Abandoned Darkness

by Kate Wendley

  He dropped down on the other end and zoned out on reading player’s stats. The Braves were in their groove this year and made it to the postseason again. He might just owe Zach some money if they won tonight’s game and made it to the second round.

  It was a couple innings before he was startled by the door to the vampire sub-basement opening. Shit. His stomach dropped when Anthony and Kaia stepped into the room. Why hadn’t he realized she was here?

  Zach muted the TV and popped up, reaching right out to give Kaia a big hug. “Hey! Nice to see you again, Kaia. It’s great to see you two lovebirds back together.”

  They did, in fact, look totally happy together, which only made Sebastian feel like an asshole for what he was about to do. He tried to shut down his emotions and steel his mind as he stood up and waited to be introduced to her.

  Kaia smiled pleasantly as she said her hellos to Zach, then turned her attention to Sebastian.

  Anthony was beaming like only a man in love could. “Kaia, this is my other roommate and good friend, Sebastian. I don’t believe you two have met yet.”

  Shit. His good friend… Hearing that felt like a stab to the heart.

  Kaia smiled just as warmly as she put her hand out for him to shake. His usual tenseness about touching her, a complete stranger, was overridden by his heartache and anger over the one part of his job in the family that he absolutely detested. He braced himself as he firmly grasped her hand with his right, and used his left to hold onto her forearm.

  “No! Sebastian, stop!”

  He tuned out Anthony’s protests and felt dead inside as he held Kaia and let his power flow. Anthony was probably going to hate him after this, not to mention Kaia, but what choice did he have? He never had a choice, not really. He was damned if he did and damned if he didn’t.

  He was in her head in an instant, rifling through memories and looking for specific thoughts to delve deeper into. He’d had years to hone his skills, allowing him to flow through her mind with frightening ease. He’d long ago gotten used to the dreamlike sensation, forcing him to concentrate in order to keep his sense of self while he jettisoned from thought to thought in less than a heartbeat of time. Normally he tried to keep a wall up around his own mind since he absorbed things from his victim’s head without even trying, and he always got in and out as fast as possible, but this girl was dating one of his only two friends. With her he was going to dig deep no matter how long it took.

  He angrily forced himself into her innermost thoughts, surprised to find them so easy to get into, though that might be because she was human. He knew he was being harsh with her, but he also knew that whatever he found in her head would only end up hurting Anthony anyway.

  He quickly and bluntly forced memory after memory to pop up into the forefront of her mind. He wasn’t immediately finding anything incriminating, so he dug deeper until he hit a bright red wall of pain. He forced himself to focus on it and realized he was squeezing her hand and forearm too hard and it was hurting her. He eased up his grip and was quickly in her mind once more.

  He braced himself for the onslaught of foreign images, thoughts and emotions he knew he’d absorb, but was a little overwhelmed by how quickly everything came to him. His human self struggled to keep a wall between what was her mind and memories and what Sebastian knew were his own, but his wolf didn’t care about walls. His wolf seized on her every weakness and pushed confidently ahead.

  He felt confused, then realized it was Kaia that was confused, not him. She could feel him in her head, but didn’t understand what was going on. That thought was quickly drowned out by the distraction of memories he was dredging up in her mind.

  He struggled to keep his identity separate from hers as he focused on what he was looking for. He wanted to know everything she thought about Anthony, and as soon as he put that request out there, he was instantly barraged with intense thoughts and emotions. The overriding theme was that she loved Anthony and was happy they were back together, but she secretly feared their relationship was too new and strange for it to last.

  Sebastian wasn’t satisfied with those too perfect, saccharine thoughts, and pushed backwards in time. He wanted to know how they met. Had Ethan ordered her to seduce Anthony?

  She instantly remembered the first time Ethan found out she was seeing him, and how overprotective he acted. Then she remembered back to meeting Anthony. She’d crashed into him inside the bookstore, and he hadn’t been happy about it. But after apologizing to him, then being so excited that he had a book by one of her favorite authors in his hands, he’d awkwardly started talking to her. He seemed out of his realm trying to make conversation, but his dark eyes and intense gaze were intriguing. His attention was completely on her from then on, and his giant scar and his pale, creamy skin contrasting with his sharp features and long, dark hair quickly grew on her. She couldn’t imagine a night without him now that they’d made up again.

  Sebastian was pissed off. She had to be tricking him. What about Ethan? Why was she friends with him, and why did she live at Wild Woods, where only supernaturals lived?

  He saw her in her mind working at a manufacturing plant, and Ethan coming to talk to her. Then he saw random images and thoughts of them spending time together.

  But never as anything more than friends.

  A dark, ugly wall appeared out of nowhere in her mind, and her thoughts didn’t want to acknowledge it. There was a door in the middle but she didn’t want to reach out and turn the handle to see inside. He found himself reluctant to look in that direction, just like she was, then forced himself to remember he wasn’t her. Her memories weren’t his memories, her fears not his.

  He wanted to know what she was keeping blocked off in her head.

  She got more and more reluctant to even glance in the direction of the door, but he kept pushing her towards it. Her emotions felt like she was being physically forced into something she had no control over and fear flooded her mind.

  He didn’t care how scared she was, he wanted to know more. She panicked in her dream, as she’d started to think of it. She wasn’t sure if she was hallucinating, dreaming, or going out of her mind, but she desperately didn’t want to open the door that was now too big to ignore.

  He shoved her towards it and forced her hand to turn the knob.

  It was a mistake. Dark, ugly things quickly filled her head. He forced a request out to search for anything related to Ethan or Anthony, but his demands were horrifically overwhelmed by memories from a past well before she’d come to Atlanta and met either of them.

  Her heart raced in near terror as she was leaving home the night after high school graduation, in her memory. She was driving through the night, hoping he wouldn’t find her and wouldn’t know where to look. Her car was packed with as many of her things as she could gather before he got home from the bar. A map was stuffed in between a couple bags of food on the passenger seat, along with all the cash she’d saved over the last few years. God she hoped he didn’t ever find her.

  Sebastian didn’t know who ‘he’ was, but he felt the fear of him as if he were Kaia. She was scared out of her mind. She didn’t want to get caught by him, but she’d never lived on her own before, either. She hoped she’d be able to make it. She even decided to change her name so he’d have a harder time finding her.

  Gabriella. Over and over again he heard that name in her mind. She cringed every time she heard it because it meant she was probably in trouble for something. And the smell… She hated the smell of him. Her dad? Her uncle? Sebastian wasn’t sure. And her brothers? She was the only girl in a house with five guys and she hated that, too.

  Horrific and humiliating memories of living with him and his kids popped up in her consciousness. His boys were her cousins, but they didn’t treat her like anything better than dirt. She remembered a time she got in trouble for wrecking the car, except she hadn’t done it. One of the boys had, but they all banded together and blamed her. Most of them sneered at her while he punched her
for it. Only Jeff had the decency to at least look guilty, but it didn’t do her any good. He’d never fess up.

  She felt the punch now like it just happened. Her head whipped to the side and she tried not to cry out. He hated it when she cried, when she made any noise at all. He kept screaming at her about the trashed car, so mad his face was red, veins growing in his forehead while his words came out in spittles.

  He finally grabbed her by the shoulders and kneed her in the stomach with the force of a man used to hard fighting. She saw stars as she fell to the ground, trying to still her spasming muscles and helpless sobs that she knew from firsthand experience could easily push him even further over the edge.

  **

  Sebastian heard a faraway, familiar voice, but his mind was too focused on the emotions of the events he was reliving for the person’s words to make any sense to him.

  “Sebastian! Let Kaia go!”

  He startled when he realized it was Anthony shouting at him, but Anthony didn’t belong in the scene in his mind. Sebastian looked around in confusion.

  “Let Kaia go! She’s going into shock!”

  He startled and eased up on his grip as he focused on her, but he was still confused. He knew he was here, looking at Kaia, but he was also still in her head, replaying their past. He stared into Kaia’s wide, unseeing eyes. Tears streamed down her cheeks as her whole body twitched. It felt like he was seeing himself in the mirror as tangled emotions raced through them both.

  “Sebastian!”

  He jerked and reflexively shut down his power, which dropped him abruptly back into the here and now. His sense of self battled with the overwhelming volume of Kaia’s memories now in his head, but this wasn’t the first time he’d read someone. His mind quickly worked to reorganize everything so it made sense again.

  There was too much to wrap his head around, though, and he worried about why he and Kaia were on the ground. Had he hurt her? He didn’t think he’d ever physically hurt someone while he was reading them before, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on what had happened.

  Anthony was on his knees with Kaia in his arms as soon as Sebastian let her go. She was weakly trying to pull away from him, her expression glazed over like she was deep in a reverie. She was no doubt still reliving her memories in vivid detail, an unfortunate side effect of Sebastian’s disgusting power. And since she was human, he wasn’t sure how long the effect would last.

  Everyone’s eyes were on her as her nervous twitches began looking like she was shaking her head. She hoarsely whispered, “No. No,” and awkwardly tried to scramble away. Anthony looked like he was at a loss for how to help her.

  Thoughts that weren’t his own buzzed around in Sebastian’s head. He pressed the base of his fists to his temples to try to force his mind to stop racing. He’d gone too far back in Kaia’s memories and now felt like shit in more ways than one for doing it.

  His sense of himself was wildly spinning, racing over, around and through all the memories he’d absorbed purposely and on accident from Kaia. It made him want to scream in confused mental agony, claw his brain out of his head, and throw up all at once. It’d been years since a reading felt this overpowering. He grunted in his head, or maybe out loud, he wasn’t sure which. There was just too much…

  And he hadn’t found a single shred of evidence that Kaia was anything other than a woman who really liked Anthony.

  Her gaze locked on him and it made everything in his brain go quiet. In place of his confusion was now an intense feeling of shame.

  Kaia looked more and more upset as she watched him, then clumsily got to her feet. “No.”

  Sebastian was too messed up to move, so he just sat on his knees and watched her. The murmurs of her memories eventually overcame the short burst of quiet in his head. They built in momentum, storming through his mind, then gradually receded, over and over again like ocean waves.

  Feeling like he had something very important he needed to say, he focused as hard as he could to get the words out. His voice sounded rougher than he’d wanted when he said, “I’m sorry, Gabriella. I’m so sorry.”

  “Shut up! Don’t call me that!” She jerkily shook her head, her eyes wide and horrified. Anthony was cautiously by her side, keeping her steady on her feet.

  Her anger at him made him feel even worse than before, and he almost remembered why he shouldn’t call her by her name, but then another avalanche of confusing memories assaulted him.

  His emotions felt like a hurricane of never ending ups and downs as he struggled with trying to separate his identity from hers, and all the while he was pissed at himself for being so rough with her in the first place. Now that he was out of her mind, the images stopped, but the feelings and thoughts attached to them haunted him in surround sound. He jerked at Zach’s voice in the background.

  “Anthony, she’s hyperventilating. Could you put her in a trance to calm her down?”

  “I don’t want to do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because Ethan’s done it too many times. No more.”

  Sebastian forced himself to focus on the memories he pulled from Kaia’s head. Yes, there were strange blanks that could easily be vampire trances. He focused harder and found jumbled memories that felt almost like dreams, but not quite. They had to be Ethan trying to cover her discoveries about him before she was allowed to know about their world.

  Her anguish over her past filled his thoughts again, making him dizzy as they all competed for attention in his mind.

  He startled at Anthony’s voice.

  “Kaia, it’s me. Anthony. Shhh, it’s ok. Please Kaia. Shhh…”

  Anthony held her while she breathed way too fast, her heart beating so harshly Sebastian could hear it loud and clear from where he sat on the floor in front of her.

  Something in his blood connection to Anthony caught his attention and helped still his racing thoughts. He focused on their link and felt a strange shift in his friend.

  An incredible possessiveness came over him. It felt like Anthony was finally claiming Kaia with his soul. Happiness filled him to the brim. He wasn’t sure which of them was actually feeling the happiness, Anthony or Sebastian, but Kaia’s fear and confusion threatened to overwhelm the goodness of it. Her emotions were too fresh in Sebastian’s head, and for his own sanity he needed them out.

  He focused on Zach, on Anthony, then on his surroundings. Anything that was different than Kaia.

  His wolf came forward in his mind, always there to help him when he was confused after reading someone. His wolf knew what he needed… he needed to not think human thoughts. He needed to just be. His wolf knew how to do that, to live and breathe and move around on gut instinct alone. His wolf lived in the moment.

  Sebastian’s mind was a mess, though, and he wasn’t sure if his wolf could focus enough to take over for him. He was too confused by the mishmash of memories that were Kaia’s, but felt like his as they all intertwined in his mind.

  He couldn’t think straight, he could only feel, and what he felt was pain, humiliation, but also hope and love. All the emotions ebbed and flowed, overlapping each other over and over again, making it impossible for him to get a grasp on what was real.

  He found himself licking Kaia’s hand, showing her he accepted her as family. She didn’t like him licking and nuzzling her, but she didn’t fight against it very hard. She belonged to his brother, Anthony, so she was his family now, whether she liked it or not. But she was scared… too scared. He was sorry for that because he knew it was his fault, but he’d done the right thing because now he knew everything would be ok.

  **

  Sebastian let Zach lead him back to the guard’s couch when Anthony took Kaia downstairs. Zach’s presence next to him helped calm his mind. He had a way of making things quiet, but it was only a temporary relief. The voices and memories would come back with a vengeance once anyone disturbed the silence.

  After a time, Sebastian had no idea how long, he felt like he co
uld mostly focus again.

  “Thanks for sitting here with me.”

  Zach quietly said, “I know your job sucks, man. Anthony understands that, too.”

  Sebastian didn’t say anything. They might know it sucks, but they had no idea what he went through when he read people. He tried not to resent them for being as perfect as they were, but they couldn’t possibly understand because no one else could do what he could do.

  “She took those punches like she was used to them.”

  He tersely replied, “Yep.”

  “Ethan?”

  He looked away. “No. Has nothing to do with Ethan or any supernatural. It’s years in the past, though she’ll be remembering it in more detail for a while now, thanks to me.” He hated himself for his power and what it did to others as much as what it did to him.

  Zach’s hand on his shoulder made him take a breath and calm down. He’d been friends with Zach for a long time, and after all the years of fighting and wrestling at the ranch as their animals, and sometimes fighting and wrestling around at home just because they had energy to burn, Zach was the only person in his life that could calm him.

  He trusted both Zach and Anthony with his life, but Anthony scared him, even after all these years. He wasn’t scared of Zach, but his hand on his shoulder was confusing him. It reminded him of meeting him at the ranch a few weeks ago, except that wasn’t Sebastian’s memory, it was Kaia’s.

  He growled under his breath and stood up. “I need to clear my head. I’m going to go clean something.”

  Zach nodded and followed him out of the vampire hall.

  **

  Anthony came by with Kaia as Sebastian was mopping the floor in the restaurant. He realized too late that they were there and didn’t have time to retreat before they were right in front of him, standing way too close. It was accidental touching distance.

  He’d been able to control his power for over seven years now, but it was hard to break the habit of being scared to touch people. Back when he couldn’t control it, it was as much a shock to him when he accidentally read someone’s mind as it was to his victim. The horrified looks on their faces still haunted him.