Alphas Unleashed (33 page)

A few moments after the Timewalker disappeared the door of his cell had burst open. Two Scouts and one Lord invaded his space, obviously hunting the female. They must have felt the massive energy disturbance caused by her arrival.

But they charged into his cell expecting to find him weak and semiconscious with a female Timewalker for company.

What they got was a pissed-off Immortal unleashed and drunk on power.

The Lord’s telepathic voice had been a screech of sound.
Contain him!

Aron smiled as he remembered the maniacal laughter that had escaped his throat. He’d opened his arms in welcome and ripped the bolts holding his manacled feet to the wall as he rose. He’d answered the dark Lord and his minions in kind.

Today you die.

He’d turned the less-powerful Scouts to ash first, their power flowing through his body had felt like a scalpel scraping over raw nerves. Aron had turned on the dark Lord next, and in his final moments of life the bastard had inadvertently given Aron the will to turn back the tide of evil flowing through him.

The dark Lord wilted in Aron’s arms, faded willingly into nothing but dust. But before he’d let go he’d called Aron,
“My King.”

Aron looked him in the eye and made a solemn vow.
“Never.”

Thank the gods for the Timewalker’s blood. Her strength had soaked through his skin, gifted him with the will to fight for his own dark soul. With her blood came memories of the isolated mountain home he’d become determined to find in this place called Colorado. She’d gifted him with the strength to ash those bastards. He’d walked out of that prison and opened a portal to Earth.

He’d hung on to sanity by his fingernails, but he’d survived.

For now, he had a purpose that drove him, that kept him fighting. The human doctor’s name had come from her blood and her memories. Doctor Jacob Hansen. Casper Project. Black Gate. Colorado. He’d seen the home in her memories, the names and faces of a few men she trusted and admired. They were warriors already. He would find them and give them this gift, this weapon. The human soldiers would know their people and understand the ways of this new human world. He did not.

When the Triscani killed his mother and took him from his home he’d been fourteen years old. Earth had been different then. Simple and open. He did not understand this new reality or its machines. He’d been gone too long from his home. Too much had changed. The Triscani Lords had taken his life, locking him in that prison cell for centuries. But the changes in the world hurt his soul. He did not belong here any longer. Everything he’d known and loved had long ago been erased. Not just gone…forgotten.

He was a relic, a prisoner from an ancient war. He’d get to the doctor and give his gift to humanity. After that, he’d track the Hunters down, lead them away from the human at the Casper Project, and end this game they played with him once and for all.

He’d walked for hours now, too tired and weak from his battle with the three Triscani in his cell to summon another portal. He crouched on the earth, welcomed the cut of rock and the sharp jab of dried weeds into his bare feet and palms. After the smooth sterility of the box, he welcomed the sting of this wild, living place.

He’d hoped the portal would have settled him closer to the home. Isolation might be good for the humans, but it made his job that much more difficult. No humans. No help. No cover for his chest or shoes for his feet. No food. So far he’d survived on what she had given him in her blood. It was late spring, with the mountains still cold and the peaks wrapped in snow. There were no berries yet, nothing to eat but the wild animals lucky enough to survive the frigid lack over the winter.

And he didn’t have time to hunt. He was hunted, and the Triscani were fast, ruthless, and strong. Move. Keep moving. That was all he had time to do.

He came over the top of a small rise and swallowed the relief that threatened to buckle his legs. There it was, the house from her visions. Dusk darkened the sky and he thanked the gods he’d found it before full night. He’d approach in the shadows of twilight, and slip past the doctor’s human protectors.

Using his precious energy reserves, Aron scanned the house and the minds of the human inhabitants. Some had power. Some did not. But their minds were trained, disciplined. They were soldiers and each and every man on the property was on edge.

Aron could read energy signatures from this distance, but to read their actual thoughts he’d need to physically touch their flesh. From a distance he’d know if a man were angry or honest, cruel or honorable, but not where their thoughts or loyalties lay.

“Gods be damned.” Aron cursed at the sky. Beyond any shadow of a doubt, the doctor wasn’t in the home. Aron wanted to scream in frustration. He had stolen the man’s energy signature from the female’s mind. Doctor Hansen wasn’t on the property. And neither were the other men that she trusted. Not one of them.

The men in the house below could be anything. Friend or enemy. Ally or traitor to his brother. He could read the men but the gift was worthless now. Honorable men fought on both sides of every war and believed that they did what was right.

Unless he recognized one of the men below from the Timewalker’s memories, he’d have to take one of them and question him, find out how much these humans knew about the Immortals on both sides of the battle, and whose side they were on.

He moved on silent feet toward the house, choosing to circle around uphill and capture one of the perimeter guards. It wouldn’t be easy to get close in his current condition, with the remnants of his chains clinking together where they dragged on the ground behind his ankles and with the scent of his blood a nimbus of death around him. He was certain any being with a modicum of awareness would smell him coming.

He checked the wind and adjusted his course. Uphill and upwind. Better.

A flash of movement caught his attention higher up the hill. Another human guard? A Triscani Scout? One of the bastard Triad soldiers? He had no way of knowing and no time to investigate. He studied the ground, searched the earth, sky and trees for any signs of danger, and saw nothing.

He crept forward, cautious now. The back of his neck prickled and his gut tightened in dread. He was being watched. Triscani or human, he didn’t know. He had to question the human guard, had to find out where the doctor was, or all his planning and pain were for nothing. It couldn’t be for nothing.

He picked up his speed. All he needed was a minute or two. If the man refused to talk, he’d wrap his hands around the man’s throat and steal the human’s memories. He didn’t have time to ask politely. The Triscani were close now, so close he’d swear he could smell the metallic stench of their blood and the dusty decay of their minds.

The human was dressed in dark green combat gear designed to blend in with the mountain terrain. The human was young and healthy, strong. The weapon he carried was designed to kill humans, not the others. Metal and wood. Useless against all the Immortals and their servants. The human weapons would stop neither Aron nor his enemies.

Aron gathered the shadows around him and ordered his legs to carry him to the human. It had to be now.

One step. Two. Three.

Claws raked across his back and black hands grabbed at the manacles around his ankles.

The Triscani Hunters had found him. Two dark Immortal assassins, the forbidden sons of the Itaran Queens, moved silently, like dark shadows. They raced through the trees and dragged him with them by the dark talons buried in his back, away from the human, away from his goal.

“You can’t hide from ussss, brother.” The male twisted his claws in Aron’s back.

Brother. The Triscani Hunters had been handsome men once, tall and ethereal like their mothers, and filled with power. Inevitably those sons turned, consumed the souls of their enemies until their flesh reflected their evil spirits and their once tender skin became like obsidian stones, inhuman and hard. But they kept their power. It grew in them like a dark tidal wave until they were consumed by their lust for more souls.

“I’m not your brother.” Aron twisted, forcing the sharp bladelike fingers to slice through the side of his back, and wrenching out of the monster’s hold. This one was young, and newly turned. He could still talk, and his face, though black as crude oil, still looked human. His eyes had not yet faded into a face that looked covered with plaster and painted black.

He’d seen one of the Triscani Lords in his prison turn an entire room of humans to ash, his hands morphed into crystalline daggers soaked in blood, and on one tip dangled the last of the humans still beating hearts speared like a fish. There had been nothing human remaining of that Lord’s face.

The Triscani could shift their bodies into other forms, fluid as water, light as shadow or hard as stone. Just two tracked him now, but more would follow. He knew a small army hunted for him, and they did not sleep, did not eat food. When they were hungry, the killed. They never stopped, and they were always hungry.

He twisted to face the evil creature stalking him from behind and kicked at the skull of the beast wrapped around his right leg. He had no weapon, no Immortal blades soaked with poison to paralyze them, no light to burn their flesh.

A sickening crack sounded beneath his left heel as the first Triscani’s skull collapsed. The creature laughed at him and clawed at his thigh. Pain sliced through him as the male’s dark bladelike fingers pierced Aron’s thigh above the knee and cut down, shearing off tendons with a horrible popping agony as each layer of his musculature was dissected away from the bone.

The other enemy came at him from his left with his trench coat flapping like flags in a strong wind as the Hunter gathered his power. The creature’s claws arced toward his neck and Aron threw up a hand to block the blow. The Hunter’s brutal strength drove him to one knee as his injured leg gave out beneath him. The Triscani and he were face-to-face, inches apart, sharing breath.

The Triscani’s nostrils flared at the scent of Aron’s blood, and the beast licked his lips as if he could taste Aron’s suffering on the air. His eyes glowed an eerie blue and Aron felt his own power rise in answer to cast a strange golden hue to the Hunter’s hideous face.

“You are no king. You are weak. Afraid. Pathetic. I don’t know why the master wants you back.”

“I’m not going back.” Aron grappled with the Hunter and felt his life’s blood running down the flesh of his back to soak his pants. On the ground, his knee rested in a pool of warm blood. They couldn’t kill him this way, but they could weaken him, force him back to the other side of the Gates between worlds. They could force him to leave Earth once more, to return to the Triscani dimension. They would lock him back up in that fucking cell.

He’d rather die.

Summoning his darkest self, he clamped his right hand down on the shoulder of his first attacker whose bladelike fingers were still lodged in his thigh. He pulled back and let the other’s hand reach his tender throat. He needed both attackers to touch him now, flesh to flesh. The moment the second creature’s flesh touched the bare skin of his neck, he unleashed his power. He took them in, absorbed their evil and their energies, consumed their black souls as well as all the human souls these two dark ones carried with them.

It was a feast of evil that made Aron’s stomach churn and threaten to heave. Aron’s head spun and his vision went dark. He fought to remain conscious as the black swell of their combined energies flowed into his flesh, into a body not meant to contain it. Aron felt stretched too thin, like his skin would split open with the barest whisper of a touch, but he did not stop.

The Triscani screamed, and the sound was inhuman, soulless. He heard the humans at the house scramble and yell at one another as they scurried around like ants trying to rebuild a wrecked nest, looking for the source of the sound.

The humans would never find it. Aron soaked up the Triscani evil until their bodies disintegrated into dust. The mountain air carried the dry particles away like flakes of ash from a burned-out fire. The Triscani were no more. The Immortals were gone, destroyed by the one power born to their kind capable of killing them. The forbidden sons were not sent to the dark dimensions out of love, or to protect them, the Immortal queens sentenced their sons to an eternity of isolation out of fear.

Every son born to one of the Angelus Mortis eventually unleashed his dark gifts, and once that evil tasted freedom it was nearly impossible to fight. The power took over the mind, the heart, and the soul until no thought could fill the mind but more, more, more….

“Fuck that.” Aron staggered and fell to the earth. He fought to hold on to his own mind, his own thoughts, fought to stay in control. The humans gathered below him in the open field of grass in front of the house, organizing to swarm the side of the hill. He hadn’t planned on allowing them to capture him, but he had no choice now. He couldn’t stand. The toxic taste of the two Immortals’ energies raked through his insides like blades as his blood soaked into the dry ground.

Chapter 2

“What are you boys up to?” Zoey Williams whispered the question to herself where she lay sprawled across a cold boulder, careful to keep her body flat to the ground. Her forest camo would keep her hidden from the air. She couldn’t afford to create a profile for one of the perimeter patrols to see from the ground.