Serpent's Desire_A Reverse Harem Urban Fantasy

by Tansey Morgan

  I spun around and made a mad dash for the front door, running alongside the bar, which provided the only straight line and clear shot to the exit. Then I pulled a hard left, leapt onto a table, and threw myself against him, grabbing his shoulders and sending him crumbling to the ground with me. He kicked and squirmed away for an instant, but I grabbed hold of his leg and pulled him back to the ground, causing him to slam his chin against the stone. This guy was slippery, but I was quicker than he was. My instincts were operating a fraction of a second before his, just enough to give me the edge.

  The sentry turned around and snarled something at me in German, and while I didn’t understand the words, I assumed he was hurling insults at me given that he was gritting his bloodied teeth, and his aura was flaring bright red. I got up, still holding his leg, and advanced on him, but he dug a knife from out of a sheath I hadn’t seen—maybe behind his back—and slashed the air in front of me, causing me to back up and drop his foot from the surprise. He wriggled away again, scrambling fast to get on his feet. He had almost made it to the door when a bar stool came flying at him from across the room and struck him in the back, sending him slamming into a stone wall, and then into the floor, knife spilling from his hand.

  Raph came up beside me, panting. “That should do it,” he said.

  “You threw that?” I asked. “That’s fucking awesome!”

  “What about the others?”

  I turned my head around but couldn’t see anyone in the bar. The door to the upstairs room was open, and the light seemed to be dimming and growing, as if someone had knocked a ceiling light fixture and caused it to sway back and forth. The music was so loud I couldn’t hear anything, no sound of a struggle, or a fight—not even voices.

  “Should we check on them?” I asked.

  “Let’s tie this guy up first.”

  I ran around the bar and searched for a rope, anything I could use to wrap around the guy’s arms and feet. The only thing I found was a multi-socket extension, so I grabbed a knife, cut the cable, and brought it over. Raph, who seemed to have an instinctual understanding on how to tie someone up, managed to make it look like the guy would need to have the strength of ten men—or magic—to break out of that knot, and I didn’t think he had any magic to use.

  Wouldn’t he have used it to get away?

  “Lilith,” Dante called out from the other side of the bar as he approached. Vik was with him. Both men looked a little disheveled and out of breath. Vik had a busted lip that was beginning to bruise, and for the first time since we’d met, I felt an urge of want toward him. I liked a man who could take a punch, and Vik proved he was that kind of guy.

  “We got one,” I said, standing. “What about you?”

  “He got away, back exit.”

  “Dammit. Did he say anything?”

  “Nothing that will help us here. What about this one?”

  “Unconscious,” Raph said. “I don’t know how long he’ll be out; could be a few hours.”

  “We need to wake him up, but not here. We’ll take him back to the car.”

  Vik and Raph nodded, then between them they picked the Sentry up and dragged him out of the bar and across the street. The sky had opened up by the time we stepped outside, and thick, cold pellets of rain were falling. Dante clicked the button on his remote control and unlocked his car as we ran up to it, and I jumped into the passenger seat before the rain could really get under my skin. A few minutes later, we were on the road again with an unconscious guy in the backseat.

  Not exactly how I thought my night would turn out, but here we were.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Johan

  We weren’t driving for long, but we had long enough to get away from the bar; every possibility existed that Konrad had called for help, and the last thing any of us wanted was to be present when the cavalry arrived. The problem was, we didn’t have anywhere to take this guy as bringing an unconscious man to the hotel would have aroused suspicion, it would have taken hours to get back to the mansion.

  Instead, Dante found an empty parking lot to pull the Audi into, and then opened the glove box to hand me a sharpie.

  “Whenever you’re ready,” he said.

  “Me?” I asked.

  He nodded. “You.”

  “Why do I have to wake him up?”

  “You’re a woman. He may open up to you.”

  “I’m a woman who tackled him and contributed him to the whole blood dribbling down his chin situation. I doubt he wants to talk to me.”

  “He won’t want to talk to any of us, but we have to try.”

  I turned to Raphael. “Raph, can you see into his mind? Draw the answers to our questions out of there?”

  “That isn’t how my power works,” he said, “If he’s thinking about something I can usually sit and watch the thoughts as they form, but I would need for him to be awake, and for someone to be triggering those thoughts to form.”

  “And you’re holding the permanent marker,” Vik added.

  “Yeah, thanks.” I let the tension leave my body on the back of a sigh, and pulled the cap off the sharpie. “Alright, here goes.”

  The strong, chemical smell of the sharpie under his nose roused the unconscious prisoner with a start. He bucked and squirmed, his aura flashing around him so brightly it was almost blinding to my senses, almost too much, but Vik and Raph held him in place. With his hands tied behind his back there was nowhere for him to go. He stared at the men holding him down first, then at Dante, then at me.

  He threw his neck back, looking like he was about to lob a glob of spit and blood at me, but Dante pistoned his hand out and grabbed him by the throat. “Don’t,” he warned. “You’re alive because we want you to be.”

  The man’s eyes were the eyes of a buck that knows it’s been cornered by the wolves. It knows it has to be careful if it wants to survive, even though death is almost a certainty in its mind; in its, and the wolves’ minds. Instead of squirming, kicking, and trying to get away, he allowed his breathing to relax and stopped fighting. That was the clever play.

  Dante released his mouth and wiped the blood and spit, that had been meant for my face, on the man’s shirt.

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  He said nothing, just looked at me as if I’d asked him to tell me how many children he had murdered today. He shook his head, but said nothing.

  “Not talking?” I asked, “Or can’t understand me?”

  “He understands,” Raph said. “And speaks English.”

  The man shot Raph a look that could have struck him dead, if a look had the power to do that. “Let me make this easy for you,” I said, “My friends want to hurt you, but we also have questions, and if you can answer them, I can try and convince them not to, but I need you to help me. Will you help me?”

  The man glanced at each of us in turn, then slowly nodded.

  “Okay,” I said, “What’s your name?”

  “J-Johan,” he said.

  “Johan. Pleased to meet you. I’m Lilith, but you already knew that because your friends conspired to kill me, am I right?”

  He stared at me, unblinking, unmoving for an instant that seemed to spiral out so far it could have swallowed centuries. He then shook his head, and pressed his lips together.

  “No?” I asked, “No, you didn’t know, or no, you aren’t talking anymore?”

  Again, he shook his head.

  “Raph? Anything?” I asked.

  “He doesn’t strike me as being a supernatural. I can’t sense it. But he has trained his mind to block even me out. I can’t get through.”

  “Okay, so we’ll have to do this the hard way, then.” I looked at Johan. “You realize you have no friends here, right? No one is coming to help you. We are the people who decide what happens to you, so you have to decide for yourself whether keeping quiet is worth dying for, or whether you should just tell us what we want to know, and then you get to walk.”

  “If… if I tell you,
” Johan started to say, his accent thick, and German, “Will you loosen the binds?”

  I glanced at Dante, then back at our prisoner, and nodded. Raphael reached behind Johan’s back and loosened, but didn’t remove, the cable, and Johan seemed to visibly relax. This was good. If he was relaxed, then he would talk.

  “Do you know who I am?” I asked.

  Johan’s lips pressed into a thin line. He nodded. “I do.”

  “Why did your people come for me?”

  His eyes flitted from me, to Dante, then back to me. “You are a woman…”

  “Do you have a problem with women?”

  “You don’t understand. Women are killed because of the mother gene.”

  “Mother gene?”

  “Fuck!” Vik cursed, understanding seeming to dawn upon his face, darkening his eyes. “No, no.”

  “What is it?” I asked, and as soon as I took my eyes away from Johan, he started to convulse.

  I turned to look at him again, but immediately I wanted to look away. His eyes were open, but they were bleeding fingers of blood that had started to crawl along his cheeks. He opened his mouth to scream, but his voice couldn’t manifest, as if there were something lodged inside of his throat. Raph held him down to try and stop the convulsions, but Johan continued to shake, and stutter, and choke on his own saliva. Around him, his emotional aura brilliantly flared, allowing me to sense not fear, but the absolute terror of a man who knew he was about to meet his untimely death.

  His eyes never stopped bleeding. They bled so much, in fact, that his chin and neck were soaking with it, the coppery smell filling the car. But this wasn’t all; his lips were starting to turn small, and black, veiny lines had started to appear around the corners, stretching from his mouth into each cheek. Johan didn’t last much longer. He died in his seat, his mouth slack, eyes open, his face covered in blood.

  I drew my hands away from him, fingers trembling, heart pounding inside of my temples.

  “What…” I started to say, but my brain couldn’t make the words come. Cold, ethereal fingers travelled along the length of my spine, causing my entire body to shudder, alerting me to something happening, or about to happen, behind me. They’ve found us, I thought, God, they’ve found us, they killed Johan so he wouldn’t speak, and now they’re going to kill all of us.

  In front of the car, a few feet away from it, a man stood, slowly lowering his right hand. But it wasn’t Konrad, or the man without a face—it was Leo, and it didn’t take me long to realize it had been he who had done this. He had been the one to murder Johan with whatever demon magic he possessed.

  I went to unlock the car door, but the locks slammed shut before I could reach the handle.

  Leo shook his head. “You’re going to drive,” Leo said, loud enough for us to all hear him. “You’re going to drive that car back to the mansion, and you’re going to do it right now.”

  “And what if we don’t?” I asked, “Are you going to kill us like you killed him?”

  He turned to the side, walked three steps, and his form melted into wispy lines of black ink before disappearing entirely.

  “Dante?” I asked. “We aren’t going to do what he says, are we?”

  He looked at me, his eyes grave, and serious. “We don’t have a choice,” he said.

  “What are we going to do about this?” Vik asked, gesturing with his head at the corpse next to him. “Are we supposed to ride with… this… between us?”

  “Let’s stuff him in the trunk,” Dante said, “We’ll figure out what to do with him when we get to the mansion.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Mother-Gene

  The Keeper, Nicolai, and Liam were all waiting for us when we pulled up to the mansion. No Aiden, though. Nicolai took the corpse with him down to the morgue with Liam’s help, while the rest of us followed the Keeper into the main living room where a fire was in full burn, logs crackling, the scent of smoky wood hanging in the air. Leo, of course, was there too, standing in front of the fireplace with his hands crossed in front of his chest.

  Before anyone could get a word off, Leo rounded on Dante and began to talk at him, instead of to him.

  “That had to have been the most irresponsible, irrational, and stupidest stunt you’ve ever pulled, Dante. What the hell were you thinking?”

  Dante didn’t raise his voice. Instead he stuffed one of his hands into his pockets, walked over to the fireplace, and warmed his other hand. He looked at Leo, jaw clenched, eyes narrow and sharp, as if ready to cut. “Did you really expect us to sit on our asses while we let you handle the situation? And for what reason? You don’t really give a fuck about Lilith, you just want another accolade on your shelf.”

  “I expected to be listened to.”

  “You expect everyone to do what you say, but that’s not how the game is played around here. You don’t have the authority you think you do; final say belongs to our Keeper.”

  The Keeper said nothing; he simply watched things unfold.

  “Really? We’ll see about that.” He turned to look at the Keeper. “I want the mansion locked down in a way that will prevent anyone from leaving. I want them to hurt if they try to getting away. Maybe then they’ll learn their lessons and do as they’re told.”

  “Why is this necessary?” the Keeper asked.

  “Because we are at war, and we can’t have dissent and insubordination within our own ranks if we want to survive. It’s about time we started working as a team.”

  “Really?” I asked, speaking through my already ravaged nerves, “Because what you did back in that parking lot seemed like an executive decision.”

  “You,” he said, pointing at me as if I’d killed his first born. “Who gave you permission to speak? Who asked for your opinion, or your input? When are you going to learn to just let us do the talking?”

  “Maybe when you learn to stop being such a dick?”

  “That’s enough,” the Keeper said, finally speaking. He was rubbing his temples, and his eyes were shut, but he walked into the center of the room and approached me, specifically. “Leo has told me a lot of things, but before I make any decisions, I need to know from you, from all of you, what it is you found on your excursion.”

  “I’ve told you all there is to know,” Leo said.

  “You’ve told me your side of the story, now I want to see if it matches up.” The Keeper looked at me. “Well?”

  I could almost feel everyone’s eyes on me, watching me, waiting to hear me speak. The anxiety building inside of my chest was intense, and very real, but seeing Liam come running into the room with Aiden by his side helped make me feel a little more at ease. At least they were here, and that meant they would be able to learn what happened, too.

  “We did find something,” I said, “We found out a lot of things.”

  “Like what?”

  I looked at Vik, Raph, and Dante in turn. Dante nodded his encouragement. “So, I think there’s a cult out there working separately to the werewolf and the vampires I’ve encountered so far. I think this cult wants me dead just as badly, but I think they have a special reason why compared to the supernaturals who just want to gain more power by murdering other supernaturals and eating their essence.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well… before Leo killed the one and only prisoner we were able to get, he mentioned something—the mother gene.”

  “This is bullshit,” Leo said, interrupting.

  “It isn’t bullshit,” I snapped. “The mother gene was one of the first things I had ever read about in a passage about vampires that talked about how vampires didn’t inherit genes from their mothers because they were created, not born. I didn’t ask about it, but it made me think that male supernaturals cannot create supernatural children; only females can. Their children then inherit whatever supernatural traits they have directly from their mothers. Is this true?”

  “That’s a myth that has never been proven,” Leo said.

  “L
et her speak,” the Keeper said, shutting Leo down once and for all. “It isn’t something that has been especially documented. Most couples that produce supernatural children are supernaturals themselves, usually from the same breed. Werewolf with werewolf, mage with mage, succubi with incubi. It’s very rare that we get cross-breeds.”

  “I find that hard to believe, but you’re the experts. Anyway, what I think is that this cult is hunting females down and killing them to stop us from having children and increasing the population, and I think they’ve been doing it for a long time.”

  The room fell silent while Keeper carefully considered my words. The fire popped, and the sound alone made me jump. “We aren’t locking the mansion down,” the Keeper said.

  “What?” Leo asked, raising his voice, “We have to keep everyone inside at all costs.”

  “Why did you kill that man?”

  Leo narrowed his eyes. “We don’t know what he was going to say. For all you knew, he was summoning help.”

  “He wasn’t!” I said, “I could see his aura, he was more afraid of dying at our hands than at his cults’ hands. He was going to tell us so much more than what we got.”

  “And do you think your senses can’t be tricked? Do you think you can’t be lied to? Because that’s what this sounds like. I still don’t buy the mother-gene story, either. Why would they want to wipe us all out by killing our women? And where’s the proof that’s what’s going on?”

  “We have the proof,” the Keeper said, “Other centers have reported the same thing—that women are being targeted and systematically killed. We didn’t know why, but this is better than any theory I have been able to come up with, and It makes sense.”

  Leo shook his head and approached. “Even if that’s true, why does locking the mansion down not seem like a good idea to you?”