by Aya DeAniege
Troy reached out and smacked Quin’s arm. “You suggested Gaia has some kind of Earth power?”
“We were having a conversation,” Quin growled through gritted teeth.
“And I’m pulling it back to the other topic. Look, I accessed the phone and managed to jump to a satellite and started looking into things, checking things out. You said she has power, right?”
“All of the original children have power, what’s your point?” Quin demanded.
“Gaia is the Earth goddess, so you assume she has an Earth or naturally based power and she’s been buried somewhere, right?”
“We think so, yes. Hard to ask about it, considering the person who did it is dead.”
“On the west side of the continent, there’s a thing that some people call the Eye. I can’t find any real explanation as to what caused it. It’s round. It looks like an eye and can be seen from space. Original child, that’s got to have a lot of juice, right? Especially over time.”
“I’ve read a little on that, doesn’t it go down really far?” I asked. “If she’s trying to unbury herself, shouldn’t she be out by now?”
“Do I look like an expert on the world?” Troy asked. “I can only tell you what’s on the internet, and I’m a lazy researcher.”
“I don’t want to do a new quest,” I groaned.
“We won’t,” Quin said. “As I said, it was one reason to come out this way, not the only one. Finding her would have been nice. But, not finding her isn’t the end of the world.”
“I just told you!” Troy shouted.
“Calm down, sweetie,” Balor said.
Troy huffed out a breath instead. He seemed very cranky because Quin had just said we weren’t going roving across the African continent.
Because I was certain they didn’t have a helicopter on standby or something. I was not looking forward to that trip. Even thinking about going on that kind of adventure made me stop and think about getting back to where we came from, or even home. That would mean going back the way we came, which meant another long walk.
“If I had a family, I’d send one of them over,” Quin said. “Hey, Balor, why not call your guy and have him look into it?”
Balor almost smiled, but then wiped the grin off his face. He cleared his throat and focused on Quin.
“Don’t think that’s possible, considering he doesn’t answer to me. Especially given the whole problem. That we discussed.”
“More of that Vaguery I don’t want to hear,” I said with a shake of my head. “Send Lucrecia. Or Anna, or anyone on the Council. Pick up a phone, put on your Wraith voice and blackmail someone into it. Fer crying out loud. Troy, stop baiting them into adventures.”
“You got to go on an adventure. I didn’t.”
“How about we all go home?” Quin asked. “We don’t have to stay together forever. Vampires wander, it happens. You two could even go off and investigate that, be the hero, find Gaia. That’d be fun.”
“No, they don’t find her,” I said, then as I realized what I had said, I turned on my heel and walked away.
“What are you doing?” Quin called after me.
“This way to home, right?” I called back to him.
“But what?”
“I’m going home!”
“You don’t know where home is!”
“Hey,” I said, turning back to them. “You can come with me, or you can stand around bickering while the friends of these guys come around with like a missile launcher or something. Either way, I’m not getting exploded.”
“Being blown up,” Balor corrected.
“Gettin’ ‘sploded,” I shouted, then turned and continued walking.
It took moments for them to catch up to me. Quin turned me slightly and motioned.
“On the way, can we, uh, can we find a postal box?”
“You think this is the one?” Quin asked.
I had recorded a little bit nearly every night. Then I had deleted it the next morning. It had never felt right. I just didn’t want to give it up. It was the last thread of my mortality, the only thing connecting me back to my old life.
It’s time to let go.
“No, I don’t think it’s the one, but I could probably keep this up for centuries,” I said.
“Does that mean I can say something really corny?”
“Like what?”
“Let’s go home.”
“That’s really bad,” I said.
“Let me show you the world.”
“Possibly worse.”
“Okay, well, then, just shut it off so we can talk about Council business, would you?”
Hesitant, and worried about what I would do without my last remaining anchor to the human world, I pressed the record button and ended my narrative.
Preview of:
My name is Kazimir DeElysia. I am four thousand years old, well, just shy of four thousand, but I’ve been told that mortals prefer rounded numbers, and I’m closer to four thousand than thirty-five hundred.
I was twenty-seven when I was captured, taken to what you know as the Crete, and then turned into a vampire. My turning was consensual, though I didn’t quite understand what was being offered. I knew immortality and hunting the night, but my Maker was little more than a fledgling when I was turned.
That is the term that mortals are familiar with, correct? ‘Maker,’ as if we create toys and set them loose on the world. As if the one who turned me could be summed up with such a hollow title.
I called her ‘Love’ then, and through most of history.
Maker... no wonder the vampiric world is so weak and pathetic.
They have a name for me, you know. They whisper it to one another and fall silent as I pass by. Few see me these days, as I am a wanted man.
I reside outside of Council control. I always have. The Council and I just don’t see eye to eye on so many important topics of conversation.
Such as the place of a child in the life of their ‘Maker.’ The Council views all as free agents, a ridiculous belief. Some have made children only as blood bags, or weapons, or whores. That is their only use, the only thing they are good for.
Only an heir might come and go as they please, and only one heir is needed. All other children are there to serve the will of their Maker, nothing else.
These are the same people who believe a vampire should be destroyed if that vampire does not meet their very strict requirements. If they’re too young or too old, if they aren’t perfect upon turning.
Not even the hermaphroditic are welcome amongst Council lands any longer. One must be male or female, nowhere in between.
Oh please, like you believe every fantastical tale they tell you about honesty and equality, about being the great saviour of mankind? The Council doesn’t believe that. They believe in only one thing: control.
And they will gain that control by whatever means necessary.
I suppose some of you might be eager to hear how I’ve spent my four thousand years on this planet. Well, too bad. I’m not going to ramble like dear, soft Quintillus about my daddy issues.
My father and mother raised me to be a fighter, a warrior among my people. For that reason, when I was captured, I was sold. Perhaps to be a guard, or perhaps they knew to whom they sold me, knew what would happen to me. The reason why no longer matters, I was sold into slavery and turned. That’s about as much of my history as I’m willing to share with any mortal soul.
Don’t take me to be a pathetic loner just because I live outside of Council lands. I have made my way and lived in factions before. I know how to ‘play nicely’ as Elysia would say, though only ever for her.
Whatever my dear Elysia asks for, I try in earnest to deliver. She has kept me sane all these years and given me a reason to do more than simply be.
So, when Elysia picked up the book of the Prophet, hot off the presses as it were, and she became interested in such narrations and their effects on the mortal world at large, I agreed to take up the task.
But only for her.
Oh, who is the Prophet you ask?
Well, dear reader, just because you’ve seen the vampire world through Quin’s eyes, does not mean that you have seen the whole world. He’s always had a knack for knowing just a little too much, has happened to slip into town as I was just getting comfortable.
But we’ve never met face to face. He does not know what I look like, and until his televised interview just under a year ago, I had no idea what he looked like either. I simply know the man by reputation and know to stay out of his way as much as he knows to stay out of mine.
Most vampires ignore the obvious, their little minds too shallow to accept the whole truth, but it’s paying attention to those details, following the interviews and reading the books that the Council expects other vampires to ignore, that has given me such a keen edge.
They call me the Warlord.
If only they knew how appropriate the name was.
Coming Soon:
Prototype
An Aurora Novel
(Working Title)
My name is Maggy Doyle. I have a three-year-old daughter, a husband, a home, and an extended family. I work a secretary job for a lawyer’s office and spend my days just trying to fly under the radar of pretty well everyone.
See, five years ago, I was found wandering around a field. I don’t recall anything before that moment. I had no idea who I was. If it weren’t for Harry, if not for how much he loved me before the incident, I would have probably been lost forever.
Imagine my surprise when I opened my front door one day to find men standing there, demanding my daughter and I go with them. They wouldn’t answer my questions or tell me where they were taking us.
There’s this nagging at the back of my mind telling me that it has to do with Aurora. The still new, third world we were linked to, ruled by a woman who is said to have not only created the world, but also animals, and who knew what else.
What could she possibly want with twenty people ranging from late teens to middle-aged? The only thing we have in common is amnesia. Our lives before a certain point were erased. We didn’t do anything wrong, none of us know each other and our incidents were months or even years apart.
We’re completely harmless.
I think.
My name is Nathaniel Edwards, I am just over forty years old as I write this introduction. I’ve chosen to write this of my own volition, I was not pressured into it, nor was I commanded by my wife and Mistress, Isabella. Today she may be Mistress, but tomorrow she will be my sub once more. Most likely you are reading this because you read Isabella’s books and were curious about my part of the story.
Or you whined about how you didn’t get all the details in the middle portion of her books and now you’re hoping my absolutely detailed account with her will rectify the situation.
I’m not the least bit sorry to say, you will be disappointed. This is not a detailed account of my time with Isabella Domme. You already know what happened when she was around me. I lost my mind, my lust got the better of me.
No, this account covers before I met Isabella, how I became the man that I was when she met me. Yes, I will cover—however briefly—my time with her during the contract but it will be focused on after she was removed from my home. While my journals from our time together are being collected, and edited slightly for inclusion in the national archives, I don’t much feel like sharing that with you.
My story does not begin and end with Isabella. Just as hers did not end with marrying me. Well, her written story did, but she went on to bigger and better things in the real world. My story doesn’t even begin when I met Him.
Master.
Fragments*
Working title
Daughters of the Alphas
My name is Rebecca, you may know of my sister, Rachel? I’ve been told her story, how she ran around claiming to be a faerie, beat up a bunch of Alphas and then broke the man who had broken me. Several days after those events, I woke whole, beside a man I had never met, with no memories of what happened.
None.
They tell me that I agreed to it, that there was no other way. They even had video to show me, but that doesn’t make a body feel any better.
I lost two years of my life. Like coming out of a coma, I woke to a changed view. Children I didn’t want, a changed family, I don’t even recall my father’s death. How does one even begin to pick up the pieces from that?
Rachel and I are back together, she’s promised never to leave me again. The Alphas have already begun circling like sharks, wanting to draw her blood but unable to tell us apart. Only two of them can look at us and know which is which.
Morgan and Gerrid. Rachel says Morgan is unavailable, and that if Gerrid touches me she and Morgan will cause him harm. But Morgan isn’t with us, and I’m not entirely certain that Gerrid considers Rachel a threat. It’s not that I have a problem with Gerrid, it’s just that...
Alphas, you know?
About the Author
Aya DeAniege is a Canadian author who wrote for years, first to please herself then writing stories for free—believing no one would ever pay to read her stuff—before pursuing indie publishing. She still writes mainly for personal pleasure, with topics ranging from romance, fantasy, science fiction, on to whatever takes her fancy in the future. World creation fascinates her, and when she finds one she likes, she dabbles endlessly.
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