Solace

by Raven Dark

  With the same words.

  “Revolution. Is. Coming. Revolution. Is. Coming. Revolu…”

  Doc rushed across the room to her, setting his kit on the floor beside a gaping Hatchet. The reed-thin man stared at Setora like he didn’t know what to do with himself. He backed up to give Doc room. Doc knelt and opened his kit, taking out a biolight.

  “Sir.” Cherry’s voice came from the doorway behind me where everyone else had stopped, but I couldn’t take my eyes off Setora long enough to look at her. I only half heard her. “Is this what she was doing before?”

  “Revolution. Is. Coming. Revolution…”

  “Setora.” Doc’s voice held my focus. He shined the light in Setora’s eyes. He looked back at me and shook his head. “It’s just like last time. It’s like we’re not even here.”

  I marched into the room, ignoring Hawk’s attempt to stop me.

  Doc moved aside to give me room. “Sheriff, don’t touch her.”

  “Revolution. Is. Coming.”

  I kept a pace back, much as I wanted to shake her until Julian left her alone. “Setora. Let me talk to Setora.” My words were intended to provoke a reaction from whatever was controlling her; I didn’t expect compliance.

  Setora’s eyes met mine, but I had the strangest feeling she wasn’t seeing me. She wasn’t, but someone was in there looking at me through her eyes.

  I shuddered.

  “She. She of the Four. Is not. Here.”

  But she was. She had to be. I searched for any sign of the woman who had given herself to me, who had shared so much with me, with my men. Her body was held in a regal pose that, for all her poise, Setora never possessed. Her eyes were utterly blank, devoid of emotion. And yet, I could feel his hatred for me—Julian’s revulsion—rolling off of her in waves.

  “You fuck. What the hell do you want with her?”

  “Sheriff.” Doc shook his head. “You might not want to piss him off.”

  A twisted smile pulled Setora’s lips into a ghastly expression I didn’t recognize, as if someone else was making her lips move.

  “So you are Sheriff, are you?”

  Her voice said my name like a demon, full of hate. Hearing this thing inside her address me directly threw me for a moment.

  “Leave her alone,” I gritted out.

  “Now I see why you are Cama Don of the Dark Legion. What word did she use for you? Ah, yes. General.”

  “Cama Don.” Dice breathed the word. “Holy shit.”

  I had no idea what a Cama Don was, nor did I know if there really was a person talking through Setora. The idea seemed ridiculous, and yet…

  “Ah, Dice.” Setora’s blank stare turned on Dice. “Son of Cama Don Bastille. I remember your father. He was a…decent man.”

  Dice’s eyes widened. Everyone around him looked at each other, baffled.

  Whether or not this Julian knew Dice’s father was irrelevant. He still had possession of Setora.

  “What do you want with her?” I snapped.

  “How dare you speak to me in such a manner.” Setora’s voice was a terrible hiss. “As if your pathetic mind could grasp what I am, or what plans I have for her.”

  Anger boiled in me, but I tamped it down. Doc was right; if I angered him, he might make her hurt herself. “Try me.”

  Another twist of a smile.

  “She belongs to me. She calls you Master, but she is mine. I will find her, one way or the other. Nothing will stop me.”

  “But why Setora? Why her specifically?” Hawk asked behind me.

  “She is the bearer of change. She is my Cama Di. Those who bear the Mark, all are mine.”

  “What mark?” Pretty Boy growled.

  “You see? You cannot understand. You cannot understand us because you are not one of us.”

  “One of who?” Doc demanded.

  Her eyes turned to him, unseeing. “The Kren. You are not of the Kren. She is of the Kren. She bears the Mark. She is Cama Di.” Her eyes swiveled to me. “She is mine.”

  “You’re not getting near her,” I spat. “You—”

  “You can’t keep her from me. She will come to me. Do not try to stop the tide of change, Cama Don. You, your men…even the one you call Yantu—even a hundred Yantu like him—are no match for me. We will speak again soon. Revolution is coming.”

  With that, Setora’s face went blank, she twitched as if something had left her body with a sudden jerk, and then she crumpled to the floor.

  Chapter 15

  Never Helpless

  As soon as Setora passed out, I rushed to her and scooped her up in my arms. “Doc, why the hell is she naked?” I set her on the bed, covering her with my blankets. I had a hundred questions, but for some reason, that one leaped out at me first.

  Doc had picked up his kit and now set it on my dresser by the bed as he shot Cherry and Hatchet a questioning look.

  “She just started stripping off her clothes, sir,” Cherry said. “I’d have covered her, but Hatchet said we weren’t supposed to touch her.”

  “Was she asleep when this started?” he asked.

  “Yeah, she was out cold,” Hatchet said.

  “Okay.” Doc addressed the crowed congregated in my doorway. “Everyone except Dice and the General, clear the room. We’ll brief you after.”

  Everybody started arguing at once. Pretty Boy and Steel refused to leave, and a panicked Cherry demanded to know what would be done to help Setora until Dice hushed her.

  “All of you, relax,” Doc ordered. “I’ll sedate her for now to keep her asleep. I’m hoping heavy sedation will keep him from taking over again. We’ll update you all after, but for now, we need a word with Dice, so everybody else out.”

  Grumbles rose up from all of them, but Hatchet herded everyone out. Cherry and Gretle departed last, the old woman putting her arm around Cherry’s shoulders. Hatchet stepped out and shut the doors behind him, leaving only Doc, Dice, and me in the room.

  I sat on the bed at Setora’s side while Doc pulled up a chair on her other. Doc took out a syringe from his kit and loaded it with a cartridge filled with some kind of sedative.

  “What do you think, Dice?” I asked him. “That word Setora called me. What was it, Commodore?”

  “Cama Don,” Dice said. He wheeled himself closer to us, the hook that served as his left hand glinting in the room’s low torchlight as he moved. “People used to call leaders that a long time ago. But no one says it anymore. No one’s used it for a long ass time.”

  “What about the other word?” Doc stood, took a cotton swab and rubbing alcohol from his kit and swabbed Setora’s arm with the alcohol. “What the hell is a Kren?”

  “Fuck if I know. I’ve heard that word before, too. I don’t know what it means, though. But I’ll tell you one thing, Sheriff. I never mentioned my father to her. How the hell could she know his name?”

  “So this is for real.” Doc inclined his head at Setora in wonder. “It was really him in there.”

  “It has to be,” Dice said. “There’s no other explanation.”

  “Do any of those stories you heard indicate anything about where Julian is?” I asked.

  “Not that that I remember.” When Doc picked up the syringe and moved to inject her, Dice’s face lost color. “Needles. That’s my cue to get gone. Keep me updated on what’s happening, all right, son?” He gave me a shaky smile.

  Doc grinned. “Hatchet?” he called.

  The assistant stuck his head into the room.

  “Take Dice for me, will you?”

  Once Dice had been wheeled out, Hatchet shut the doors behind him again. I turned to Doc.

  “Doc, if he knew Dice’s father, then Dice was right about what he said before.”

  Doc nodded. He’d already injected Setora because he was putting the syringe away now. “We’re dealing with someone who’s at least a hundred years old.” He sat again and looked at her with wonder, but I had a strange feeling he was imagining Julian there, not her. “Violets l
ive longer than us, but something tells me Julian is a lot older. Maybe hundreds of years older.”

  I took Setora’s hand, leaning over her. No sign remained to suggest that anyone was in there except her, thank fuck. “How is that possible?”

  “It shouldn’t be.”

  I leaned back in my chair and scrubbed a hand through my hair.

  A male Violet. The concept hammered itself home like a sucker-punch to the gut. It defied logic. Male Violets didn’t exist. Everyone knew that. The word itself—Violet—conjured up images of refinement and poise, well-bred slaves trained to serve men. And above all, it was associated with femininity. A man, with abilities like Setora’s? Combined with the Maker-given, legally mandated right to leadership and command?

  My blood ran cold.

  Someone with capabilities like Setora’s, but apparently much stronger, without the law of slavery to curtail what he could do. We had a problem. And right now, this Violet, if that’s really what he was, seemed to be able to take control of Setora at will.

  When I found this son of a bitch, I’d cut out his purple heart and shove it down his throat.

  “I want a look at your wrist, General,” Doc said quietly, pulling me out of my racing thoughts. “It looks painful.”

  I glanced down at the dark purple bruise on my wrist. It throbbed, but until he’d mentioned it, I’d been too focused on what was happening to Setora to notice.

  “It’s fine, Doc. I can barely feel it.”

  “Humor me, General.” He got up and walked around the bed. holding out his hand, wearing a stern expression that only he could pull off with me.

  I growled at his infernal mothering and held my bruised wrist up to him. “Have at it then.” The sooner he looked at it, the sooner he’d stop worrying about me.

  Doc took my wrist and looked it over. “Swivel it for me.”

  I did, with only a twinge of pain.

  He nodded and released me. “It seems fine, but if you need something for pain, let me know.”

  “I won’t.”

  He ignored me and went back to his seat.

  “I don’t suppose there is any way we can prevent what happened to her from happening again, Doc?”

  “Other than the sedative I gave her, no. If Julian is a Violet, I know even less about him than I do about her. Without understanding exactly how he did what he did or how to stop it, there’s nothing more I can do to help her. It’s a risk even drugging her. The drug I gave her has a component that prevents the mind from entering a dream state. There’s no way to know if it will stop him for sure, but at least some of the time, he’s connected himself with her through her dreams. I had to do something to allow her to rest without his influence.”

  “So what’s next? We can’t let him keep doing this to her.”

  “We’ll have to wait and see if it happens again.”

  “And if it does?”

  “Well, I hope this time she—he—says something that tells us more about him. Something more concrete about what he wants with her. Where he is. And most importantly, how to sever this connection he has with her.”

  If it can be severed, my mind mocked darkly.

  Fuck, we’d figure out how. We had to.

  For a long moment, Doc just watched her, and I did the same, neither of us saying anything. If I knew him, he was thinking the same thing as me.

  What the fuck did we do now?

  “I took a blood sample.” He spoke softly, seeming to be thinking out loud. When I scrunched my brows at him, he sat back. “I wanted to see if it was still blue. I thought it might tell me something…anything.”

  “Was it?”

  “No. And it didn’t change even after twenty minutes. It seems, whenever she’s healing, her blood changes, but it also does the same thing when Julian is connected to her. During that dream, when she seized last time, it did the same thing.”

  “What does that mean?”

  He heaved a breath. “I have no idea. But both times he linked himself to her, he did it through some sort of mental connection, and both times she was asleep, so maybe he can only do it when she’s out cold.”

  “But she’s asleep now, and nothing is happening.”

  “Doesn’t look like it.” His eyes were still on her face.

  “Any theories?”

  “I wish I had one. Perhaps he can only link with her for a short time before he needs to rest. Maybe he can’t control when it happens, but then again, maybe he can. We have no way of knowing unless we talk to her, and maybe not even then.”

  “This is such a fucking mess.” I scrubbed my face. “Can he do this to anyone else? Or is it just her?”

  “Well, what she told me and Pretty Boy suggests he can to some degree.”

  “And those stories Gretle and Dice talked about suggest the same.”

  “Yes. The women at Delta went into the same fugue state as Setora did here. But they didn’t say anything like she did, so we can’t know if his control over them is to the same degree as it is with her.”

  “I’ve never heard of a Violet taking control of other women like that.”

  “No, neither have I. It might be strictly a male power. But it might be that Setora will be able to eventually, if her abilities change or grow like they keep doing.”

  I swallowed, forcing myself to ask the one question I’d been putting off.

  “Doc. Is…is she dangerous?”

  He blew out a long breath, leaning forward on his knees. Meeting my gaze without a word. He didn’t need to answer, I could see it in his eyes.

  I looked at Setora, sleeping so peacefully in my bed, like a slumbering angel. The woman was a hundred and twenty pounds soaking wet. She probably couldn’t lift a sack of potatoes on a good day, and yet she could have broken my wrist. The implications were beyond comprehension.

  I shook my head at Doc. “I suddenly have this absurd image of her waking up and trying to stab everyone because Julian wants us all dead.”

  He gave a forced laugh.

  I reached out and took her hand, closed it in mine, and brought her fingers to my lips.

  “What do you want to do, General?” Doc whispered. “I mean, we can’t lock her in a room and chain her to a wall.”

  “Why not?” I smiled against her fingers, my mind going to forbidden places, covering the pain that cut at my heart with false levity.

  “If we did, for how long? She hasn’t done anything wrong,” he said reasonably. Something in his tone told me he knew I wasn’t serious while his reply suggested he knew we might have to go there. “For all we know, this may never happen again. The last thing she needs is to be treated like a criminal.”

  “I know.” I ran my lips over her fingers, trying to tell her I was there with her, to give her my strength. “So we won’t. For now, we wait. I need to protect my men, but until she does something more threatening, she stays here, constantly under armed guard.”

  “I agree.”

  I pushed to my feet and went to the small bar along the back wall of the large bedroom, pouring myself a drink of whiskey from the crystal decanter. I offered Doc a glass. He shook his head.

  Right, Doc never drank while on duty.

  “What does she need now?” I asked him, throwing back the whiskey in one gulp and letting it burn away the emotions eating at my insides.

  “For now? Rest. Relaxation. And as you said, an armed guard watching over her at all times, obviously, in case he shows himself again or there’s another seizure. And when she wakes up, she also needs to know there are people who care about her, and that what happened doesn’t change anything. If she wakes up anytime soon, she may be too out of it to really process what happened, but you know how she is. If she didn’t feel like a freak when Julian was messing with her the first time, she will when it hits her what she did. She’ll need to see that we’re still there for her.”

  “We can do that.” I poured another glass, downed it, and returned to my seat at Setora’s side.

&n
bsp; It pissed me off that reassurance was all we could give her. Gentleness and sweet words wouldn’t protect her. Kisses and promises wouldn’t get the fucking job done. I wanted to scour the world over, find this fucking Julian, and watch the life leave his violet eyes while I strangled his pompous ass.

  “Good.” Doc stood up, came around the bed again and poured himself a glass of water from a pitcher on my nightstand. “Sheriff.”

  I looked up at him. It didn’t go unnoticed that he’d dropped my title.

  “Yeah, Doc?”

  “I know you have questions, but take it easy with her,” he said carefully, returning to his chair. “It’s not uncommon for someone who’s had a seizure to be asleep for a day straight, or even longer. But with Setora’s healing abilities, she could wake up at any second. If she does, chances are she’ll be too out of it to be of much help for a while.”

  “I understand that, Doc, but she’s the only person who has any answers, and we need them as soon as possible before the same thing happens to her again. Or worse.”

  We needed a plan. We needed some way to protect her, and we couldn’t do that if we didn’t know a lot more than we did now.

  He sipped his water. “I get it. Ask her a few questions if you must, but tread carefully. It looks like Julian can only connect with her when she sleeps, but if we’re wrong, for all we know, he may hear everything we say when she’s awake. We can’t trust anything we hear.”

  Shit, he was right. The nickname I had for her had suddenly taken on a whole new meaning.

  “As I said,” Doc continued, “she needs rest, but Setora also needs to know you aren’t upset with her.”

  I leaned forward in my chair. “Upset with her? Why would I be upset with her?”

  His eyes flicked to my wrist.

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake. It’s not even sprained, you said it was fine.”

  “I know. But Setora has been trained to be the perfect slave. And right now, she’s a slave who hurt Master. One who knows she may have destroyed an important club alliance we’ve been working toward for weeks.”

  I ran my hand down my face and nodded. I supposed there was a chance the Brothers of Brimstone could change their minds after what they’d seen, but if I knew them as well as I hoped I did, it would take more than that to drive them off.