by Skye Malone
Arise
Book Four of the Awakened Fate series
Copyright 2015 by Skye Malone
Published by Wildflower Isle | 1567 Highlands Drive NE, Suite 110-404, Issaquah, WA 98029
www.wildflowerisle.com
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this text and any portions thereof in any manner whatsoever.
This book is a work of fiction. All characters, names, places and incidents appearing in this work are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
ISBN: 1-940617-16-2
ISBN-13: 978-1-940617-16-9
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014906856
Cover design by Karri Klawiter
www.artbykarri.com
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Other titles by Skye Malone
The Touch Me series
The Awakened Fate series
The Children and the Blood trilogy (published under the name Megan Joel Peterson)
Pronunciation Guide
Aveluria (av-eh-LUR-ee-uh)
Dehaian (deh-HYE-an)
Driecara (dree-eh-CAR-uh)
Greliaran (greh-lee-AR-an)
Ina (EE-na)
Inasaria (ee-na-SAH-ree-uh)
Jirral (jur-AHL)
Lycera (ly-SER-uh)
Neiphiandine (ney-fee-AN-deen)
Niall (nee-AHL)
Nialloran (nee-ah-LOR-en)
Nyciena (ny-SEE-en-uh)
Ociras (oh-SHE-rahs)
Prijoran (prih-JOR-an)
Renekialen (ren-eh-kee-AHL-en)
Ryaira (ry-AIR-uh)
Sieranchine (see-EHR-an-cheen)
Siracha (seer-AH-cha)
Sylphaen (sil-FAY-en)
Teariad (tee-AR-ee-ad)
Torvias (TOR-vee-ahs)
Velior (VEH-lee-or)
Yvaria (ih-VAR-ee-uh)
Zekerian (zeh-KEHR-ee-en)
Prologue
Wyatt
I hated bullets. They got in the way of everything.
Blood dripping down my arm, I slowed to a walk while I watched the car race off. That scale-skin girl was in the back of it, and my cousin too, the latter of whom was responsible for the shotgun damage to my shoulder.
The bastard.
A growl slipped from me. I didn’t bother to hold it back. I was in a field; it wasn’t like there was anyone to hear me. But I’d been so close. So damn close and if Noah and his stepsister hadn’t shown up with a car and a shotgun just as I was about to finally get my hands on that thing…
The growl grew stronger. Noah disgusted me. The betrayal of our calling, our mission, wasn’t even the half of it. He’d gone so far as to get involved with one of them. And sure, the fish girl was hot; her kind were that way on purpose. But how anyone could let themselves actually fall for a creature like that was beyond me. Just the feel of her skin, or her legs around yours, with the knowledge either one could change into scales or that tail thing… repulsive didn’t come close.
And that wasn’t even bringing into it their manipulative bullshit, and how they could take away your will with a touch.
Anyone who stayed near something like her obviously enjoyed being a victim.
And so they deserved what they got.
I glanced to my shoulder while the car vanished over a small rise in the farmland. Light like the glow of lava showed beneath the tear in my shirt, obscuring the wound and steadily closing it up. My changed skin had absorbed most of the damage from the shot Noah had taken at me, although with a gun that size, some of the shell’s impact had still gotten through. It wasn’t bad, though. Distance had helped. If I’d been closer to the car when he pulled the trigger and he’d had better aim, it might’ve been a different story.
One more thing the pretty-boy bastard had to pay for.
I turned back toward the silos, letting my skin become more human while I went. The structures showed in sharp relief against the clear blue sky, and the midmorning sun revealed my younger brothers still trying to catch their breath by the nearest tower’s side. Owen had his hand braced on the metal wall, while Clay was bent double. Even over the distance, I could see they looked like they wanted to puke.
Grimacing, I walked back toward them. I hoped the fish girl was heading for the ocean so we could track her there. I was sick of farmland.
Clay looked up. “You let her escape?”
“Shut up.”
Still breathing hard, he resorted to a glare in response.
I ignored it, moving past him. Clay hadn’t been able to take me in a fight in his life and he knew it. Words were the worst he could do to me. And the fact wasn’t lost on Owen either. Two years older than Clay and a year younger than me, he wouldn’t risk challenging the status quo for that guy’s sake. Not if it ended him up answering to Clay.
And besides, they hadn’t been able to catch her either.
Damn fish.
I rounded the side of the silo and started back toward the warehouse at the far end of the grain company property. Up ahead, police cars bounded down the country highway and then whipped tight turns into the warehouse parking lot. I sighed. Cops were nearly as bad as bullets, and for basically the same reason. Dad’s guy, the puny Doctor Harman Brooks, would clear them out fast, though. He wouldn’t want anyone poking around his precious laboratory. And as for that couple standing by their green sedan beside the warehouse, their heads turning as if they were searching for someone… whatever. They were probably friends of Harman’s too.
Dad marched from the warehouse. Brock wasn’t with him. My lip twitched toward a snarl. If that little bastard had taken the opportunity to kill the fish we had tied up in Harman’s lab while I was busy chasing down the girl, I’d damn well make him pay.
After all, I wanted to kill a scum-sucker more than I’d ever wanted anything.
Stories said it felt wonderful, taking a dehaian’s life with your bare hands. Their magic running into you while their blood poured out, filling you with a high more powerful than any drug could provide – all of which just got stronger the more scale-skins you killed. Earl hadn’t been able to tell us much about it. After a fish bastard put their magic on his daughter – turning Jeri into his little slave up till the day she killed herself to make the longing stop – Earl had gone blind with rage. He’d taken the guy out so fast, the fish probably hadn’t known what hit him, and Earl had been too distracted by what the guy did to Jeri to really enjoy the killing.
But I needed to feel what it was like. I needed the craving inside me to end, to finally be satisfied. It gnawed at me like a hunger, just like I knew it did for anyone who wasn’t as pathetic as Noah, his brother, or their dad. But until those dehaians who’d just escaped us, the fish Earl killed had been the first one we’d heard of in my lifetime. They were hard to find, the scale-skins. They looked like humans, mostly acted like humans, and there wasn’t much to set them apart from the herd besides a weird sense of wrongness, like they weren’t the same as other people and didn’t quite fit in. But that was difficult to detect, especially since I was starting to suspect they intentionally surrounded themselves with humans to disguise that sense.
I’d give anything to get my hands on a dehaian and kill them slow, savoring every bit of how amazing it would feel.
None of that would happen if the cops reached them first.
Dad strode toward me. “She got away?” he snarled, his voice low while his gaze took in me, Clay, Owen, and the complete la
ck of fish girl between us all.
“Noah was there,” I explained.
Disgust flashed over Dad’s face, at least until he spotted the blood on my arm and anger supplanted the expression. Grabbing my shoulder, he muscled me back from the cops.
I let him push me. He was bigger and stronger for now.
“Idiot,” he snapped, throwing a glance to the police. “What’re you doing, letting them see you–”
“Sir?” came a guy’s voice.
Dad turned as one of the cops walked toward us. An annoyed sound escaped him and his grip tightened on my shoulder. “Say you ran into something,” he ordered in a low mutter.
I didn’t respond. The fish and Noah were getting farther away with every second. We should leave, and if the police tried to interfere, we ought to just handle them.
Though I supposed ‘handling them’ would be difficult for even Harman to cover up.
“Did you see what happened here, sir?” the cop asked.
Dad glanced to Harman. The doctor caught sight of the guy coming our way and immediately rushed over.
“Officer,” Harman called. “Officer, this is a… he works with me. They, um… it was his son…”
The cop’s face shut down as he looked between us and the old man. My brow furrowed. Dad’s son?
I scanned the parking lot, suddenly realizing I still hadn’t seen Brock. I couldn’t feel him anywhere either. He hadn’t stopped hiding, and by now, he really should have.
“What–” I started.
“I need to talk to my boys.” Dad muscled me back again and looked to Harman. “And you.”
The doctor swallowed hard. “I-if you’ll just excuse us,” he said to the officer. Harman turned to one of his assistants, a toothpick of a guy barely out of his teens, wearing a lab coat several sizes too large. I recognized him. He’d been one of the cops we’d scoped out back in that hick town, Reidsburg, where the fish girl lived.
“Aaron,” Harman said, “could you finish explaining to the police what they need to be doing here?”
The assistant shifted his weight and gave a shrug that I assumed was meant to stand in for actual agreement.
Harman skirted wide of us while he hurried away from the officer. Dad followed him back around the corner and behind the cover of the warehouse.
“What–” I tried again.
Dad made a silencing noise and then motioned sharply for Owen and Clay to get farther out of sight.
“Make a sound at what I’m about to say and I’ll knock your teeth out,” Dad snapped to us all in a low voice.
I shivered, wanting to do that to him if he didn’t get on with it soon.
He didn’t seem to notice my tension. His jaw muscles jumped and his lip curled as though barely holding back a snarl. With a dark glance to Harman, he seemed to struggle to speak the words. “Brock’s dead.”
My shivering grew stronger. Colors became heightened, as did sounds, and heat rushed through my skin as it changed.
Dad shoved me against the wall. “Stop it.”
He tossed a glance to Owen and Clay, including them in the order.
“What happened?” I managed, the words only marginally coherent through my growl.
“The scum-sucker boy took a shotgun to him. Close range.”
A breath left me. Goddamn it, I’d had that fish. He’d been right in front of me, all chained up and helpless, and if Dad hadn’t kept me from killing him when we’d had the chance…
My gaze found Dad, every twitch of his muscles and drop of sweat on his face visible to my sharpened vision. He’d stopped us when we’d tried to use Noah’s stepsister as bait in California, and the fish had gotten away as a result. He’d stopped us from breaking into the stepsister’s house in Kansas and forcing her to tell us where the scale-skin lived, and only Harman’s phone call had put us on the girl’s trail again. Every time we had the chance to kill one of them, Dad got in our way, and now…
And now Brock was dead.
I couldn’t stop shaking. I hadn’t even liked Brock – he’d been the youngest and weakest and barely useful at best – but that wasn’t the point. The fish were alive and he wasn’t. Dehaians one, greliarans zero.
“What do we do?” Clay asked Dad. I struggled to keep from hitting him. Who cared what Dad thought? This was his fault as much as anything.
“We get the scale-skins to come to us.”
In spite of my anger, my brow furrowed.
Dad turned to Harman. “We want her parents.”
The doctor’s eyes went wide. I looked between them in confusion. Her parents? Where were her parents in all this?
Dad ignored Harman’s alarmed expression. “They’ll get her to come back.”
“B-but you agreed not to hurt Chloe. I have other experiments–”
“Yes, and you agreed to give us a dehaian. Funny how that worked out.”
Harman swallowed again.
Dad paused. “You want more experiments. We can work on that. Bring the girl back and let you have a few days with the boy as well. But we need her parents so we can find them both first.”
The doctor’s hopes were painted all over his face at the thought of getting another chance to cut into that black-haired fish guy. I scarcely noticed. Dad couldn’t be serious. We were going to chase down her parents, and then not even kill the scale-skins when we found them? What kind of plan was this?
“Really?” Harman asked.
“You have my word.”
I couldn’t keep an infuriated noise from escaping.
“B-but won’t they know you, though?” the doctor pressed with a nervous glance to me. “From back in Reidsburg, I mean. Won’t they know–”
“They never saw us.”
Harman swallowed a third time. He seemed to be having trouble stopping. “Okay,” he agreed. “Then I’ll… I’ll tell them you’re my other assistants. My ones who deal with dehaians. And that they need to go with you to save their daughter from that Zeke boy. Yeah. They’ll believe that.”
He shifted his weight, his hands twitching as though he wasn’t sure what to do with them. “You won’t hurt the girl, though, right? I still need her for–”
“I said you have my word.”
Harman gave a tight nod. He hurried back toward the parking lot.
“Dad,” I began.
“Shut it.”
He strode after Harman.
I stared at them. I could have come up with fifty plans better than this one. A hundred, even. And each of them would have involved tearing both those damn fish to pieces and feeling their magic gush out through the wounds. But instead–
Clay made an irritated sound at me while he moved past, trailing Dad like the pathetic lapdog he was and glaring as if he couldn’t understand why I wasn’t moving too.
I growled and he dropped the glare. Walking by him, I followed Dad and Harman into the parking lot. The two of them were heading for the couple by the car, and after a moment, the reason clicked.
Those were her parents.
I walked faster.
“Bill? Linda?” Harman called. “Can we talk?”
The couple paused, caution practically radiating from them.
“These are my assistants,” Harman continued. “Richard and his, um, sons.”
Bill eyed us, clearly torn about just getting back into the car.
“They can help you find your girl and the… that boy who came with her.”
The skepticism on Bill’s face didn’t fade. “No offense,” he said to Dad. “But you all don’t look like scientists.”
“They’re here because of the boy,” Harman explained. “To help in case Zeke became… difficult.”
Bill’s caution abated slightly. “I see.”
“They want you to go with them to find Chloe.”
The woman, Linda, made a fretfully hopeful noise and hurried around the car. “Do they know where she is?” She looke
d to Dad. “Have you seen her?”
“We know how to find her,” Dad answered.
I glanced to him, realizing what he planned. What I hoped he planned. What, if it’d been me, I would’ve planned.
It was hard to keep the smile from my face.
“Okay,” Linda agreed. “Where is she? What do we need to–”
“Just follow us in your car,” Dad said.
She rushed for the passenger side of the sedan.
Bill didn’t move. “Follow you where?”
Harman fidgeted. “You better go quick, Bill,” he urged. “She’s in danger. What that boy is capable of…”
The words worked. Bill got in the car.
Dad headed toward our SUV.
“You won’t hurt anyone, right, Richard?” Harman tried, keeping his voice low while he scuttled after him.
“Make sure the cops don’t follow us,” Dad told him.
I continued past the doctor when the old man paused. Still clasping his hands, Harman shifted his weight for a moment and then scampered toward the police.
“We actually going to do any of what you told him?” Owen asked.
Wordlessly, Dad tugged open the door and then climbed in. I took the passenger seat, leaving my brothers to get in the back.
“Are we?” Clay pressed.
Dad turned the key in the ignition. “Those ropes still behind you?”
My lip curled. He did have the same plan as I would’ve made.
Dad glanced to us, his expression like ice. “There’s a barn about ten miles away. Saw it on our drive here. We pull over, get her parents out, and leave the vehicle there. They’ll fit behind you two. But we don’t hurt anyone too badly just yet.”
“What about that thing you told Harman?” I asked. “How we’d bring the fish back for him? Not touch the girl?”
Contempt showed on Dad’s face as he put the gearshift into drive. “Don’t be a moron. We find them, we’re killing them all.”
Chapter One
Chloe
We’d made it almost thirty miles from the warehouse near the Borman Grain company before my parents had tried calling us.