The Lycan Hunter (The Gardinian World Series) (45 page)

“I see the mistake of my loins is a traitor to the fullest extent.” Alexis
’
father, Elder Thomas, peered around Kyran’s shoulder. “We should have killed you at birth.”

Tuyir laughed, glancing over Kyran
’
s shoulder at her. “You would
blame her, wouldn
’
t you? So quick to blame the abused pup for growing
into a vengeful beast and biting you firmly in the ass. But again, you
make the mistake of assumption. She is not the first nor second to give
the Lycans information. The Lycans have studied you for thousands of years, but it has been recently that they have made larger leaps in
understanding you. They’ve come to know your technology, population
status, and various headquarter locations. In short, they know you in ways you could only dream of knowing them.”

Her father was silent for a moment, his brown gaze flicking behind
Tuyir to the sudden disappearance of the other gods. Apparently even
the gods with their unlimited existence didn’t have the time to waste on a futile conversation. Yet she and the Lycans were stuck listening
to the clueless Elders. To think she actually aspired to one day join
their ranks.

“
You blame us for their continued existence, but I fail to understand
how that’s our fault... You created them; clean up your own mess.
Unless you don’t possess enough of you parlor tricks to do what you want mortal men to do for you.”

Alexis noticed the almost inconspicuous tick in Tuyir’s ruggedly-
carved jaw. She understood the feeling. Her eye twitched sporadically
,
a sure sign that her body longed for action to spill her rising agitation.

“My job, as you say, is war.”

“So you are merely an instigator of events. You are no god. My
god has given what is within his divine power to give. He has instilled
in us the knowledge that our long heritage of hunting Lycans is His will.
You covet the faith that we have given our God. You seek redemption
not in accepting Him as your own, but in mere imitation of His
eternal power by means of cheap magic. You can have the faith of
those abominations. We are the right hand of God and will forsake
Him for no other, especially a lower being.”

Tuyir smiled at all of them. It was an addict’s smile. Blissed out
gaze, temporary joy etched on features caught in the whirlwind of a
high from their drug of choice. The god who stood before them was
obviously high, feeding himself on their steadily rising agitation.

She had grown so restless for violence that her desire to hold her gun, to feel its weight in her hands, was palpable. Oddly enough, she felt the rough grip of her semi-automatic in her hands, but she didn’t know when she’d taken it from its holster. It didn’t matter. Her mind
drifted, caught in its own lusty haze. The yearning stroked her, peaked
her erogenous zones, and brought her mind-bending pleasure merely
at the thought of cocking the gun. Pointing it. Firing. Killing. Killing...

Growls rumbled down the line of Lycans. She glanced at them
and saw that many had either half shifted, like Kyran, or fully shifted
. Apparently they shared her wanton thirst for a battlefield’s tears and the stuttering heartbeat that was War.

Tuyir stepped back to the tree line, his well-fed addiction creasing
his features. A voice came from lips that Alexis never saw move. Some
part of her, the sensible part beyond the lust haze, found it to be
disconcerting. The lusty haze didn’t care though. It relished the pleasure
as the voice rumbled and caressed its way through her, issuing a
command she hastened to obey.

“For I am more than an instigator, I give you what is my right as a
god. I give you War. Bathe in the essence of my madness, mortals. Bathe.”

Gunfire erupted, lodging into trees as targets ducked behind cover
and returned fire. Some Lycans had shifted back to their human forms
, choosing their guns over their respective animal forms.

Alexis raised her gun to return fire. She was shooting, yet she
made no conscious decision to do so. She was dragged behind cover, but she fought the fierce hold, the command to bathe in the madness
of war dictating she stay where she was. The one who had such a
commanding hold on her spoiled her shot, ceasing her ability to play war games with the faceless targets across the field.

Her captor jerked violently following a rapid burst of gunfire. The
force of the impact punched a fist-sized hole in his chest.

Bullets continued to assault him as he fell from in front of her.
Two of the rounds passed through him and hit her in the side and thigh.
She grunted at the impact, her mind still clouded by the command to bathe in the lustful arms of a battlefield’s tears.

Acutely, she became aware that all wasn
’
t as it appeared. The captor,
whose descent to the forest floor had been marked out of her peripheral
,
took on new meaning. The chaotic world, the screams of agony, the
dying sounds of a few of the Elders melted away and presented her
with a problem with a divine solution.

“Lykil, I need you, please…” she broke off with a harsh cry of pain.
“Please, I need you now.”

Lykil was suddenly there, sweeping Kyran into his arms. He glance
d around at the other Lycans, and with a short nod, the world around her blurred into a streak of meaningless images.

Alexis and the rest of the Lycans were all placed on the foyer floor
of the Blue-Oconee main house. She glanced around at the others,
but the drive to be concerned with their well-being only extended to
ensuring they were still breathing. They were, so she turned her attention
to the rage filled gaze of Lykil.

“Ronan,” he said, with a distinct crack in his tone as he bellowed towards the foyer’s twenty foot domed ceiling.

Footsteps pounded down the stairs, but Alexis kept her eyes focused
on the chest that didn’t rise and fall, the chest that was once filled with
a patient beat that often lulled her to sleep. She couldn
’
t imagine how
he was still alive, but he was. She could feel that tendril of his being
in the back of her mind in that place that was his alone to claim. He
offered her no thoughts, and the silence was almost as unbearable as not understanding how he was holding on.

Ronan stepped over to Lykil, blocking her view. His hands shook
as he went to try and take his brother from the god, but Lykil moved away from him.

“There is nothing that you can do for him.” Several gasps sounded
at his blunt affirmation of Kyran
’
s status. “Take care of Alexis. Deliver
her. The babies are in distress.”

Alexis looked down at her stomach. She didn’t feel like the baby –
wait, he said babies
– was in distress. She rubbed a cautionary hand across her abdomen and received a kick for her troubles.

Ronan glanced down at her but returned his gaze to his brother’s
limp body in Lykil
’
s arms. Alexis could tell he was having a hard time
processing the
hows
of everything. Kyran was too big –he occupied
too much space – at least in her mind, to be relegated to such a frail
and unassuming presence in Lykil
’
s arms. To imagine him as no longer
present on this world didn’t compute to her any more than it seemed to Ronan.

“Go, Ronan. She needs you, as do the others. Tend to their wounds,
because there is nothing you can do for him.” With that, Lykil turned
and went towards the hall of guest bedrooms, every step a thunderous
affirmation of a reality she hoped wouldn’t come to pass.

A wave of sorrowed cries followed him, but Alexis remained silent.
Kyran had to be okay. He was going to. She knew it like she knew he still existed, at least in part, in the recesses of her mind.

She let Ronan help her up but refused to let him carry her. He
wasn’t exactly rock steady anyway. She tried to keep him calm by
being calm herself, but the closer they got to the infirmary, the more
anxious she became. A nagging sense of foreboding was trying to creep
into the forefront of her mind, but Alexis fought back. She couldn
’
t
afford to be negative, even if pessimism was her more natural state
of being. Kyran needed her to put on a good dose of positivity and have faith, if not in the gods, at least in him.

Jillian, who had followed them in to assist Ronan, had just closed the door when Alexis’ world unraveled for the second time.

PAIN. THE MOST SIMPLISTIC TERM
she could grasp beyond the
clawing agony to describe the sorrow that scratched at her psyche.
One moment she only suffered the gnawing bite of the bullets. The
next, she felt a searing in her head and soul. It managed to walk some
imaginary middle ground between being physical and psychological
.
Her agony became married to her desire for death, but just as she was
aware of the pain, she was aware that death wouldn’t find her at the end of the ceaseless agony.

Kyran had been inside her, molded to her psyche, her heart – a tie that transcended all rational thought. Now the place that he had once
occupied was a chasm of howling wind, the space hollowed in a way that was as exacting as a nuclear blast.

Ronan reached for her. He tried to pull her from the ball she
’
d
curled into.

“He’s…,” she stifled a cry, and the words dropped off. Even they
couldn
’
t bring themselves to crawl up her throat. To vocalize it would
be to acknowledge the truth to the universe.

Ronan pulled her into his arms. He tried to soothe her, despite his
own life-size pain that stood between them. Alexis still managed to
see the misery in his brown eyes, in his free falling tears, though he
made a visual effort to keep his eyes averted.

“Let me take care of you, Alexis, please…”

The pained plea in his words seared into her. She knew she needed
to bury the ache in her soul – to shove it away like she used to do all
things she couldn
’
t stand to face. There was just so much of it. She tried
stuffing ounce after ounce of the drowning pools of misery into her various boxes.

When she thought she packed it all away, the box seeped misery
past the packing tape. The pain had a physical presence, beginning as
nothing more than a paper cut to her soul. The sting was sharp, but it
quickly dulled into a tolerable ache. The lingering ache should have
been the clue that rampant infection was waiting in the wings, because
it set in, careening past the point where antibiotics would be affective.
It quickly degraded her ability to focus on anything beyond the bleak
terrain of Kyran
’
s absence. His death was a maw that she feared no
amount of time would close. Death and only death could sate the pain,
and she had to remain among the living. Like always, she had no choice,
though she would gladly give her next breath for peace with Kyran in the eternal gardens of Gardas.

Ronan stretched her out on the operating table. His features were
now composed, but his grief hovered at the edges of his carefully
schooled expression. Jillian set up the IV, but she suffered just as they
did, her own face tear stained with grief.

“I’m sorry, Ronan. I’m sor – ”

He wiped the scalding tears from Alexis’ face. “Shh…,” his voice
cracked, and he cleared his throat before he continued, “Sleep, Alexis
. Find peace, if only for a moment.”

The medicine that Jillian injected into her worked fast. But Alexis knew peace wasn’t what the darkness would bring.

***

Alexis stood in the twin
’
s bedroom. It looked like an upscale baby
store had exploded in the room, everything about the quality of the furniture spelled out opulence. A sleek mahogany changing table set near the door. Filled with gender-neutral clothing in organic fibers, a matching dresser stood to the right of the changing table. Next was a bookcase already stocked with various children’s books, followed by an overflowing toy box. An overstuffed recliner set to one side of the
large bay window while the crib set to the other side. Alexis rubbed
her gritty eyes and returned to staring down into a crib, which was
occupied by two sleeping forms that resembled their father too much to make losing him easier.

It had been two days since she woke up to the angry squalling of her son. Two days since she found out that she had been blessed two times over with a reminder of her now dead husband.

She
’
d missed the first day of their lives, forced into a medically
induced coma, because she had woken up from surgery angry and
inconsolable. Ronan had been forced to put her back out, letting more
time pass in hopes that her soul would gain a sense of equilibrium
and allow her to function beyond her grief. Alexis had gained some
perspective, and now she could cope, more out of necessity for a job
she wasn
’
t even sure she could do than for the joy of motherhood. She
would apply more effort than her own parents had.