BloodMarked (The Fraktioneers Book 1)

by Lu J Whitley

  Because what she was seeing couldn’t possibly be real. The stern set of his sharp chin. The straight nose. Full lips. Slim brows. Each feature that came into focus seemed manufactured by her imagination. He drummed his fingers lightly on the wine-colored upholstery, an impatient habit he had. She remembered it well. “Sternchen,” he said by way of greeting, the word sending a shudder down the length of her spine.

  She shook her head. “Don’t call me that.” Only her father called her that.

  He rose gracefully to his full height, and Greta took a few steps back to give him a wide berth. Eighteen years had gone by. Eighteen long, hard years, and he looked like he hadn’t aged a day. “Very well,” he said smoothly, running one hand down the length of his blazer and slipping it into the pocket of his slacks.

  She chuffed with a bravado she didn’t feel, “You’re a close facsimile, I’ll give you that.”

  He tutted his tongue against the roof of his mouth. Another habit she remembered. The sound he’d used when she’d disappointed him… Which was often. “Greta, what makes you think I am not real?” She could still hear traces of his accent, the German making the consonants rougher than necessary.

  She planted her feet wide and pushed her fists against her waist. “How about, if you were real, you’d be pushing sixty by now?”

  “Is my age really so bothersome, hmm,” he mused. “Does it not then feel odd that your friend, Jaromir, is centuries old, yet he looks little older than you?”

  Greta tried to come up with a snarky comment for that but got nowhere. “Okay, how about the fact that you’re DEAD?!”

  He took a step toward her, but when she flinched, he angled to the side and walked past her instead. “How do you know this?” With his chin pinched between his forefinger and thumb, he looked as if he was deep in thought. “Did you see me die? Or did your mother and Jaromir tell you I had died?”

  Come to think of it, Jami had never really said anything on the subject. He’d told her the story of that night, but had he used the word ‘dead?’ Had her mother ever said it? She ran back through her memory, trying to find any mention of her father being deceased. She came across words like ‘gone’ and ‘taken.’ ‘Missing.’ Her mother had never wanted to talk about it. There was never a funeral. No grave. Nothing.

  The contents of her stomach curdled. She bent forward at the waist, feeling the sudden urge to vomit. They’d known. Both of them. The whole time.

  ★Chapter 12

  Greta just stared, a lump in her throat the size of Texas. A man who had to be her father stood before her - in real life. He was silent and pensive as he looked down at her, scratching his long fingers back and forth across his shadowed jaw.

  All this time, he’d been alive.

  “Why didn’t you come find me?” She hadn’t meant to ask the question out loud, but now that it was out there - hanging between them - she really wanted the answer. She needed the answer. She hadn’t known he was alive, but he’d known for eighteen years that she was somewhere in the world, alive and missing him.

  He glanced at her for a moment, before looking away. His head tottered from side to side, as if he was weighing his answer carefully. “Fraktion hid you well,” he said simply, as if those four words were all she needed to hear to make up for his absence.

  “Hid me well?” Her voice shrieked up an octave. “So well that it took all these years to find me? Even with your whole damn army out looking for me?”

  “Think about it, Sternchen…”

  “I said,” she growled, her teeth bared for emphasis, “don’t call me that.”

  He put his hands up, palms out. Diamond cufflinks winked at his wrists as he signaled his surrender. “Sorry,” he breathed. His eyes closed, and his mouth crinkled down at the corners in a grimace. “Greta. Think about it. Fraktion, they are masters at making people disappear. It is what they do.” His slim fingers lifted to his temples, massaging near his hairline as if she was giving him a motherfucking migraine.

  “Uaaargh,” she squealed in frustration. To be honest, she had no clue what Fraktion was. Or what it did. Jami had mentioned the word once. Once! But he’d never gotten around to telling her a goddamn thing. She’d be remedying that as soon as he came to get her out of here. “And why do you think they hid me from you?” She gestured to the castle around her, moving her hands in a grand sweeping circle. “Maybe because you were shacking up with those disgusting skin walkers, hmm?” She heard a chorus of hissing voices come to life around her. Guards. She didn’t know how many, but at least now she knew where they were.

  “The Changelings,” he enunciated carefully as his eyelids slipped open, “are a necessary evil.” Pale gray irises lit with a hint of annoyance.

  “Necessary,” she shrilled, her hands curling into claws and fisting in the stiff brocade of her skirt. “It was necessary to try to kill me? And how about Mama? Was it necessary to kill her?” Her voice broke on those final words, but she didn’t care.

  “Your mother’s death was… unfortunate.”

  “Unfortunate?!” Greta took a leaping step forward and stuck her finger right up in the man’s pompous grill. She was repeating him like a fucking parrot, but his words snapped something inside her, setting a swirling ball of hate and rage free. “You LET them kill my mother! Your WIFE!” Her tone rose so high she was surprised it didn’t drop off the end of the audible spectrum. “What kind of monster does that and then says it’s ‘unfortunate?’”

  “Yes,” he breathed on a rough exhale. He sounded tired. “I did exactly what I had to do to get you here.” One of his hands shot back through his ebony hair, making him look a little unkempt. A little sad. Almost like her Papa. “I regret what happened to your mother. She was a good woman. But in the grand design, she was not important. You are important.”

  “Why,” she gritted, sucking back a sob. She would not give him the satisfaction of watching her break down. Not today. Not ever. “You’re just going to kill me now to make it safe for your minions to wander the Earth without the threat of death messing up all their henchmen plans.”

  He shook his head and laughed, but there was no humor in the sound. “You really have no idea do you?”

  Leaning forward, he stepped into her personal space, one slim hand shooting out and encircling her left arm from the top of her thumb to halfway up her forearm. Greta tried to take a step backward, but he held her to the spot. He was so strong for such a wiry bastard. She tried to slap his hand away, but only succeeded in making his hold tighter. The pressure threatened to crush the fragile bones in her wrist. He brought up his other arm and started pushing back her sleeve. With her free hand, Greta reached for her waistband, seeking the concealed brooch pin.

  He did that aggravated tut with his tongue again. “Greta, don’t be silly. That little pin will do you no good here.” She stilled. How could he possibly know? She glanced down at her waist. The silver serpent was completely covered by luxurious folds of fabric. Not even Mady had known it was there. “Ah,” he chuckled as he slid her sleeve past her elbow. “So you are on a first name basis with the help, are you?” Without lifting his gaze to her shocked face, he stroked one bony finger across the exposed star-shaped mark that colored her skin. He whispered a word in a language she didn’t know. But it felt soft, familiar, as it slipped past his lips. Immediately, the mark on her skin flared to life, sending a wave of warmth coursing through her veins. Her eyes rolled back in her skull, and she shuddered. It felt as if something inside her was stretching and yawning to life, her skin struggling to hold it in. “You are not their death,” her father whispered as visions began to take shape in her mind, like someone had pulled back the velvet curtain at a movie theater. If she had been able to, she would have closed her eyes and tried to block out the horrific images playing across that screen. “You are their salvation.”

  She was on what looked like a battlefield. Broken bodies lay at her feet. Fixed eyes staring at the sky. Mouths stretched in silent screams. Some l
ooked deflated, as if their bones had been pulled out through their eye sockets, leaving them hollow. Across the bloody field, she saw lines of black shapes. Men and woman cut a swath of destruction, leaving piles of corpses in their wake. Each one was connected by a map of red branching streams. They flowed from her skin, like veins and arteries pumping her life blood. She could feel each racing heart as if it was her own.

  She choked back a sob, trying to retreat. Pulling in on herself, she sat on the blood-soaked earth between the scattered corpses. She blanked everything around her, seeking out the quiet place inside her head where she couldn’t hear the tapping beaks of the carrion birds that were already preying on the carcasses around her. She found the waiting whiteness and wrapped her arms around it, holding on tight. It shot through her, filling her from the soles of her feet to the tips of her hair.

  I am here, a voice fluttered through her skull, I will protect you.

  Greta’s throat stretched with syllables, those words of power she didn’t know, but she spread her lips and let them flow free. Waves of brilliant light coalesced around her, building like tides. Her whole body vibrated with the force until she couldn’t hold it in any longer. Like an atom bomb, she exploded outward. Her eyes popping open as the last ray of power escaped through her skin.

  Her gaze skipped around the room, trying not to let the nightmarish battlefield follow her back to reality. The dining room came back into view, but her father wasn’t standing in front of her anymore. Instead, she was surrounded by a circle of guards, all covered from head to toe in riot gear. Their eyes were the only thing visible, and they told her all she needed to know. Yellow orbs stark against their black masks, their pupils dilated. Every single one of them looked like he was about piss his pants from sheer terror.

  She couldn’t help it, a piercing scream burst from her throat. This was it, the point when she finally snapped. Shit just could not get any worse. A few of the guards took a wobbling step backward. Then, over the sound of her own ragged shriek, she heard the sound of male laughter, cutting through the tension in the room. Her father was lying on his back, flattened to the floor, and his chest was rising and falling with hiccuping breaths. He was still there. Still alive. After that display, she wasn’t sure whether she was glad of the fact or not.

  He pulled himself up to a sitting position, not bothering to smooth the wrinkles from his jacket or shake the dust off his black trousers. His gray eyes lit with an internal fire. “You are more powerful than I had imagined,” he said nonchalantly, as if he hadn’t just sent her through hell and back. Shaking his head, he rose lithely from the floor. He took a step toward her and flicked two fingers at the line of guards to her right. “Take her back to her room.”

  “What,” she cried, struggling against their outstretched arms. Grasping hands clamped onto her shoulders and hips.

  He turned away, without as much as a glance back in her direction. “And bring me that maid.”

  Greta’s heart leaped into her throat. “No,” she wailed, “You leave her alone.”

  He didn’t respond. She kicked out and caught one of her captors in the knee, sending him crumpling toward the floor. “If you touch her, you bastard…” A strong hand closed over her lips, cutting her off. She stretched her neck out, trying to get free, but it was no use. Her father slipped through a servant’s entrance at the other end of the hall. Leaving her. Again.

  ★ ★ ★

  Stein whistled through his front teeth, and Jami banged him across the back with his elbow. “Shh,” he hissed without bothering to drop the binoculars from his face.

  “How the hell are we gonna get in there,” the troll whispered, his breath puffing out in condensing clouds. “That place is like Fort Knox.”

  “Worse.” Jami stuffed the binoculars into his satchel and readjusted it over his shoulder. He’d seen enough.

  Ragnarsborg was meant to be a fortress. His father had designed it that way, sparing no expense to keep the marauding neighboring tribes away. It was set back against the side of a high craggy cliff. The stone had been pulled out by hand, and each granite square was carefully placed. It was a marvel of engineering for the time period, one that had struck fear into the hearts of Ragnar’s enemies and inspired fealty among his people.

  Now, it was just a big pain in Jami’s ass.

  He knew that castle like the back of his hand. Knew every grand hall and every snaking passageway. So, it hadn’t escaped his notice that they’d brought Greta here for a reason. He knew it was a trap, and Brandt knew he would come regardless. He was sorely mistaken though, if he thought Jami would come into this fight at a disadvantage. What he knew, and that bastard didn’t, was that his father had been a deviously smart man. In the careful planning of his family seat, Ragnar had put in a failsafe - a rear entrance, invisible from the outside that could be used to safely evacuate the women and children if the castle ever fell into enemy hands. Only Jami, his mother, and Ragnar himself knew its exact location, after the king had neatly disposed of any planners and builders who had seen the thick, iron-clad door.

  He bared his teeth in a mirthless smile and tapped Stein on the shoulder, silently signaling him to follow. None of the guards had been wearing night vision goggles, which was in their favor. Takers could see well at night, but not well enough to see the two hulking shapes deftly moving over the icy rocks at the base of the castle’s outer wall.

  He led Stein to the rough cliff face that made up the eastern wall of the fortress, crawling and crouching as he made his way over the piles of scrabble left by nearly a millennium's worth of rock slides. He knew, tucked away there in a man-made cave, he would find what he was looking for. Rising quietly to the balls of his feet, Jami ran his hands along the wall, smoothing them over the stone until his fingers found the edge of the cave entrance. Shit. He let out a string of audible curses, and Stein brained him with a fist to the back of the skull to get him to shut up.

  “What the fuck,” the troll hissed, but Jami just shook his head and let out a sigh.

  There was one small problem. Sometime in the past eight-hundred years, part of the cliff had fallen in, and the mouth of the cave was obstructed by a serious pile of boulders. Jami dropped down into a crouch and ran his hands back through the locks of hair that had twisted free of his ponytail, and he inwardly cursed the shortened strands. Stein squatted behind him waiting for orders or an explanation or for Jami to get his shit together. He took a deep, steadying breath and forced his brain to think.

  The rubble wasn’t something he and Stein couldn’t handle, given enough time. But as it stood, they now had just three hours to get into the castle, get Greta, and get back to the plane they’d landed some twenty miles away, before the sunrise burnt him to a crisp and turned Stein into a useless hunk of stone for the duration of the day. No sweat. He chuffed under his breath and stood back up. Seeing no other course of action, he grabbed the first boulder and moved it silently to the side.

  “Seriously,” Stein grunted as he shrugged out of his trench coat and laid it gently on the snow covered ground. His tattoo covered biceps flexed as he came up beside Jami. Without preamble, he grabbed a stone that probably weighed half a ton and hefted it out of the way with little more than a sharp exhale of breath. Sometimes, it was really nice to have a troll around.

  Luckily, the blockage wasn’t as bad as Jami had previously thought, and it only took about thirty minutes to make a hole big enough for both of them to shimmy through. It would have been ten if Stein had agreed to let him continue alone, but the troll wasn’t having it. And Jami didn’t mind having back-up.

  The inside of the cave was stale and dusty. The must of stagnant centuries clung to the air and assaulted Jami’s sinuses as he slid through the opening, following his friend’s swishing tail down into the darkness. “Gah! Balls,” Stein gritted as he stood and cracked his thick skull against the low ceiling.

  “Watch out for that,” Jami chuckled. There was barely enough room for him to stand upri
ght. Poor Stein was going to have to limbo all the way to the other end.

  “Thanks.” The troll raised one broad hand to rub at the vicious looking knot that was growing out of his forehead. “How far?” Jami turned to face the other man, and Stein gave him a sideways glance of confusion. He probably would have shrugged if he’d have had the room to flex his wide shoulders.

  “It’s not far,” Jami explained, “but I need to take care of something first.” He dropped down into a crouch and lowered one knee to the ground as he pulled his satchel over his head.

  Stein bent at the waist slightly and put out a staying hand. “I know you love me and all, but I don’t think marriage is really an option right now. Thanks for asking though.”

  Jami raised his gaze and cocked an eyebrow at the troll, who was flashing him a shit-eating grin. “Can you be serious for a minute?”

  “Me, be serious?” Stein clasped a hand to his heart and looked affronted. “You’re the one proposing.”

  “Stein.”

  “What? To be honest, I think it’s really unprofessional of you. Does this constitute sexual harassment? I might have to take it up with Deacon.” Jami just shook his head and let it go. Stein could go on like this for hours.

  “I need you to keep watch for a minute.”

  Suddenly, the troll was all business. “What’s the plan?”

  “Well, we can’t go in there blind. We can take out a lot of them between the two of us, but we have no way of knowing how many Takers Brandt’s got stockpiled in that place.”