His Dark Bond

by Anne Marsh

  “You did this,” Brends said hoarsely. That blade didn’t waver.

  Beside him, Vkhin shifted, readying himself for the fight they all saw coming. The world stood still for a damn long moment, and then Michael agreed. “Yes.”

  No regret, no pain. Just the cold, flat tone of a killer, as if the Archangel was ordering the Dominion to take out the trash.

  Vkhin was moving, but Zer slammed a hand into Vkhin’s chest. “Hold up,” he ordered. His own blade hadn’t left his hand, and he couldn’t deny the protective, possessive urges tearing through him. Anger. Grief. A white-hot wrath. “Michael is mine,” he growled.

  Vkhin looked like he wanted to argue, but Brends wasn’t done suffering out there alone in the clearing. Moving toward the Archangel, he demanded to know how Michael could have done this.

  A flicker of hot emotion crossed Michael’s face, was quickly locked away. Instead of answering, the Archangel looked at his hands. That bright red stain colored his golden skin as Brends swore to kill the other male.

  Vkhin’s icy gaze watched Zer. Watched the Dominions’ chosen leader hesitate. “Choose,” he said implacably. “It’s time to choose.”

  Christ. He wanted things to end differently. He wanted Esrene’s chest to move. No chance of that. Instead, Zer either let Brends step up to the plate and take on Michael—or Zer threw the entire weight of the Dominions behind Brends’s rebellion. He could make this more than personal.

  The minute he stepped into that clearing and didn’t put himself between Brends’s blade and Michael, he’d drawn the battle lines, and the others would follow. Follow because they’d sworn to and because more than a few of his brothers wanted to hunt this killer who had cut his way through their females.

  In the end, it wasn’t much of a choice.

  He’d loved Esrene. As a sister or something more, he didn’t know. So never mind that he’d sworn himself to Michael. He’d take down the male he’d vowed to protect and serve, because life wasn’t perfect anymore and he’d hesitated too long.

  Esrene wasn’t coming back, and Michael’s games had to stop now.

  He stepped into the clearing and stood beside Brends.

  No human had ever asked him about that day.

  “Yeah,” he said slowly. “It’s true.” It was—that was the hard part to accept. He’d staged a rebellion against the one he’d sworn to protect with his life. He’d broken his vows, and now he was paying the price. That was the truth.

  Before he’d gotten the words out of his mouth, she was shaking her head. “There’s more to it than that, Zer, so don’t put me off with half-truths. You were a Dominion. There was a rebellion. What I want to know is why.”

  His reaction to the question startled him. Something unfamiliar and warm uncurled in his chest. He didn’t like the off-balance feeling one bit.

  “I want the truth, Zer. Why does this matter to you? Why would a bunch of condemned killers want so badly to find a way back into the Heavens? I’m willing to bet that you have a reason. A good reason.”

  He swallowed. Hard. Nessa didn’t take anything on faith. He knew that. She dealt in logic and facts, but now she was reaching out to him. Trusting him.

  But he was a damned bastard—literally.

  Her fingers stroked lightly over his shoulder. “Tell me what’s going on here really, Zer.”

  Telling her the truth she wanted so badly would win her over. He could taste victory—but, somehow, the taste was bittersweet. She’d believe him, but for all the wrong reasons.

  “I’m a killer.” He took another step toward her. She made a small, feminine retreat. One more step and he’d have her pinned between his body and the wall. When he inhaled, he could smell her, and her scent was as intriguing as the rest of her.

  She gave him the teacher look, the look that said she was running through her facts. Analyzing. “Why did you rebel?” The question wasn’t directed at him. “Feel free to corroborate or deny, but I’d hypothesize that there was some sort of betrayal. You had just cause.”

  Bingo. He had her back against the wall. Reaching out, he braced powerful forearms on either side of her head. “You’re good, professor.”

  Pleasure shone in her eyes as if he’d complimented her eyes or her hair. “You don’t seem like the type to just pull a power play.”

  “Why not?” He leaned in a little, tormenting himself with the delicious heat of her body. He could have stayed like this all night. “You don’t know me. Maybe I’m a coldhearted bastard who wanted things his way.”

  “You want things your way, all right,” she agreed.

  “You want a bedtime story?” He handed her a pillow, and she wrapped her arms around it. “I guarantee you won’t like my stories.”

  “Try me.”

  How to explain the deaths no one had been able to explain? “We found a pairling one night,” he said finally. “Dead. Her body slit from one end to the other.” He left out the details of what had been done to her sexually. This female didn’t deserve the nightmares.

  “Wait. Back up. What’s a pairling?”

  He waved a hand. “Think of it as a brother-sister matched set.”

  “Related.” She nodded.

  Sort of. The Dominions were bred, not born, but the connection was still there. “Close enough. Which was why her pairling was so upset when he found her.” Upset didn’t begin to cover Brends’s rage. The male had been homicidal.

  “Was she the first?”

  Christ, maybe she did understand where he was going with this. “No. Something had been wrong in the Heavens for months. There were deaths. Disappearances.”

  “And no one cared? No one noticed?” She sounded as incredulous as he’d been.

  He shouldn’t be burdening her with this. He knew that. Fighting this battle was his responsibility, not hers, even if she was going to be the weapon he used. “You have to understand how it was, baby. She should have been protected. Cherished. We failed her,” he added grimly, “and she died. It was every bit as much our failure as the killer’s.”

  “You told someone,” she guessed. “Next in the chain of command.”

  “No.”

  “But why not?”

  Because he’d suspected that Michael himself was the culprit. “No point,” he said curtly. “Better to handle it ourselves.”

  “You went after the killer.”

  “We did.”

  “You knew who the killer was.”

  “I found my boy Michael at the scene.” He smiled coldly. “My gut told me he’d done it, but we didn’t have the proof. We weren’t going to let the same thing happen to any other females under our protection. We took preemptive action.”

  “You rebelled.”

  “Yeah.” That was one way of putting it. He’d led the charge in a Fuck You of cosmic proportions. “Insubordination. The Archangel reamed us a new one and tossed us out of the Heavens.”

  “Christ,” he growled through gritted teeth, “don’t you see that it didn’t matter? We broke the cardinal rule: thou shalt not rebel. Esrene’s death was merely an excuse for what we did. We needed a reason to pick a fight with the Archangel who held our leashes, and we found it. We broke every rule in the damn rule book twice and it was all a setup. Cuthah, Michael’s lieutenant and second in command, wanted us out and I took his bait. He served Michael right up to me and I fell for it.”

  “Cuthah played you,” she interrupted. “That’s what bothers you now.”

  Christ. It did. “Cuthah was playing a deep game of his own and he set up the Dominions to take us out.” Cuthah had been a traitor, but he hadn’t been the only guilty one. Zer was guilty of insubordination. Of refusing to play by Heaven’s rules. You broke those rules, you accepted the consequences.

  “It was a long time ago,” he said finally. It felt like yesterday.

  “You want me to just let it go?”

  “Yes,” he said firmly, and he scooped her up, sliding her beneath the covers. “We’re just going to slee
p,” he promised. “No sex.”

  He sensed feminine trepidation and that damn curiosity of hers. He’d whetted her appetite, for sex and information, and she wouldn’t let this go.

  She wasn’t going to be his. She’d belong to one of his brothers, body and soul, and he wouldn’t poach on another male’s territory. Still, he didn’t mind her outraged reaction to co-sleeping. Turning away from the bed, he reached for the switch to hit the lights.

  Too late, he remembered the scars.

  Nessa knew instinctively that Zer didn’t display his scars. Not to anyone and certainly not to anyone human. She didn’t know whether the intimacy seduced her—or pissed her off. So, he wasn’t human. And she wasn’t an angel. He’d known both those little facts before he’d kidnapped her; if he was experiencing buyer’s remorse, he could damn well let her go.

  The scars were deceptively simple, thicker, paler twists of tissue that had formed over his injury and that went far deeper than the skin of his back. Oh, God. She knew instinctively that those scars cut all the way to the soul. He’d lost what mattered most to him, and those scars were merely the visual proof. Now, she knew what kind of injury a Goblin had to sustain to scar like that. Those twisted ridges of white skin on his back marked where his wings had grown.

  She couldn’t stop herself from imagining him with wings. She’d never seen a Dominion, but she could easily picture Zer as he must have been. Magnificent. She knew that without a doubt. His wings would be as dark and powerful as he was, making him a fearful predator. Who had her in his sights.

  Why hadn’t he healed? “I thought you were immortal. That every wound would heal.”

  “No.” The flat look in his eyes warned her she wasn’t ready to hear the rest of the story. “Near-immortal, baby. Cut our heads off, and you win. If you were strong enough, you could saw my head off and be clear of me.”

  The bed dipped and swayed as he got in, settling his weight beside her. Between her and the door. God, how long had it been since she’d slept with someone else? Not been alone in the night?

  “Just sleep, baby.” His eyes made dark promises, but right now, this was what she needed. Comfort.

  He needed it, too, she thought, sleep pulling seductively at her eyelids. His arm pulled the heavy velvet comforter over them. It settled across her. Around them, the candles flickered out. This leader of the Fallen, their sire, was just as alone as she was. She wouldn’t make the mistake of thinking that made him weak or any less of a bastard. He wasn’t going to back down from his demands, but maybe she could take what he was offering right now, and maybe, just maybe, she could avoid paying the price.

  CHAPTER NINE

  God, he loved recruiting the Fallen, corrupting the formerly incorruptible Dominions. Loved the almost sensual rush of pleasure as he seduced them—step by step. Leading them right down the path he needed them to take with dark promises of power and pleasure. He’d promised them their wings would be restored so that the entire world would finally know that these Dominions were back on the right track.

  Some of them had believed him.

  Fools.

  Cuthah couldn’t stop the cold smile that curved over a face many had called handsome. Handsome or not, it was one more weapon he used. Now, he drank in the bitter rush of air ripping through his powerful wings, the heady rush of flight with each strong beat. There. Signaling to his lieutenants, he drove down to meet the ground rushing up toward him. Frankly, he didn’t know how the Fallen had survived this long without their wings. He counted his blessings, however, because it made them ridiculously easy to seduce.

  Because, God knew, the rogues would do anything to get their wings back. Even sell him what little remained of their souls. Carefully, he scanned the postapocalyptic landscape stretching away below him. The walls of the Preserves glowed balefully upward, their mazhykical wards slipping away beneath him.

  He didn’t need to pass through the wards when he could simply go over them.

  “Land here,” he barked, and the others flying with him immediately began their own descent. They knew better than to hesitate, even if the ground soaring up to meet them was rocky and barren and they were hampered by the burdens they carried. The rogues incarcerated here were cheap whores, renting their bodies out to whoever could pay their price. He disliked them, disliked having to use them, but he would put together the army he needed, and then he’d cut off their hope for redemption.

  When his feet hit the ground, he folded his wings back. He could have shifted to human form, but he wanted to remind the rogues lurking in the shadows of what they’d lost. Striding forward, he pulled his fyreblades from their sheaths on his back. His lieutenants fell in behind him.

  “Everything is prepared.” Hesath didn’t look at him, just kept on moving forward.

  It had better be. Crossing his arms, Cuthah stopped, waiting. The fyreblades were a blazing beacon in the darkness—the rogues couldn’t help but come. He was counting on it. The Preserves were a mazhykical wasteland, a prison designed to hold the rogue Fallen who craved just one thing.

  Souls.

  They would indeed come, like fish to a lure.

  His lips curled in disdain. Still, he had no desire to spend more time here than was necessary. He glanced behind him at his lieutenant. “You put out the word?”

  “Exactly as you commanded, sire.” The lieutenant’s eyes were busy dissecting the black shadows around them, the scarred knuckles of his right hand wrapped around the haft of his blade. He was ready to gut the first bastard who sprang at them.

  The shadows moved now, thick with life. Of one sort or the other. Soulless bastards were coming to him, exactly as planned. Three millennia without being tossed so much as a bone, and the Fallen were soul-starved. Dying for what they couldn’t have. What they’d been denied. The Archangel Michael had cut his own throat when he’d exiled the Dominions to this cold, mazhykless world. The Fallen craved the taste of a soul like the down-on-their-luck addicts they were, and he had just the drug to sell them.

  Ten cautious minutes later, the first rogue crept to the outermost edges of the shadows, front-lit by the pool of light from the fyreblade. He was not alone.

  Hesath’s gaze moved over their new company, counting. “More Fallen coming.”

  “Good.” That was what he needed. The Fallen rogues were going to be the raw fodder for his army.

  “They are crazed.” His lieutenant didn’t shift his gaze from the first male who entered the circle of light. His observation was neither a challenge nor a question, just a careful statement of fact. “I cannot guarantee what they will do.”

  Truth. These Fallen were lost to the soul thirst. Over time, the transformation had irreversibly etched itself across their bodies. The first male into Cuthah’s circle had been tall and broad-shouldered once upon a time. Now, rage twisted his features, bent his back and shoulders into a brutal travesty of the powerful warrior he had once been. Skulking out of the shadows, he was more beast than man as his dark eyes darted toward the source of the light.

  “They are what I need.”

  “It is not my business to question, sire, but how can they be of any help?”

  The questions became tiresome. Once, Cuthah would have killed the male for daring to ask. Now, however, he schooled himself to patience. He’d only just replaced Eilor with this male. Striking him down would cause more trouble than it was worth.

  “Once,” he said coldly. “Once, you may ask. They are malleable. Vulnerable. They want what we can offer them.”

  His lieutenant considered Cuthah’s words, then nodded in comprehension. “They are for sale.”

  “Even if they do not yet know it, yes.” Fortunately, their loyalties were easily purchased—another flaw in Michael’s original plan. You could not deprive a male for so long and expect him to embrace his punishment.

  “The two females we carried here—” Hesath paused, delicately.

  Maybe this new lieutenant was not as stupid as he’d feared. “Y
es. The females.”

  “Bait.”

  “Precisely. The Fallen here want nothing more than to drain dry as many human souls as they can take. I give them what they want, what they need—and they are mine.”

  Recruiting was so much simpler when the Fallen wanted to Fall. He had the lures, but he’d had to consider carefully the possible candidates. Only a fool would waltz straight into G2’s and make his offer to one of those. Those Fallen were hard-core. The loyal. Zer’s inner circle wasn’t ready yet for what Cuthah had to offer.

  “I’ve brought you a present.” He directed his words toward the visible rogue, knowing that he had a larger audience lurking in the shadows.

  One of the rogues spoke from the shadows. “What do you want?” Rusty with disuse, the voice hinted at the feral madness that eventually consumed all rogues. Gone, Cuthah judged, mad and endarkened, but still dangerous.

  “Service. And, in exchange, I’ve brought you souls.” He paused, waiting.

  “No.” Thirst had made the male’s face savage, burning away any beauty he had once possessed. A long-healed scar cut across his cheek, and the coppery scent of blood hinted at more recent, hidden injuries. Cuthah judged the male should have been starving, but those eyes were shuttered, giving nothing away. The body did, though. The body was tense with hunger and lean, too lean. If soul thirst didn’t consume him first, physical hunger would. “I want no souls. None of us here do.”

  “Speak for yourself,” Cuthah replied. There was no leadership in the Preserves, only a brutal game of natural selection. If time had not been so limited, Cuthah might have bothered to destroy the rogue, or try to find out who he had been. But, honestly, why bother? The rogue wouldn’t last long in here. None of them did.

  “To drink?” Another guttural rasp, this time from Cuthah’s left, drowned out the first speaker’s pithy curse. This one wasn’t so troubled by ethics. Good. This new recruit was dark, like all of them. Undoubtedly, he’d been a handsome bastard before he’d picked the losing end of the Heavens’ battle. Now he had hungry eyes and a restless hitch in his gait.