by D. N. Hoxa
His eyes stared at me behind the shortest, thickest eyelashes I’d ever seen.
And then he hit me so hard, he nearly broke my jaw.
His knee on my stomach took the breath out of me. I jumped back a couple of steps, and he followed. I didn’t fight back—couldn’t fight back. I just did my best to avoid being hit. He was maybe half a head taller than me, wide shoulders and narrow hips. His left arm was covered in blood and his blue shirt torn. I had no idea when I’d done that.
He was a shifter, although I had no idea what he turned into. I’d never come across someone with that kind of vibe before. It was strong and wild but perfectly silent at the same time. Sneaky. He skin smelled of summer and tangerine and something else I couldn’t define.
And when I finally had enough of studying him, I threw him against the wall face first and brought his right arm up as far as it would go. The smallest movement would break his elbow. I doubted he was stupid, though I’d been wrong before.
My mouth was right next to his ear. He was gasping and his breathing was uneven. I gave him a couple of seconds to calm down before I tightened my grip on his arm. He didn’t make a sound.
“I’ve got a couple questions I want to ask you. Ready to talk?” He didn’t say anything. I pulled his arm farther up. Again, no sound. “How about now?”
He watched me through the corner of his eyes but didn’t say a single word. I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t want to break his arm, but he was leaving me no choice. Cursing in my mind, I began to pull his arm up again when…
“Stop.”
Thank God.
I loosened my grip a bit. I still didn’t know what exactly I was going to do with him. It wasn’t like I could keep him hostage or turn him over to the Council. Still, I played along. I would figure it out somewhere along the way.
A chair covered in blood was just a few feet behind me, and that’s where I sat him down. The barrel of my gun was pressed firmly against his forehead, my hand on the trigger though the safety was on.
“Don’t move,” I said, but he didn’t seem to care. He turned all the way around to look at all the bodies and the ashes that covered the floor before he turned to me again.
“You’re the Raven?” he asked me, brows arched and eyes filled with disbelief. Wasn’t that, you know, obvious?
Apparently not.
“The one and only.”
Those blue eyes of his were very distracting, but I would look weak if I looked away so I had to keep staring at him. His expression gave nothing away as I found myself looking for something that said he was admiring me as much as I was him. I mentally slapped myself in the face, hard. Concentrate.
“You’re just a kid,” he said, and he actually smiled. I was tempted to take a step back. The asshole! He didn’t look much older than me himself.
“I am not a kid. Asshole,” I muttered. I was twenty-one years old, damn it. And why the hell was I letting this guy get to me? He’s the enemy, Star, I reminded myself, and cleared my throat. “Wanna tell me what the hell you sickos think you’re doing?”
If I could just get him to tell me what the RR was doing, I could get the hell out of there and be done with him.
“Sickos?” he said, and then he laughed. He actually laughed in my face!
“What the fuck were you doing here?” I hissed.
This wasn’t like me. I never allowed myself to get pissed like that. I needed to get my thoughts under control and fast.
“You don’t actually think I’d tell you, do you?” He seemed genuinely curious.
I hit him with the back of the gun on his face. Ugh. It felt like I hit myself. What the hell was wrong with me?
His lower lip split and filled his mouth with red hot blood in a second. The curiosity in his eyes was replaced by anger. He wiped the blood with the back of his hand, never looking away from my eyes. Strangely enough, I had no sick feeling in my stomach from being in front of the guy. No pull, no dizziness. It was like he didn’t want to harm me.
“I was hoping you would be a fucking adult so I could talk to you, but apparently, that’s too much to ask,” he spit.
“Talk to me about what?”
“About the fact that you have no idea what the hell you’re doing.” Here we go again.
“Seriously, man, one of you sick bastards is gonna have to tell me what the hell that means!”
I was tempted to hit him with my gun again, but I controlled myself.
“Are you really that blind?”
Holy crap, this man was testing my patience.
“What the hell are you talking about?” I pulled the gun up again to show him that I was going to hit him if he continued to mock me.
“They’re using you. Your precious Council is using you.”
This time, I laughed.
“Wow. So that’s the big secret! To think that I actually wondered a time or two about what the hell it was I had no idea of.”
“You don’t understand—” he started, but I cut him off.
“It’s you who doesn’t understand. Of course they’re using me. And I’m using them.”
I’d had enough of this bullshit.
“Oh, really? Well, then, they must’ve told you what you are.”
My mouth opened, but no word came out for a second. How the hell did he know about that?
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Exactly that. Have they told you? Do you know what you are?”
“Of course I know what I am.” He couldn’t possibly know, could he?
“Okay, then, what are you?”
“Why the hell would I tell you that?”
“You don’t know.”
He smiled as if he’d just won a fucking game, crossed his arms in front of his chest and leaned back on his chair. Unbelievable.
“And you do?”
Not the smartest comeback, but curiosity was killing me. I’d practically gone a whole life without knowing what I was or where I belonged. Now this guy was telling me that he knew? It didn’t help that I was thinking about kissing him in the middle of what could be the most important revelation of my life.
“I do. And so does your precious Council whom you serve with such loyalty. They’ve known since day one when Mara came looking for the book in Samuel’s store. Why do you think they’ve been so generous with you?”
My stomach tied up in knots. He knew? The RR was supposed to think that the girl they’d tortured four years ago was dead. How the hell was this possible?
But I knew that if I asked him that, I would sound even more clueless. So I didn’t.
“Because they take care of their own,” I said instead. That was what Uncle Sam said to me once. That was what McGraw said to me, too, when I first stepped into Lyndor.
The man laughed again. “Well, that’s rich, considering what a big, fat lie that is. They lied to you, Raven. They don’t take care of their own. They use their own instead, until there’s nothing more to get out of them. They manipulate them until they have nothing more to offer. They took you because of what you are.”
“Bullshit!”
“No. It’s the truth,” he said calmly, and had I not known that he was a Rebel, I would’ve been tempted to believe him. He looked and sounded as sincere as it gets.
Then it hit me.
It was so clear, it was ridiculous I hadn't thought about it earlier. I’d never before had a chance like this. I’d never actually had a conversation with a Red Rebel before. What would happen if he actually believed that he got to me? What would he do if he thought he made me believe in everything he said?
Would he take me to his leaders?
I barely held my smile as I lowered the gun and looked away from him. Through the corner of my eye, I saw him smiling.
“I-I-I…” It was harder than it looked to actually fake stuttering, but I did a pretty good job. “You’re saying that they lied to me. All this time.”
“They did. They lied to you every day,” he sai
d, his voice more alive than before. It looked like it was working.
“But why would they do that? I don’t understand…” I tried to make my voice shake and maybe blush a little, but nobody was that good.
“Because of the prophecy. Because they’re afraid of you. It’s much easier to control you without your knowledge than earn your trust the right way,” he continued.
The prophecy. What a load of bullshit. Everybody knew that prophecies were a myth. Nobody could tell the future. It was just too complicated. Too many possible alternatives to be considered.
“Are there others with you?” he said. How I wished I could make myself cry that second. Tears would perfectly complement the way I looked: so desperate, so hopeless, completely devastated. “Hey, are there others with you?”
He took the gun from my hand, and I had to let him. I was packed with my knives and I had my katana attached to my back, but it still felt like shit to let him have it.
“No,” I whispered.
He stood up and pushed me down to take his seat. I wanted to roll my eyes and tell him about the thousand ways I could kill him while sitting on the chair, but I held my tongue.
“You really know what I am?” I asked instead. This particular question wasn’t that much acting. It was my curiosity. I wanted to know what he would say.
“The Elders,” he said. “They know. They’re going to tell you everything, I promise.”
It was like a slap to my face. Even though he held a gun in his hand, he was no threat. I didn’t feel the pull in my stomach when I dropped my shields. Which made me feel like shit for fooling him like that.
“The Elders?”
“Yes, the Elders. The same ones your Council took their thrones from. I should’ve guessed that they wouldn’t teach you anything about them.”
My mind was a mess. I was a good judge of character. I could always tell when someone was truthful or not. And looking at this guy, he sounded like he meant every single word he said. And fighting against myself over this was not healthy. Or productive. I needed to get my head together and stop feeling guilty. He was my enemy. I just had to repeat it enough times in my head.
“What now?” I asked as he made sure that everybody around us was dead. He looked a bit relieved when he found Vlad’s vampire hiding among the sea of bodies. He even helped him to his feet.
“Now, I take you to meet the Elders. They want to talk to you.” Oh, blessed day. That sounded absolutely perfect. “That’s the only reason you’re not dead yet.”
Flipping him off would have made my day, but I controlled myself. This was perfect. He was going to take me to meet his leaders. I was going to have the Red Rebels served on a silver platter for the Council by the next morning.
When the guy took a pair of handcuffs from a dead guy’s pocket, I almost laughed in his face.
“Those really aren’t necessary.”
I could free myself from them in under a minute but having cuffs around my wrist brought not-so-happy memories to me.
“The Elders might believe you, but I don’t, Raven.”
He closed the handcuffs around my wrists, and the cold metal made me flinch. He then took me by the elbow and dragged me out the door. His hands were big and strong. I couldn’t help but imagine how they’d feel on more intimate parts of my body. I shivered at the thought, a ball of flame slowly lighting in my belly. I gritted my teeth, angry at myself for letting even my thoughts go that far. He kept dragging me behind him like a dog, the iron biting into my skin little by little, and I was having sex fantasies about him?
“You don’t have to be rude!” I snapped, jerking my arm from his hand.
“Rude?” he said, laughing like a madman. “Look behind you!” He waved at the nine dead bodies and two piles of ashes still in the room. “Look at what you just did!”
His voice was filled with disgust. He did have a point, but no way was I going to admit that. I’d play his game but I had some terms of my own.
“Fine, then! Kill me. Come on, what are you waiting for?” He stepped back in surprise. “I didn’t know, okay? I still don’t, and you’re not telling me shit.”
“You should have listened!” he hissed, and I began to feel it. The pull in my stomach. He was so pissed, he wanted to hit me now with everything he had.
“What did you expect me to do, point a gun in your face and say ‘hey, do you have something really important to tell me before I kill you?’ Is that it?”
We were enemies! How could he not get that? God, this was so going the wrong way. It was not how I wanted the conversation to go. And the worst part was that I was actually explaining myself to him and not just for the sake of the act.
He pointed the gun at me, shaking the barrel in front of my face like it was his pointing finger.
“You talk too much.”
He turned on his heels and continued to the stairway.
What the fuck just happened? I asked, over and over in my mind. How did I get there? I was confused. Really, really confused. Nothing was going the way it was supposed to, the way it always did. My mind wasn’t calculating all the ways I could kill him, and the sick feeling in my stomach was gone again. And he was talking to me like I was some spoiled little brat! Shaking my head, trying to figure out what to do, I followed him. Seeing my sister must’ve messed me up even worse than I thought.
When the guy stopped to check the dead warlock guard’s pulse, I wanted to tell him there was no need, but the look of hatred he gave me made me keep my mouth shut. I didn’t want to piss him off even more than he already was. I had a role to play and an entire organization to bring down.
God, I couldn’t wait to see the look on Vladimir’s face. He was going to be so fucking pissed that no Royal Guard had ever gotten this far.
Now, all I had to do was find a way to make that stupid guilty feeling disappear, and all would be well.
16
——————————
Night air filled my nostrils and helped clear my head a bit. The guy that was going to take me to the leaders of the RR themselves had me by the elbow and dragged me across the street when we left the alley, as if I were a dog on his leash. I didn’t react. I let him think he had the upper hand in the situation.
A black Porsche Cayenne waited for us at the end of the road. He practically threw me in the passenger seat, and Vlad’s vampire hopped in the back all on his own.
In an attempt to distract myself, I tried again to figure out what the guy’s magic was—what he turned into. Nothing. Maybe I was mistaking his vibe and he was some sort of a warlock. No creature could ever fool my stomach until now, but warlocks and witches had many different abilities. My mind went back to his words from earlier. He said he knew what I was and so did the Council. Impossible, of course, but there was something about his eyes when he said it.
He took his cell phone from his pocket and made a call. It lasted only a couple of seconds before he hung up and got into the driver’s seat. He probably notified other Rebels that he had me. And I bet they believed him.
I watched his every move as he put the key into the ignition and turned it, bringing the car to life. I realized I was staring at him so I turned to the other side.
“What’s your name?” I asked. Not knowing bugged me for some reason.
He turned to look at me, his right brow arched in question. What was his problem? I returned the favor and held his eyes until he sighed.
“Aaron,” he finally said. “Yours?” He spat the words as if he didn’t really give a damn but was asking just to be polite.
“You already know my name.” The one he and his organization had given me. Raven. I’d never liked it, but it stuck.
He didn’t say anything after that. Fine by me. I checked for my weapons while he drove in silence. He had my gun and I’d lost my katana during the fight, but I still had Bob, my favorite dagger, and three more very sharp knives in my boots. Wearing tight things didn’t leave you with a lot of places to hide
weapons, but I never really needed many.
We stopped in front of an apartment building. Surely, that’s not where their base is? Or maybe he was hoping to fool me, bringing me into a place filled with Rebels to kill me. Again, fine by me.
I was hurt, sure. I had a vampire bite on my arm, my left thigh was cut, a rib might’ve been broken and my head hurt a little from the chair Aaron had thrown at me, but I could still take another ten of them easily. Even without the gun.
“What about...me?” This came from the vampire in the backseat. His was voice was so weak that I had to roll my eyes. Aaron looked at him through the rearview mirror.
“You’ll stick with me until I can get you to the place, Dug.”
The place. How mysterious. I rolled my eyes again.
“This is it?” I asked.
The building looked innocent enough. Nothing out of the ordinary. No magic that I could feel, meaning not a sup was in there, waiting. Tough luck.
“No, this is my apartment,” Aaron said. “We’ll meet the Elders here before going any further.”
Ah, hell. The leaders weren’t in there. I was ready to bet my life on it. Which only meant that he was going to take me to the Fifth to meet them. Double shit. I wasn’t going to be able to kill any of them.
But then again, I’d never known the Red Rebels had that much magic as to be able to afford renting space in the Fifth Dimension. It took a lot of power to create even a little thing there, let alone an image of yourself and others.
Live and learn, I guess.
I followed him inside the building, up the stairs like a good little girl. He stopped on the second floor, in front of apartment B1 and unlocked the door. The place was big enough to fit ten, barely. TV, sofa, black wooden table. Pictures. A lot of photographs. Most of them of landscapes, beautiful ones. Only a few of them were of people. I wondered if it was Aaron’s work. They were really beautiful.
I waited, unsure what to do while he checked something behind the wooden white door in the far right corner. I didn't even bother to turn to Vlad’s vampire. Usually the people I had business with were mean—evil men and women, and every word coming out their mouths was a lie. That was easy. I always knew they were lying. I refused to believe I was losing my touch with Aaron, because until that second, I hadn’t even caught the smallest hint in his voice or body language that said his words weren’t true. God forbid if my physical attraction to him was somehow intervening. I’d thought guys I killed were hot before. This was definitely not a first.