“You have never learned to ask the right questions, kid. Don’t you get it?”
He faded into the abyss.
“Wait! Come back!”
Nick growled in frustration. “If you know the answer, why don’t you tell me!” He hated whenever they did that crap with him. Why did they have to play these games? Why not spill the beans and let him make soup or toss it?
“I swear I’m getting a tumor from all this!” Nick sighed as he listened to the voices in the aether and tried to sort through the madness of it all. Millions of thoughts came at him simultaneously. A cacophony of complaints, needs and wants. No wonder the gods tuned them out. You had to or you’d lose your mind.
It was unrelenting. People ricocheted through life like random pinballs speeding through one giant machine. Everything about it made him dizzy.
Honestly, he didn’t know how Acheron remained sane. In some ways, he wished Ambrose had never told him about his future.
Closing his eyes, Nick tapped the very powers he’d mentioned. His clairvoyance opened and left him standing over his mother’s body.
Left him in the darkness of his own home, feeling betrayed by Acheron and Kyrian for allowing the Daimons they fought to murder her in cold blood.
More than that was the guilt. He should have been there. Tears streamed down his face as pain lacerated him. His mother had given him life. Had sheltered and protected him with everything she had. And how had he returned her love?
He’d left her defenseless when she needed him most. On the very night when the Daimons had come to his door in the guise of a Dark-Hunter, Nick had been out with the other Squires patrolling to protect strangers.
Not his mother.
He’d left her in the hands of the immortal protectors who’d sworn to keep humans safe from the demons who preyed on them. Trusted in Acheron and his army to shelter the only person he needed and loved.
A woman who had been kind and caring toward all of them. Nick choked on a sob as he saw her throat slashed open and her glazed, glassy eyes that accused him of carelessness.
This was his unstoppable future.
The one pith point he couldn’t change. No matter what he tried, all roads led him here.
Throwing his head back, he shouted out in agony. Why couldn’t he save her? With all the powers he had?
We are destruction …
The voice of the Malachai whispered through him. It was a thunderous, dark sound that he knew well. An amalgam of all his predecessors. Older than time, it reverberated through his entire being.
With it came that surge of power. Primal and raw. Nick forced it down. He didn’t want to go Malachai.
Not now.
He needed to stay rational and to figure this out. He couldn’t give in to the hatred. There was too much on the line. Too many that he cared about.
“I won’t let you tell me who I am,” he breathed. “I am Nick Gautier.” Tomorrow, he might become Ambrose Malachai. But it wouldn’t be today.
No. Not today.
Suddenly, his phone rang. Jumping, he answered it, no longer thinking it peculiar. Peculiar was becoming his new middle name.
However, that being said, what he did find shocking was to find Virgil Ward on the other end.
“You remember me, kid?”
“Um, yeah.”
As a blood-sucking attorney, literally, Virgil was a hard creature to forget. A little over six feet tall, he didn’t appear to be any older than sixteen or seventeen—Nick’s age when Virgil had been turned into a real vampire after a demon had bitten him. Now he spent eternity working night court for the damned and preternatural as part of the Laurens and Ward Law Firm in a posh downtown office.
Virgil was also the only one whose powers of persuasion and masking put Nick’s to shame. That boy could pull the wool over anyone’s eyes.
“Good. I just got off the phone with your mom and I’m going to walk you into the police station to see about this matter where they want to talk to you, and make sure you don’t hit lock-up, for reasons we all know. Where are you?”
“Do you know a guy named Takeshi?”
“As in the zeitjäger, kick-your-hide-sideways?”
“That’d be the one.”
“Very familiar. Still have the boot prints on my left cheek. You with him?”
“Affirmative.”
“Good lad. Safe place. I like it. Can you put him on the phone for me?”
Before Nick could answer, a strange buzzing started on the line. One that drowned out Virgil’s voice. His vision dimmed. Pain exploded through his head and left him in absolute agony.
What the heck?
He blinked in an effort to clear his vision. Yet all it did was make him queasy. Dizzier. The darkness lifted into a bright, searing light that made it even harder for him to see.
Tires squealed.
Before Nick could recover, something slammed into him and sent him careening through the air.
An instant later, he landed on the pavement and realized that he’d been struck by a car.
Unable to move, he lay in the street as his entire body throbbed. Voices assaulted him. He tried to get up and focus.
Everything was hazy and surreal.
You are mine, Malachai. And I will make you bleed …
CHAPTER 4
Nick could feel the breath of his son on the back of his neck as his powers weakened and left him feeling drained and helpless. For the first time in his life, he understood his father’s animosity toward him. It was an involuntary survival instinct built in to their Malachai DNA that wanted to destroy anything that threatened them.
It was innate and primal. Terrifying. The fact that his father had gone down protecting him and his mother said a lot for Adarian.
That alone allowed him to finally forgive his father for the sins that had created Nick. Allowed him to let go of the hatred and anger he’d borne for the creature who’d sired him. For the first time ever, he understood his father’s mind set.
And what made his mother such an incredible gift. Even after all the horrors his father had put her through, she’d still been able to find the good in both of them. Rather than hate Nick for the violence of his conception, she’d found a way to see past the horror of it. Never once had she held his father’s acts against him.
You are my most precious baby boy, Nicky-Boo. There’s never anything you could do to make me not love you, through and through. For you are, and will always be, my baby angel.
It was why the thought of her future murder crippled him now and would one day destroy him. She truly saw no evil in this world.
For he was a Malachai born of equal part Mavromino and equal part Kalosum. Like the firstborn, Monakribos, Nick alone shared that unique birthright.
So how then, could he have a son born of such hatred that he could feel it crawling over his skin like a living creature? This amount of venom came straight from the Source. He sensed it as if it were a part of him.
All Malachai were conceived in violence to do violence and to die violently.
Yet Nick knew that he’d never, ever be able to harm another person that way. It just wasn’t in him to act the way his father had.
Never. He knew himself better than that.
Laughter echoed in the aether, in and out and all around as he pushed himself to his feet. Something else sizzled.
He turned a circle in the darkness, seeking some hint of the malevolent child he could feel and not see. Why were they playing this cruel game of hide-and-seek?
Suddenly, he was surrounded. The very shadows emerged into the light to attack.
These were the kinds of demons he knew well.
With his Malachai powers, he summoned his sword and went after them. He felt the familiar surge of rage, but quickly pushed it down. Don’t give in. He knew better than to let his anger rule him. In spite of what Caleb and Xev thought, he was paying attention during his lessons.
He heard his instructors and friends.
Most days anyway.
He spun and caught the first demon behind him with a vicious blow that caused it to shrink back into the darkness. Another came forward to attack. Nick barely countered in time to keep it from slashing his arm. But he severed its hand. It shrieked and withdrew.
“Nick!”
That was Virgil’s voice.
Nick’s sight dimmed. Everything shook and spiraled. What he heck? He wasn’t sure what happened. Not until he began to fall through the aether again.