by Aja James
And so the shadow warrior conceived a plan, in the tradition of the Anatolian royal house:
He would do his duty and pass on the shadow arts to the next generations, and he would train a warrior strong enough to defeat him in combat.
To end him.
Surely the Dark Goddess, if she were indeed watching over his Kind, would approve of the symmetry and logic of the path he’d chosen.
Now, in this time, in this place, he was known as the Master.
Fortuitously, the island of Nippon, that he’d randomly selected as his exile a world away from Anunit, was inhabited by a particular breed of humans that were adept in learning the ways of the shadow arts. Their limited lifespan and strength, however, prevented any of his students across the centuries that he’d trained them, from ever coming close to achieving mastery of the techniques and skills.
All except one.
The Master narrowed his eyes upon the new pupil, a boy by the name of Ryu.
A boy one of the Master’s human liaisons claimed a decade ago to be his.
Misaki Handa wasn’t the only woman who’d made such a claim since the Master had begun surviving off of human blood, sex and souls. The sex wasn’t particularly useful in providing nourishment, but he pretended that if he fucked enough females, he’d be able to erase the memory of the Princess, of how his desperation for affection and connection had ultimately led him to this living hell.
He’d been quite prolific in willing partners. There was nothing he didn’t do with his body, to their bodies, giving them endless, mindless pleasure while he took his fill of their diluted human blood, and sometimes, their souls, to sustain himself.
He, however, had felt nothing.
There had never been pleasure for him. Anunit had come close, in the beginning, to making him feel. He’d…cared for her. He’d been loyal to her.
But that was millennia ago. Now, he cared for nothing.
Certainly not the word of a pretty human whore he’d bedded a few times and promptly forgot.
Still.
There was something about the boy.
He reminded the Master of himself at that age. Too inured to the harsh realities of the world to live but too strong to die.
Come to me, my beauty.
The Master stilled and took a step back into a darkened corner of the shrine, easily blending into the blackness, all but invisible.
But the whisper on the wind, in the very air around him, continued to swirl and echo, and no matter how substance-less he made himself, he could not un-hear the words. Nor disobey the command.
Come to your Mistress.
The Master released his corporeal form and dissolved into thin air, riding the swift breeze that rustled the leaves of the giant cherry tree in the shrine’s courtyard. A split second later, he reformed in a secret cave beneath the mountain where he made his home, and where he rested his strength during daytime in dark seclusion.
Anunit was awaiting him there, an entourage of shadow warriors and vampire guards in tow.
Her prisoner was kept on an iron leash in the corner where the Master stocked his rice vases. The once-rebel-leader Tal-Telal was looking on the outside like how the Master felt on the inside—a ravaged wreckage of a male.
“I find you at last,” Anunit began conversationally as if they’d only been apart a few years, or mere months, rather than centuries.
“Were you looking for me,” the Master returned without inflection, clearly conveying with his tone that he didn’t care one way or the other.
She made a show of looking around her. The cave was not large, enough to house three small chambers with a tunnel that led out to the base of the mountain. There was enough room for the Master to rest, meditate and store supplies.
As he did in his long ago youth, he slept on the cold hard ground. There was no softness in his lair, no furniture, no personal effects, no light and no color, just like his boyhood chambers in Anatolia.
“Do you like living this way?” Anunit asked idly as she surveyed his space. “Do you truly prefer this Spartan existence to the luxuries to be had at my side?”
He didn’t tell her that he could buy those same luxuries himself. He’d amassed quite a fortune as an assassin for hire, and once the coins started flowing in, he couldn’t seem to stop their accumulation. He had no need for money himself, but he found that gold paved the way in the human world. It was convenient to have some handy.
“What do you want?” he asked, ignoring her questions.
Surely after all this time, she was done with him. And while they shared enough of a tenuous Bond for her to reach his mind, she no longer had the power to control his body.
There was a slight lift of her shoulders.
“I merely wanted to see how you were,” she said silkily, meandering closer to him, her voluptuous body curving this way and that.
“Did you miss me?”
He simply held her dark, opaque gaze and said nothing, waiting for her to get to her point.
“I have need of more shadow warriors,” she revealed at last, circling behind him, her fingers glancing just barely over the fabric of the black robes at his back.
“They are merely human,” he told her. “Surely too weak for your purposes.”
“No matter,” she murmured. “I have ways to make them stronger.”
He regarded her closely as she circled back around, coming to stand only two feet in front of him, within arm’s length.
“You would risk your immortal soul to Turn them?”
Only a True Blood, a Dark One born, could Turn humans into vampires, but they would lose a part of themselves in the process, and with each Turning, their soul would become more and more fractured, until finally, there’s nothing left. Only madness and decay.
She smiled briefly, a secretive, serpentine smile.
“I’ve found other ways.”
“And if I do not let you have my trainees?” he asked, even though he knew he would not like the answer.
She sighed, as if disappointed in him.
“Have I not left you to live in relative peace and solitude away from me? Do you really think it’s your own strength that allows you to survive without my Nourishment? Do you really want to find out if I can still command you through my blood in yours? And if I succeed, I’ll still get what I came for, only you’ll be part of the package as well.”
She reached up a hand to cup his face, but he seized her wrist before she could make contact.
Despite his painfully tight grip that could break her wrist with just a bit more pressure, she smiled humorlessly up at him.
“What will it be? Shall I take with me some of you, or all of you?”
He released her wrist, but his message was clear—try to touch him again and he’d snap off the offending limb.
“Take the men,” he allowed, though he knew he’d be consigning them to a mindless, violent, eternal servitude that could only be escaped by death. It was better than losing his hard-won independence.
He didn’t care for the fighters he’d trained, after all.
He didn’t care about anyone.
“Leave the boys,” he added almost as an afterthought.
In fact, there was only one boy he wanted her to leave alone. He hoped she couldn’t read his thoughts as she used to do.
She tilted her head to consider him, staring long and hard into his double-lidded black eyes, the green of his irises having receded entirely over the millennia that he’d tied himself to her.
“Very well,” she said in the end. “But I will come back for more when the boys grow into men. Shadow soldiers are hard to come by, after all. And I find them infinitely useful as part of my arsenal.”
She stepped closer so that their bodies were but a hair’s breadth away from each other.
“Are you sure you don’t want to come with them? We used to be good together, you and I. I have always desired you. You are the most beautiful male I’ve ever beheld.”
&nbs
p; He knew why she desired him. It wasn’t his face or body; those were only superficial. It was his strength and power. She craved the power of his Gift. She wanted to harness it for her own.
“No,” he answered.
It occurred to him that this was the only time in his long existence he’d ever truly been in a position to choose for himself. She could try to control him once more through his blood, his tattooed heart, if she was so inclined, but she might not succeed. And they both knew it.
Finally, she stepped away from him, gathering her guards to depart through the tunnel, dragging the prisoner in her wake.
As she walked away, she threw over her shoulder, “Nice little island you have here, Enlil. I think I’ll visit quite often.”
Over the years, she did visit often, for she’d decided to install her prisoner in one of the abandoned lighthouses by the sea. It was the perfect location to hide him from anyone who might still be searching, though in all likelihood, they’d given up a long time ago.
But other than that, her path did not cross the Master’s.
He sent her his trainees as they grew up, per their tacit agreement that she’d keep her end of the bargain and leave him alone.
One of the humans decided to go his own way, disobeying the Master’s final instructions. A man by the name of Takamura. As if he knew what the Master’s pupils were being used for, the army of which they were joining the ranks, Takamura began his own school of shadow arts in the distant city of Kyoto. Though his students were merely human, they still proved to be a formidable force against the Mistress’s minions.
The Master witnessed these struggles with indifferent detachment. He didn’t care which side won or lost as long as he was left alone to find his own end.
And finally, his end arrived.
The boy called Ryu, whom the Master knew was special from the moment he had laid eyes on him, had grown into manhood and was finally close to mastering the shadow arts. More so than any trainee who’d come before him. Even the Dark Ones the Master and his sire had trained long ago in Anatolia.
But did Ryu have it in him to kill?
The Master had his doubts.
Thus, the Master went about providing him the incentive. He learned all he could about the boy’s background and history, how he’d lived for the first ten years of his life in a whorehouse with Misaki Handa, how she’d treated him, groomed him to take her place and sold him to the highest bidder. How that rich nobleman who had a sadistic fetish for little boys ended up mysteriously stabbed to death. How the boy was finally found on the steps of the Master’s Shinto shrine.
Surely Ryu would want to avenge his lost boyhood. Surely he would not hesitate to seek retribution against the female who’d hated, used and abused him.
But when the Master sent Ryu on a mission to end the life of Misaki Handa, Ryu had wordlessly refused, even if it meant the loss of his own life.
This would not do.
So much of the boy, now a full-blooded male of twenty, reminded the Master of himself. Though he’d had it in his power to dethrone his sire as tradition dictated, he’d held back. He couldn’t kill the only relation in the world that he had, even though his sire had always hated him. Now, Ryu refused the same of his uncaring mother.
The Master and Ryu shared a similar weakness, a weakness the Master would do the boy the favor of eliminating.
But when Ryu challenged the Master for killing his mother, he hadn’t been strong enough to defeat the Master after all. By pure instinct, the Master fought back, beating the male within an inch of his life and leaving him to die in the courtyard of the Shinto shrine.
The boy did not die.
When the Master returned to bury his body, Ryu had almost fully healed himself of his mortal wounds, the dead body of another trainee lying near him, drained of blood.
And that was when the Master finally realized:
Misaki Handa had not lied.
*** *** *** ***
The shadow warrior came to on a sharp inhale, jackknifing upright in the inky darkness.
Heart pounding triple time, pulse racing, blood roaring, he gulped in deep breaths and blinked hard, trying to dispel the dense fog still veiling his vision.
Where was he?
What was he up against?
The last memory he had was of facing off in a death match with his son, Ryu Takamura. They had been in a restaurant full of people. And then…
And then he’d blacked out.
“Eli?”
Without thinking, he brutally grasped the hand that reached out to touch his arm, almost snapping the wrist in two.
A female’s sharp gasp and pained moan.
Clara.
He let go immediately, blinking hard to see her.
A blurry outline of Clara came slowly into view. She was sitting beside him on her bed, holding her wrist with her other hand. He couldn’t yet make out her features clearly, couldn’t see the expression on her face.
“Are you okay, Eli?” she asked, and he could hear the genuine concern in her voice even though she should have been more concerned with her own injury.
A pain he’d so carelessly and easily inflicted.
He shook his head, both to clear it and in answer to her question.
He was not okay.
He remembered everything.
“How—” he began, but the word came out in a hoarse growl. He tried again.
“How am I here?”
“The couple from the restaurant, Ava and Ryu were their names, helped me bring you back home. They didn’t stay long. Ryu answered an urgent call, and they left in a hurry.”
“What did you tell them? What did they tell you?”
He didn’t mean for the questions to come out so aggressively, but he was panicking inside, his heart thundering in his ears.
If Clara knew what he was, the things he’d done, he’d lose her forever.
He wasn’t ready.
He’d always known he didn’t deserve her. Didn’t deserve this life.
But he wasn’t ready to let go of the small slice of heaven he’d tasted over the past few days. He was dying inside at just the thought of losing her.
“They didn’t tell me much actually,” she replied carefully, perhaps sensing the unstable sharpness of his emotions.
“Ava said that she only met you a year ago, and the conditions had not been ideal. Ryu didn’t say anything at all after you suddenly lost consciousness.” That wasn’t entirely true. His lowly uttered departing words before leaving her apartment had been, “Be careful. He is dangerous.”
But Clara decided to leave that out. She would judge for herself. And whatever Eli had been in his past, it was not the male he was now.
Not the male she knew he could be in her heart.
“As to what I told them…Ava only asked one question—how I knew you. I told them I met you a couple of weeks ago. You helped me, and now I’m helping you while you recover your memories.”
He was silent for a very long time, simply breathing deeply in and out.
It was after midnight. Clara had put Annie to bed immediately after Ava and Ryu left.
The little girl had given her worried looks, picking up on the tension between the adults. But more than that, Annie had been worried about Eli, seeing him passed out cold on Clara’s bed. She’d fallen asleep next to him, her head on his arm, her small hands clutching his, her brows scrunched in a fierce little frown as if she were his very own protector.
Whatever it was that had made Eli black out at that moment in the restaurant, Clara was thankful for the timing as long as it didn’t endanger Eli’s health. For a few breathless heartbeats she’d thought the two males were going to tear each other apart regardless of the audience. The way they’d bared their fangs reminded her of feral beasts, driven only by instinct, without conscience.
Though Ava and Ryu had not revealed much information to Clara, she’d seen enough to deduce for herself that the other male was also a vampire. An
d one who didn’t particularly like Eli.
To put it mildly.
Finally, Eli turned to look at her in the darkness, his glittering gaze spearing intensely into her.
“I remember,” he said solemnly.
Clara’s heart fell. Not because of the words he uttered but because of the meaning she heard in his voice.
I am dying, he might as well have said, for the finality and bleakness in his tone conveyed something similarly dire.
“Oh,” she acknowledged, not knowing how to respond. The pertinent next question should have been “what do you remember?” But she didn’t want to ask it. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know, not if his revealing his truth would lead to his leaving her.
Still, she said for his sake, because she would listen wholeheartedly if he wished to tell her, “Do you want to tell me about it?”
“No,” he answered definitively without hesitation. “But you have a right to know.”
She knew that they could tiptoe around this, but it would always be there between them. She didn’t want anything to be between them, not if it was a barrier. She wanted to love all of him, and in order to do so, she needed to understand his past.
“Then tell me,” she bade him.
“Tell me everything.”
Chapter Fifteen
I can’t bypass the encryption. We need three things at once to activate the chip. The subject’s retinal scan, five digit palm print of the right hand, and voice command. I’m working on the password or words. Shouldn’t take much longer.
The Creature scanned the lines of text from Zenn’s new head of IT, Grace Darling’s capable replacement.
Zenn was one of the Mistress’s many enterprises that employed unwitting humans to carry out her diabolical plots of world domination.
Or world annihilation, depending on her mood.
This particular cyber genius was all of twenty-five years old, with a double degree from MIT and Caltech, two years at Google, two years at Apple and another year at Amazon, already getting paid close to a million dollars in total comp when Zenn snatched him up by doubling his salary and perks.
The beautiful thing about humans was that 99.9% of them could be bought at a certain price. You just had to make the right bid.