Darkness Falls

by A C Warneke

  She huffed out a disbelieving laugh, wondering how drunk he could have been to miss the mark in the first place. Before she could ask, he turned on his heel and disappeared into the growing crowd. Shaking her head, she turned back around and her gaze slammed into Feryn’s as he glared at her from across the short distance.

  It was ridiculous how her belly tightened with desire at seeing him, despite the fact that the material draping across his waist did little to conceal his impressive penis. In the warm light of the fires surrounding him, his mark glowed even brighter than usual and from this distance it was breathtaking, swirling around his ribs and thighs. He was all hard and gleaming muscles and she wished that they were alone and that they weren’t fighting.

  His eyes narrowed as he took in her outfit and she thought he would be pleased that she wore the dress that he had given her. But by the time he raised his head and met her eyes once more, his scowl had become even fiercer. Confused by his contrary action, she put her hands on her hips and tilted her head to the side in a silent question. Instead of answering her, though, he turned on his heels and walked away, squeezing his hands into two tight fists.

  Throwing her hands up in the air, she went in search of Varick, since he was now the only reason she was there. As hard as she tried to ignore what was going on around her, she found it impossible to shut out the sounds of pleasure and the way bodies moved in sensual dances, both on and off the dance floor. It surprised her to realize she could tell which figures were Aradians and which were humans. There was nothing overt to distinguish the two species, just a feeling that pricked in her belly around Aradians. At that moment her belly was practically on fire from the vast amounts of the creatures.

  She was staggered by how many Aradians were at the party. For some reason, she had assumed there were only a handful of Aradians throughout the entire world but there were hundreds at the party alone. Certainly there were more out there, including the vamp creators.

  Jesus, how many Aradians were there?

  Moving through the fringes of the gathering, trying to avoid the darkest corners, the low pulse of drums that permeated the sultry, tropical air started to have their way with her. Her limbs felt looser, her skin tighter, her heartbeat faster and her body hotter the longer she remained at the party. Bodies moved against hers as she slowed to a crawl, losing herself in the sensual atmosphere. Her chest rose and fell with each panted breath and she was growing desperate for Feryn, for his touch, for his possession.

  A woman’s orgasmic scream pierced the throbbing beat and a shudder worked its way through Malorie. If she didn’t find Varick in the next ten minutes, she was going to head back to her rooms because she ached with desire for Feryn and he was avoiding her like the plague. The sheer material was beginning to feel oppressive and she understood why everyone else was wearing next to nothing. If she was a little less self-conscious, she’d be tearing her dress off and sliding her hands over her overheated body.

  What the hell was Feryn thinking forcing her to attend this stupid thing and then keeping his distance? In desperation, she looked around the fucking masses, hoping against hope to find Feryn so he could relieve the burning pressure that was tying her in knots and making her unbelievably horny. She didn’t even care how big of an asshole Feryn was acting, if only he would find her and ease her suffering.

  “Malorie,” a scratchy voice called out, breaking through her fog of lust. Looking around for the source of the sound, all she could see were bodies writhing together, in dance, in pleasure. A soft chuckle cleared a few more cobwebs away before the voice added, “Over here, in the space between the library and the gym.”

  Trying to walk as casually as possible and not give away the fact that her legs were noodles and she wanted to be fucked, she made her way over to the buildings that disappeared into the night sky. The space between them didn’t seem very large until she was standing directly in front of the gaping hole, which only reinforced her awareness that the Aradian island was monstrous.

  As soon as she was out of the warm glow of the firelight, her eyes adjusted and she quickly spotted Varick sitting by himself on a comfortable chair that looked like it belonged in a sitting room and not outside. To her surprise, there was a second one just like it waiting for her and with a smile, she sat down. “How long have you been watching me make a fool of myself?”

  “Not long,” he rasped, his voice still scratchy from disuse. He held his hand out for her to take, which she did without hesitation. His long fingers wrapped around hers and squeezed, matching the grateful smile on his lips, “Thank you for finding me. In the caves, I mean.”

  “I’m sorry it took me so long,” she told him, squeezing his hand in return. Despite having only met him once before, since she didn’t count the cave as a meeting, she felt such a connection to him, such love for him. He was family.

  “It’s my fault,” he told her, taking the blame. “If I hadn’t erased myself from your life….”

  “I remembered you when I saw your picture months ago,” she interrupted, not letting him go any further. “I should have heard you then but I was… overwhelmed.”

  Varick smiled and she saw so much of Feryn in him that it took her breath away. His green eyes sparkled with quiet laughter as he said, “Yes, I suppose my father can be a bit much to take.”

  “You have no idea,” Malorie said with a grin, still holding his hand. Leaning back in the chair, she looked through the darkness and out over the festivities, wondering where Feryn was and if he was going to swoop in and separate her from the one person she truly wanted to see. “I don’t think he knows what to do with me.”

  “That’s an understatement,” Varick said softly with a rusty chuckle. He leaned back in his chair as well, gazing towards the dancing but Malorie knew his thoughts were a thousand miles away. “He’s told me that I am to be a brother. Congratulations.”

  Glancing at him out of the corner of her eye, she didn’t notice any bitterness in his expression. Of course, he had just been through hell so maybe he didn’t care or he had learned how to hide his emotions very, very well. Licking her lips, she asked softly, “Are you okay with that?”

  Startled, he looked at her with bewildered eyes, “Why wouldn’t I be? I’ve known for years that you were meant for him and naturally that means children, hopefully many children because my father is an incredible dad.”

  “Yeah but you’ve been an only child….” Her words trailed off as Varick arched an eyebrow in disbelief. As color flooded her cheeks, she cleared her throat, “Well, after everything you’ve been through, I thought you might need some time to adjust to, well, whatever. All of it.”

  His lips quirked up in a half-smile as he shook his head, “And yet if he hadn’t found you when he had then I would never have been set free.”

  Slowly, she nodded her head, realizing once again that had things played out differently, Feryn would have been gone and there would have been no one else powerful enough to take on Taella and her vampire hordes. Had Malorie dreamt of Varick without meeting Feryn, she doubted there would have been anything she could have done for the boy. Taella would have been at full strength and a lone vampire hunter, even a battalion of vampire hunters, would have been no match in the Aradian caves. If they had even made it that far.

  “So, you’re okay with this?”

  That rusty chuckle came from between his lips once again and she relaxed back into the chair with a smile on her lips. They were silent for a few minutes, absurdly comfortable in one another’s company. She wasn’t too surprised since he had changed the course of her life when she was sixteen and she hadn’t even known it. It still plagued her how things could have been different if he had let her keep her memories. In the end, she had to begrudgingly admit that he had done the right thing by concealing them.

  A sudden gruff sound came from the back of his throat and jolted her out of her reverie. Turning her head, she looked at him in curiosity. A grin played at his mouth and laughter dance
d in his haunted eyes as he said, “He didn’t want the two of us to be left alone in the same room because he is under the delusion you might prefer me over him.”

  Her lips parted and she stared at him for a moment as the meaning of his words sank in. A giggle bubbled up from her belly and exploded outwards because Feryn was apparently unaware of the messed up connection between her and Varick. Still clutching his hand, she covered her mouth with her other hand to try and contain her mirth. “So he wasn’t truly worried about you going all psycho on me at all, was he?”

  Grinning mischievously, Varick shook his head no, which only made her laugh harder. As difficult as it was to imagine, maybe he wasn’t angry, maybe he was jealous. She had to know and with a small smile, she asked, “He’s jealous?”

  “As a fucking bear.”

  “And you didn’t do anything to assure him that there is absolutely nothing between us?” she asked, feeling ridiculously happy that Feryn was jealous. “That there could never be anything between us?”

  He shook his head no, a hint of the old Varick shining through the cracks in his broken exterior. “He watches you all of the time and it gives me some pleasure to tweak his pride, even if it is all I have.”

  “Oh, Varick,” she said on a sigh, her laughter dying just as abruptly as it had begun. Twisting in her chair, she reached up and cupped his slender cheek in her palm, nearly crying as he closed his eyes as if in pain. After a moment, he pressed his skin against hers and seemed to take comfort in her touch. “Don’t you realize that you have so much more?”

  He opened his eyes, letting her see the hollowness that swallowed the green depths. “She took everything from me, Malorie. I don’t know who I am anymore.”

  What could she possibly say to that to make it better? Brushing her thumb over his sharp cheekbone, she brought the hand she held up to her lips and kissed the bony knuckles. “We’ll make it all right, Varick, even if it means hunting the bitch down wherever she is and killing her ourselves.”

  “Father has bound her and put her in the dungeon.” A wry smile curved his lips as he shook his head. “Besides, I no longer have the strength to kill her.”

  “You came awfully close back there in the caves,” she teased, hoping to lighten the burden he carried. She wouldn’t tell him that if he wished it, she would kill Taella for him. At his slight nod, she added, “What if you drank some of my bloo….”

  He stopped her before she could finish the offer, putting his finger over her lips and frantically shaking his head no. “I never should have drunk your blood after you rescued me but I was out of my mind with confusion and rage. I thought you were another illusion crafted out of my own fevered dreams. You have no idea how often I imagined you saving me, Malorie. I envisioned it so many times: grabbing you and draining you of your blood and then ripping Taella’s head from her fucking body. It wasn’t that I had anything against you but I really, really wanted her to die.”

  In spite of his words, Malorie chuckled as she leaned back in the chair and relaxed once more. “You would have had to drink a lot more blood if you wanted to drain me dry.”

  A soft chuckle eased past his lips as he leaned back, too, and muttered, “Well, thank the gods for that. I’m pretty sure my father would have killed me if I had managed to kill you.”

  She snorted, “He might have thanked you for getting rid of the thorn in his side, no matter how jealous or possessive he might act.”

  “Yeah, you’re probably right,” he agreed. His expression was dead serious but his lips trembled as he fought his smile and she grinned at him. On a sigh, he murmured, “I wish I would have kept you when we first met. I think we would have had so much fun together and I wouldn’t have gotten drawn deeper and deeper into Taella’s world.”

  “Yes and as a sixteen year old child I would have been overwhelmed by your world and, worse, your father would have had no need for me at all,” she returned, rolling her eyes as she continued to smile. “I would have been kept in isolation as I popped out Aradian baby after Aradian baby until I was merely a mindless body. We never would have been given the chance to become friends.”

  He cringed at the future that would have been, knowing she spoke the truth. “Okay, then I guess that this way worked out better.”

  “It would have been better had your father killed all of the vampires when he thought you had been killed instead of just vampires that killed humans.”

  Varick’s eyes widened as he stared at Malorie in awe. Swallowing thickly, he asked, “He did that?”

  “He did,” she assured him. “He would have killed all of them but he wanted to honor your memory and what Taella had established with her ‘human-friendly’ vampires.”

  “Yeah,” he growled. “She was a real saint. The fucking bitch.”

  “She had all of them fooled.”

  “And none more so than me,” he lamented in self-loathing.

  “Sweetheart,” Malorie said, grabbing his face between her palms and forcing him to meet her eyes. “She was very good at what she did, Varick. Hell, she fooled your father and I’m sure you’ll agree with me that your father does not suffer fools easily.”

  Slowly, almost grudgingly, he nodded his head. In the deepest, darkest depths of his eyes, she saw the first spark of hope and she almost smiled. Speaking in a soft, broken voice, he croaked, “I lived with her and her vampires for years and I never suspected a thing. How could I have been so blind?”

  “Because you’re a good man,” she told him with unreserved conviction. “When you’re good, you cannot fathom such evil, such depravity and duplicitousness. You expect others to be as honest as you are and take them at their word.”

  “But you saw it.”

  She smiled slightly and winked at him, “I’m not that good.”

  Varick snorted, “You’re nowhere as evil as Taella.”

  “Maybe not but I was trained to kill vampires,” she reminded him. “I will never trust a vampire or those that create them because it is too ingrained within me to hate them.”

  “Your father was a wise man.”

  “Yes,” she agreed, her stomach rumbling with unease at the thought of her father. Pressing a hand against her gut, she leaned back in her chair and nodded towards the festivities, eager to talk about something other than Gustav Hunter. “Well, are you at least enjoying yourself at this party?”

  With a grimace, he shook his head no. “I used to love these revelries, gorging myself on beautiful women, on the blood and bodies of beautiful women. But now, the thought of anyone touching me like that makes me physically ill. What if I never want to fuck again?”

  “You have to give yourself time to heal,” she said softly, wishing she had thought of a different topic instead of yet another that brought back the hellish years he spent in captivity. She wasn’t going to treat him as if he were diseased and she crossed her fingers in the hope that she didn’t say or do anything that made it worse. As long as she avoided the topics of her dad or her ex-husband or Feryn she’d be able to pretend everything was okay in her world, at least for a little while.

  “My father wants me to get involved in the new Breeder program, even though that would mean working with you,” he said softly, almost as an after-thought. Malorie immediately sat a little straighter to hear every little tidbit he might divulge, silently pleased that Feryn was letting her work on the Breeder program even though he hadn’t told her anything yet. “I think he hopes a female will be born and in twenty years she will choose me.”

  “Um, maybe you need to tell him that that will never happen,” Malorie told him.

  He looked at her with a slight smile, “But then he’ll know about our relationship and that will spoil all of my fun.”

  His words repeated in her head and she frowned, “He’s going to let the female babies choose their own fate?”

  “More or less,” he said with a shrug. “I mean, obviously she’ll have to choose an Aradian but there are thousands of males out there so surel
y one of them will be acceptable?”

  “Hmm,” Malorie murmured, contemplating this new information. It wasn’t absolute freedom but it was a concession of sorts, and it was a huge concession for Feryn to make. There were going to be a lot of furious Aradians out there when they learned the few females were going to be masters of their own limited fates. “And the males? Will they have some say in their fates?”

  “I don’t know, maybe.” He looked at her and a wicked grin curled his lips and lit his eyes, “If not, you’ll probably just release them back into the wild anyways.”

  As her jaw dropped, he threw his head back and laughed, a rusty sound that was absolutely beautiful. Shaking her head, she tried not to smile as she smirked, “That was not funny, Varick.”

  “Yes it was. Um, do you want to meet the mothers?” Varick asked with unexpected excitement in his voice. He sat up and looked at her as if leaving the orgy to meet a couple of pregnant women was suddenly the most important thing in the world. When Malorie simply blinked at him because she was still trying to process his words, his expression fell and his shoulders slumped, “I mean, you don’t have to….”

  “I’d love to,” she said quickly, jumping to her feet and pulling Varick to his. His answering smile convinced her she made the right decision, even if the thought of meeting the hordes of women who had been forced upon her father was abhorrent to her. “Anything is better than staying here and accidentally stumbling upon some bimbo hitting on Feryn….”

  “He’d shoot her down before she got within ten feet.” Taking her hand, he led her away from the festivities and further into the darkness between the buildings.

  Malorie looked at him with a grimace, letting him take the lead since she had no idea where the women were being kept. “You’re just saying that to make me feel better.”