Shadow's Pleasure: The Shadow Warder Series, Book Two (A Paranormal/Urban Fantasy Romance Series) (19 page)

“I’ll promise you two things,” Kiernan said. “First, you’re never shaking off ‘Scorch’ as a nickname. Though I’m not telling anyone how thoroughly you earned it.”

Heat flooded Sorcha’s cheeks. Kiernan wasn’t lying. She’d more than scorched them both. And she couldn’t wait to do it again.

“And second, you’re in my bed. However long this lasts, we’re not going backward. You’re mine.”

Sorcha had no comment, and that seemed fine with Kiernan. He relaxed for the rest of the drive to his loft, his fingers twined with hers, a satisfied smile on his face.

Chapter Ten

Caerwyn smelled mildew. She kept forgetting about the dank stench. Then she’d open her eyes and smell it again. Like wet laundry left in the washer for days. Or an old cellar. Which was where she was. Lying on a hospital bed in a dark, moldy cellar. At least, she thought she was in a cellar. Her grasp on reality had been slipping.

If she knew she was losing it, did that make her more sane? Or less? Something to think about. It wasn’t like she didn’t have time to ponder. She wasn’t going anywhere. Off to the side, far away, she heard whispers. Light, female sounds. Could be her sister Lissa, and Lissa’s friend Sara. Or it could be another hallucination. She hadn’t actually seen Lissa and Sara for a while. It was possible they were dead. Or somewhere else.

For so long, everything had been status quo. Miserable, horrible, but the same every day—the white, antiseptic lab, the glaring lights, Michael between her legs. Sometimes there was pain. Sometimes, she was numb. In the beginning, there had been shock. Rage. Fear. An overwhelming sense of disbelief. For a woman who had spent her entire adult life surrounded by family and friends in the safe confines of a Shadow Sanctuary, her capture had been beyond comprehension.

That first night, she’d come to strapped to a table, bathed in stark white light, her legs spread obscenely wide as a man she’d never seen before raped her. When he was done, he’d zipped up his suit pants and turned to the lab-coated man sitting on the other side of the room entering information into a computer. As Caerwyn struggled to understand what was happening, the man who’d raped her had described the act to his assistant in dry, clinical terms. Duration, sensation, her response. Or lack thereof, since she’d been unconscious for most of it. Without sparing her so much as a quick glance, her rapist had pressed a button on the table, tilting her pelvis higher and lowering her torso. Then both men had left the room, leaving the lights glaring into her eyes.

Later that night, locked alone in a white, sterile room, Caerwyn had begun to understand what was happening. They’d put a collar on her to limit her access to the energy around her. Caerwyn wasn’t a tracker. She hadn’t trained in any kind of self-defense. Her Tk was weak. At the Sanctuary, she’d held a position of some influence as Iris’s assistant and the head of Procurement and Logistics for the Sanctuary. A very human-sounding title for a job that mainly consisted of making sure they had enough food, supplies and access to the utilities they needed. Not a glamorous job, but one she’d loved. All her skills to provide for her people did her no good in the locked white room where she now resided. And her happy, easy life hadn’t prepared her to handle Michael’s brand of dismissive violation.

She wouldn’t even have known his name if she hadn’t heard the assistant speak to him. Neither of them addressed her directly. Caerwyn wasn’t a person here. She was a lab rat. An animal in a study. They were using her to breed a child of mixed Shadow and Warder genetics. That was her only purpose. It would be ridiculous if it wasn’t so terrifying. And pointless. There was only one line that ever produced Shadow-Warders. The Wilder line. Kate’s family. The Shadow-Warder was a perfect blend of Shadow and Warder in one being, chock full of power, a master of energy and spell craft in a warrior’s body. Only one Shadow-Warder lived at a time. When Kate was gone, the next might not be born for a generation or more. Why the Shadow-Warder existed, and what their purpose might be, was a mystery lost in time.

Everything she was going through made even less sense when she’d seen the Voratus. Coolly observing Michael’s assault, asking about the likelihood of conception and how long it would take. She had little experience with the demons. Had only seen a few from a distance. But she recognized the grating buzz of its energy. And Michael was working for it. Trying to give it a Shadow-Warder. Why? What possible purpose could they have?

She’d been slow to understand the depth of her danger. Too slow. By the time she’d mentally located Lissa and Sara, they’d been well secured, the girls separated from Caerwyn, all three of them locked down by the collars. They hadn’t realized how the thin copper strands would weaken them, cutting them off from the energy they needed. A little more every day. Until they were weaker than any Shadow should be. Too weak to overpower Michael or his assistant. By then, escape had been impossible. And all just two weeks after they’d been taken.

Still, she’d tried. She’d fought them with every weapon she had. Kicking, biting, screaming, hiding under the metal cot in her locked room. Captivity and the copper collar didn’t leave her many options, but she did what she could. Then, about a month after they’d been taken, the assistant, Henry, had dragged Caerwyn from beneath the bed and jabbed a needle in her side. When she’d come to, she’d been strapped to the table again. This time, the straps were everywhere. Not just her ankles and wrists, but her thighs, her upper chest, her forehead. Completely immobile, panic choked her. Michael had leaned in close, entering her narrow line of sight. Shocking her, he’d met her wide eyes with a cold gray-brown gaze. His eyes had struck her. She’d never seen brown eyes with so little warmth. But his eyes were stone, the brown chilled with a hint of gray that reminded Caerwyn of the rocks in the mountains where she’d lived. There was no mercy in those eyes. No compassion.

“I don’t need the other two,” he’d said in a level, conversational tone. “Taking them at all was a mistake. They should have been eliminated and disposed of before they reached this place. Once I had them here, it seemed like an opportunity for research. However, they’re too young for my needs. Do you understand?”

Caerwyn had tried to nod, and found that she couldn’t manage even the slightest wiggle. Instead, she blinked. That had been enough. He knew she got it. Her sister and Sara were expendable. Only by her compliance could she keep them alive. Without knowing what Michael was doing to them, Caerwyn wasn’t sure if she was helping or hurting them. But each day of life brought a chance, however slight, that they might be rescued. If she denied any of them another day, she extinguished that slim hope.

That had been the end of resistance. And the beginning of her mind’s retreat. With her passive acceptance, Caerwyn had saved her sister and Sara. But she’d doomed herself. Day after day, life was a series of violations. Forced sex, injections, spell craft. They did anything they wanted to her body, and she offered no protest. The only saving grace was that their interest in her wasn’t prurient. If Michael got off sexually on her rape, beyond the basic pleasure necessary to result in orgasm, he didn’t show it. It was the most asexual sex Caerwyn had ever experienced. She wasn’t sodomized or forced to perform oral sex. Only Michael was permitted to touch her. And it was a sign of how far her perceptions had skewed that she considered this a blessing.

Night after night, when sleep was distant and she found herself flinching at the slightest sound, Caerwyn whispered to her womb.
No, no, no, no
. She didn’t know how deeply the collar had disrupted her connection to her physical self. Shadows had some control over their bodies. How much, depended on their specific talents. A healer could tweak the smallest physical processes. Most of them could control aging and prevent disease.

Shadows didn’t need traditional birth control. They could deal with ovulation on their own, though the birth rate was low enough that few bothered to prevent pregnancy. They needed every child they could conceive. Caerwyn had never tried to tinker with her cycles. She was as regular as clockwork, didn’t suffer from cramps or heavy bleeding. A secure home, supportive family and occasional, friendly affairs meant she hadn’t worried about an unexpected pregnancy. A child would have been a welcome addition to her life. Since she’d been taken, she hadn’t had the opportunity to talk to another Shadow about disrupting her cycle or preventing ovulation. The collar messed with her sense of her own body’s energy flow. So the best she could do was whisper in the dark, praying her body would hear her and reject Michael’s seed. And every month, her period had showed up exactly on time.

The status quo might have been a nightmare, but it had been a survivable one. Caerwyn and the girls were alive. There was no baby. Caerwyn had lost her ability to mentally speak to Lissa. Possibly as a result of the unending stress, or it could be the collar. Either way, she caught only whispers from her sister. Lissa was a powerful telepath. A talent that was a novelty in the outside world had been a boon since they’d been taken. At first, Caerwyn had been able to answer Lissa as she always had. She wasn’t a telepath herself, but something about their connection as sisters had enabled her to respond to Lissa’s communications. As her mind had faltered, she’d found herself muted. Lissa’s increasing panic as Caerwyn remained silent was a fresh agony. It had been a month or two at that point. Maybe longer. Caerwyn’s grasp of detail had begun to slip. Nightmare and real life were mixing, blending in an impressionistic mess of visions, memories and fears Caerwyn couldn’t distinguish from reality.

Lissa had called to her only a few days ago. Maybe a week. Possibly two. She didn’t think it could have been more than two weeks ago. Lissa had told her there was another. A new Shadow. This one was pregnant. And she was trying to escape. Or she had escaped. Caerwyn couldn’t remember. It sounded exactly like something she would have dreamed. Then they’d all been moved. The needle again, and she’d woken up in this cell. Stone walls on two sides, newly welded iron bars on the other two. No window. No fresh air. Only the unrelenting stench of mildew and mold. The air itself felt spoiled against her skin. Slimy and damp.

Everything had changed. Not just her surroundings. Henry was gone. She hadn’t seen Lissa or Sara anywhere. Michael came but only to shove a tray or bag of food through a slot in the bars. He hadn’t touched her since the move. Caerwyn never imagined she’d fear
not
being raped. But at least then, she’d known she had a purpose. A reason to be kept alive. If Michael wasn’t trying to get her pregnant, how would she keep her sister and Sara safe? Were they even still alive? Curling into the dirty, moist sheet on her thin cot, Caerwyn felt the vacuum of time draining away, leaving only fear behind.

Chapter Eleven

The night had not gone as planned. After a quick stop to change clothes and their vehicle, Kiernan had driven them back to the spot where Sorcha had lost Caerwyn’s trace. Sorcha tried to ignore the fact that they were only a few blocks from the Warder Citadel. Dangerous to be so close to the central headquarters when she was with a Warder. Even if she was disguised. Sorcha trusted Madoc’s work, but it still made her jumpy. An Obfuscation spell would have hidden them, but not without causing its own problems.

For one thing, she’d had enough of spell craft with the ink under her skin. Just the thought of more was revolting. And she was working hard enough to sift through the spell hiding Caerwyn. All she needed was more spell craft to get in her way. So they lived with the danger. It didn’t help that they kept circling the same few blocks over and over. Even in the nondescript old truck, they were conspicuous.

Slowly, they gained a few blocks. Sorcha caught a flash of Caerwyn—grass green, the scent of lilies. She didn’t actually see or smell Caerwyn, just sensed a trace of her friend’s essence before it disappeared. It was absolutely maddening that she’d caught it in the center of a four-way intersection. Was the spell craft hiding Caerwyn that sophisticated, or did they just have the worst luck imaginable?