Crown of Doom and Light

by Jayde Brooks

  She reminded him of a time before he was even born, when vamps were careless and brazen. They had been born in secret and had lived in secret for so long before they were discovered as a species. The sudden deaths of Ancients in their sleep sparked rumors of a plague that no one could cure or stop. The ancients were drained of blood; a phenomenon that no one could explain until one night a vamp was caught in the bedroom of a small child, sucking his sweet blood from his veins. His father, who had been sleeping in a corner of the room, awoke to find the vamp killing his son. From that night on, the fate of Van Dureel’s kind was set. They were considered parasites, a disease that was nearly wiped out, until the war broke out between the Demon and Khale’s forces.

  Mkombozi considered Van Dureel for several moments before speaking. “Send one of your humans to find the Reborn,” she commanded him. “Be sure that they do not tell her that I am coming for her,” she warned. “They are to find her and then report back to me her location. Is that understood?”

  “Yes,” he said, careful not to speak her name. She would see it as disrespectful, as him considering himself her equal. But he knew better than to deny her request. “I’ll send them right away.”

  Mkombozi stepped back and let him stand.

  “I am tired,” she said, wearily. “I need to sleep now.”

  Van Dureel cautiously walked past her and motioned for her to follow him. “This way.”

  He took her to his bedroom with its view facing the ocean and a bed big enough for his own private parties. She walked in and looked slightly impressed. “No one will disturb me?”

  “I’ll make sure of it.”

  She looked at him. He averted his gaze and backed out of the room, closing the door behind him.

  Back in the living room, the questions came. “Who is she? What is she?”

  Desperate and fearful humans were easy to bewitch. He had fed off each of the ones in this room, promising that one day he’d make them like him. They believed that shit because they’d seen it in movies, read it in books. They’d seen his power and craved it for their own.

  “She is of my world,” he told them.

  “Is she a queen? A goddess?”

  “Yes,” he said simply.

  And she’d landed in his lap. He didn’t know how it was possible, but if she was really Mkombozi back from the dead, then she was pissed and she wanted her shit back. Right now, he was a lowly parasite to her. But Van Dureel was nobody’s whipping boy. He needed time to put all this together. He’d always believed in the divine, in fate, even in magic. Whoever she was, she was saturated in the shit—magic. He had to be smart. He had to be alert. And he had to be patient.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Prophet couldn’t shake the image from his head of Eden standing like a statue in front of the house. Gashes on her face and body. Her eyes glazed over as the essence of her disappeared from behind them. Her arms at her sides, her fingers splayed. Her lips trembling as if she was speaking, but she wasn’t. The part that disturbed him the most, though, was the fact that he couldn’t reach her. He surmised quickly that the Omen had her, but he could only guess what they were doing to her in that spiritual realm where they’d taken her.

  During each of the bonds she’d made with the Omen, she’d been dragged into some other dimension. Prophet had always found her. He had been there for her when she needed him most, but not this time. Why? What stopped him? It was possible that the Omen had grown enough in strength to keep her from him. It was also possible that Eden had been the one to keep him away. But why would she do that? It was an eerie feeling that he couldn’t shake. The other feeling he couldn’t shake was that the Omen were starting to get tricky. They couldn’t turn her as easily as they had done Mkombozi. Some Ancients speculated it was because Eden, unlike Mkombozi, was not a blood relative to the Demon. Physically, her DNA was as far removed from his as possible. Since she wasn’t his actual daughter, the influence of the Omen over her wasn’t as potent or direct.

  Another theory, his own, was that despite her diminutive size, her weaker species, and her youth, Eden’s resolve was just stronger than Mkombozi’s. Call it spirit, willpower, defiance, whatever . . . the young human was impressive in her courage and conviction. Everyone had expected Eden to curl up in a ball and hide in a closet, but she’d come out swinging, facing her destiny head on despite the fact that it would cost her her life. As far as he was concerned, it came down to plain, good old-fashioned badassedness.

  As he circled in the sky above his home, something strange caught Prophet’s attention. Leading up to the front door was a set of Phantom remnants, glowing blue residue akin to footprints, faded but still perceptible. Guardians were the only living creatures who could see Phantoms and their trails when they were in their invisible form. Phantoms could be seen by most, if they chose to be, but even then, their forms were ghostly in appearance. Prophet landed quietly on the house’s back deck, willed his wings away, and crept inside.

  Despite what Phantoms had managed to convince humans to believe, they weren’t ghosts. They were Ancients who existed between dimensions, which is what gave them their haunting form. They weren’t fully in either, but belonged in both. They were as real as Prophet was—and if you were fast enough to get your hands on one of the bastards, you could kill them.

  The Guardian worked his way through the kitchen into the living room and down the corridor to the main staircase, finding the trail where it entered from the front door. He stopped, waited, and listened. Just as he was about to take the first step up the stairs, the temperature in the foyer suddenly dropped, becoming frigid enough that he could see his breath. Prophet’s gaze sharpened as he peered into every corner of the space surrounding him, looking for any sign of movement. The Phantom was close, and cold air meant that he was on the move.

  Prophet turned his eyes upward in time to see a twist of gray smoke moving so quickly down the stairs that if he had blinked, he’d have missed it. The smoke cloud came right at him with such speed and force that it knocked him off his feet. He landed hard on his back on the wooden floor. But his speed was legendary, and before the dust devil could get away he swiped one long, powerful arm through the air at it.

  “Ugh!” the Phantom grunted and stalled for a millisecond, but recovered quickly enough to disappear the same way that Prophet had come in.

  The Guardian looked down at his hand and saw that it was covered in that gray dust and still smoking. He might not have caught the sonofabitch, but he’d taken a serious chunk out of him.

  “What the hell were you doing in my house?” he muttered, getting to his feet and hurrying up the stairs, making a beeline for his bedroom.

  The door was open and he stopped abruptly when he saw Eden lying in bed, sleeping soundly. He marveled at her, this small, brown human female, just twenty-six, lying there sleeping as if she didn’t have a care in the world.

  Eden slowly opened her eyes and stared into his. A shy and hesitant smile curled her lips.

  “Hi,” she said sweetly.

  Hi? Fucking hi?

  “How long have you been asleep?” he asked, concerned.

  Eden looked thoughtful before responding with a shrug. “I don’t know. Why?”

  He’d been gone for several hours, and he had no idea how long that Phantom had been here.

  Sweet and pretty Eden. Right now she looked every minute of her twenty-six years and not at all like a creature powerful enough to cook him from the inside out with just a thought. She tucked her lower lip under her teeth and batted soft brown eyes at him.

  “Rest with me, Prophet,” she said, patting the space on the bed beside her. She visibly swallowed. “And hold me. I need that right now, more than anything.”

  Need was the magic word coming from her. It was like flipping a switch, tripping a circuit—he had no choice but to respond to her needs and to do everything in his power to fulfill them. Her need compelled him into that bed. He lay on his back, pulled her to his chest, and s
ighed, relieved that Eden was still herself and that she was still his.

  Holding her sweet little body against his, it wasn’t long before Prophet started to drift off into a much-needed rest of his own. As he did, Andromeda’s words echoed from memory. At the time, the crazy old Seer spoke nonsense. But more and more, he was beginning to feel like the crazy one. He had always hoped that somehow Eden could overcome this, beat this thing with these Omen and this so-called destiny she’d been born into.

  The game is more dangerous than any you’ve ever played, and you must find a way to balance what cannot be balanced. How dare the Seer call this thing a game? How dare she come at him with her riddles and double talk when the life of the woman he loved depended so much on him.

  You must solve a puzzle that is impossible to solve.

  There was no puzzle. Not one to be solved, anyway. There was just making the most of the time the time they had left. That was it.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  They walked in on the remains of a slaughter. Hundreds of bludgeoned, bloody bodies were strewn through the streets like garbage. Molly led the way, shaking her head in dismay and disgust. Sadness tore through her so deeply that she ached.

  “It’s a massacre, Jarrod,” she murmured, strangely compelled to look into each and every face that lay on the ground.

  A year ago, Molly would have gagged and thrown up at the sight of all this, but now blood and death were as commonplace as blades of grass. She and Jarrod had come here as soon as they’d gotten the news of what happened from one of their scouts, a woman named Robin. Several of Jarrod’s Were brethren came with them, along with half a dozen human fighters.

  “This wasn’t your typical raid,” someone behind her said.

  “They’re all men, or nearly all,” another noted.

  “I can’t believe that humans, even the gangs, would do something like this,” Molly said in disbelief.

  “I don’t think it was humans,” Jarrod said, finally.

  Molly turned to her mate and saw him kneel down beside one of the victims. He turned the body over, revealing a gaping wound on the side of the neck. Soon, others made the same discoveries.

  “Vamps,” Molly whispered.

  He stood up. “Looks like the rumors are true.”

  The Vampyre nation was on the rise. And these weren’t your Twilight-type vamps or even Anne Rice vamps. Molly had seen a few Ancients squash them like bugs. But that was before Khale had died. Since then, Ancients had gone off to do their own things, counting down the seconds until the devastation of the world coming by way of Eden. And vamps had come out of hiding from their nooks and crannies, having multiplied to the point of becoming an infestation. At least that’s what she’d heard. It wasn’t like they were swarming the streets or anything, but they definitely outnumbered the Ancients.

  “There’s no pretty bite on the neck like you see in the movies,” Jarrod had explained to her. “On Theia, vamps pretty much survived off eating lower creatures, the kind that crawled on their bellies, hid in holes in the ground, that sort of thing. They wouldn’t dare try to feed on an Ancient, but every now and then you’d hear stories of one sneaking into a house and stealing an infant or something. It may have happened, but if it did, it was rare.”

  “Somehow, they got humans to first fear them, and then to romanticize them. Humans’ love affair with monsters gave them a way to rise to higher status.” Jarrod continued. “They changed their bite to that sexy one you see them do on the big screen. At least, they changed it in public, inventing something more palatable than the reality.”

  When they fed for real, vamps didn’t suck blood through mere puncture wounds. They feasted hungrily on a victim’s neck, ripping away the jugular and tearing at the flesh like animals, gulping down buckets of blood until their bellies nearly burst.

  “They took my mom.” A kid, a boy of about ten came out from hiding in one of the sheds. He was crying. “They—they took my mom and my sister.”

  The boy was shaking, flushed, his eyes wide and pupils dilated.

  “Who?” Runyon knelt down on one knee and asked.

  The boy swallowed and tried desperately to calm himself. “They were—They had dark hair. All of them. They had the same kind of hair, long and black. I heard them say a name,” he sobbed. “I remembered it.”

  “What name?” Molly asked standing behind Runyon.

  “Van Dureel,” the boy said. “I remembered it.”

  It wasn’t the first time they’d heard the name. And it was starting to sound like this Van Dureel dude was the ringleader of all these raids.

  “They started taking the women and killing the men. But I hid. I hid and they couldn’t find me.”

  Trafficking had started not long after the sanctuaries started closing their gates to anyone who had nothing of value to offer their infrastructure. They kidnapped women, girls, and children. It began when adults started trading people in exchange for admission into the sanctuaries. Husbands traded wives, and brothers traded sisters. The shit was sick.

  “Fuck,” Molly muttered, turning away from the boy.

  They didn’t just traffic these people to sanctuaries. They’d trade them to whomever they could for whatever they could, as long as it held value for them. At least, that’s what the human gangs usually did. Vamps, though, weren’t human. They could traffic women and children, they could enslave them for their own needs, or they could feed off of them.

  Molly pulled Jarrod aside and asked a question she knew she’d regret. “Do you think that vamps could mate with humans? Could they make babies?”

  Jarrod frowned. “Why would you ask something like that?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, sorrowfully. “I just don’t think they’d be all that interested in doing trades with sanctuaries. I don’t—why only take females unless they . . .”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know, Red,” he sighed. “Shit, stranger things have happened, like humans mating with Weres.”

  She appreciated him for trying to lighten the mood and to make a joke, but at the moment, nothing was funny.

  They packed up the little boy, whose name was Bruce, and started on the six-hour drive back to the ranch. Jarrod found a human family he’d become close to who’d been living on his property for a few months and left Bruce with them. Molly sat in the porch swing, trying not to give in to that queasy feeling of hopelessness that was always hovering right above her head. A few minutes later, Jarrod came out with two beers and handed one to her.

  Molly looked at her mate, her boo, her bae, appreciating just how handsome he truly was. Jarrod had long, golden brown waves of hair that he usually wore up in a ponytail or a sexy-ass man bun. His rugged features suited that cowboy persona he had, with his scruff of a beard, thick brows, and the most beautiful golden amber irises she’d ever seen. For all of his four thousand years of living, Jarrod could’ve passed for a man in his thirties. In his human form, he stood about six feet tall, give or take an inch, with thick muscles and perpetually tanned skin, even in the winter. In Were form, Jarrod grew to eight feet in height. He called himself a shifter, telling Molly that most ancients were some form of shifter.

  He did get hairier when he shifted. He also got big teeth, with elongated canines that were especially terrifying. He got claws. He stood upright though, except when he ran. Then he and his kind dropped to all fours and ran like—well, wolves.

  “You hungry?” he asked.

  She shook her head and said what she was thinking. “What good does it do to fight if all you’re going to do is lose?”

  “Don’t talk like that, sugarplum,” he replied. “You fight because it’s who you are and it’s what you believe in.”

  “But am I the only one?”

  She hadn’t used to be. Molly was once a part of a resistance, a movement consisting of hundreds, even thousands like her who believed that they could save the human race and risked their lives to do it. But in the last few months, since the Brood had bee
n destroyed, some things had gotten better; sanctuaries had begun to open up, albeit it reluctantly, allowing more humans in than they had before the Brood had been killed. But they were still too stingy to completely take down those walls. People had started to rebuild homes and businesses outside of those compounds. But other things had just seemed to go from bad to worse.

  “I’m here. Quite a few of us are still in this fight with you, Red, including Eden and that ugly-ass boyfriend of hers.”

  That made her smile. Prophet was most definitely not ugly. But she’d never dare say that to Jarrod.

  “They try to be,” she said, reflectively. “But let’s face it, Jarrod. They’re got a whole other battle to fight that’s so far removed from this one, it’s not even a thing.”

  Molly went out of her way not to talk about Eden and her dilemma, if that’s what you could call it. The woman was fighting for her soul. Soul first. Society second. Priorities. And Prophet, her Guardian, was standing diligently by her side, ready to ride or die with her regardless of whether or not she blew up the galaxy.

  “So what do you want to do?” he asked. “Give up? Hang out here with me, make love all day and night until the world ends?” he asked with a smirk.

  “Why not?” She half smiled. “I could think of worse ways to wait for Armageddon.”

  “You wouldn’t hear me complaining. You know my stance on the whole keeping you barefoot and chained to me for the rest of our lives thing.”

  “It wasn’t so long ago that you used to pat me on the head, call me kiddo, and dismiss me like I was your little brother so that you could get it on with Isis,” she reminded him. “Now all of a sudden you want me to be your sex slave.”

  He leaned close to her. “All of a sudden, I understand the error of my past and that I had no business treating you like my little brother when hiding underneath all that leather and denim was the most perfect little body I’ve laid eyes on. Shame on me!”