Not just hot, but… scalding hot.
And I’ve had him.
I didn’t need to concentrate on that night to feel the pull of desire in the pit of my stomach, to remember the wait it had felt when he took me against a wall. The thoughts were so real, with only the slightest bit of effort I could still feel him behind me, breathing against my neck, pushing against my body.
Blood flushed to my cheeks. Shaking my head, I finally took the first few steps toward him, dismissing the fantasies assailing my thoughts. I didn’t want to feel this way. Not about him. I didn’t want him to have this kind of effect on me. Not him. Anyone but him.
“What do you see?” the Horseman asked, his voice distant and… disconnected.
I turned to face the mirror and found what looked like a man sitting in the next room. He was bald, shirtless, and covered in blood and sharp-edged, circular scars. He was chained to the grey desk in front of him, but he didn’t look sedated, or even stunned. He was perfectly alert, and ready to jump at a moment’s notice.
Then I saw the collar around his neck. It was the same one I wore; a piece of magical equipment designed to suppress magic powers and enforce the natural glamor that made most supernaturals look human. That was what my people looked like in human form.
That was a Crimson Hunter.
“What am I doing here?” I asked. “Again?”
“Do you know that man?” the Horseman asked.
“I don’t. Should I?”
“He is one of your kind, is he not?”
I shrugged. “Do you know every mage in the world?”
“Only those who matter.”
“Assume the same is true with me. I don’t know him.”
“We captured this hunter tonight,” he said, “I would like to say he gave my men a fight, but considering I’ve experienced their skill and hunting tactics first hand, I have to say I’m disappointed with this one.”
“Why?”
“I believe this one is… the runt of the litter. New to the game. Perhaps even the same hunter who performed his initiation the other night.”
“It’s possible. But what does it have to do with me?”
“We tried interrogating him, but he proved remarkably resilient to my efforts. I was about to employ more… advanced techniques on him, but then he asked for you by name.”
“Me?”
“Indeed.” The Horseman’s eyes flashed. “So, I’ll ask again. Do you know this hunter?”
I looked at him again. Really looked at him, this time. Could it have been Sorzath? I would have no idea what he would like under the effects of the glamor, what human form he would be forced to take. I did know that it wouldn’t be too different to what he would normally look like, so that hunter couldn’t have been Sorzath.
Sorzath was big and powerful, but this man looked like he was all muscle and no finesse. A sledgehammer.
I shook my head. “I don’t know him,” I said, “He’s not the one from the other night. Maybe he was there, but everything happened so fast, I doubt if I would be able to recognize any of them under a glamor.”
“You’re saying there’s no reason why this hunter would want to speak to you?”
“None.”
“Then you had better go and find out what he wants.”
I stared up at the Horseman. “What?”
“I will not repeat myself.”
“You’re telling me to go into that room and find out what that hunter wants with me?”
“Unless you think we should just kill him and be done?”
I looked over at the hunter again. He looked like he’d been hurt. He was bleeding from a gash on his head, one in his chest, and several along his arms, but he didn’t seem to mind that much. He still looked ready and willing to break someone’s neck if they got too close, and that alone was enough to make my heart race.
“Fine,” I said, “I’ll go talk to him.”
The Horseman turned his attention to me fully, now, his eyes sparkling with cunning intelligence despite the dimness of the room. “Are you sure?” he asked.
He was baiting me. I could tell just by the way he was looking at me. He wanted me to back down, to refuse, or to ask for protection, at least. I wasn’t going to do any of those things. Not for him. Not for anyone.
“I’m sure,” I said, turning around and heading for the door.
The Horseman wrapped a hand around my shoulder, sending a shiver surging through my spine and into my thighs. He drew himself close to me, close enough that I could feel his chest against my back. “Be careful,” he whispered, and then the shackles keeping my hands bound together dropped to the floor.
I shrugged out of his grip and opened the door. Two guards with guns drawn were waiting for me outside. They kept the barrels of their guns trained on me as I moved from one door to the next, but otherwise gave me no trouble. The hunter looked up at me as I entered the room, his eyes igniting.
“Se… hoska resk…” he said, his voice trailing off as if he couldn’t believe his eyes.
I shut the door behind me and glanced at the mirror. I couldn’t see the Horseman on the other side of it. There was only me and the much larger hunter in the room, now. Taking a shallow breath, I approached the chair on the side of the table across from the hunter and sat down.
“Who are you,” I asked.
The hunter’s bloody grin widened. When he spoke, his throat made low, guttural sounds that to the untrained ear sounded like wolves growling at each other over feeding rights to a carcass. To me, it was a language I could understand.
“We shall speak in our father tongue,” the hunter said, “So the gutter-rats do not understand.”
I hadn’t spoken using my own people’s language in years, but I had never forgotten it. “We’re agreed,” I said, “Now, answer my question, and tell me who you are.”
“My name is Varriyuk, Sworn Blood Brother of the Crimson Hunters, but I am known as Flesh-Tearer, and that is what you will call me.”
“I’m not doing that.”
Varriyuk’s eyes narrowed, the veins on his bald head popping. “You would dare disrespect me, bitch?”
“I would dare do a lot of things. They told me you wanted to speak with me. Why?”
“I am tasked with the sacred honor of delivering a message to the holy bitch, but I bring you ill tidings.”
“Message? What are you talking about?”
“Our Blood Brother, Sorzath, has marked you as the target of his Sacred Hunt. His will be the honor of hunting you down, ripping your spine from your body, and mounting your skull upon his wall—after, of course, he has tired of mounting you and has left us to feast upon your holy flesh.”
A rush of cold pushed through me.
“You’re lying,” I hissed.
“A hunter has no need to lie. We need only to eat, and mate, and bring glory to our households.”
“Sorzath wouldn’t dare declare a Sacred Hunt against me. The other Serakon won’t stand for it.”
His bloody grin widened to reveal a mouth full of crooked teeth stained red with blood. “It has been agreed. The hunt has already begun.”
My heart had started to race, and I was sure Varriyuk could sense it. The Sacred Hunt was the Crimson Hunters’ holiest of traditions. It was said that those who initiated one had done so following instructions given to them by God, and so, when such a hunt was declared, it could not be stopped. Other Serakon had to agree, but assuming they did, the hunt would be seen through to the end.
My status as se hoska resk had provided me with immunity from being a target of the hunt for all my years. But not anymore.
I had just been handed a death sentence.
“Perhaps the myths are true,” Varriyuk said, “Perhaps we will truly commune with God as we tear your flesh from your bones and consume it. It is a noble way to die, especially for an abomination.”
“I am not an abomination.”
“Then why is your skin not the color of stone
? Where are your markings? Why is it you look more like the rats of this world than your own glorious people? It is a miracle you survived our world. It is a miracle you survived this world. But your time is at an end.” Varriyuk snapped a glance at the mirror. “All your times have come to their ends.”
A thought struck me, then; sharp and cold, like a knife to the gut. “You didn’t get caught,” I said, “You allowed yourself to be captured.”
He turned his wild stare on me again, slowly. “These people are weak and stupid. They could never hope to capture one of our kind. You of all people should know that.”
I shot to my feet and stepped back from the table, shooting a panicked glance at the mirror. Varriyuk hadn’t been captured; he had allowed himself to be brought here to deliver the message he’d just given me. But Sorzath must’ve known what being captured and brought to Harrowgate would mean for a Crimson Hunter. That only left one logical explanation for the hunter’s bravado.
He wasn’t planning on getting back out.
The hunter broke the shackles binding his arms together with a single, brutal pull of his arms. The table was bolted to the floor, but the metal chair I was sitting on wasn’t. Before Varriyuk could move toward me, I gathered my chair and smashed it across the side of his face.
The fiend staggered to the side, the metal bending around the contours of his bones, but he didn’t fall. He grabbed the chair and yanked it out of my hands. Roaring, he tore the metal chair in half, tossed the remains aside, and then he pounced.
I tried to fight him off, but he was much larger and stronger than I was, and he grabbed me by the neck. The last time I had been in a room like this one, I’d had the advantage of the element of surprise. This time, I wasn’t so lucky.
“Before I go,” Varriyuk snarled into the side of my face, “I wish to also have the honor of tasting your flesh.”
His mouth clamped down hard around my shoulder, his teeth instantly penetrating my skin and forcing me to cry out in pain. The hunter’s powerful jaw broke not only skin, but also tore through muscle, and even bones. I thought for an instant I was going to pass out as my vision started to darken around my eyes, the pain instantly sending me shooting into the realm of unconsciousness.
But I held on.
I held onto my consciousness, and to the sides of the hunter’s head.
It took every ounce of strength I had in me, but with a guttural roar, I drove my knee into his abdomen. His vice-like grip around my shoulder loosened, and the hunter groaned, his mouth coming away from my arm body dripping with blood. I dreaded to look at what he’d done to me, but the pain had subsided, at least for now.
Something else had taken over me.
Maybe it was pure adrenaline, or maybe it was something more. It felt like power; like raw, unadulterated strength surging through my veins, driving away the pain. Like magic, only it wasn’t magic. It couldn’t have been. The collar around my neck made sure of that.
I scrambled around the rabid fiend, grabbed one half of the broken chair, and as he turned around to face me, I plunged it into his neck. Varriyuk’s eyes bulged, he gargled blood, and then the entirety of his weight started to topple toward me.
I let go of the half of the chair I had been holding, and my own hands came away wet with his blood. The hunter collapsed to the ground with a thud that shook the very walls. I stood there, panting, staring at the dead hunter as the injury in my shoulder made itself known. Like a flower of pure pain, it opened, and kept opening, and I screamed.
The door opened, and the Horseman rushed inside. I staggered toward him and buried my head into his chest, falling into his arms. He held the back of my head with one hand, and lifted me up with the other.
“It’s going to be okay,” he said, and then he carried me out of the room as my consciousness started to drift.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Hot blood ebbed from the gaping wound in my shoulder, but I never lost my grip on consciousness. I held on, my jaw clenched shut, one hand wrapped tightly around the back of the Horseman’s shirt. I couldn’t let go. Not of him, or of the world. If I did, I feared I’d slip away to nothing.
He carried me swiftly to his quarters. With a quick swipe of his hand, he viciously cleared his desk and prepared it for me to lay down on. The varnished wood was cool against my back, but as soon as my shoulder touched the desk, the injury screamed.
Groaning, I turned to my side to shield myself from the pain. My vision was already swimming, my body growing weaker by the second. I watched the Horseman rip his shirt clean off his body and fashion it into a kind of tourniquet.
Maybe it was the blood loss, maybe I was a little too woozy, but it looked like his muscles were glistening. The light bounced off the ridges of his abdomen, his pectorals, and his shoulders as if they were wet. The sight of him made my heart beat faster and harder, which was only accelerating the rate at which I was losing blood.
“Lay still,” the Horseman said, and he arched over me, the vast landscape of his muscular body towering above my head. “Your wound is too grave for me to heal directly. I need to try and stem the flow of blood. This will hurt.”
“Fantastic,” I managed, though speaking was a struggle.
Without asking, he worked at my jumpsuit’s zipper and pulled it down to my stomach. He then eased my shoulder out of the jumpsuit a little, just enough for him to loop his shirt around and under my back, and then over the wound. When he tied the knot, I sucked in a sharp breath of air through my teeth.
“Holy shit,” I said.
“That wasn’t the painful part.”
The Horseman sandwiched my shoulder between his strong hands and pressed them together, around the wound. I could’ve screamed, but I didn’t. I wouldn’t. Not in his presence. Tears welled up in my eyes, but they didn’t fall. I shut them and turned my head to the side, concentrating on keeping my breathing as steady as possible.
Then came his scent, piggybacking on a strong gust of wind that crashed around me like a wave. It was warm and cool at the same time. It was the natural wild, the primal wild; a scent that made me think of vast mountains, huge, towering trees as old as the world itself, and flowers of every shape, size, and color.
My entire body flooded with warmth radiating from my shoulder, instantly numbing the pain and sending something like life rushing through me again. My vitality, my strength, my vigor. I felt it all start to return as if I was being pumped full of a cocktail made of morphine and pure adrenaline. I clenched one fist, then the other. My grip was weak at first, but as the seconds passed, it strengthened, the overwhelming rush of power.
As the rush of magic started to fade, my vision cleared, and I saw the Horseman’s abdomen and chest hovering above me. I could feel the heat pulsing out from his skin. I could see the veins pumping beneath it. I could hear the beating of his strong heart within his chest.
The Horseman released my shoulder from his grip and pulled away enough that he was now arching over me and looking down at me from above, his long hair falling around his face and lightly brushing against mine, his eyes full of fire and life and almost, I thought, glowing from within.
“Better?” he asked.
My heart was still pounding, only now it had more blood to work with, so staring directly at him was difficult. “Alive,” I croaked.
“That will do. Try to move.”
“That’s going to be a little difficult with you hovering over me like that.”
The Horseman’s eyes lowered. I could feel their gaze tracing the lines on my neck, my collarbone, dipping toward my chest. He took a deep breath in through the nose, then pulled himself up and straightened out. He extended a hand toward me, offering his help getting up.
I didn’t take it.
I didn’t want to touch him any more than I needed to, worried that prolonged contact would make me… do things I didn’t want to do. Things I would regret. Like what I’ve already done. I needed to distance myself from him, physically, long enough that I’
d be able to outrun the confusion, anger, and lust brewing inside of me like a storm.
I rolled off the desk on the opposite side to him. There was no pain in my arm, no screaming joints or muscles. The area was tender, sure. The skin felt a little tight, the joints a little stiff, but you wouldn’t know a fiend had just bitten me and broken muscle and bone as if they were made of tissue paper.
I shrugged, feeling the roll of my shoulders. “Thank you,” I said. “You saved my life.”
He cocked his head to the side, his long, black locks cascading around his bare shoulders. I saw him fully, now took in the whole sight of him. He was perfectly toned, his skin taut and pulled tightly across his substantial muscles. But there was grace to him. Power, also; yes. Raw, brutal strength—but grace, too.
“You’re surprised,” he said.
“Maybe a little.”
“You shouldn’t be.”
“And why’s that?”
The Horseman paused, maybe examining me, maybe carefully choosing the words he was going to use next. “Because as long as the Crimson Hunters are a threat to this facility, you are an asset I cannot afford to lose.”
“An asset,” I said, nodding. “That’s good to know.”
Did I seriously think he was going to say anything else?
No, of course not. This was the Horseman. The butcher. The murderer. I had to keep repeating those words in my mind like a mantra. It was the only way to escape his… gravity. The pull I felt when I saw him. When I inhaled him. I had never felt anything like this in my life, had never experienced anything like it.
All my life I had trained for battle. For war. For survival. Every last moment taught me how to get through the next; every enemy I faced prepared me for the one that came after. I had spent so much time hardening my skin, I had assumed my heart had followed suit. My heart.
Night Hunter (The Devil of Harrowgate Book 1) Page 12