Black Beast

• Title Page
  
• Chapter One
  
• Chapter Two
  
• Chapter Three
  
• Chapter Four
  
• Chapter Five
  
• Chapter Six
  
• Chapter Seven
  
• Chapter Eight
  
• Chapter Nine
  
• Chapter Ten
  
• Chapter Eleven
  
• Chapter Twelve
  
• Epilogue
  

BLACK BEAST

by NENIA CAMPBELL

Nenia Campbell

Copyright ©
2014 Nenia Campbell

Published on Smashwords.

All rights reserved.

DEDICATED TO...

imaginations everywhere.

“
In trials of ir'n and silver fain

“The dead will rise and walk again

“The blesséd few that touch the light

“Will aid the war against the night.

“But one by one they all will die

“Without a cause to rule them by

“As Darkness spreads across the land

“He'll wield the oceans in his hand.

“Five warriors will oppose his reign

“And overthrow the Shadow Thane

“They come from sides both dark and light

“The realm the mortals call “twilight.”

“A magus crowned with boughs of fire

“Will rise like Phoenix from his pyre

“A beast of shadows touched with sight

“Will claim a Dark One as her knight

“The next, a prophet doomed to fail

“Will find her powers to avail

“The final: one mere mortal man

“Who bears the mark upon his hand

“The circle closes round these few

“Made sacred by the bonds they hew

“But if one fails then so shall all

“Bring death to those of Evenfall.”

—from the Exegesis

Chapter One

Finn pored over the file on the desk. His heavy breathing stirred the papers. In his head was a snarl of forbidden thoughts and desires.

To hell and back with this
, he thought.

Before him was a roster of all the Otherkind in Barton, a small California town of no consequence that had become a hotbed of strange Otherworldly activity. The files were classified and meant for Council use only, though he did not limit his usage and perusal of them as such.

He had paged through it several times and could have recited the information inside from memory. Slayers were migrating to Barton in droves. That was odd in and of itself, since the Slayers were normally content to stay in the bigger cities. More quarry there, to make quota. And a bit of petty lucre.

Finn knew a thing or two about that. He was well-acquainted with ill-gotten gains as both the trader and the goods. He often worked in the capacity of a bounty hunter and before that, once, he had been a slave. Sometimes, he could still hear the screams.

Pray to your gods. Perhaps they will turn over in their graves.

Or perhaps not.

Otherkind were leaving. Or disappearing, in some cases. No forwarding address. Nothing. Witches and shape-shifters both, vanishing without a trace.

Finn rubbed at his lower lip in thought. That could be construed as hostile. By law, all Otherkind were required to keep the Council notified of their location at any given time. Part of the truce that had been negotiated after the War. Supposedly it kept the dissidents from organizing.

In reality, the law was intended as a choke-chain to curb the shape-shifters, whose territoriality made them difficult to reckon with. Witches had no such problems. They didn't used to, anyway.

Karen Shields's name leaped out at him from the file. Many knew her as the daughter of Lincoln Shields, one of the esteemed members of the Council. She was also in the running for a seat, although if one were offered to her it was unlikely that she would ever take it.

She was Finn's fiancee. They had been betrothed at a young age. Informally, though there was nothing casual about the arrangements at all. Their union would be heralded in all the great houses for many years to come.

Heritage was everything: it was a golden skeleton key, gleaming with power, able to get the wielder through any number of locked doors; it was the christening of the marriage bed with virgin blood on snow-white sheets; it was the benediction of a pristine pedigree, refined through ages of selective breeding and the occasional mercy culling.

It was life, and death, and all that spanned between.

It was his birthright.

The Riordans were an ancient and noble line of witches who could trace their lineage all the way back to the nobility of fifth-century Ireland. For hundreds of years, the most powerful witches of each clan had been wed to one another, knowing that with each successive generation they were one step closer to creating perfection.

Most witches could only master one element. The dedicated could usually manage two, and they were known as Diads. Triads could master three elements. Then Quads, the rarest, had command over all four.

Phineas Riordan's father, Royce Riordan, was a Quad. He never let his son forget it—especially since Finn was not. No, he still struggled with earth. The filthiest element, the element of the wilds, of the base…of the shape-shifters.

A shudder tore through him.

And yet, the element eluded him, resisting capture, slipping through his fingers like so much water. It was an irony made more cutting by the fact that water, for him, was so fluently commanded. Only air was simpler. Even fire, the most difficult and mercurial element of all, had been a cinch in the face of this stubborn, unprepossessing element.

We hunger in earnest for that which we cannot consume.

The sycophantic masses praised him for his considerable prowess, responding to his power with the jealousy, awe, or even outright fear that were all his due. But until he could master earth, he would never be good or worthy enough.

He had been born to and bred for success. Finn slammed his fist on the table, rattling the various paraphernalia set out for him to do his work. Failure was
not
an option. To even consider it was blasphemous. Had anyone suggested it to him, even in jest, he might have killed them on the spot, and the Fourth Rule be damned.

Royce's word was law and none dared oppose him, not even his own son. On the day of Finn's inauguration, when he finally claimed his own seat on the Council, his father had only said one thing to him:

“Don't make me regret this.”

It was as if his father had cracked him open, to examine all the faults that lay within. As if they were no more than so many twisted, degenerate pearls before one pompous, vainglorious swine. If Royce knew how deeply ingrained his debauchery was, he would have amputated him from the line before the rot could take root, and lead to gangrenous family ruin.

One day, Finn would take his father's place. But when that moment came, he wanted to make damn sure that he was a Quad. Damn sure. The legacy of the Riordans would carry on. No one would compare him to his paterfamilias and find him lacking.
That
was his duty.

Everything else came second.

He ran his fingers over the edges of Karen's picture. The photo on file did not do her justice. She was as beautiful as she was ruthless. A mate, the shifters would say. A union based less on love and more on sex and dominance. The phrase had a grain of salacious truth to it, although any real interest she had in him was superseded by her desire for power.

Not that she was without her charms. She had many, most of which he was intimately acquainted with, and she
was
a powerful Diad. But women were as pernicious as a bed of vipers.