BloodMarked (The Fraktioneers Book 1)

by Lu J Whitley

  He thought he heard the beast laughing softly inside his head. Perhaps it was out loud. Was he so far gone he couldn’t tell? Want, the beast hissed, that inexorable pull, urging him southward. To her.

  Jami scooted backward, inching toward the safety of the shadows. “No. I won’t,” he grunted, sinking his ass down into a hollow in the stone. The beast chuckled again, sensing the lie.

  ★ ★ ★

  The dust puffed lightly around Greta’s boots as she hopped down out of the aircraft, the unforgiving concrete sending a shock of pain up through her heels. But she didn’t care. That pain was nothing. She felt like someone had scooped out her insides with a rusty spoon, leaving her empty and aching.

  At least they’d turned on the damn lights this time, so she wasn’t dependent on Stein to lead her through the dark hangar. They’d been giving each other the silent treatment ever since he’d told the pilot to turn the plane around, and they’d headed back to HQ, no closer to getting Jami back. “Jaromir is alive,” he’d told her. “He isn’t being held captive,” he’d said. “If he doesn’t want to be found, we won’t find him.” He’d been so fucking rational. Why was he so fucking rational? She needed crazy. Irrational. She needed someone to scour the entire continent for any sign of Jami, like he’d be doing for her if the situation was reversed. But no. She managed to be the only woman in the world who found herself in the company of a rational imaginary creature. Go figure.

  “Greta,” Stein grunted as he followed her out of the plane, his heavy boots making not even a whisper of a sound. Someday, when she was done being livid with him, she needed to make him teach her that trick. But she was done talking. She was done listening. They’d been so close. Just a few more minutes, and they’d have been on the ground. The blood stained ground. She shook her head, trying to clear the images of those hollow, lifeless bodies. All that dark oozing blood. That wasn’t Jami, she told herself for the thousandth time, that was the beast. Maybe she’d believe it at a thousand and one. “Greta!”

  “Stein,” she mocked in her best petulant teenager voice, which was a little too accurate for her liking. If she wasn’t too busy beating a fast retreat, she probably would’ve crossed her arms and stomped her foot, just for continuity’s sake. As it was, she power-walked like a mad woman, trying to put as much distance between her and the troll as possible. Even though she had no idea where she was going. Where could she go? Now that Jami was gone, she’d lost everything. Her protector. Her place. She wouldn’t stay at Fraktion, even if she had been welcome. Did she even have a room? She was so not bunking with Stein. A single tear found its way free of her eye before she could suck it back. She reached up and pushed it away. She had no time for tears; she had a man to find.

  Stein huffed in frustration, giving away his position, which happened to be squarely on her heels. “Would you just wait a fucking minute?”

  She wheeled on him, putting a finger in his face… Sternum… Whatever. She had to crane her neck back and peer up at him, which she imagined was about as threatening as a mouse trying to give a tom cat a good talking to. “No, you wait a fucking minute.” He stopped so suddenly that his tail kept the momentum, lashing at her shins. “I’m tired. I’m starving. And I’m… I’m…” Hold it together, Greta. But the sob broke through.

  The big troll whispered to her in his hypnotic soothing voice, “It’s okay.”

  She reeled back as if she’d been slapped. “It’s not fucking okay!” Tears tracked down her cheeks, hot and salty as they streaked over her lips, but she didn’t bother to wipe them away. Who cares? “It’s not okay until he’s back.” She turned to walk away, but Stein reached out a hand toward her shoulder to stay her dramatic exit. She shrugged it off. She didn’t want to be touched. Well, she did. What she wanted more than anything in the whole goddamn universe was a pair of strong arms wrapped around her. To be nestled in snug and tight and safe. Unfortunately, those arms weren’t Stein’s. “Don’t t… touch me,” she said around a racking sob.

  “Greta,” he cooed as he reached out that big hand again.

  “I said,” she screamed, the sound so shrill she thought she heard one of the painted window panes crack, “don’t touch me!”

  He threw his hands up in a gesture of surrender. “Yeah,” he crooned softly, “Okay.” He was using that mesmerizing quality in his voice again. The one that said, ‘calm down’ and ‘back off’ and a hundred other platitudes she felt whispering against her mind like a physical caress. But she didn’t want to calm down. And she sure as hell wasn’t going to back off.

  “Stop doing that,” she shouted, putting her hands over her ears to block out the sound.

  “Stop doing what, Greta?”

  “I said, stop!” She threw her palms out toward him, intending to push him back or at the very least give him a bad tummy ache. But the motion was sluggish, like her mind was running out of batteries. Stein’s wide-eyed expression registered, and she glanced down. Just in time to see slow motion sparks of white light arc from her fingertips to the big guy’s chest, like static from a Tesla coil.

  Time sped up.

  Slowed down.

  Sped up again, like someone with their finger on a cosmic fast forward button. One second, Stein was standing in front of her, yelling. Then he was floating slowly through the air, as if suspended in liquid.

  Cool, she thought to herself, right before her brain short circuited, and the world went black.

  ★ ★ ★

  Jami’s eyes flashed open in the darkness. White hot pain shot through his body, like he was being jolted with electricity. He surged to his feet, looking for an adversary. He looked up and down the length of the narrow cave while running his palms ran over his exposed chest, checking for damage. But he was alone. Uninjured. He shook the remnants of sleep from his cloudy mind. “What the hell?” His hot breath plumed out into the frigid air. The temperature must have dropped nearly twenty degrees, and he shivered, even though he was immune to the cold.

  He moved toward the mouth of the cave and hazarded a look at the sky. After nightfall. How long had he slept? He rose from a crouch and stretched out his aching muscles, testing them for residual injury. No pain. No tenderness. All his remaining wounds had healed while he’d dozed the day away.

  Hurt. The beast inside his mind mewled like a frightened animal.

  “No,” Jami answered reflexively. He wasn’t hurt.

  Hurt, the thing said again, more insistently, hurt!

  “What the hell? I’m fine.” He was. He felt like he’d been flayed alive and put back together with a few parts missing, but other than that, nothing was...

  Hurt!

  The knowledge dawned on him like a hot poker burning through his chest. “Gods,” he breathed. There was only one other being on this planet that the beast cared about. “Greta!” She was hurt. “How?” His feet wandered in the direction his mind was taking them. He’d left her with Stein. She should be safe. He wouldn’t have left her if he’d thought she wouldn’t be safe. “How,” he repeated, when the beast didn’t answer.

  Hurt, was all he received in return.

  He burst from the cave like a lion being freed from a cage. “Uuaaaargh!” A roosting owl took flight at the sound of his roar. Other animals scurried underground. He could hear their frantic hearts beating. The moon was high in the sky. The South Star lit like a beacon, signaling the direction his heart was longing to travel, but he knew he couldn’t.

  There was no way Brandt could have found her, he reasoned to himself. No way had her father located Fraktion’s underground compound. If he had, there would’ve been no reason to torture Jami to try and gain the information.

  “No,” he cried, as the pain swept through him a second time. Black dots swirled behind his eyelids, and he fell, dropping to his knees in the snow. He felt as if his body was being pulled apart from the inside out. Felt a white hot hand rending through skin and muscle. Felt his throat torn raw by the scream that echoed out into the silent fores
t around him. And then he felt... Nothing. “Greta,” he rasped, the sound clawing free.

  Gone, the beast whispered, Gone.

  ★Epilogue

  “Papa,” she whispered, the light seeming to make the noise waver and ricochet off the walls.

  “You’ve done well.” His deep voice rumbled with his elusive approval, and she felt her cheeks ache with a smile. “Soon we will be together again, Sternchen.”

  She let out a long sigh, her phantom hand rubbing over her translucent breastbone. It was as if her body lacked substance, was made of little more than light and emotion. “Yes, Papa.”

  “Sleep now,” he crooned, “You will need your strength for what is to come.”

  She felt him fading from her mind like a fleeting caress. “No, Papa! Don’t go! Don’t leave me again!”

  “Shh. Soon.”

  She tried to move. Tried to reach out to him, but it was as if her arms had been filled with lead. “Papa!”

  Too late. He was gone. She fought back the tears that clung to the edges of her eyelashes, threatening to fall. I must be strong. I’ll show Papa how strong I can be.

  Greta railed against the blissful calm of sleep pushing against the corners of her consciousness. She’d had enough of sleep. Of inaction. She was ready to stand and fight. Willing and able to make the imposters pay for their treachery. “Soon,” she repeated her father’s promise aloud, knowing he would have little trouble finding her now. The connection between them was so strong. She didn’t know how she’d never felt it. How he hadn’t found her long before now. “Soon we’ll be together again.” The light winked out in fractured spider webs of blackness, a deep sleep taking hold and pulling her under.

  ★ ★ ★

  A loud footfall brought Jami out of the trance like funk he’d spent most of the day cultivating. He stopped and listened to the surrounding woods. The snap of a scattered twig. Leaves rustling in the wind. “What do you want,” he growled, the scent of human fear burning a path through his sinuses.

  “I… I…”

  “Spit it out! I don’t have all day!” He did really. He had all the time in the world now that he’d failed so spectacularly. Greta was gone. He had no hope of eradicating the Taker plague. If it weren’t for the beast in his head and its annoyingly strong sense of self-preservation, he’d have walked out into the daylight and not looked back.

  “He knows where she is.” The shaking voice didn’t need to elaborate on who ‘He’ was. Jami had recognized the scent of the teenager almost immediately. Little Gus. Who Brandt had sent to clean him up back when he was trapped in Ragnarsborg. Who’d been following him at a reasonable distance for the past week and a half.

  “Did he send you?” It was a ridiculous question. Brandt wasn’t silly enough to send a fifteen year old after him. But a lie, under the circumstances, would cost the boy dearly.

  “N… No. I escaped.” The thin little thing was shaking so hard, Jami could almost hear the tremors. “I had to warn you.”

  “Consider me warned.”

  “Don’t you care? He’s going after her!”

  He chuffed under his breath. “It doesn’t matter much now. She’s…” He couldn’t finish the sentence. Not just because his tongue refused to obey the command, but because something inside him still resisted. She couldn’t be gone. He wouldn’t believe it until he saw it with his own eyes. Which was why he was still out here, on his own. Instead of going back to HQ.

  “Dead?” The boy’s throat constricted around the word, and Jami’s heart followed.

  “Get lost, kid.”

  A shadow crested the horizon, blocking out the last rays of sunlight filtering through the mouth of his cave. Gus’s thin silhouette propped its fists on its waist. “She’s not.”

  “Not what?”

  “Dead. She’s not dead.”

  Jami sat up taller against the rough stone wall. “How the fuck do you know?”

  “Why would he go after a dead girl?” The silhouette shrugged in time with the question.

  Why would he go after a dead girl? Jami gave the only reason he could think of. “Because she’s his daughter.”

  Gus’s rasped inhale gave Jami the answer to a lot of questions that had been swirling around inside his head. “That means she’s my…”

  “Sister,” Jami supplied. “Exactly.”

  “He didn’t come after me.” Gus took a step into the cave and plopped down on a worn stalagmite, his head falling into his hands. “He never came after me.”

  “You’re not Wyrd.”

  Gus raised his head, a humorless smile stretched across his boyish face. “Hiti,” he breathed, and a small orb of flame burst from his outstretched palm.

  Jami reared backward, clunking his head harshly on the cave wall. “Shit!”

  The boy let out a short chuckle, but the humor never reached his eyes. “Why would he go after a dead girl,” he repeated.

  Jami found himself nodding, a throbbing stab of hope darting through his chest. “Tell me everything.”

  Thanks so much for reading! I hope you enjoyed yourself. Stay tuned for more from The Fraktioneer universe in

  BloodStone

  When a favor’s called in, what’s a troll to do?

  Spring 2016

  About the Author

  ★Lu J Whitley★

  Once upon a time, in a land far away, a girl was born who was just a little odd around the edges. One thing led to another, and now you're reading her stories.

  Lu is a full-time writer and self-professed oddball who lives a quiet life in the mid-Midwest with her geeky, roboticist husband and four-legged children.

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