by Elise Marion
Book 2: The Seal
Elise Marion
The Seal
Smashwords Edition
Elise Marion
Copyright 2015 by Elise Marion
Edited by Zee Monodee
Cover Art by Najla Qamber Designs (www.najlaqamberdesigns.com)
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, places, or people, living or dead, is coincidental.
Table of Contents
Micah’s Ragin’ Cajun Slang Dictionary
Prologue
Chapter One: The Aftermath
Chapter Two: I Dreamed a Dream
Chapter Three: The A-Team
Chapter Four: Up the Bayou
Chapter Five: The Change-Up
Chapter Six: Strategy
Chapter Seven: Dancing with Devils
Chapter Eight: Naked Truths
Chapter Nine: The Purge
Chapter Ten: Ghosts
Chapter Eleven: Crossing the Line
Chapter Twelve: The Morning After
Chapter Thirteen: Point of No Return
Chapter Fourteen: Revelation
Chapter Fifteen: War Council
Chapter Sixteen: Confession
Epilogue: Ransom
Micah’s Ragin’ Cajun Slang Dictionary
About the Author
Book 2 in The Guardians series, The Seal, now available!
Micah’s Ragin’ Cajun Slang Dictionary
Podna – friend, or partner
Neg – term of endearment for another person (male).
Cher/cherie – “darling”, “sweetie”, or “honey”
My foot! or My eye! – no way!
Mamere – grandmother
Papere - grandfather
Mais – Well … usually used to start a sentence.
Peekon – thorn
Bebelle- doll
Makin’ the misere- making trouble
Where y’at? – A New Orleans greeting that basically means ‘how’s it going?’
Weh- Yes
Cho! Cho! – Wow!
Qui c’est q’ça? – Who’s that?
Skinny mullet- A skinny person
Boug- little boy
Texian- Anyone who isn’t from Louisiana
Boudin- sausage made with cooked rice, pork, onions, green peppers, and seasonings
Cracklin- fried, crispy pork skins
Pistaches- peanuts
Patates- potatoes
Laissez les bons temps rouler- Let the good times roll!
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Prologue
Jack Bennett lay on the narrow cot in the corner of the room, hands folded over his abdomen, eyes closed. Colors and pinpoints of light danced on his eyelids—blue streaks arcing back and forth as if someone drew on the darkness with a marker, interspersed with purple spots that seemed to come and go of their own will. Far more interesting than the stark, white emptiness of his surroundings. He tried not to count the seconds and minutes as they crawled past, but that proved a difficult task. After all, it’s how he had spent yesterday. The day before had been more of the same.
Taking a deep breath, he latched onto the tones of red mingling with the other colors etched into the darkness. The crimson color flickered to life like a match being sparked in a blackened alley and took on a more solid form. Like tongues of flame. Or locks of vibrant hair tangled between his dark fingers, seeming to wrap around them of their own will—entangling him, ensnaring him, like the woman they belonged to had.
He could see her as clearly as if she lay next to him, long and lithe with that fiery red hair falling past her shoulders. Skin made golden from the scorching Louisiana sun, with a face that exuded both beauty and toughness, eyes made of liquid gold and framed by dark lashes, and plump, rosy lips made for kissing.
He shouldn’t have fallen in love with her. She’d been his mission, a job, a means to an end. To make matters even more complicated, she was a half-demon Naphil, with one of the most diabolical demons ever spawned for a father and a drug addict for a mother. She made her living by taking her clothes off in front of men for tips, and had serious abandonment issues.
Those facts only made him like her more. For someone to be so strong when life had done everything it could to break her … it amazed him. She amazed him, inspired him to be better. In her, he’d found someone to fight for, something to believe in.
A sound alerted him to the presence of someone else in his white cell, which jerked him from his thoughts. Opening his eyes with a grunt, he turned to his side and glared at the intruder.
“Michael,” he spat, moving to a sitting position.
Teeth gritted in anger, he forced himself to remain silent. He was a Guardian, and the ancient order had the Angel of War at its head. To disrespect his leader wouldn’t gain him any points, and he needed as many of those as he could get. The gigantic angel standing before him, wings spread across the containment space, remained his only contact with the outside. He would decide if and when Jack could leave.
A difficult task, showing this angel respect. He stood between Jack and his freedom—between him and Addison.
“Jackson,” the angel replied, bending his large wings back and striding further into the room.
The use of his full name rankled. No one ever called him that.
“Are you ready to talk?” Michael asked, folding his hands behind his back with a casual air suggesting he had nowhere else to be and nothing better to do.
Jack knew that couldn’t be further from the truth. The war between Good and Evil always raged on. The fight had become even more urgent now that the Great Duke of Hell, Eligos, had broken the rules of engagement. Jack, and other elite Guardians, had been tasked with stopping him. Yet another reason he would rather not be standing here. He should be on Earth with Addison and his battle partner, Micah, not cooling his heels in some sort of purgatory cell.
Raising his chin a notch, he speared the angel with a glare. “Talk about what? Unless you’re here to tell me I can go back, I have nothing to say to you.”
Michael’s chest swelled, and he seemed to grow larger and taller, making him even more intimidating than usual. No easy feat for a male who stood twelve feet tall and stretched as wide as five men standing side by side. His glowing white eyes seemed to penetrate Jack to his very soul.
“Very well,” he replied, turning his back. “I will return tomorrow. Perhaps another day alone—”
“Wait!”
Jack dropped his practiced ‘I-don’t-give-a-damn’ face and chased after him.
The angel paused and his wings ‘whooshed’ as he turned back.
Desperation must be radiating from his stare, but didn’t care. He had lost track of how many days he’d been here; morning, noon, and night had all blurred together.
“How long am I going to have to stay here? You can’t go on letting my family and friends think I’m dead.”
Michael inclined his head. “You are dead.”
True, he had died. His heart had literally stopped beating after he’d been harpooned by the demon Mammon’s massive horns. It had hurt like hell, and the sensation of drowning and suffocating as his own blood had filled his lungs hadn’t been pleasant. Addison’s terrified face looming over him as she’d pleaded with him not to die had been worse.
“Yeah,” he agreed, “but if God intended for me to stay dead, I’d be in Heaven or Hell. Instead, I’m here. Why?”
“I have told you,” th
e angel replied, answering with the patience of a teacher schooling a slow-witted student. “That is something you must discover for yourself.”
“How?” he bellowed, exasperated. “How am I supposed to discover anything when I’m locked up in here alone, with no food—”
“You are dead; you have no need for earthly sustenance.”
“I happen to like food,” he grumbled.
The angel crossed his massive arms over his broad chest. “You know what you need to do to get out of here. Answer the question. Why are you here?”
Running both hands over his close-cropped hair, Jack grunted in frustration, biting back a much louder scream and string of curses.
“I. Don’t. Know.”
Michael studied him in silence for a moment, then nodded as if having just decided something. “Very well. I shall return tomorrow.”
“No!”
He dashed after the angel’s retreating form, but as usual, could not keep up. Michael’s long strides took him to the other side of the white room that had no walls, ceilings, or floors. A portal opened with a wave of his hand, and just beyond him, Jack could see the wonder of Heaven. Green fields and the smell of spring reached out to him. The sound of laughter, music, and the flapping of hundreds of pairs of wings filled his ears. His heart leapt into his throat and stayed there as he watched Michael step through the hole and close it behind him.
He stood there, staring off into blank whiteness for a long while after the angel had left him. His chest heaved as he struggled to control his breathing. His blood rushed with a surge of heat and the urge to punch something gripped him. A hot tear splashed one cheek, and he dashed it away angrily, pissed at himself as well as at the angel for making him feel so weak and helpless.
Falling to his knees on a floor he could not feel, he buried his head in his hands. This day would pass just like many of the others before it. Now, he had nothing to do except ponder the idiotic question for another twenty-four hours—or, what he assume must be twenty-four hours. For all he knew, he’d wait for days or weeks before the angel returned. All the while, the riddle would taunt him. A question with no answer that he could fathom.
In the meantime, his parents, sister, best friend, and the woman he loved, mourned him. Staring left, then right, he encountered the yawning, white space of nothingness. From the invisible walls enclosing him, Michael’s words echoed ominously, begging to be answered.
Why are you here?
Chapter One: The Aftermath
Red and pink lights flashed, gleaming off the exposed, oil-slicked skin of the feminine bodies gyrating around silver poles on stage. Throbbing R&B music thrummed through the air, a sensual, pounding rhythm that seemed to control the dip and sway of the girls’ hips as if by marionette strings.
They represented an array of diversity, from tall to short, rail-thin to buxom, pale to ebony. Luckily—or unluckily, depending on how you looked at it—Micah Boudreaux had always been a man of eclectic tastes.
He supposed it must be a good thing; he wasn’t exactly picky. However, it often made things difficult when deciding which woman to pursue in a room. Was he in the mood for a blonde or a brunette? His lips curved into a lazy smile.
Why not both?
Turning his heavy-lidded eyes to the half-naked waitress bending suggestively toward him and exposing her cleavage, he accepted his shot of vodka and bottle of beer with a nod of thanks. At least, he thought he’d nodded. It had become damned hard to know when the room seemed to shift and tilt, first one way, then another.
Fumbling with large fingers, he couldn’t grip the glass. He had started seeing double hours ago, but thought he’d figured out which thing to grab and which to ignore as a mirror image of the original. Yet, when he made an attempt for the little shot glass, he realized he didn’t have it quite as figured out as he’d thought.
Reaching out, he grasped the arm of a passing dancer. She’d just come from behind one of the red curtains cordoning off the private dance areas, counting the large stack of ones she’d accumulated. She lurched, squealing with surprise when he toppled her onto his lap. Steadying her on one knee, he gazed up at her through eyes made unreliable by liquor.
Average height with slim hips and implants that would have put Pam Anderson to shame—the blonde stripper would do. She might have been wearing too much makeup, but he doubted he’d remember her name in the morning, much less what kind of goop she’d had on her face.
“I seem to…to be havin’ a bit of trouble, bebelle,” he slurred, running a hand from between her shoulders to the small of her back and beyond.
The stripper giggled, shifting a bit in his lap—seeming oblivious to his hand on one of her toned butt-cheeks.
“Help a man out, wouldya?”
Giving him a sly glance from the corner of her eye, she reached for the double shot. Turning, she stood, then straddled his spread thighs. Placing the shot glass between her breasts, she rose up on tiptoe to bring them level with his face. Her fingers slid through his hair, her long, tacky nails raking his scalp as she tilted his head back. She loomed over him, leaning at the perfect angle to pour the vodka straight into his mouth.
He swallowed, licking his lips as he straightened. Grasping her slim hips in his oversized hands, he pulled her back down to his lap. Keeping one hand on her thigh, he reached for his beer with the other, chasing the booze with the brew. His head buzzed and his veins seemed to tingle beneath his skin while the liquor did its work. The more he drank, the less he cared, until all that remained on his mind was finding a private place to get the sexy little stripper naked and on her hands and knees.
“What’s your pleasure tonight, baby?” she drawled in a distinctive New Orleans accent, much different from his Louisiana Cajun.
Shifting his hips against hers so she couldn’t mistake his arousal, he studied her from beneath droopy eyelids.
“How much for you to take me behind one of them curtains and show me a good time?”
Wrapping her arms around his neck, she leaned into him, resting her bouncy implants on his massive chest. She pressed her hands against him, eyes wide with awe as she trailed them from his pecs and outward toward biceps as big as her entire body.
Like most women, she seemed attracted to his size and strength more than anything else. Not that he didn’t have looks to match the body. He had a nice-enough face for a country boy, and plenty of girls had told him his green eyes were pretty. He wasn’t stupid enough to think his freakish size and strength didn’t earn him a few bonus points. One of his fists was big enough to crush her ribs—a fact that became increasingly acute the longer the tiny thing sat in his lap. Something about knowing he could so effortlessly snap them in two always seemed to draw women to him like a moth to a flame. It ensured that he never went without a lay when he needed one.
“It’s forty bucks for a private dance.”
Biting his lower lip, he hooked his forefinger through one of the straps of her electric-blue bikini top. Trailing it back and forth, he let the finger linger on her skin, then skimmed it downward, brushing her nipple.
“What if I wanna have a really good time?” he whispered.
She reacted predictably. Everyone knew some girls at Temptations pulled double duty as strippers and hookers. His state of drunkenness hadn’t thrown his judgment so far off that he couldn’t spot a piece of ass for sale.
“One hundred and you pay me first,” she murmured, leaning close so they wouldn’t be overheard. “One-fifty if you’re into kinky stuff.”
“I’ll keep it all-American this time around,” he replied.
Reaching into the pocket of his jeans, he retrieved a roll of bills. Plucking five twenties from the folded stack, he put the rest of it away. Letting his hand linger on her waist in a slow caress, he slid the bills down to her hip, tucking them into the waistband of her shorts—if the indecently tiny things barely containing her butt cheeks could be called shorts.
Standing, she grasped the front of his
shirt and tugged, urging him to his feet.
“Follow me.”
Chugging the last of his beer, he stood and slammed the empty bottle onto the table. Dragging the back of one hand across his mouth, he staggered after her.
She parted one of the red velvet curtains shielding the private dance areas from view. He stepped into the little nook and found himself enveloped in shades of purple and red. The plum vinyl chair she pushed him into matched the tasseled ropes tying the curtain back. Giving one of them a pull, she stepped in behind him and let the tapestry fall closed behind her, separating them from the noisy taproom.
Slouching in the chair, he slid his belt through its loop and unbuckled it.
“My name—”
“I don’t do names,” he grunted, interrupting her before she could finish.
Easier, not doing names. If he didn’t know someone’s name, he could stay within the parameters of not giving a damn about them. He didn’t have to feel guilt over what he was about to do.
Not knowing someone’s name went a long way toward keeping him numb where they were concerned. This way, he didn’t have to feel hurt when they betrayed or left him. He didn’t have to mourn them when they died.
The stripper smiled. If he’d insulted her, she did a great job hiding it. Wordlessly, she reached up and untied the strings of her tiny bikini top. The bright blue triangles fell away, revealing several thousands of dollars’ worth of surgical enhancement. The huge globes of her breasts tapered into a narrow ribcage and waist that hardly seemed capable of holding it all up. Below slender hips stretched powerful legs that he supposed had become toned from years of performing in platforms.
Blood surged straight to his groin, and his erection fought for freedom against his boxers. Standing, he unbuttoned and unzipped his jeans. A self-satisfied smirk curved his lips when her gaze fell on the length protruding from his open jeans. Being as big as a Mack truck came with other perks.
With a nod, he gestured her closer. Grasping a fistful of her platinum hair, he lowered her to her knees in front of him and thrust toward her mouth. A gasp burned in his chest as she enveloped him, sucking with all the finesse and skill of a porn star.