Soul Resurrected (Sons of Wrath, #2) (2 page)

Scars.

Weaknesses, deep inside my bone, strengthened and calcified under the weight of the bullshit I was forced to carry.

Wolff’s Law.

Like a shark that cuts through the water, it’s only instinct to survive, my life became nothing more than intervals of staying alive, and all that emotional shit passed right over me.

Being untouchable gives you power. It incites fear. It keeps
them
out.

Flames of hell couldn’t get its long and eager claws past the steel I’d spent my entire life casting and molding. In fact, I’d come to enjoy the challenge of blades picking and scraping at my exterior with a craving to devour my insides. The world’s best attempts at sticking me with its pain and suffering thwarted by my indifference.

My shield was impenetrable.
Impenetrable.

Thing about not being able to feel is, you lose that connection which separates the living from the dead. The magic of fingertips trailing over flesh disappears into the ghostly sensations of a thousand pins and needles, none distinct enough to reach deep within, to where the soul waits to be reawakened.

Resurrected.

Touch, the antithesis to numbness. Tangibility. Proof that something exists, that it’s real and has the power to affect you—to break you, if it wants, just because it can. Not just physical touch, either.

I never believed in love. Mostly because love never believed in me enough to break through my shield. Why believe in something that’s never touched you?

Fuck blind faith. That’s for preachers and old, church ladies, with their self-righteous, finger-pointing bullshit.

Love doesn’t protect a boy from cigarette burns in his flesh and the stench of innocence being robbed by wandering hands. Love isn’t the medicine that keeps a boy from puking his guts out after he’s been fed rat poison in his morning cereal. Nor does it stop a blade from breaking the skin, spilling blood, leaving another scar to fill the gaps between the hundreds already marring the body.

For some, love is a myth. A fairytale for little girls to chase after, and fall into depression when they finally grow up and realize it never even existed. Love is a word that carries on the wind and fades into nothing.
Nothing
.

Everything eventually becomes nothing in the end. Including love.

The absence of emotion, of touch, of
being
.

Numb.

Numbness kicks love’s ass and sends its pussy-whipped tail back into the land of fantasy. It blankets a boy on cold nights when the gnawing sensation of hunger reminds him that there is no god—at least, not one that gives a fuck about him.

Numbness protects. It holds back those who think they’re strong enough to penetrate its thickness. It can’t be swayed or tricked. It keeps touch as an illusion, all while convincing that it’s too real to be trusted.

Numbness is my shield. My faith. My reality.

More real than the idea that love will ever touch a bastard son, like me.

-
Logan

CHAPTER 1

Some lives just weren’t worth the trouble of saving …

The dark room swallowed Logan, as he lay sprawled on his bed—just as he’d been left after ditching his date with death. A stomach-turning sensation of thickened skin and tingles swathed his body, closing in on him, phantom sensations crawling over his flesh that kept him awake. Every five minutes or so, he willed an arm or a leg to move. No go.

Shadows danced across the wall on the occasions that one of the Catatones guarding the mansion passed through the floodlight below his window. He focused on them only because his neck had been propped in that direction and he had no choice. Good thing, though.
She
had been assigned to watch over him and slept somewhere beyond his periphery, the reminder heating his blood every time her sleepy moan drifted across the room.

The fury could’ve split him right down the middle.

Her
blood ran through him—pumping in his veins, feeding his heart, keeping him alive.

Calla’s.

The woman who’d gotten him stabbed with Demortis, the only element capable of taking down a demon, now swam through his body as the only element capable of saving him. Her blood. Pure. Probably the closest he’d ever come to being righteous.

The irony was enough to leave him scratching his own eyeballs out of his head—that is, if he could reach the damn things. Like a bitch slap from the gods, who probably sat around drinking beers over the shit, poking fun at him.

The side effect of returning from the dead?

Feeling like the fucking dead.

Logan tightened his lip, wishing he could kick his own ass for being so stupid. Not like he’d
had
to save her or anything. Hell, being a demon meant being the exception to human rules.

And being a son of Wrath meant never having to play by
any
species’ rules.

Yet for some reason, one lodged so deep inside his brain he couldn’t even begin to explain, he’d felt the need to intervene. Not so much for her sake, but because the little prick trying to rape her had taken a jab at the psychopath buried in Logan’s bones. Taunted him.

Then finally tripped his kill-switch.

Yeah, that’s what Logan told himself, anyway, because no other excuse could possibly justify why he couldn’t stir a single muscle in his body for anything having to do with her—Calla. The girl they’d picked up at some underground party, so high on Shine she’d have probably let every one of the brothers have a go at her if they’d been the ravaging bastardly types.

Lucky for her they weren’t.

“Should’ve walked away,” he muttered, his voice the only part of his body he
could
control.

A zing of pain shot through Logan’s feet, flexing them into an unnatural, paralyzed position. “Ah, shit!” Hadn’t his feet been numb just seconds ago?

Not even forcing his muscles to relax shook the sting away, one like a strike to the level of his bones, as if they shattered with impact.

He held his breath and clenched his teeth while the pain crept up his leg. “Motherfucker!” He spoke past gritted teeth, keeping his voice low to keep from rousing his babysitter, but damn, his back arched like one of those tetanus-infected bastards, his eyes squinting so hard they could’ve popped backward into his brain.

Black smoke curled behind his lids, and a deep laughter mocked him as the agony reached his spine. Trembling in the bed, Logan clamped his mouth shut and allowed the convulsions to run through him.

In silence.

He’d known pain—gut-turning,
put-me-out-of-my-fucking-misery
pain. Nothing compared to what wracked him at that moment, as if nightmares could invade the body and inflict injury. The burn, like molten lava oozing in his veins, seeped into his every cell, searing him from the inside. Sweat trickled down his temple at the same time as a chill burst deep inside his bones and swept through his limbs, leaving behind a wake of nausea.

That black smoke carried the familiar sensation he’d felt once or twice in his life—from the quick witted son of a bitch that brought the toughest demon males to their knees: absolute death. Stygius. The place in the underworld from where no soul ever returned.

With shallow panting breaths, he allowed the blackness worming its way into his mind to take over as something dark and wicked laid claim.

All Logan could do was let it take him.

Intense brightness filtered into his eye sockets and broke his preoccupation. He opened his eyes. A shimmering crack split the wall across the room.

What the …

Did something go wrong when he returned from the dead? Had Stygius come to reclaim his soul?

The crack burst open to a blinding light that forced Logan to shield his eyes.

’The hell?

For a brief moment, he thought himself dead, until the light faded and his dark and dreary room expanded through the wall, mirroring a pale purple room, like that of a young girl’s.

Logan rubbed his eyes but paused.

Wait … I can move?

Had the gaszla drugged him?

He scanned the room for Calla. Lucky for her, she was nowhere in sight, though something told him that wasn’t necessarily a good thing. Less than a minute ago, he’d heard her moving around, meaning the whole scene had shady written all over it.

Grunts drew his attention back to the purple room. Quiet. Guttural. Undeniably lycan.

He crawled forward, off his bed, reveling in his newfound muscle control, and came to a stop in front of the glowing opening of his wall. He looked upward, his gaze trailing the flickers of light down to the left side of him. Would it seal him on the other side?

A tearing sound brought him back to focus, and Logan stepped into the purple room. Like a stealth predator, he crouched low and stalked around the end of the bed.

A bloodied foot, thin and unmistakably human, caught his eye, trapped beneath the back haunches of the beast—lycan as he suspected—that bent forward, straddling the much smaller body. It’d been way too long since Logan last took down one of the bastards. He could almost feel its backbone cave with the imagined swift kick.

Adrenaline coursed through Logan’s veins at the thought of meat encasing his bare foot and the impact of his heel busting right through the rib cage to the other side. Ah, the twisted pleasures of killing. He raised his foot, positioned it along the wolf’s spine and stomped down.

Logan stumbled forward as his foot passed through as if through a ghost but caught himself.

A muffled scream came from beneath the wolf. Long locks of blond streaked with blood fanned out from below the beast’s bowed head while the attacker quivered alongside the chafing of its teeth against its victim’s spine.

Logan’s hands crossed over one another in his reach to tear the wolf away from the girl.

What the fuck? A hallucination?
Was
he
dead?

As if he’d become nothing more than a
spectator
to the grisly attack.

He tilted his head, the disbelief of what lay before him teasing his senses, as thoughts battered his skull yet formed no reasonable explanation other than sheer insanity.

Or really good drugs.

His muscles tensed with each outcry from the victim.
Odd
. Maulings typically didn’t tug much empathy from him.

Red creeping across the pale brown carpet grew a deeper shade with each pull of flesh. The sloppy nature of it all was enough to kill whatever fascination he might’ve gotten from watching, knowing he couldn’t stop it.

“Hold still, now, darlin’,” a voice said from behind. “No need to be loud and feisty. Shit, nothing like waking up the whole goddamn neighborhood this early.”

Logan twisted to find an older man, vaguely familiar, with smooth dark gray hair and a leather jacket, approaching with the kind of calm that raised an eyebrow. The Alexi patch he wore on his shoulder and the accent served as reminders from a previous encounter—Logan had once again, come face-to-face with General Wade.

The girl’s body spasmed. “Please!” Her words gurgled as if fluid had gotten trapped in her throat. “Get it … away!” As she coughed, her legs jerked with a rough, tearing movement of the beast. “Oh … God!” A spray of blood shot up into the air.

Logan’s hands balled into fists at his side.

“I’m not here to hurt ya. I’m here to save ya.” Wade set a silver case on the floor and knelt beside the beast, stroking the girl’s hair without interrupting its mutilation of her back, as if he waited for it to finish off the meal—as if the wolf wasn’t fazed by his presence. “You’re safe now, sweetheart.” The soft tone of his voice scraped at Logan’s bones.

How did killing her help the girl?

“My … brother?” she asked, as though unaware the beast still sat hunched over her, working at her spine like it’d scored the tender meat.

“He’ll be fine. Just fine.” Wade cleared his throat. “You just sit tight. I’ve got some medicine here. Might burn a little at first.” Fangs slid beneath his top lip with a slight turn of his head toward the beast. A crack of his fist against the lycan’s bloody maw sent the wolf flying backward with the girl’s flesh within the grips of its mouth, still attached to her back, that zipped free down her spine and tore away.

Logan skirted to the side, his hand passing right through the thrown beast’s body.

Wade rose to his feet only a second before the glint of his pitched dagger flashed past Logan’s eyes and pierced the wolf dead center in the chest. He pounced on the beast and, with fluid movement, gripped its hackles, yanked the dagger from its chest, and dragged the blade across its gullet.

A yelp rose and died in its throat.