by Erin Raegan
I had once told my mate she would be safe here. That my Dahk would accept her.
Those promises had haunted me.
My Dahk had betrayed my faith in them. But now I truly did believe we were on the brink of true change and unification. Uthyf had gone to great lengths to gain our species’ acceptance and his new queen worked just as diligently. But it was the young Lydya that had sealed my Dahk’s approval of the humans’ presence. Her bravery had shown my Dahk all that the humans had to offer.
I did not believe there would never be conflict. There was too much changing and not just with the humans’ arrival. But Sym was a gift and my Dahk were starting to see the benefit and beauty of opening their minds and hearts.
But even as we united as a species, outside evils threatened that newfound peace.
I watched my king closely as he spoke heatedly with the leaders of our allies.
“We cannot trust him,” Uthyf growled at the grainy image of the Kilbus Lord.
I agreed we could not trust the Shadow Assassin, but unlike my king, I also believed we could not trust the deceiver who so adamantly insisted that we try. The Kilbus Lord had fooled me once long ago. I would never tolerate Uthyf’s alliance with him.
“You may have no choice,” the Kilbus Lord said on a sigh. “The assassin is the only one who has had any interaction with the Bour outside of Hugund. He knows Viytenus. He is a valuable asset in the upcoming war. There is history there but it is not my place to say.”
“How do you know this?” Lander, the Xixin King, demanded.
The three kings glared at the comm image of the Kilbus Lord as he grinned at them slyly. “Trust me my friends. The assassin is an ally.”
Juldoris
The human female screamed and raged against the bars of her cell deep in the Juldoris dungeons. “You asshole! Let me out!”
The Juldo guards ignored her rage as they had done for the long days of her imprisonment. She was nothing more than a slave to them now. But even if they felt any compassion toward the human female, they dare not defy the assassin’s order of her imprisonment.
Even so, their fear did not keep their minds from wondering. Wondering how she could be used against the assassin who refused to claim the very throne on which he sat. She may have been nothing more than a slave to them but they had been ordered to keep her well fed. They had been ordered not to lay a hand on her human head. They had borne the wrath of their creator as he swore to gut them if any harm befell her.
The assassin claimed to care for nothing and no one but the Juldo guards wondered if finally they may have found a weakness in the assassin’s armor in the form of a human female.
Sneak Peek
READ ON FOR A SNEAK PEEK AT THE FINAL BOOK IN THE GALACTIC ORDER SERIES
COMING DECEMBER 2019
SHADOW ASSASSIN
CHAPTER ONE
“Hello?”
Nothing. Silence.
“Helloooo?” Nothing but the annoying trickle of water down the stone walls. “Urgh!” I banged my fist against the bars of my cell door. I hit them again and again until my palms screamed in pain. Huffing my frustration and letting loose a ragged breath, I slid down the wall at the back of my cell. The stone scraped my back through my dirty t-shirt. I looked down morosely and clenched my bare toes into the sandy floor.
Rubbing my eyes, I looked up to the sliver of light coming through the tiny hole in the ceiling that was a piss poor imitation of a window. This would be—my eleventh night? Twelfth? — I was losing track.
The days were so short here. Barely four or five hours. But the nights were endless. Or at least it felt like it. At least six times that long. That made almost thirty-five-hour days. It was impossible to keep track of the amount of time I’d spent in this cell. At least in human terms.
But I wasn’t in Kansas anymore. Er, Earth anymore. I was on some alien planet so fucking far away from Earth, it was a dream.
“My fucking pee bucket is full assholes!”
I screamed behind my clenched teeth when no one answered.
Not even those two red freaks that had been guarding me this whole time were out there anymore.
A low groan echoed through the halls, and my eyes lolled to the cell next door to me. That poor freak was waking up again. He was in and out of it since I got here, and I suspected he didn’t have much longer to live given he was one giant slab of pulverized meat. He was one of those bat things that had helped us out back home. After the white ones had invaded and started fucking eating people. They, the Dahk, had come and helped get rid of them. They still were. At least they were still there before I was snatched and brought here.
Dad had been working with them. Shockingly. But I guess they didn’t give him much choice in the matter. They had kind of dropped out of the sky and saved us against our will. I snorted. We were on the brink of extinction before they showed up so you’d think my Father, the former Vice President, now President, of the free world would have kissed their feet, but nope. Not my Dad. He had resisted at first. Nearly gotten a few of them killed. Then we would have really been fucked. But thank god that douche Howard hadn’t succeeded with shooting them out of the sky and turning another alien species against us. Now pop was knee-deep in peace treaties and catering to a slew of aliens from all over the damn universe.
We owed the Dahk and that weird pirate lord so much. They had saved our asses, but pop still didn’t trust them. But I guess that was part of the job. Still, if those big bastards wanted to wipe us out after all that effort to save us, then we were woefully unprepared to fight them off. We were so unprepared it was laughable. They had space travel for one. Fucking laser guns for another. And yeah, our bullets basically did nothing to them. Dad may be the new President and pseudo peacekeeper of the world, but really, he was just a glorified lackey to the Kilbus Lord. That alien let my pop think he had a say in humanity’s recovery efforts, but really Kil said jump and my dad asked, ‘How high?’”
I had very little hope anyone was coming for me. Sure, I may be President Burin’s daughter, but Kil was a hardass and not a little scary—a whole damn lot—and I would not be anywhere near the top of that alien Lord’s priority list right now. If my dad knew how to fly a damn spaceship, I might’ve had a chance, but that was a no-go.
I was alone. I was all the hope I had of getting out of this place. I had to save myself.
I pushed my weak body up into a crouch and faced the wall. Gripping my chipped belt buckle in my fist, I went to town on the tiny little hole at the base of the wall. I had started on it sometime around the second night in here. That hooded guy had ordered those hulking red guys to toss me in here, and at first, I had inspected every inch of this cell. There were no weak points other than a tiny little hole. I felt a cool draft and decided to try and widen it. The stone was set like huge bricks, one on top of the other. I thought if I could just gauge out the clay holding them together with my belt buckle, I could push one of them out and crawl out. But the stones were so deep, and it was taking me forever just to get the bottom of the stone brick clear.
My hands were a bloodied, bruised mess, and I didn’t know how much longer I could continue before I seriously hurt myself. They were feeding and watering me but not enough to keep up a good amount of strength. And the food was weird. So weird I had balked at eating it at first. It was some pukey orange stew-type sludge. It smelled rank, and I had to force it down after my stomach threatened to cave in on itself sometime after the second night.
They gave it to me once a day, once an alien-day. So really, they fed me every day and a half in human time? I sighed and adjusted my grip on my belt buckle, my sawing motion starting to wane. Thinking about food was only making my stomach cramps worse.
The bat guy groaned again and shifted in the sand in his cell. I looked over at him warily. If he really was waking up, then I was in for a hard night. He had to be in pain for all the moaning and whimpering he did every time he woke up.
Firyt, or somet
hing like that, was his name. It was hard to tell what the Juldo were saying most days. I’d had the language chip implanted like a lot of humans had when the Dahk came to town. Mostly because my pop insisted on it after the Kilbus and Dahk forced it on him. But also because I wanted to be able to communicate with the guys saving our asses. Even so, the Juldo talked in low grumbly tones, and it sometimes made them hard to understand even with the translation chip. All except the hooded one. His voice was clearer, but I wished it wasn’t.
He’d only said a few words in my presence, but even those guards had flinched when he spoke. I watched his deep red lips move, but it was like several voices had left his mouth. Like a group of people were speaking all at once through his low, gravelly voice. It was freaking unnerving. I had been relieved when the guards had dragged me away.
Survival instinct had flooded me when he was near. Something about him just screamed hazardous. It was the way he carried himself. His voice. The fact that he seemed to be completely shrouded in shadows as he lazed in that enormous throne lording over his red-skinned buddies. Buddies, I should add, that seemed more terrified of him than even me.
I crawled over to Batty and shoved my hand through the bars separating us. He had a small cracked bowl in his cell, and I pushed it against the wall of his cell with tips of my fingers until a slow trickle of water streaming down the stone walls slowly started to fill it. Once it was full of the grainy, dirty liquid, I crawled closer to the front of his cell, slowly pushing the bowl closer and closer to him one bar at a time until I could lift it and trickle it into his mouth. He coughed and spewed out the first few sips but eventually started gulping it like he did every time I offered it to him.
He was too weak to do much of anything for himself, and even though I didn’t know him, I felt a sort of kinship with him locked away down here. We were both prisoners, even though we didn’t get the same treatment. Not yet, at least. For now, they seemed fine with keeping me locked away but this poor guy got the shit beat out of him by a few of the guards every time they got bored. After witnessing it so many times, I honestly couldn’t believe he was still alive. I wouldn’t have survived the first hit from that red guy with the metal arms. If they suddenly got bored with him and turned their attention to me, I was screwed.
So even though it filled me with sick and guilt, I was grateful they hadn’t seemed to let up on him yet. My guilt ate at me so bad I tried to take care of him any way I could.
“Thank you,” he rasped when he finished gulping the water. His swollen and bloodied eyes locked on mine and then grew hazy as he faded back into sleep.
“Sure thing,” I whispered, using the rest of the water to wipe at the gashes on his face.
Several more hours passed in the dark. No sound but my own ragged breathing and the shuddered breaths of my neighbor. There were dozens more cells down here, a long hallway dark hallway of them, but I rarely ever heard a peep from any of them. We may be the only two prisoners here but it was hard to tell. If you made any kind of sound, those red guys shut it down real quick. Or at least they usually did. I hadn’t seen them in a long time now. But fear could have kept any other prisoners quiet.
Unlike me. They had thrown me in here but hadn’t laid a hand on me since. They didn’t even come into my cell. They just shoved me a bowl of sludge and a weird leather bag of water whenever they felt like it. So I hadn’t kept my mouth shut. Not at first. Those first days here, I had screamed and raged, but they completely ignored me, and after losing my voice more than once, I gave up. They weren’t interested in anything I had to say.
My buddy started coughing and hacking, and I crawled back over to him, warily patting his back as he rolled onto his side. The Dahk may be helping us back home, but that didn’t help their appearance for me any. They were scary looking. Literally bat-like. And not the comic book kind. Leathery wings, flat pointy ears, sharp fangs and claws, ridiculous feet that rested at the bottom of their curved muscled thighs. And purple with scales. Yeah, they didn’t exactly instill a friendly or welcoming appearance. But I was alive, and we hadn’t been wiped out of the universe because of them and the Kilbus. The least I could do was help one of them out if I could.
“I would not sit so close,” a voice drawled from behind me.
I spun around on my knees and fell on my bottom, my back slamming into the bars now behind me. The hooded guy was leaning against the wall outside my cell. He was tall— a good foot and a half taller than me. He wore a long hooded black coat that cast his face in shadow but was sleeveless and bared his red muscled arms and the silver veins bulging from them. His left hand looked mechanical but also weirdly smooth and fluid, like skin. He had five fingers on each hand and was humanoid-ish, but our differences were too obvious to avoid. I had a feeling when I got a look at his face, those differences would only be more pronounced. The others like him looked so different from each other. Some of them had two arms and two legs. Some had four. Some had none. One guard that frequented my neighbors cell had snake-like limbs and spikes coming out of its eyeballs, but it was red-skinned like its buddies and had the same weird mechanical implants and appendages but in different variations. This guy blatantly staring at me was the first I’d seen that wasn’t nearly covered in the implants.
“Why not?” I growled at him, backing away to the back of my cell. I touched the back wall as I shakily stood to my feet.
He tilted his head to the Dahk panting in the cell. “He is a traitor.”
I flinched as his layered words rumbled through my cell, but I lifted my chin in defiance. “He’s not one of you.”
He slowly shook his head. “He is a traitor to his crown.”
“The Dahk King?” I didn’t know much about that guy other than he was the one who kept sending us and the Kilbus Lord aid. He couldn’t be all that bad if he was willing to help out a planet of humans that meant nothing to him and did nothing to earn that support.
The hooded alien nodded once.
I huffed. “What does any of that have to do with me?” I wasn’t going to let the guy rot just because this guy said he was a traitor. Innocent until proven guilty and all that. Besides, if he really was a traitor, he had reasons for it. Good or bad reasons, I wouldn’t judge him without knowing him.
The hooded alien flashed sharp white teeth at me through a harsh grin. “He is not a fan of your kind.”
I looked at the Dahk alien carefully. He didn’t like humans? He didn’t even know me.
The hooded asshole chuckled quietly.
“Something funny?” I snapped.
He stepped up to my cell door and hit the mechanical lock. The cell door slid open on a whoosh, and I backed into the corner. “What are you doing?”
“You don’t want your freedom?” He tilted his head as he stepped into the cell.
I watched him warily, my eyes shooting past him to the barren hall. “You’re letting me out?” I didn’t believe him for a second. He was the one who ordered me locked away down here.
He bent slightly at the waist and waved his arm to the door.
It felt like a trap. My feet stayed glued to the floor.
“You’ve done nothing but shout for your freedom since arriving, but now you will not take it?” He chuckled again and crossed his arms across his broad chest.
“You’re going to let me go, just like that?” I fisted my hands. I didn’t like being played with.
He didn’t reply. Just stood there, silently watching me. My belt buckle was still in the back pocket of my jeans. Curling my left hand around it, I skirted the walls toward the cell door.
He didn’t move an inch as I came closer. He was standing just inside the cell doorway and to the right, leaving me only a small opening.
I waited until I was standing opposite him, trembling.
He lifted his hard jaw to the door.
I lunged through the opening and tore down the hallway, my dirty, bare feet slapping against the cool sand. I slammed into the door at the end of the hall,
fumbling with the flat handle. My shoulder screamed at me as I rammed the door, but it wouldn’t budge.
I stepped back panting and slowly closed my eyes as a dark mocking laugh drifted to me from behind.
“Come, little human, we have no more time to play.”
Acknowledgments
Hmmm, what to say about Ignyt and Lydia. I loved this story so much. Lydia was soft in a way that made her exciting and fun. She is different forom my other heroines and that just made me fall in love with her all the more!
Ignyt was someone sitting in the back of my brain ever since War For Earth, and I just had to get him and his brothers out of their shrouded corner and into the light and I just fell so much in love all three of them. Poor Ohta, he will be hard to forget. ;)
But you want to hear about Tahk and Peyton! I know, I know. I teased you with a lot there, but I hope it satisfied you enough that you got to see the birth of Sym (Corny name and all, I’m all about the corny baby names and very aware he and Syn drove you a little bonkers ;) But, yeah, I loved coming back to my first couple soooo much, I don’t think I’m going to be able to stay away for long! So yes, my greedy readers, you’ll be getting your novella with them soon enough!
But more importantly. VYR! YES VYR! SO MUCH VYR! I love, love, love a thousand times writing him. I missed him like crazy! His little part in this story wet my appetite and he will be featured in Shadow Assassin, so get excited! CUZ I AM!
Which brings me to the final installment of the series. Shadow Assassin will be the final book. FOR NOW. I’m ready to close it off for a little while before taking a trip to visit Kil and then coming back home and giving you all your little side stories, I just haven’t decided how i’m going to hit Yilt, and Borv, and Gunnor, Syn, and Gryl, YET. But I do want to come back for them. And so many more. Maybe even Kudeyas one day ;) Idk, it might just be a collection of stories, or a small series of Dahk love stories without all the crazy drama. WE SHALL SEE!