And not just this moment.
It had the sense that Tal-Telal battled demons every moment, given what he’d endured over many millennia.
It was just that, in this particular moment, he couldn’t hold it in any more.
He broke.
From a distance, the Creature watched this strong, courageous, selfless male give in to the vast, unending pain that tore him apart inside.
Only to be released in that one shout.
That was all.
In the calming quiet that followed, he stood tall, his strong legs slightly spread as he faced the unsympathetic, silent Bay, the night stretching endlessly before him. Given that he was blind, he’d be forever surrounded by darkness even if the sun shone brightly overhead.
What did it feel like to live like that? How could he possibly persevere?
Not for the first time when it thought of Tal-Telal, the Creature felt a burst of admiration.
And something else.
Something deeper.
Suddenly, the warrior turned in its direction, his uncanny aquamarine eyes seeming to look directly into the Creature many yards away.
There was bleakness in those eyes. In the cloudiness of his irises, the only physical manifestation of his blindness.
But there was also hope. A spark that shone from within.
The Creature turned its back and walked briskly away.
*** *** *** ***
Twenty-four hours later, Ariel Kyles scanned her irises, gave her voice recognition and thumb prints to the AI security, before the airtight doors to the top-secret underground facility opened to admit her.
“There you are,” the lead researcher said when she entered, walking over with a device that looked like a grocery store barcode gun.
Ariel turned around as the researcher reached up and punched the device into the base of her skull.
There was a sharp sting, but quickly gone. She turned back to face the researcher again.
“The animals are in their cages. Separate rooms. Sound proof walls,” she reported.
“Very good,” the researcher said, nodding with approval. “You’ve done well.”
Ariel merely looked at her.
She’d done what she’d been programmed to do. Compliments were superfluous.
“The Paladin has given me a thorough account of the animals in the enclave,” the researcher said.
“We have catalogued each and every one of them, dead or alive, including the ones we’ve left behind. But one animal seems to be missing. A black panther. It had been sighted by the other soldiers as well, but then, suddenly, it was gone. You wouldn’t happen to know anything about it, would you?”
Ariel blinked once.
“No. I have not seen it. Perhaps it was trapped in the caves when the mountain blew up.”
“Hmm,” the researcher mused, looking at Ariel’s face closely.
“You will have to tell me how you managed to infiltrate the enclave. But I can also look through your memories I suppose.” The researcher held up her scanner.
“Be my guest,” Ariel said tonelessly.
“Why don’t you start with your story first,” the researcher requested.
Ariel stood at ease, in the military position with her hands behind her back, legs slightly apart, as she settled in for a recount.
“I made contact with Maximus as planned. The ambush resulted in the way we expected: he thought I saved his life. He began to trust me.”
“What happened to his familiar?”
“You saw the video footage yourself. It disintegrated into stardust. What do you think happened to it?”
“Hmm,” the researcher murmured again.
“As my research bore out, Maximus has the animal strain in him. The drugs I gave him to trigger the dreams resurfaced long buried memories. With those, I convinced him to follow the leads and find out who he really was.”
“Strange that you didn’t send me any updates or videos of your progress,” the researcher remarked.
“I know how to execute my mission,” Ariel pointed out, neither arrogant nor annoyed at the subtly accusing tone of the researcher. She was merely factual.
“You know it too. If I need to build his trust, I’m not going to risk suspicion or blow my cover by feeding you tidbits unnecessarily.”
The researcher pondered this with narrowed eyes.
“Go on.”
“I triangulated his dreams to the location where you found us. His genuine pursuit of self-discovery got us in.”
“And what was your excuse for being with him? Surely those animals don’t welcome humans readily into their midst?”
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br /> “They do not. But Maximus needs me. As his blood source if nothing else. I was his partner in this journey,” Ariel answered.
“Those animals can take humanoid form. He could have drank his fill of any of them,” the researcher argued.
Ariel’s eyes glinted.
She breathed deeply, one, two, three times, before responding, her voice just as neutral and as monotone as before.
“Maximus in his vampire form was no match for any of the animals. He would have been killed on the spot if he tried it.”
“What triggered his transformation?” the researcher asked, her dark eyes keen.
“A fight that got serious,” Ariel responded. “If he hadn’t transformed, he would have lost his life.”
“And now here we are,” the researcher murmured.
“Yes. Is there anything further you required of me?”
The researcher stared into Ariel’s face for a very long time, considering.
Then she said, “Have you fucked him?”
“Yes.”
The researcher nodded with approval.
“Good. Where are you on your cycle?”
Ariel shrugged with one shoulder.
“I haven’t checked.”
The researcher tapped quickly on the touchscreen of her device and read the results out loud.
“You are ovulating right now. Almost at the peak.”
She looked back at Ariel.
“You better get in the cage with the tiger and get his seed the old fashioned way, my child.”
*** *** *** ***
Maximus awoke with a metallic taste in his mouth.
That was the first thing he noticed.
The second thing he couldn’t escape, literally, was the fact that he was naked, in his vampire form, and strapped down to a cold, steel table, his arms tight to his sides, his legs spread apart.
His head was held immobile by a contraption that wound around his brow, and a mind-bending migraine began at his temples to encapsulate his entire skull in throbbing pain. He could actually feel the needles that inserted into his body—in his temples, his neck, the veins on his arms.
He opened his eyes and had to take a few seconds to adjust to the dim light. Every sensory stimulation hurt.