Christopher: Blood Brotherhood – Erotic Paranormal Dark Fantasy Romance (4 page)

“Rembrandt did it.” Master nodded. Of course he did. He’d been messing with his plans for years now. “Go there and see what happened. You can do it. Just don’t let them see you. And while you’re there, find someone that can read and write and get them to come back here with you. You are Master, are you not?”

“I am; yes. I am. Excellent plan.” He started to stand and realized that he needed to clean himself up. Even if no one saw him, Master liked to look good. And he would have to try and stay as this self. Shifting to his beast, even as much as he loved him, was going to harm him in ways that he would not recover from. He understood this now. Without his medicine, he would have to be careful where he tread from now on.

There had to be clothing here. Not anything that he would normally wear, but there was no cleaning staff here to clean up after him so he had to wear what he could find. Mostly it had been Dolin’s things, but right now he knew that he needed something that made him look powerful. Going to the shelter again, he found himself in Ward’s rooms.

There were things there that he’d never wear. A large sweater that had some sort of animal on it. There were pants too, soft ones that were so bright with color that Master decided that he’d rather not be seen glowing with them on. Finally, he settled on a nice soft shirt and some pants that were a little snug, but fit him well enough. He was ready to go when he realized that he had left Dolin behind. He needed his friend now, if for no other reason than to keep him from being too lonely.

It took him an hour to find Dolin in the mess that had been made. And Master was saddened to see that his friends head had been split open at some point and now he was no longer able to travel with him. Another thing to blame on Rembrandt and that woman. The list was getting very long, and as soon as he had his drugs and them where he wanted them, he was going to list each item before he extracted payment for it. They would understand that this had to be done.

“Those people are going to pay for this and I will enjoy it.” Master didn’t have a clear plan on how to make them pay, but they would. As he made his way to the little place where he could travel between worlds, he thought of something he’d seen in the other world. A recording device. He had to find one of those so that he could put his list to words, his own words to keep things straight. “I will need to have Ward or one of the men I bring back tell me how to make it work. Such things have been a mystery to me for too long.”

He moved through the portal and landed near the cave that he’d spent so much time in. Master was glad for it really; the travel had exhausted him too much to walk much more, and he knew that he’d have to go to wherever the green switch had worked. Going into the cave, he lay on the ground and closed his eyes. Later he would find out about the portal, get him some men, and kill Rembrandt and that woman. Things would work out, he just knew it.

~~~

Chris was sitting in the entertainment room when Kate walked in. It had been three days since she’d been brought here, and she didn’t seem to be any happier about it now than she had then. He was pretty sure he knew how she felt, but he did need to speak with her. When she saw him, he stopped her when she turned to leave him.

“Please, don’t go. I’d like a word with you, if you don’t mind.” She asked him what he could possibly want. “I’m not really sure what I want, but I would like to ask you a few questions. What are you, for starters?”

“I don’t see what that has to do with anything going on around here.” He guessed that she was right, but it didn’t make him want to know any less. “What are you?”

“Panther, as I’m sure you know. And a little more. The more part I don’t know how to explain, as most of this shit is just coming to us as we fumble around. But you seem to not only know what you are, but have a handle on it too. I just...can’t you just answer the question for once?” He watched her and knew that she was struggling with whether or not she wanted to stay or leave. “Please? Sit down and talk to me.”

“I’m a shifter. Elite shifter. Nate, that other guy that no one sees, he is one too. But I think I have a little more than him. I’m older too. Even older than you are.” He nodded. Chris had no idea, but he had thought she was older the other day when she’d been talking to Ana in the kitchen. “Does that satisfy your curiosity?”

“No. Not really. I know what an elite shifter is, but what is the more?” He was glad when she sat down. It meant that she wasn’t going to bolt again. “And just how old are you?”

“It’s considered rude to ask a woman her age, isn’t it?” He grinned at her, and she, unlike most women he knew, didn’t seem to be charmed by it. In fact, he thought it pissed her off. “I’m over four hundred and twenty years old. I’ve been through a few decades and have had time to practice things that come to me with age. The more is what my husband gave me before...he gave me all that he was when he took me as his mate.”

“Does he know where you are?” Kate told him that her mate was dead. “I’m sorry. So is mine. She died a few years ago when I drove the two of us over a cliff. She and my unborn son were killed.”

“I didn’t really care for my mate. He was...he wasn’t a nice person. Not most of the time, anyway. Then one day, right before we were to go on a long trip together, to see his family as a matter of fact, he was taken away in chains and hung in the town square. It was said that they did all witches that way, but he wasn’t one. Not wholly anyway.” He wondered what the not wholly meant, but before he could ask her, she spoke again. “What was your mate?”

“Human. Or mostly human…I don’t think she was aware that she had a little magic in her. I meant to tell her, but we never got...conversations were not high on our list when fighting was so much easier. We began our marriage well enough, I guess. She was older than me, and smarter. Or so she kept telling me.” He waited for Kate to tell him that everyone was smarter than him, but she only stared at him. “Anyway, her father didn’t care all that much for me from the very start. I mean, he made no bones about it. He was under the impression that she could have done a great deal better than me. I guess she could have, but we were happy, for a time I guess. Then when we found out that she was going to have a baby, things sort of changed.”

He got up to go to the little fridge that seemed to be in every room he was in. Chris drank about twenty to fifty bottles of ice cold water every day. More if they were working. After he drained the bottle and tossed the container in the trash, he offered Kate one. When she took it, he sat down again, but this time on the same sofa she was on.

“They had money.” He turned to Kate and nodded when she said that. “She married you to get back at her dad…you know that, don’t you?”

“I kinda figured that out after the fact. But she was going to have my baby, and I figured I could put up with a great deal for a child. We were mates.” Kate shook her head, and he sat there while she made her way to him, scooting along the sofa as she did. “Our kind can’t have children by anyone but our mates.”

“Maybe so, but did it ever occur to you that it wasn’t your child? She wasn’t what you are, so there was no reason for her to not have a child by another man, was there?” He didn’t answer her. He had thought about that a great deal. But as she touched her fingers to his chest, right where his heart was, he held his breath while she pressed her fingers into him. “Your heart is pure. Untouched by love, yet filled with sorrow and anger. You’re angry more than you are hurt, aren’t you, Chris?”

“I never said I loved her. Only that she was my mate. I don’t think either of us uttered those words the entire time we were together, as a matter of fact.” Kate moved back to her side of the sofa and Chris felt the loss profoundly. He wanted her to be close to him again…he wanted— “How did you know that? I mean, what did you feel when you touched me?”

“That there is no love in your heart. If you let me search through your mind, I can also tell you about the accident you said that the two of you were in. I doubt very much you were the cause of it.” He asked her how she would know that. “Because you don’t think you were either. You might have at first, but you don’t any longer, do you?”

He didn’t say anything. Chris had thought about a lot of things lately. Like Pella’s father, and some of the things he’d said to him when they were still at the graveside. He’d demanded that Chris admit to killing his little girl and to not take the insurance money. There had been a great deal of it too. Chris hadn’t touched it, but turned it over to the local hospital to have a children’s burn unit built in Pella’s name. That too had sent Pella’s father over the edge. Enough so that he’d dragged him to court several times before all of this happened.

“I don’t guess it matters anymore.” Kate said it did to him. “If I let you do this, what do you get out of it?”

“I don’t want anything from you.” She stood up. “I don’t even want to be here, but until Remy is satisfied that I’m not part of the problem, I’m stuck here.”

When she left him, Chris leaned back on the sofa again. He had a feeling that he was going to regret not having her tell him what he might already know. That there had been a second car on the hillside, and that he’d been avoiding it rather than driving like a fool as he’d been told he had been. Yes, he’d been driving fast, but not stupid. The roads were dry, not wet as he’d been told, and there had been someone else on that windy road other than him and Pella.

They’d been arguing. Loudly and viciously. She’d told him—not for the first time—that her daddy would help her leave him if he didn’t do whatever it was she wanted at that moment. Chris told her that she should leave him, but she wasn’t taking his child with her. Her laughter and her next words had caused him to look away from the road, just for a moment, and when he looked back he saw the other car.

“There wasn’t another car. You killed her. You murdered her and my grandchild.” Chris had heard those words spoken to him almost the moment he opened his eyes and asked about Pella and the other driver. Martin Webster had been standing over his bed screaming at him that he’d killed his only child. And a grandson that would have been so much better than his supposed father.

“The other driver, I saw him.” Martin had hit him then, hard enough to knock him off the gurney he’d been on and into a nurse. “I want to see my wife. Now…I need to see her.”

“You killed her. You killed my little girl.”

The memory of that day, like so many after, had haunted him. Daily almost. But as he sat there, his heart in his hand, he thought of Kate, and realized in that moment that the memory of what he’d done had not haunted him since he’d met her. And he wondered on that for the rest of the night.

Chapter 4

Hector looked at the dead creature and wondered who had sent it. Kate had explained to him that she’d seen several of them recently. And Hector had had to explain that they were from his world, and that he’d had no idea that they’d been brought here.

“They’re birds of prey, Merriam’s teratorn. Or that’s what we called them long ago. We have not used them in our world for killing for a great many years. I would have thought, if asked, that they were all dead. Perhaps Dolin or Ward have sent them in an effort to kill us.” He had said to Remy just this morning he needed to go back to the other world to check on things. Now he had to make it a priority. “I shall find out from them what I can.”

“You do know that this is some fucked up information.” Hector, now that he had been here for a while, was beginning to understand some of the things that they said to him, and knew that this was not a question that Skylar expected an answer for. “How the hell do we win this thing if more and more shit keeps popping up all the time?”

“I’m sorry.”

He was too. Everyday Hector regretted everything that had happened to these people. Mostly the ones in the encampment where he was now staying with his son, but all the deaths in both their worlds, too. He’d found out recently that he’d not created the monsters that were plentiful here, but he did still feel bad for the deaths that they’d caused. It seemed that what they’d done had been a mistake from the very beginning.

“I shall see if I can find out how many they have sent. Miss Kate has said she’s killed three of them; perhaps that is all of them.”

“I doubt it.” So did he, but he only nodded at Remy when he spoke. “When do you leave to see the other world? And I want to tell you again how much I hate you going there. It’s not safe for you. You have no idea what might be waiting for you on the other side. Nor if the portal that you use is even safe any longer.”

“I am very careful. And they do not see me until I can be assured that it is safe for me to show myself. As for the portal, if I cannot use it, it will simply not let me enter on this end. It’s a failsafe that I have put in when I was there last. Perhaps I will find that Ward and Dolin are both dead, and that Benton has died as well.” That, too, wasn’t something he was counting on. Evil people seldom did what was right. “I will leave now if you do not mind. I have a list of things that I need to procure as well. Some plants that I think will help with things here, and if I can, I’d like to bring back a few of the drugs there as well. Things that perhaps Weston can break down and see what they are made of. Some of which I think will cure a great many things that have killed before this. I am working with Weston, a fine doctor by the way, and he is most pleased for me to bring things back for him to study.”

He’d been having long conversations with the doctor lately. Weston was a brilliant doctor and surgeon, and since they’d brought him help, he had more time to experiment with some of the items they’d been able to find for him. A few of them that the malefactors had been turned with had been analyzed several times, and they were working on a cure for them.

The agate had been the biggest find for them all. Not that the people found much use for it here, but in his realm, it had been as valuable as gold was here. Dolin and Ward had used them to convert some of the malefactors into stronger and meaner killing machines. Now...well, he wasn’t sure what they were doing, other than resurrecting things that had long since died out. And that was making him think they were getting desperate.

After telling Ruben he would return soon and that he’d look for some of the items on his own list, Hector made his way to the portal. There hadn’t been one before on this property, but he had set one up the last time he’d been to the other world. Remy thought it a good idea; that way no one could come back with him that they didn’t want to. Anything that came through it without permission would die. Anyone with ill will or murder on their mind would also die. It was a safety net that Remy had insisted on and Hector loved. Remy, for all his old world ways, was a very brilliant man, Hector thought.

The first thing he saw when he exited the portal was destruction. Not the kind of destruction that one would find in a developing neighborhood, but things were destroyed in a way that made him think there had been a great deal of anger in it. Just as he was bending to see what was shining back at him on the ground in the otherwise desolate area, he saw Benton moving in his direction.

Hector was shocked at what he looked like. Not only did the man look as if he’d been chewed up and spit out, a term that Vicki had taught him, but he’d been chewed in a way that made him look as if he was close to his own death. Laying low while keeping an eye on the creature, he listened to what he was saying. The man seemed to be having a conversation with Ward. But as far as Hector could see, there was no one with him.

“I know that’s what you said, but I’ve no way of making that work. You know that, as I have repeated myself several times on the matter by now.” The long pause made Hector think that Benton was listening to the phantom Ward talk. “Yes, yes. I get it. If we kill them then we can have all the stones we want and build an army of my men. But I have to be able to make the drugs first. I’ve only just a few left, and that’s not enough if that bitch tries to burn me again with her evil magic.”

Benton moved around the area, circling around and around like he was looking for something. Hector did as well. Whatever the man wanted, he wanted it too. Then he remembered the shining object and looked around until he found it.

It was a vial of something clear. The needle was bent in an odd way, but the cylinder was full of the liquid. Putting it in the pouch that he’d brought with him, Hector watched and listened to Benton. It was then that he realized that he was looking for what Hector had found.

“I know that you say you didn’t take it, Ward, but where is it if you don’t have it? That medicine is all that I have to keep me from hurting. I hurt all the time now, thanks to Rembrandt. I need it. Randall thought to keep if all from me, but you know how smart I am, and that was his downfall.” Benton limped by him, dragging his long arm behind him as he did. “I need to find a way to make more of it, and then I will be master of all there is to see. That and only that will keep me from being killed when I go back there. And then I’m going to kill Rembrandt. Did I tell you I was there recently? They have a nice place, and here I live with nothing. Not even a clean bed. I, master of all, have been reduced to living in a cave where there is nary a stone to keep me warm.”

Hector wondered where the cave was, but concentrated on what Benton was saying. It seemed like gibberish, but he pulled out his note pad and began writing as quickly as he could. His handwriting was very neat most of the time, but right now he didn’t care so long as he got it all. Hector knew that this was going to be helpful to them all once they figured out what he was talking about.

Benton kept going on about finding his meds. Hector had no idea what the drug would have done to him, or for him, for that matter, but there was no way that he was going to help him by giving it to him. Whatever it was, he was sure it was bad for them. There had to be a way to make something to do the opposite of what this thing did, and he was going to see if Weston could produce it for them.

After another twenty minutes or so, Benton moved on, not finding the vial that Hector now had. Hector got up from his hiding place and made his way around the neighborhood. It took him ten more minutes of wandering around to realize that he was in Dolin’s neighborhood, and that the rubble in front of him had at one time been the man’s home. Going over the area, he found what he thought was the shelter that the two of them, Dolin and Ward, had been hiding in when he’d come here to scare them. It was much like the one that Jamey had lived in when she’d been hiding out in the other realm.

That was where he found the body of Ward. Or what was left of him. His head had been torn from his body, but there was no sign of it in the shelter. The man had been tossed aside as if he were no more than a rag that had been soiled. Hector was almost afraid to go to Ward’s home, or what was left of it, fearful of what he might find there as well.

He’d not cared for either man toward the end. Both of them had killed his lovely wife, and had tried to do the same to his little boy. From the start they’d led him to believe that he’d been responsible for the creatures that the other realm had been fighting. He’d begun to keep his notes on projects that he worked on in secret, even going as far as to have two sets…one for the office, and the other that he’d had hidden at his home. And it turned out that not only were they the ones that had done it, but the two of them were related in some way.

Ward’s home was in worse shape than Dolin’s. The walls that had been made entirely of glass were shattered into such small pieces that it looked like sand. His furniture, always the best for Ward, was nothing more than puffs of cotton hanging from dead or dying trees and on the grass. It sort of reminded him of flowers in the spring. Shaking his head at the senselessness of it all, he moved to where he knew a beautiful garden had once been planted, hoping for a few plants to save.

He found some plants that he’d been looking for. He also managed to find a few boxes and a spade that he could dig them up with. There were flowers there too, most of which he was sure would grow in the other world, and he wondered briefly what sort of colors they’d get in the other soil. He took these boxes to the portal to await his return to the other realm.

Most of the gardens around the homes, like them, had been knocked over. He wondered, just a little, what sort of thing had done this, and didn’t want to dwell too much on it being Benton. The man had been insane before this, and he wondered if it had gotten worse. Well, he supposed he knew it had gotten worse, but how badly was anyone’s guess.

There were no bodies at most of the other houses, thankfully. There were no bodies much anywhere, now that he made his way to the labs. Hector was amazed at the contrasts of things here. A flower garden in full bloom, their buds nearly a foot off the ground, was surrounded by so much destruction that it was amazing that something as delicate as them had survived at all. A playground, devoid of children, was in pristine condition, yet all around it trees were toppled, their roots like large spiders climbing from the dirt. A house stood as if it had only just been built between two that looked like someone large had simply stepped on them, crushing them to the dirt. Destruction on a mass scale was everywhere.

The lab was in worse shape than the homes surrounding it. The windows had been broken out, pieces of them sparkling brightly in the afternoon sun like diamonds. Papers were flying about, most of which made no sense whatsoever to him, and after gathering a few of them, he let them go. Vials had been thrown about; lab coats, most of which were stained with a dark rust that he knew as blood, were flapping in the wind like a kite on a warm summer day. Hector smiled at the thought, how so many things reminded him of things he and his son now did. But then he entered the lab proper.

The smell of death permeated the air. It was thick with it, so thick that he wanted to turn and leave. It was strong enough to cause him to gag, and he had second thoughts as to whether or not there would be anything there that he might need. But he knew that some of what he had said he’d find, things that he wanted to bring out, were below where he stood, so he covered his mouth and nose with his shirt and moved deeper into the building.

The bodies had been stacked up in tall piles around the rooms. Most of them had been dead for a long time if their decomposition was any indication. He would not have been able to tell anyone who the people were but for their names on their lab coats. Even those were stained so badly that it would be nearly impossible to tell what they might have said at one time. But as he moved on, going to the labs, he wondered what sort of terrible mess he’d find there.

Broken glass and doors torn from hinges met him, and even the tables had been bent double. Their use, if one were to enter this room for the first time, would be unknown. Cabinets that had at one time been neatly filled, labels stuck to the front so he could easily find what he wanted, were now nothing more than broken glass and steel, the items that they’d once held no longer safe within their confines. Even the equipment was torn up, broken beyond repair. Walls were embedded with surgical tools, glass, and even...he thought it was bone. Hector did not want to think about the force it had taken to do that.

He found Ward’s head, decomposed and rotted, sitting upon a table as if he were ruling the room. And this was where he found the body of Dolin, his head also missing. The two men had not been killed easily, it seemed, but perhaps quickly. Again, he wondered at the strength that it would take to tear a man’s head from his body like that.

The noise behind him had him moving quickly to a safe place before he was seen. Then when he shadowed himself, making sure that whoever was there could no longer see him, he watched as three men, all of them loyal only to Ward and Dolin, entered the lab. They looked like they had been doing well; their clothing was clean and they didn’t look any worse for wear with all that had been going on. He wondered where they were hiding out.

“I tell you, I saw Hector. Plain as day. And he looked fit too, nothing like he did when he was here.” The other man, Tony he thought his name was, asked him where he was then. “I don’t fucking know. But he’s here, and if he’s here then things might be turning for us. I can’t do this anymore, Buddy. There is no one here to do chores and shit. I’ve taken to washing my own clothing at the pond down the way. Those women that are there? They told me to do it myself. No respect no more, I’m telling you.”