Forsaken Hunger

by Nikki McCoy

  That had been over three centuries ago.

  Saden understood Serrakus’ greed in keeping Phoenix alive for so long. However, if given the chance, Saden would kill the murderous betrayer and the Djinn that hid like a coward inside his body. Their union was an affront to everything the Vampyres and Rakshasas valued. The peaceful way of life both races strived for. Phoenix’s reputation for being an utterly cold, ruthless Drakon only cemented Saden’s view of him.

  And the asshole was trying to pass off pleasantries in his garage as if they were old acquaintances.

  “What the fuck are you doing in my home? Serrakus gave me two weeks to complete my assignment.”

  “I didn’t come here on behalf of Serrakus. I came because of him.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Phoenix trailed his fingers over the vinyl covering the motorcycle. “You should be careful who you choose to keep close. In this life, relationships can only bring complications. Especially with humans involved.”

  Son of a bitch! Saden’s heart punched into overdrive. Serrakus couldn’t know about Daneya and Mckenzie, otherwise he’d have sent warders after him. Not a lone Drakon. Which meant Phoenix had been spying on him and decided to play a little game of blackmail. There could be no other reason for his presence. “Are you threatening them?”

  “I’m warning you. Forming attachments may not be in your best interest right now.”

  He flipped the knife from hilt to tip and flung it at Phoenix, done with the man’s cryptic bullshit. Phoenix dodged the blade a second before Saden slammed him hard into the wall. “If you lay a hand on them or tell Serrakus, I will make sure you spend the next century locked away with only the warders to keep you company.”

  Phoenix’s gray eyes flashed in the dull light. “I’m not here to harm them,” he ground out. In the next breath, he had Saden’s back to the wall. “You’re on your last assignment. Serrakus is setting you up to take a fall so he can keep you longer. I heard him bragging about it to Lucius a few days ago.”

  Saden frowned, too stunned to speak. Gabriel was his last job? If that was true, it explained why Serrakus had tipped off Gabriel to the investigation by alerting the Rei’jin of the house of Avram. He swallowed heavily as the implications of Phoenix’s news hit him.

  He could be free.

  No more degradation or pain. Days of endless suffering and nights filled with bloodshed. He could be at peace in the oblivion of death. For him, there would be no afterlife or ritual ceremony of his passing. It would be as if he’d never existed in the hearts and minds of his people. The gift of an end to erase his shame.

  Pure elation filled him, arrested immediately by the thought of Daneya and Mckenzie. Even if he were to take care of the threat Gabriel posed to them, it might not be enough. He was convinced now that the Vampyre had continued his operations after setting Saden up fifty-six years ago. There was no telling how much his enterprise had grown since then. If Daneya was a loose end because of her knowledge, another Vampyre—or Djinn—would merely take over in Gabriel’s absence and come after her.

  While Blade had sworn to protect her and her daughter if anything happened to him, it wasn’t the same. Daneya was fearless in the field, and sometimes brash. Saden had saved her countless times when she’d gotten in over her head. He wasn’t sure if Blade was ready to handle her from the sidelines.

  And what would happen when Blade inevitably made some mistake to warrant a prolonged punishment? No one would be there to watch over Daneya and Mckenzie.

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  Phoenix backed away, his face expressionless. “I have my reasons.”

  Whatever they were, Saden didn’t trust him. But neither did he have a choice. It was too dangerous to move Daneya and her family to a different location. He couldn’t risk them trying to escape while he was doing his job. And Phoenix would simply follow them if he wanted to. If Saden tried to put him out of commission, Serrakus would find out and punish them both.

  He strode back to the entrance and hit the panel to open the garage door. “Get out. Show your face around here again and I’ll stay alive just to make you suffer.”

  Tension permeated the air between them. The door leading to the manor swung open and Daneya peered in curiously. Saden jerked his gaze back to Phoenix where now there was only empty space.

  “I heard voices,” Daneya said. “Is Blade back?”

  He scraped a hand through his hair and shook his head. “I was just talking to myself. I’ll be in soon.”

  She glanced around once more then went inside.

  When Blade returned half an hour later, Saden and Daneya left with Mckenzie and Cherri looking on solemnly from the front porch. He wondered how much Daneya had told them of what was going on. Probably as much as he knew she always did. Minimal truth with colorful assurances that she would come back safe and unharmed.

  It was what his parents had done with him when they were alive. Only they hadn’t been able to follow through with their last promises to return.

  He vowed silently to do everything within his power to make sure Daneya kept hers.

  Chapter Nine

  About ten miles from Gabriel’s mansion, he turned onto an abandoned dirt road that came to a T some distance from the highway. The intersecting road had once connected Gabriel’s land to his neighbors’ and was now overgrown with weeds and brush. Still accessible, however. It came to an end at the bottom of the slope the mansion rested on where they both got out. A brief scan with his Drakonem’s power told him all was as expected.

  After putting on his trench coat, he pointed to the sliding glass doors leading into the mansion from the back. “Wait here until I signal you from those doors. Gabriel is asleep in his bedroom in the right wing on the first floor. I’ll take care of the four leisonguardes patrolling the left. We’re going up in the middle to his office on the second floor. Stay close to me and as quiet as possible. Got it?”

  She looked off to their left where the roof of another building was visible above the surrounding trees. “What about that? Is it owned by Gabriel as well?”

  “His laboratory, which I’m pretty sure is a front for his operations. It runs on a skeleton crew with a joke of a security system. We won’t find any information there.”

  As he started to dissolve to his dragon form, she called out to him. “Be careful.”

  He smiled then took flight. The glass on the sunroof he’d accessed previously was still cut, allowing him to lift it with a suction cup and enter undetected. Gabriel hadn’t installed any security measures in his own home. Likely too cocky to think a Drakon would dare break into it with leisonguardes there.

  The outer hallway opened up on the left to a banister overlooking a parlor room. A man and woman lounged on a sofa below watching television with their backs turned to him. Though the room was expansive, it was still too confined to accommodate his dragon form, leaving him with little opportunity for surprise. After taking the staircase down, he crept up noiselessly behind the two.

  The man sat up abruptly and turned the TV off. “Wait. I think I felt a vibration.”

  Saden clapped a hand over the man’s mouth as the woman scrambled to her feet. She managed to pull out a gun just before he hit her with a low bolt of power, rendering her unconscious. In the next moment, he was yanked forward over the couch and fell flat on his back. The man grinned above him with one hand held palm out.

  Bad move.

  In the time it took the Vampyre to channel his power, Saden rolled over and kicked him square in the gut. Another kick sent him sprawling to the floor.

  Seconds later, a voice carried from an open doorway leading to a dining room. “I know I heard something.”

  Saden ran to the wall and stood with his back to the side of the doorway. He struck when the third guard stepped through and took him down with a fist across the temple. On the other side of the dining room, he waited by the swinging door and listened for sounds of the last leisonguarde. When
footsteps drew near, he slammed the door inwards, catching the man in the nose. The man reeled back then swung blindly and finally toppled to the ground after Saden delivered three rapid blows to his head.

  Back through the parlor to a corridor behind the foyer, he came to a sunroom and waved at Daneya from the sliding glass doors.

  She jogged up and slipped inside. “That was fast.”

  “You were expecting it to take longer?”

  A playful smirk lit her eyes. “I don’t know. I haven’t really seen you in action yet.”

  “You saw me take down Messing.”

  “Doesn’t count. I shot him full of lead first.”

  He shook his head, grinning. “We’ve got to hurry. The guards won’t be out for long.”

  They took the staircase to the second floor. In Gabriel’s study, Saden found the pressure panel in the corner and opened the wall to the hidden alcove. Inside, there was a large ceiling panel above that led to a section of the attic walled off from the main space. He was betting that was where Gabriel kept his recent records.

  When he moved one of the crates to stand on it, he caught Daneya’s questioning stare and shrugged a shoulder. “I liked to explore when I was a kid. Gabriel hasn’t changed much since then.”

  The aged wood splintered around the lock on the panel and gave way at his force. He raised it then pulled down a collapsible ladder. Daneya went first and flipped the switch for an overhead light. The small area was cramped with several filing cabinets, a glass-front casement holding journals and folders, two full CD racks and a computer atop a plain wooden desk.

  Saden scanned the CDs first. All were labeled with a year and the name of a state, totaling four different states in all from what he could see. It was the dates that immediately threw him off.

  The earliest one started at the year 1939 and went in reverse chronological order from there. Odd, considering the fact that Gabriel’s research hadn’t earned him the position of Korvaute until after Saden had been born in 1948. His laboratory had been erected only a few years prior to that. 1939 was eighteen years before Gabriel had betrayed Saden. There was something significant about that year, he just couldn’t figure out what.

  “Look at this!” Daneya exclaimed. She flipped through a stack of manila folders. Each one contained the medical and family history documents of human females with their respective pictures attached. All ranged in age from eighteen to twenty-two and were reported with excellent health.

  Daneya paused at one and yanked it from the pile. “I knew this girl. She was…a friend.” A page of hand-written notes was stapled to the back of the last document in the file. She skimmed a finger along the words as she read aloud.

  “’Specimen 4-6 gave birth to a healthy male on Aril 19, 1883. The child was taken into the home of one of my trusted assistants and his preyuna where I will continue to chart its growth until such time as it has reached its full maturity. Afterwards, as with most the other specimens, 4-6 expressed interest in staying on at my facility in the hopes of eventually bonding with one of my men.

  “I explained to her that while her contribution to our race was greatly appreciated, we had no more need of her services as a child-bearing donor and encouraged her to return to her previous life. Her memory was then erased by one of my leisonguardes and she was compensated anonymously for her time and effort.”

  Unshed moisture gleamed in Daneya’s eyes as she looked up in horror. “This is wrong—the year, the facts. She never volunteered for what Gabriel put her through. He used her for years then threw her away like garbage. Every single one of the babies they forced her to carry was taken away before she could even hold them. The only compensation she got was a bullet to the head when they were done with her, I’m sure of it. I tried everything to find her when I could, but she was gone. He killed her. I know it.”

  Saden didn’t think she was aware of the pieces of her own past she was divulging to him. The naked pain in her trembling voice shook him as nothing else had. He took her into his arms and held her fiercely. “I promise you he’ll pay for everything.”

  She tilted her head back to meet his gaze searchingly. “How could he destroy so many lives for the sake of creating more?”

  Her words triggered a connection to the false dates Gabriel was using. “Because his own had been destroyed for the same goal.”

  “What?”

  He looked over the CDs again. “1939. I remember that was the year Gabriel’s preyuna and baby died in childbirth. He’s using that year to mark the beginning of his experiments and recording them on a reverse timeline.” At her stare of confusion, he explained, “I think Gabriel started his work with the Djinn in 1947. Replace that year with 1939 and count down from there for each subsequent year of his experiments. So this year, his research would be labeled with the date of 1873, exactly sixty six years from 1947, only in reverse from 1939.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “For the same reason none of those files contain any personal identification on the females. If anyone were to try to use the files against Gabriel, it would be almost impossible to prove he had anything to do with the females’ captivity.”

  “So you’re telling me we’re screwed?”

  He quirked his lips in a half grin. “You really got to learn to stop doubting me. Look for files that are dated within five years of 1873. We’ll find the most recent information in those.” While she did that, he did the same for the CDs, taking one of each state and putting them in an inside pocket of his trench coat.

  “Aren’t you going to check them on that computer?”

  “Their data could be encrypted. And Gabriel might’ve installed a program into the computer to alert him if anyone tampers with it. We can check them at my place. Right now we need to get out of here.”

  As she gripped a small stack of folders and climbed down, he glanced around to make sure they hadn’t missed anything. Then froze when he heard her gasp. “Daneya?” When he saw her rifling through the top drawer of the filing cabinet below, a thorn of dread pierced him. “Don’t look in there!”

  The words were out of his mouth before he could think twice. By the time he dropped down, she was holding up the profile with her picture on it and frowning at him. “You knew this was here?”

  A number of excuses came to mind but none would come out.

  “You lied to me. That night when you stopped Gabriel from kidnapping me, you didn’t just happen to track him at the same time he was endangering an innocent.” Anger seeped into her tone as her fingers slowly crushed the paper in her hands. “You’d already done recon on him.”

  “Daneya, I can explain—”

  “My first instincts were true, weren’t they? You somehow found out he was coming after me and wanted to use me as the evidence you needed to incriminate him. What happened? Did you suddenly grow a conscience when you saw him abducting my daughter?”

  Shit! This was not going well. He had to get her out before the leisonguardes woke up. “That wasn’t my plan.”

  “Then tell me!” she cried. “Tell me the truth because you sure as hell better not expect me to believe your knowing about this”—she waved the crumpled paper in the air—“is just a coincidence.”

  A shadow of movement was all the warning he had. He tackled Daneya just as a spray of bullets flew over their heads. In the next instant, he sent a bolt of Drakonem power at the ceiling of the study then shielded Daneya from the blast of debris that crashed around them. As soon as the dust settled, he found the female guard he’d taken out first lying half covered in debris on the floor. There was no chance of getting Daneya out from downstairs without running into the others.

  He grabbed a standing lamp and used it to shatter the window in the study, then took out leather gloves and an Eddy belay device from his coat. When Daneya came near, he handed her the gloves. “Put those on.”

  “What are you doing?”

  After fastening the grappling hook to the window sill, he attached t
he carabiner to the other end of the wire to her belt. “The rest of the guards will be here soon. Rappel down to the ground and get to the car. Whatever happens, don’t stop until you reach my place.”

  She tucked the folders under one arm then balanced precariously on the edge of the sill. “Where are you going?”

  “To buy you some time.”

  “Saden—” she started. Her eyes left his and widened as they focused on some point behind him. “Look out!”

  The man from the parlor couch was standing in the doorway with a gun in hand.

  “Move!” Saden shouted. He ducked a few rounds then rolled to the side of Gabriel’s desk for cover. Strong vibrations began to shake the immediate area he was in and before he could gain his feet, the wood floor splintered and fell out from beneath him. The air was knocked from his lungs when he landed and his skull banged hard against the linoleum floor below.

  The man jumped down and straddled Saden’s chest, using one hand to crush his throat and the other to punch him repeatedly. Saden blocked the fourth punch then slammed a fist into the underside of the man’s jaw, snapping his head back. He managed to shove him off then gulped in precious air. Past the ringing in his ears, he heard someone talking off to his left.

  “Go get the one that escaped. We’ll take care of this guy.”

  The sound of running boots faded from what appeared to be the kitchen. Saden pushed himself up and kicked the vibrations man in the temple. A heartbeat later, a second guard flung out his hand and released an arc of lightning that hit Saden in the chest. The force of it picked him up off his feet and slammed him back into the edge of a counter. He took a fist to the gut then went vertigo for a few seconds as he was thrown across the room. Through blurred vision, he saw the second guard advancing on him with an ugly sneer.

  Saden waited until tiny sparks lit the man’s upturned hand then pulled out a knife and buried it hilt deep in the man’s calf. He yanked it out when the guard went down screaming and cracked the butt of it over the man’s skull. After forcing his legs under him, he ran across the left wing of the mansion to the sunroom and caught sight of Daneya through the sliding glass doors. She had just arrived at the car with the third guard sprinting toward her at alarming speed. He was fully covered with a ski mask and gloves to protect him from the sun for a short while.