by Ashur Rose
TABLE OF CONTENTS
COPYRIGHTS
GLOSSARY OF TERMS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
CHAPTER FORTY
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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COPYRIGHTS
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. ASIDE from brief quotations for media coverage and reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced or distributed in any form without the author’s permission. Thank you for supporting authors and a diverse, creative culture by purchasing this book and complying with copyright laws.
Copyright © 2017 by Ashur Rose
Published by Wet
Dedicated to the one who opened me up and touched me just there.
GLOSSARY OF TERMS
Burning or Spectra-burn: A feeling of intense need or desire to claim a mate.
Diune: A half-breed. Any Dryg that is mixed with another species.
Della: Darling; dear one; beloved; a pet name given to a cherished one.
Empyrean: A world inhabited by Dryg-folk; a different dimensional realm of existence that is governed by the Phyrss.
Enni nuun: Emyprean word meaning “thank you”.
Joe (slang): a word used by some Chicagoans as a greeting; a term used to identify another person whose name is not known.
Nether: Hell; under realm
Phyrss: Queen and counselor to Dryg-folk; overseer of the Dryg watchmen.
Posey (slang): A derogatory term. A vulnerable, weak or overly sensitive person.
Pure: A Dryg’s mate.
Scaggi: A highly abusive Empyrean word used to describe a stupid person.
Shade: Any creature belonging to the under realm; an underling; demon
Sorainese- is ash produced from the Sorain volcano located in the Nether. Further: Sorain is the only Nether volcano that produces such ash and erupts so infrequently (once every 70-110 years) that the shades have been known to hoard it. Originally, the ash was used to fortify stonework tools. Because of its ability to rapidly degrade stone when reconstituted with different mediums, such as water, it became highly sought after and valued. By accident, the shades discovered that the ash of Sorain had the ability to poison Drygs, which often led to their deaths when left untreated.
Submissive or Sub: A lesser Dryg or human that is used for sustenance.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A big thanks goes to: Luke Evans, Mira J., David McIntosh, Daniel Henney, the lovely Roxanne aka “Roxie”, Charlie Hunnam, and A. M. (you're so sweet, you just might rot my teeth)
CHAPTER ONE
IAIN
IAIN BANE, BANISHED WATCHMAN of the Empyrean Realm, stood at the entrance of a dark alley trying to ignore the cries and bloody gurgles behind him. Killing had never bothered Iain. Three hundred years had proven more than enough time to stain the ground with his fair share of blood. But the screams…the screams, as the humans would say, drove him batshit crazy.
He looked over his shoulder at the bloodied body throttled against the wall, writhing and clawing under the hold of his brother Cree. A little longer and the essence squirming inside of it would be useless. Might as well have been for the temporary good it would do a mated.
“Come get some, E,” Cree yelled.
Iain looked at his brother’s face: gray, creviced, and grimaced, eyes blazing red beyond a protruding brow bone. A warrior’s face in their world, an ugly son of a bitch in this one.
“I’m straight,” Iain said.
“Don’t dick around with me, E. I’m keeping count of the weeks—” The rest of Cree’s sentence caught in his throat as he slammed his clawed hand into the chest in front of him, damn near puncturing the flesh. Luminescent tendrils of energy flowed from the body and curled around Cree’s wrist before darting straight into his core. The corpse slumped to the ground and Cree folded over.
Iain smirked at the sight. “You were saying?”
Cree staggered toward Iain, his wings cascading to the ground on either side of him like webbed walking canes. He whipped his trident tail toward Iain, lowering the outer two prongs to leave the one in the middle standing. “Fuck you, smartass.” He straightened up and morphed from Dryg to human form. “Apply that wit to your burning, and you’d know you’ll get through it just like we did. You don’t have to go without culling.”
Iain shrugged off the comment and adjusted his trench coat over his wings. He may have been essence-starved, but he wasn’t stupid. None of his brothers could ever experience a burning such as his. He was diune, a Dryg half-breed. And of all the species his father could have knocked up, the horny bastard had chosen a mortal woman. Back home, in Empyrean, the consequences of the ol’ man’s actions went largely unnoticed. Only here, in this Phyrss-forsaken realm, did being a half-human diune take its toll. The time would come when culling wouldn’t be enough to sustain him, when the only thing that could extinguish his spectra-burn was his pure—his fated mate.
And she was close.
Why she was in this realm was beyond him. It wasn’t a common practice to banish the females of Empyrean—unless the female had chosen to accompany her banished mate. With their species on the decline, females best served as Birthers—surrogate mothers—rather than being exiled. But his fated mate was here. He felt her presence deep within his marrow, filling his body with vicious need—so much need he often shifted between human and Dryg form for relief. He’d grown irritated at her lingering scent flitting around the city, the faint smell of black currant igniting his spectra into frenzy. A seasoned tracker, he’d never understood, not for the three infuriating months he’d pursued her, how the trail had always ended cold.
Iain glanced at Cree. “You finished with the pep talk, brother?”
Cree nodded his head at a woman walking toward them. “You finished sulking like this pathetic sub?”
Iain had scented the woman waiting across the street when they’d arrived in the alley. He’d watched her work ‘customers’ all night and had known it would only be a matter of time before she got the nerve to come over to make her move. He wasn’t in the mood for human tonight. He shifted his stance and folded his arms across his chest. Most humans understood body language. He hoped his ‘don’t f
uck with me’ exterior resonated loud and clear.
Unfortunately, this human was the exception.
“You boys looking for a good time?” she asked, planting herself in front of Iain. “Got a spot real close—just around the block.”
She stood before him featureless. Despite having senses sharper than most breeds of diune, thanks to his Dryg father, being half-human took away any semblance of normal vision when outside of Empyrean. In this realm, he negotiated his surroundings by scent and sound. Unlike his other organs, his eyes were weakened and couldn’t adjust. Everyone appeared to him in auras: reds, grays, or in this woman’s case, purple.
“Not my type, sweetheart.”
The woman decided to press her luck elsewhere as her shape moved closer to Cree. “What about you, big boy? Wanna fuck?” Cree was a solid, two-hundred-and-eighty-pound bulky mass wrapped in leather. Humans, women especially, had the good sense to steer clear of him.
That this woman hadn’t left meant one of two things: Cree was using his gaze to toy with her, or this woman had the potential to be a decent sub—a quality a Dryg valued most in a human.
Potential or not, if she moved any closer, she’d see the—
“Oh my God.”
Shit. Too late.
“Is that—is that a body?”
“It’s not a mannequin, love,” said Cree.
Iain shook his head. “You should’ve sent her away.”
“I like the way they panic and hyperventilate. It’s kind of cute. Like zebras in the wild.”
“Ohmigod…ohmigod!” Iain could hear her heartbeat thump in her throat. The bracelets on her wrists jangled as she searched her purse.
“Knife?” Iain said to Cree.
“My bets on pepper spray. They always go for that shit first.”
She stopped digging through her purse to pull out the biggest can of pepper spray known to mankind and aimed it at their faces.
“Back off, you sick fucks.”
“Told you,” Cree said.
“Are you going to handle this?” Iain asked coolly.
Cree shook his head. “Nah. I just culled. You handle it.”
“I mean it,” said the woman, quivering.
Iain lowered the black shades he seldom removed and stared at the woman. Her body stiffened, the pepper spray can fell to the ground, and Iain felt his influence tether them together as he projected to her mentally.
Keep it moving, darling. Nothing to see here.
The woman nodded, as they often did whenever he unleashed his cool gaze upon them, and then backed away, slowly melting into the swarm of pedestrian traffic. Later, she’d insist that leaving was her idea, that the commanding voice was nothing more than her common sense taking hold.
Cree watched the nice piece of ass disappear up the sidewalk. “Cock block.”
“Let’s say she didn’t see the stiff behind us. If Rubee found out you’d bedded a woman she hadn’t approved, she’d ground you.”
Cree shrugged. “True.”
“Then she’d blame me because I’d allowed it.”
“Also true.”
“I don’t need your pure giving me any more side-eye than she already does.”
Iain belonged to the Bane clan, one of the few remaining clans of Drygs after The Great Purge. Iain had fought alongside his three brothers for nearly two centuries against the evil rogues responsible for destroying much of their race in the purge—but no matter how many shades Iain had destroyed, he was always shunned for being diune. Humans, Iain quickly found out, were weak, disposable creatures, only useful to sustain the diune until they covenanted a pure. Cree’s pure never let Iain forget he was one half of that.
“She just needs some time.”
Iain’s eyebrow peeked over the rim of his shades. “It’s been over a hundred years, Cree.”
“More time, then. And when you find your pure, she’ll have no choice but to respect you as the merciless bastard you are. Bane, baby. All the way.”
Iain rubbed his knuckles over the center of his chest. Entertaining the idea of finding the pure who kept disappearing made his spectra ache.
“And if you don’t find your pure,” Cree added, “well, this place could always use a few more turned to decorate it.”
“You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?”
“Look, all I’m saying is you can’t keep starving yourself. This isn’t Empyrean, where we don’t have to worry about taking penance, E. You don’t cull here, you turn. And I know for damn sure you haven’t culled from a sub, let alone a shade, and that one”—Cree pointed back into the dark alley at the body oozing black goop into the crevices of the cobblestones—“would have been plenty for the both of us. But look at you.” Cree popped Iain’s coat collar. “You’re living off your reserves now. You’re pasty white and your hair is streaking. Damn it, you’re like one of those damned vamps from the cinemas.”
Iain grimaced.
“Maybe we could go to the Sanctum, hear what the Phyrss has to say,” Cree suggested.
“We’re banished. Stuck in this shithole of a realm until we prove we’re worthy again.”
“We’re banished from her sight. She never said she wouldn’t hear us out.”
“That’s a stretch, Cree.”
“Shit. It’s better than nothing.”
“And what about Steele? Did you forget?”
“She misunderstands Steele.”
“He had sex with one of her virgins—”
“That’s debatable.”
“Recorded.”
“All right, say what you want, but you know the old hag will have answers. She might’ve kicked our asses out of Empyrean, but it’s still her fucking job to counsel us.”
Cree clapped Iain’s shoulder. Comfort was supposed to be somewhere in the gesture, but all Iain felt was pain. The darkness threatening to consume him wormed through his essence-starved body. Had been for months now, ever since his pure arrived. His throbbing hands at night had been the first sign followed by calloused palms and weight gain. But now his sensitive skin and white streaks highlighting his coal-black hair confirmed it. If he didn’t get his hands on her soon, there would be nothing to stop him from turning.
Nothing to keep him Bane.
Iain shrugged his brother’s hand from his shoulder. “There’s a reason why nearly all turned are diune, Cree.”
“And there’s a reason why none of those poor bastards were Bane either. Diune or not, you’re from a different stock—the purest stock.” Cree took off his trench coat, exposing his wings, and descended into the darkness of the alley. “Dawn’s approaching and we need to perch, you especially, vamp-boy. We’ll talk about this at sun down.”
Within a few pumps, Cree was airborne and soaring over the tall buildings.
Iain took in the sight of his brother disappearing into the darkness and knew that his own nights were numbered.
CHAPTER TWO
LILITH
LILITH HARPER POPPED AN antacid tablet into her mouth and weaved through the crowd of male pattern baldness and testosterone in three-inch stilettos. All without spilling a drop of her table’s fourth round. Serendipity’s, one of Chicago’s premier strip clubs, was at max capacity just two hours into her shift and her feet were paying the price for it.
She lowered the tray onto the table full of frat guys and yelled out the drink orders over the bass blaring in the background.
“Feelin’ Twisted. Unholy Mary. Corona and”—the hand of the owner of the last drink came down on the back of her thigh and squeezed—“Asshole.”
Asshole leaned forward and cupped his ear. “What?”
“Calypso!” Lilith corrected. She placed his drink in front of him and gently eased his clammy hand from her skin. Playing nice at work meant more tips and with rent coming due, she couldn’t afford to piss these guys off. “Your drink? It’s Calypso, right?”
Asshole nodded, his red-rimmed eyes falling to the hem on Lilith’s short dress. She could sme
ll the rum seeping from his pores. Not many guys ordered rum in strip clubs, which probably meant he had mommy issues. “When do you go on stage next?” he asked.
“I don’t, sweetheart. Boss doesn’t like us servers dancing.” Double dipping he’d called it.
“So what do I have to do to get a lap dance?” he asked, grabbing his crotch.
Die, come back, and die again, Lilith thought. She could handle a drunk. She just couldn’t handle a sleazy one. But she knew this guy’s asshole-like ways weren’t entirely his fault. The dark energy swirling around him in wispy strands had been lashing out at her since they’d been seated, but, like all personal demons (or PDs as she liked to think of them), it finally gave up once it realized what she was.
“You gotta talk to a dancer,” Lilith reminded him as kindly as her patience and aching feet allowed. “They’re the ones in thongs.”
As she walked off, she heard Asshole yell, “Stuck up bitch!”
Lilith rubbed her chest. The antacids did nothing for her heartburn and Asshole wasn’t making it any better either. She thought for exactly two seconds about continuing to the bar because two seconds was all the time Asshole had given her to make a better decision before he said, “Broke hoe.”
She couldn’t argue about being broke, but the hoe part was debatable. She turned on her heels with her drink tray poised over her shoulder and walked back to the table of cackling college boys. “I’m sorry. Did you say something?”
Asshole held up a wad of cash. “What? You don’t need the money?”
Lilith nodded and glanced around for her boss. Personal demon or not, this guy had exhausted her customer service skills and what she was about to do could get her fired. “You ready?”
Lilith didn’t give him time to answer and placed her tray down to straddle him. His friends watched as she rode his lap and rolled her body in motion to the music. Lilith was no dancer, but honestly how much effort did it take to distract a drunk? When she had him completely red in the face, she parted his legs and turned around to grind on him with her ass. His personal demon thrashed, nearly crawling out of his body to get away from her. And who could blame it? Her speak, the power stirring inside of her, was enough to irritate any demon.