Bastard Stepbrother (Bad Boy Stepbrother Romance)

by Faye, Amy

  He took another tool from behind Cady, and then grabbed her right hand. With a quick movement, he sliced it open, letting blood pour to the ground. She screamed as the men turned to watch.

  “Marukka, knower of secrets, we command that you stop poisoning Cady! She is protected by The Mother. She is protected by The Priest! Leave her body now!”

  He handed the dagger to the man who had pinched her other nipple, and he sliced open her other hand. She again cried out, and felt a hand between her legs. Fingers were playing with her, and it felt good.

  “Men, we must have her orgasm. It is the only way to force the demon to let go of her soul.”

  The pain in her hands and the pleasure at her clitoris confused her. She wasn't sure how to react. She only knew that she wanted to be good. She wanted to be right again. And the way they were touching her felt so nice.

  As an orgasm rolled through her, the bearded man once again splashed the rose scented water on her. It burned, but only slightly. It was barely a tingle, not enough to make her cry out in pain.

  “Marukka! Leave her body! Stop poisoning her thoughts! Allow her to be pure again!”

  With another orgasm, Cady began to feel as if she was floating. Her whole body felt light and airy, and her head was buzzing. It felt the way the static on TV looked. She began to laugh, quietly at first, and then with a rapturous quality.

  She fell back to the bed, panting and still giggling. The bearded man smiled over her, then kissed her forehead. Something about his lips felt black and evil, but she ignored the thought. She felt too good to address it.

  “Gentlemen, we have our first successful exorcism.”

  “Can we be sure?” An apprehensive man asked, clutching his hand around his neck.

  The man with the beard put one last splash of the rose water on her forehead. “No more burning. And look, does she not look pure again? Is her laughter not angelic?”

  The men cheered, slapping their hands together and hugging. The man with the beard grinned, and he didn't wipe it away that time.

  “Come, let us go celebrate. You can each have two women tonight.”

  The men exited, leaving the bearded man behind. He hovered over Cady for a moment, then smiled. “You did well. You will stay here until you recover. I'll send someone in to unbind you, and then bring you food.”

  He kissed her forehead again, and that time she could not ignore it. There was something truly evil about the man with the beard, the son of The Priest.

  Dean

  The ski lodge would be fine without Dean for a few days. He knew that. It was fairly self-sufficient, and he paid his best maid an extra $10 an hour to run it all. That would give her kid a great birthday next month, and she was happy for the extra money.

  He wasn't happy about leaving.

  Dean had argued with Edwin, then begged him to find someone else. It wasn't like him to beg. He wasn't the kind of man that let someone else see him week, but when it came to Olivia, all bets were off.

  In the end, though, Dean couldn't deny that he owed his friend. He also couldn't deny that finding Edwin's kid was extremely important, for a lot of reasons. She wasn't just in danger because of who Edwin was. She was in danger because of who she was.

  So Dean had left his lodge, his pride and joy. He had stood for long minutes with his hand on the head of his stuffed bear, praying that he would make it back to be greeted by the beast again. Old men don't survive long in his line of work.

  The work wasn't that bad. Being a detective was as second nature as the actual hunting was. A small voice, deep down inside of him that he often ignored, reminded him that this was all he was good for. That he was truly happy to do something more than yell at the maids for not folding the sheets correctly, or the cooks for overcooking his most expensive steaks.

  He hated that voice. It was louder now than ever before, telling him that he loved this work. That if he died doing this work, he would die a hero.

  Dean didn't want to be a damn hero.

  When he had arrived, he ditched his beat up old pickup truck a mile down the road and walked the rest of the way to the compound. It truly wasn't much of a compound, more of a farm. There were a couple of big buildings, and one small one. The fields were being worked by men, even in the middle of winter. It wasn't a cold winter, but the ground was still too hard to be successfully worked.

  Still, they labored, and they rarely stopped for food or water. It was strange and unsettling to watch the men work for hours on end, sweating and grunting, without so much as a dinner break.

  There were a few men who stood around chatting with one another, never picking up a tool to work. They were the overseers of the operation, and their loud laughter carried even as far away as the road where Dean was watching. He noted the woods, too, and decided that would be a good place to camp when the sun fell.

  The women rarely went outside. When they did, they were accompanied by men. They were either pulled out of one of the long buildings, perhaps a cafeteria, or the smallest building. Dean wondered if the women all slept in one small building, and how many there might be.

  Though the internet had a few mentions of The Lore Keepers, they had mostly stayed out of people's sight. Considering who was behind the operation, he was sure there was something more to that than just staying out of the way and keeping their heads down. It had to be magic.

  And yet, he sensed no magic in those fields. No magic from the men.

  Dean watched as a man brought two women back to the small house. He had watched them leave with their hair up in tight buns and their skin pure, and now he saw that their hair was a mess, their faces flush, and their bodies covered in fresh bruises. There was no doubt what they had been subjected to. Anger made Dean's nose flare, but he snorted it away. He had to stay calm.

  “Olivia, what are you up to,” he whispered. His ex wife had been a feminist, for a time. Before she went off the deep end. He wondered why her followers would treat their women like sex toys, but he supposed that she was barely Olivia anymore. Who knew what she thought about other women anymore. Maybe she found them inconvenient, or boring, or evil.

  Before the woman had gone fucking nuts, his supposedly sexist views were a common cause for argument between them. She didn't like it when he pointed out that hormones dictated a lot more about the differences between men and women than she would admit.

  Then again, she never had a problem being treated like a whore in bed. He smiled at the memory, but it was a painful smile. Their sex life was great, but sex could never make up for that crazy, and those memories were poison to him. He had to stop thinking about it.

  He watched while the sun went down, writing a few words now and then in an old beat up journal that he carried with him on every big job. Aside from the male workers never tiring, there was no evidence of anything strange. It was a normal farm. He couldn't sense witchcraft, and vampires would never labor under the sun. Those were the only two things that could control people's minds, aside from the normal cult behavior. All he saw was just that: normal cult behavior.

  It was just a group of men looking for acceptance from their peers, and willing sex toys in the form of a harem. He had counted twelve women coming and going throughout the day, but he was sure there had to be more.

  Just as the sun was finally saying its final goodnight, he noted that one of the overseers was walking towards the small building. He had long hair and a beard, and had taken the company of many women throughout the day. The one behind him, though, Dean hadn't seen leave with him.

  She had bright red hair and bruises on her cheek and arms. Her hands were bandaged, and she treated them like fresh wounds, wincing as the man with the beard held them. She fit the description Edwin had given Dean, the description of Edwin's daughter.

  Aside from the pain of her hands, the girl looked happy. She smiled as she hugged the bearded man before going into the small building.

  “Strange,” Dean mused. He wondered if she really needed saving
, but she deserved to at least know her father was looking for her. There was no getting around doing this job.

  There was no way getting around dealing with Olivia. He prayed to the stars that she wouldn't show up, but he knew his own luck.

  His eyes were tired and the sun was gone, and Dean was ready to sleep. He ran across the field in the dark and into the woods, where he climbed a tree. He would sleep in the branches, where no animals would find him, and he would have a good spot to start watching the men again tomorrow.

  Chapter 4

  Cady

  Cady was in the room again. It looked similar to the room where she had been exorcised, but still different. Subtly different. The evil thing, the torturer, was pressing a hot poker into her foot when she noticed something new.

  At first she thought it was a strange, vile statue, but then it moved. It was a cone-shaped monster with awful appendages with horns and claws. Cady should have been terrified of the thing, but instead she was only curious. She felt that it was familiar to her, and that it meant her no harm.

  The being watched as she was tortured, never moving from the corner of the room. The torture was very different from the exorcism. There was no desire by the torturer to heal her. A drawn out death was his only desire.

  Something was coming. She knew it as well as she knew her own name. Something was coming, a horrible future where all would be tortured as she was being tortured. A horrible future with madness.

  The vision faded, and so did the being. Her sense of that horrible future left, too, and she was no longer sure of herself. Could such a bloody, horrifying future really come to pass? It seemed like it couldn't be real.

  When she woke up, she didn't startle. The dream no longer terrified her, though she could still feel the heat on her foot. When she was awake, her fear was dulled. She loved her people again, and saw nothing wrong with her surroundings. It was the dream that was wrong, evil, vile. Not the people that she so dearly loved.

  The being in the corner of the room was burned onto her mind, though. She wanted to know more about that, because she felt a kinship to it. She felt closer to that thing than she ever had to her own mother. Could it have been a metaphor for something? A being like that couldn't possibly exist in the real world.

  One thing she knew for sure was that she would find her answers in the library. The only problem was that the library would be hard to get into.

  The sun was already out. The other women were sewing or chatting with one another, as they did when they weren't cooking, cleaning, teaching the children, or being used by the men.

  Women of The Lore Keepers learn to read as children so that they might read the vast collection of cookbooks that The Priest collected. He had an eclectic taste and liked to try things from other cultures, so relying on memory was never good enough. If he didn't try a new dish every week, he was dissatisfied, and the women were punished.

  During their schooling, they read classic books like Alice in Wonderland, Aesop's Fables and the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as well as recipe books. As adults, their reading was limited to the recipes. Cady often wished she could read fiction again.

  The library, unfortunately, was in the same building that the men slept in. It was very likely she would be caught, but she had to know what that being was. She had to know why she felt like it was family.

  The morning was the only time she could possibly get into the library without being caught. The men were mostly working in the fields, if they weren't being treated to a woman. If she could sneak around the cafeteria and to the back of the men's dormitory, she could sneak into the library through a window.

  She stood and walked to the door, but Janine stopped her. “Where are you off to?”

  “I just have to use the bathroom. I'll be back in only a moment.”

  Janine smiled and nodded, but Cady could tell she was suspicious. She went out, and then did make her way to the bathroom in the cafeteria, just in case she was being watched. Waiting a few moments, she left the bathroom and circled around to the back of the building. There were no men on that side, so she ran to the building next to it.

  Once she was next to the men's dormitory, she crouched low and moved as fast as she could while remaining silent. She had to keep her head below the low windows. It was hard to crouch and keep quiet at the same time.

  The very last window on that wall belonged to the front of the library. It was always open during the day, because it otherwise became unbearably stuffy, even in winter. Peaking through the window, she saw that the room was empty, at least as far as she could see. Someone could be hiding in the back room or behind the shelves, but she doubted it. Reading was a night activity for the men, when they were tasked with doing their religious learning.

  If the men knew about demons like Marukka, they must know about the being she had seen in her dream. There had to be some book they were reading from that would tell Cady all she needed to know.

  The front of the library held most of the classic books they had read as kids, as well as a few bibles. The bibles were dusty and unused, which didn't surprise her. They had never read them as children, and something told Cady that they weren't worshiping the Christian God.

  She winced as she passed the bibles. Her mind still couldn't decide if she had really been possessed or not. Everything about the exorcism had felt so real, from the burning water to the secrets told to one of the men.

  Could that really have been faked? Her heart hurt when she thought that her people would lie to her. She saw the women as her sisters and the men as lovers. Being hurt by even one of them was worse than anything she could imagine.

  If she had truly been possessed, she was glad that they exorcised the demon from her. She didn't want to be evil. All Cady wanted was to be good, to lead a normal life, and to please The Goddess. Everything did feel better. She felt clearer than ever before. It was just the dream that confused her. Could she really believe in a dream?

  Stepping into the section where the older, stranger books were came with a strange sensation that worked its way up her spine and made her shiver. She no longer felt in control over her body, but then when she wanted to stop she did. It felt as though she were being guided, more than forced.

  She let the sensation push her forward, and allowed it to make her pull out a book. It was small, small enough to hide in her robe. She didn't even look at the cover. Instead, she flipped open the pages and chose one at random, when the sensation told her she should stop.

  There, on the page, as a drawing of the being she had seen. It was perfect, despite being the drawing of an amateur with a shaky hand. She read the passage below the drawing.

  The Great Race of Yith

  Omniscient beings capable of time travel and transferring minds with other beings. They have incredibly long life spans, and keep their knowledge in a grand library.

  The beings of a dying elder world, wise with the ultimate secrets, had looked ahead for a new world and species wherein they might have long life; and had sent their minds en masse into that future race best adapted to house them – the cone-shaped beings that peopled our earth a billion years ago.

  Thus the Great Race came to be, while the myriad minds sent backward were left to die in the horror of strange shapes. Later the race would again face death, yet would live through another forward migration of its best minds into the bodies of others who had a longer physical span ahead of them.

  The Great Race's members were immense rugose cones ten feet high, and with head and other organs attached to foot-thick, distensible limbs spreading from the apexes. They spoke by the clicking or scraping of huge paws or claws attached to the end of two of their four limbs, and walked by the expansion and contraction of a viscous layer attached to their vast, ten-foot bases.

  As for the marginal notes in dream-hieroglyphs and languages unknown to me...

  Cady stopped reading, though she was obsessed by the strange words and phrases. She heard voices from outside and rushed to
stuff the book into her robe. She carried it with her out of the window, where she crouched and waited.

  Once she made it to the cafeteria, she stood once again as no one would think it strange for a woman to be leaving the cafeteria. As she did so, she stopped to slow her breath and look around. There, she saw that a man was being dragged. A handsome, giant of a man that she had never seen before. The men dragging him were being ordered by The Priest's son.

  The strange, new man looked over at her, and when she looked into her eyes her stomach flipped. The moment was quickly lost, however, when The Priest's son punched him in the stomach, forcing him to the ground. She gasped, but turned her head. If she got involved, it would spell death for her. Without a doubt.

  Instead, she went back to the cabin and joined the other women. The air had become cold outside, and so her face was red and numb. Quickly taking the book, she hid it between the wall and her bed.

  She turned around and found that Janine was sitting on the bed with her. Her friend smiled. The bruise on her cheek had faded since she first noticed it. Cady smiled in return.

  “Not feeling well?”

  “No, I'm afraid not. But you know how it is when we try new food.”

  “Oh, I know! Yesterday's salmon was weird. I wonder what they put in it.” Janine laughed. Cady held back a sigh of relief that Janine hadn't noticed the book. She would only take it out at night, when no one was watching her.

  “Do you hate me?” Janine asked. She looked to the ground, her back stiff.

  Cady opened her mouth, then shook her head. “Of course I don't. You did what you thought was… you did what was right. You saved me.”

  Janine held out her hand, and Cady took it. To her horror, she felt the same evil feeling that The Priest's son had given her. A blackness, a deep blackness that threatened to suck her in. A void, like the sky on a moonless night. Cady shivered and looked away for a moment to collect herself.