Ex Tenebris: A Dark Fantasy (Nëphyr Book 1)

by Cindy Mezni

  10

  Late Admissions

  “The session of the Council is going to be short today because Nathanael and I have to leave very soon,” I announced when I entered the room, Nathanael on my heels.

  Drake having contacted me a few hours ago, Nathanael and I had to meet him so that he could tell me what his investigations had unearthed. Even if Drake had assured me to have found what I needed, he had also hinted that a problem had occurred. It hadn’t even amazed me, given my bad luck. He hadn’t told me more during out last call because the government intercepted all the phone or internet conversations of New Hell. And it was better that the human authorities knew nothing, if the clan didn’t want to see the army showing up here. And the High Instances and their Trackers after that.

  “Edenaï, I want you to watch over the humans and let nobody come near them. Make sure they don’t try to escape. By the way, did you do what I asked you earlier?”

  “Yes. I discreetly brought the child and her sister to Caine’s car and he left with them. He said he’d need a few hours to drive them to his contact who will take them to their city and come back.”

  I was relieved. The girl was finally far from New Hell. Far from me. Her sister had gone, too, but it was a detail. All that mattered was that this child wasn’t here to torment me anymore. I’d decided it was wiser to send the woman and the kid back to their home. I’d been careful to remove any compromising information in their mind, in case this commando operation was indeed a government’s initiative; a hypothesis that appeared to me plausible, even if the presence of the little girl in New Hell made me doubt it. Still, I didn’t exclude the blood drinkers lead, in light of all the things they’d already done against my clan. That was why I kept the other humans as prisoners, hoping to find sooner or later who, mortals or vampires, had lead them here. I suddenly remembered the human who’d been injured.

  “How’s the man with the wound in the throat?”

  “He insults me and is as annoying as the rest of his kind, so it probably means that the blood Caine gave him kicked in.”

  Xander smiled upon hearing the statement of Edenaï. Apparently, she and her humor were to his liking. Too bad for him that the reverse wasn’t true at all. Between she and I, the Reaper was undoubtedly unlucky with females.

  “Logan,” I continued, turning toward him, “I want you to take care of Edenaï’s responsibilities. You’re going to manage the house and report to Xander any suspicious behavior. You’ll also be in charge of the comings and goings in the Reserve, as you usually are.”

  Logan agreed silently. He was always docile and obedient in following my orders word-for-word. If all my subjects could be like him, my reign would be a walk in the park.

  “Xander, I—”

  “I ask to accompany you, Majesty,” he interrupted me and I stared at him, taken aback.

  “You mean to accompany us,” Nathanael rectified in passing.

  Xander ignored his intervention.

  “I’m a member of the Royal Guard and, if you go out of New Hell, it’s my duty to ensure your safety.”

  Since when did Xander have some chivalry in him? For sure, as he just said it, it was his role, but he’d seemed in no hurry to accept this responsibility before. So why this sudden change of heart?

  “I don’t need you, Xander. You’ll be more useful here.”

  “So why take the other member of the Guard with you?” he asked, his face closed off.

  It all made sense suddenly. It had nothing to do with his role in the Royal Guard. Xander wished to take advantage of the mission to seduce me. Everybody knew my affair with Nathanael had begun during a mission we’d both been on. Plus, Xander probably was afraid that history might repeat itself if I left with just Nathanael and he became my lover again, taking away from him any chance he might have with me.

  “Because I need him where we’re going,” I eventually answered.

  Nathanael had planned to make a detour and talk to one of his human contacts, a hacker, so he could check whether the government had its eye on us and if missions against us were in progress. And if so, whether one of them included humans sent to our territory to get information, making us pass some kind of test or something.

  “Need him for what?” Xander said, mocking.

  The allusion was clear, and I didn’t like one bit his insinuations. By the Devil, a single jealous ex-lover was more than enough to deal with! I didn’t want a pretender with a wounded ego, too, even though I’d never given him the slightest hope.

  “Let’s make everything clear: I need no protection, whether it’s from the Royal Guard or anyone else. And Nathanael will be more useful where we’re going and you, Reaper, will be more useful here. End of the discussion.”

  I took a deep breath before continuing.

  “You and Caine are at the head of New Hell during my absence. You make the decisions by mutual agreement and you contact me in case of a major problem. Understood?”

  “It’s crystal clear,” Xander said, all his professionalism back.

  “Don’t forget to station somebody in the basement to keep an eye on Venom and on the security team. Knowing Venom, she has probably one or two lovers ready to help her to escape, so watch out. And she could be capable of freeing the others, just to make things more complicated for us.”

  “Everything will be perfectly fine during your absence, Majesty,” Xander assured me.

  I hoped he was right to be so confident and that everything would really be fine. But my unmatched bad luck made me think it wouldn’t be.

  Nathanael and I ran at a breakneck speed to make our first stop, Macon, Georgia, where his contact was living. Then we would head for Birmingham, Alabama to see Drake who was coming back from Mexico. Nathanael knowing the route to Georgia very well, I followed him without a word. Still, he made me lose patience by forcing me to zigzag and take little alley after little alley. We’d just come out of New Hell and were in the security perimeter set up by the government, so there wasn’t a living soul nor a camera here to locate us and sound the alarm because we weren’t on our territory anymore. Why did he take roundabout ways?

  I stopped running all of a sudden after a couple of minutes of this. I was fed up. I had to wait for a few moments before he retraced his steps and found me. I was leaning against the wall of a disused building, legs and arms crossed. We were going to get things straight and we were going to do it now. That way, we would be able to finally concentrate on what mattered.

  “What are you doing?” he asked me, annoyed, as he approached me.

  The legendary phlegmatic Nathanael had apparently given up his place to the easily irritable Nathanael for good.

  “I should be the one to ask you this question,” I shot back, trying to express myself with a calm voice.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “What are you playing at?” I asked in the same tone. “It’s your way of getting back at me for having told you the truth the other day, isn’t it?”

  “You’re ridiculous,” he said with condescension.

  Yet, the tension emanating from him was more and more palpable. Why would he react like that if all this had nothing to do with what had happened three days ago? He was lying, it was obvious.

  “Hit me,” I ordered him.

  He frowned, lost.

  “What—”

  “I said hit me,” I cut him off, becoming insistent. “It isn’t complicated to understand, is it?”

  “You’re—”

  “Blow off steam, so that we put an end to all this bullshit because I have no time for this, and there’s no way I’m going to travel with you in these conditions.”

  He chuckled curtly while getting even closer to me. Our bodies were only separated by a few inches and some thin pieces of fabric. I could already feel everything in my being begin to react to his closeness. And that wasn’t a good sign. I couldn’t stop it, however. When had he touched me for the last time? I didn’t remember . . . b
ut it was all of a sudden too long to my liking.

  “But you do have time to spout bullshit,” he said with an excessively sardonic smile.

  “What do you expect from me?” I whispered, moving closer to him, conscious that I was taking risks by doing it.

  Our two bodies were now pressed against each other and, every time I breathed, my breasts were indecently crushed against his chest. I had to put an end to all this before it went wrong. I had—unfortunately—no time for a misconduct with Nathanael. In the end, Xander had been right to be afraid I’d give in to Nathanael during this mission.

  “First . . .”

  I held my breath, feeling apprehensive about the words that were going to follow.

  “ . . .I wish for you to take these clothes off.”

  I thought he was saying that because he wanted to fuck me. What followed made me understand the real signification of his words.

  “It isn’t like you and they make you look vulgar and it doesn’t please me at all.”

  I smiled without being able to refrain myself. Vulgar, huh? Apparently, in spite of several decades of cohabitation, the poor man hadn’t noticed I was like that. And this was not due to a black dress with a killer low-cut, a leather jacket and two damned shoes with vertiginous heels. Edenaï had dressed me so that I wasn’t out of place among humans—according to her. Anyway, if I’d gone out in my usual cloth—very short dress, bare feet and nothing else—I would have gotten myself noticed for sure.

  “Honey, I am vulgar,” I answered with a voluntarily seductive smirk.

  “That I know. But I already have quite enough competitors as it is and I don’t need you to rouse a crowd of human males and females with these clothes.”

  Any desire I had for him disappeared all at once. Asshole! Irritated by these words, I shook my ebony hair to give myself a disheveled look, the one I would have had after a roll in the hay. I removed the leather jacket and threw it on the ground. To Hell with all of this! I took off the heels Edenaï had chosen and tossed them far away. Then I eventually made side cuts on my dress to the point we could distinguish the color of the underwear I was wearing. Nathanael didn’t like my style and considered me a tease? I was going to become one just to irritate him. Childish, for sure, but really delicious if it infuriated my ex-lover. And he ended up reacting… but not as I’d wished him to.

  “Do you know how much I like you like this? You can’t know how much you stimulate my imagination. The images swirling in my mind… It’s better I don’t tell you about them,” he concluded after a brief pause and with a lustful look.

  It was definitive and irrevocable: I hated him. Now my crazy mind was imagining which images were in his. I ground my teeth while forcing myself to forget those more than explicit scenes filling my thoughts.

  “I thought you didn’t like me when I was vulgar,” I said with some curtness.

  “True,” he granted me. “But only when I’m not the only one to enjoy it and others can, too.”

  He really didn’t know what he wanted when it came to me, and I didn’t know what to do with him, something that annoyed me a lot.

  “You’re—”

  He interrupted me by kissing my mouth savagely. What followed was rough, almost animal, as if he wanted to devour me. I was panting when Nathanael’s lips moved away from mine. I closed my eyes to pull myself together. Mentally, I pushed out a heartbreaking sigh. The lack of sex was making me act like a virgin facing her first emotions. When I reopened my eyes, the intense look and half-smile of my ex-lover set me alight with desire and my imagination became truly obscene. The images of our two bodies intertwined in diverse positions followed one another without me being capable of stopping it. I might even have let slip a barely audible moan. After what felt like an eternity of depraved ravings, Nathanael seized my chin and forced me to look him straight in his eyes. He had a haughty expression which left me no doubt: I had indeed moaned. Oh, Satan . . .

  “You must be truly sex starved to react so strongly to a simple kiss,” he said, as proud as a peacock.

  I gritted my teeth. His comment irritated me because it was true. And it was his fault if I was forced into this long abstinence.

  “Maybe it’s a sign I have to choose a new lover, as you recommended to me. Too bad I didn’t let Xander come.”

  My little deceptive revenge had its effect and any trace of enjoyment disappeared right away from his face. He seemed stoic outside; inside, it was probably a whirlwind of emotions.

  “Why do you do this?”

  “Why do I do what?” I asked him, not certain what he was getting at.

  “Every time you show a weakness, every time you show me I’m more than a way to entertain you, afterward, you do everything to convince me of the opposite. Why?”

  And now he was bringing this up again. I pushed him away. When he was nearby, I had difficulties keeping a cool head and, thus, explaining my point of view.

  “You get ideas. You’re only a way to amuse me and nothing else. You imagine cracks, feelings, when there’s nothing. Face the truth, Nathanael.”

  After fifty years of imagining me as he wanted to see me, it was almost impossible to destroy the image he had of me. But he had to stop being in denial someday.

  “You think the problem comes from me but it doesn’t,” he said serenely. “It’s you who deceives yourself and refuses to see the truth. And whatever you say, whatever you do, I’ll continue to cling to you until you accept the reality as it is.”

  I almost gagged.

  “Well, what do you know? The big bad monster becomes sentimental,” I exclaimed sarcastically. “By the Devil, get a grip on yourself! You’re a Nëphyr, not a human teenager living his first love story! It’s not worthy of what you are. In fact, you know what? You’d deserve for me to pull your head off for letting such idiocies come out of your mouth.”

  “Even if you believe that having feelings is impossible for us, you’re wrong. You love blood, flesh, sex, power, and suffering, so tell me why you couldn’t love me? Be logical. You remember your human life, thus these feelings you felt in the past are there, in you. Even if they become blurred little by little, they still are there. The only reason you don’t feel them is because you always repress them. And it’s understandable when we know Ezekiel and—”

  I stopped listening to him, his voice no more than a distant hum. It was as an explosion, a volcano in eruption: hatred, desire for revenge, hope, despair . . . All I had felt in the first times of my Nëphyr life, in this cell, this anteroom of Hell for weeks, months, spread in me. And this time, Ezekiel wasn’t the only one responsible for it. Nathanael was the main cause of this real hurricane which was destroying the cage I’d needed so much time to create around these devastating feelings. Because there was nothing worse than a multitude of uncontrollable feelings in a being devoid—or almost devoid—of scruples and who had colossal strength and destructive gifts.

  “Do you really want me to express my feelings?” I asked him, trying to control my voice in order to not yell, interrupting his speech. “Is it really what you wish for?”

  He stared at me, surprised and less self-confident all of a sudden. Too late. He had wanted feelings, well, he was going to have them.

  “I—”

  “Bastard!” I screamed as I punched him in the nose with phenomenal strength. “You want to know why I can’t love you? Simply because I hate you! I hate you, do you hear me? Every time you passed in front of my damn cell, you met my gaze and I implored you silently to help me, to do something for me. What did you do? Nothing! You let me rot in there, like all the others! You let this monster do everything he wanted to me! You let him destroy everything I was! He destroyed any humanity in me and you did nothing! So now, don’t come blaming me for being inhuman and feeling nothing! And consider yourself lucky that I am like that or I wouldn’t even have been able to let you breathe the same air as me!”

  I felt something wet sliding along my right cheek. I furiously wiped th
is tear. I didn’t want to cry. I hadn’t let a single tear of blood slip since the time where I was shut away in the basement. There was no way I’d become weak again. Tired of all this, I walked away from Nathanael, whose nose was broken and bleeding. He probably thought we hadn’t ended this conversation because his hand found itself on my shoulder. The beast in me taking control, I whirled around, seized his arm and broke it without hesitation. Now it was hanging limply along his body. Nathanael didn’t emit the slightest complaint. His face didn’t even express an ounce of pain. My opinion of him went a bit up at that. Having expressed my anger, I managed slowly but surely to pull myself together.

  “I’m impressed,” I said with a smile devoid of warmth.

  I came closer to him and grabbed his arm to put it back for the fracture to reabsorb itself.

  “Sincerely, I’m really amazed. No scream or anything. Hats off!”

  “It was the least I could do to not respond after what I did to you.”

  I brushed off his words with a wave of my hand.

  “Please, spare me your little verse on your remorse.”

  “Too bad for you, I’m not going to avoid this particular little verse,” he retorted firmly. “I should have done more to help you, and I’m truly sorry not to have done it.”

  Puzzled, I frowned. ‘More?’ For doing more, it was necessary to have done something in the first place. Yet, he hadn’t lifted a finger at the time.

  “What do you mean ‘I should have done more to help you?’”

  He offered me a small, amused smile. I knew him enough to recognize when he really smiled and when he bluffed to put up a front. He was trying to hide something.