TARNISHED (Book 5.5, The Caged Series (Novella)) Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  TARNISHED

  Copyright

  More by ALN

  Dedication

  Prologue

  The Beginning

  The Impetus

  The Poison

  The Attack

  The Plan

  The Annihilation

  The Foretelling

  The Light

  The Rouge

  The Queen

  The Unmasking

  The Standoff

  The Turning Point

  The Prodigal Son Returns

  The Depraved

  The Return

  The Dilemma

  The New World

  The Darkness

  The Calling

  The One

  Epilogue

  Connect with ALN

  Next in the Series

  Tempted by Evil

  Acknowledgments

  TARNISHED

  By

  Amber Lynn Natusch

  TARNISHED Version 1.0

  Copyright © 2013 Amber Lynn Natusch

  All rights reserved.

  This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-9891023-2-2

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, businesses, places, events and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is entirely coincidental.

  Published by Amber Lynn Natusch

  Cover Design by Dannielle Gleim and Amber Lynn Natusch

  Photography by Vella Photography

  Editing by Jennifer Ryan

  www.amberlynnnatusch.com

  More by Amber Lynn Natusch

  The Caged Series

  CAGED

  HAUNTED

  FRAMED

  SCARRED

  FRACTURED

  TARNISHED*

  STRAYED

  CONCEALED*

  BETRAYED

  (* novellas)

  The UNBORN Series

  Coming in 2014

  UNBORN

  The Light and Shadow Trilogy

  By Shannon Morton and Amber Lynn Natusch

  Tempted By Evil

  More Including Release Dates:

  amberlynnnatusch.com

  facebook.com/amberlynnnatusch

  Follow @AmberLNatusch

  Tweet your thoughts through the book

  To those with a shady past that strive for a brighter future.

  Prologue

  The Punishment

  How did it come to this?

  Centuries passed and I was always his chosen one. His invincible warrior. His most lethal assassin. Now, buried deep below the surface, entombed in the earth, I question it all.

  There are lines that cannot be crossed―should not be crossed. That was what he'd asked me to do. To succumb to the darkness that consumed him—again. To lose any shred of morality I had left so that nothing could pull me back. Not even her.

  I lay here in my earthen confinement and reflect on what I've done. I cringe instantly, seeing the puppet I was—the puppet he so skillfully crafted, manipulated, and molded to create the soulless immortal that would best serve him and create the world he wanted.

  The child that once glorified him is gone. The warrior that idolized him, jaded. The heir he so painstakingly groomed, lost. A wedge driven between us, deep and severing.

  I will no longer answer to him.

  I will, however, do the task I was charged with: to keep the balance between the human and supernatural worlds at any and all cost—but not because of him. And I will not let him poison my brothers. They will answer to me and me alone—eventually.

  I know of things that I should not, and once I escape, I will tell him just how many. He traps me here to make an example of me. He suffers me to live. And I know why. Ares may think he holds all the cards in this game, but I have one.

  And mine is trump.

  The Beginning

  There is no such thing as a childhood when you are born of a god. Age and time mean nothing. I could practically wield a sword before I could talk and was lethal not long after that. I reached adulthood by human standards within just a few years of being born. It was the way of beings as powerful as I.

  Everything about my life was predestined, my creation a strategic maneuver. Ares was amassing an army of sorts, an army to carry out what he himself could not do: police the supernatural world by force. I was eventually to be the leader of his soldiers, his most brutal and soulless killing machine.

  But I didn't know that then.

  It took centuries to see myself for what I was.

  When I was young, not yet a man, I idolized my father. I was his champion, his favorite, his Aniketos—the invincible one. Above all the others, he counted on me to do the job for which I was conceived. I was his greatest weapon in a war that he could no longer fight. He lived vicariously through me.

  His power had fallen with the rising of the true God, leaving him in a position of great irony: to maintain his immortality, he would have to take a passive and non-violent role in keeping the supernatural world at bay, policing its inhabitants so that humans would continue to be ignorant of their existence. It also meant that if he broke the agreement and directly brought death to another, he instantly forfeited his own life. Such was his fate, if he chose to accept it, and he did all too happily. Ares was very much into self-preservation; an altered life was better than none at all.

  His limitations left my brothers and me to do the dirty work at his behest. Though peace was what he was charged with keeping, he managed to incite chaos and terror everywhere he went. Everywhere he sent me. The Petronus Ceteri had been created long before I was born, with the purpose of killing one of the most nefarious of all supernaturals: Romulus, King of the Werewolves. Once that had been achieved, our numbers increased by the spreading of his seed, and we were dispersed across the land to enforce Ares' will—his legion, as the case may have been.

  The PC was entirely fathered by Ares, though with different mothers, all of whom were handpicked for their various traits. The result was a force to be reckoned with by any measure. I was head and shoulders above my brothers. By the time I was an adult, my place as Ares' number one was fully secured.

  But he wanted more.

  My first kill cemented a feeling in me that I would never be able to fully reverse. I wanted more instantly—more blood, more pain, more death. The need to cause those things washed over me in the most welcome way, and I struggled against it, fighting hard to remain in control. Though the sensation faded slowly after that first encounter, it never disappeared. It awakened a part of me that could never be sedated, and Ares was all too aware of that fact.

  That was the true beginning of the end.

  I had been born of an angel, but, in her absence, that side faded quickly. With every kill I made, I found myself sliding into a darkness that warmed and welcomed me like an old friend. Like it had been waiting for me to succumb to it for an eternity. When I gave into it fully, I was truly unstoppable. There was nothing I wouldn't do, no being I wouldn't kill. It became harder and harder to arouse me from my blackened haze of blood lust, and very few individuals were capable of doing it. Isadora, the Healer for the Petronus Ceteri, was one of those people.

  She had an ethereal nature to her that seemed to call to those final threads of goodness within me. Whenever she was present, my dark
ness subsided, if only enough to seem more balanced. More the warrior I wanted to be.

  “You are more than what you do,” she would tell me, looking at me with her childlike eyes. She was the first Healer bound to the PC, but she had been young when the ceremony had taken place. Though she was centuries older than many of the PC brothers, she appeared a petite and frail teenager, her tight brown curls framing her delicate features. Maybe it had been that innocence that called to me.

  The more I fell into the void that threatened to consume me, the more I sought her presence. I found myself with her almost constantly when I was not out doing Ares' bidding. I found a companion in her that I had long needed. She was a balancing force, much like my mother would have been had she ventured to stay and not abandoned me at the first sight of the monster she had created. Ares had long told me of the utter disgust she had displayed only moments after pulling me from within her. I carried that with me, that knowledge fueling my emptiness. It was no wonder the darkness could so easily overtake me.

  I had been empty since the day I was born.

  But Izzy saw something that few others could. “You have a higher purpose,” she would tell me, taking my seemingly massive hand in her tiny one. “You will see it one day. It will all be clear to you.” Her words were always sealed with a knowing smile that warmed me. She was a light that shone through the blackness—a shred of hope in the absence of any. She was my friend.

  I remember clearly the day she was taken from me. The day she was murdered. Someone snuffed out that light I so eagerly sought, and with that action created a warrior devoid of feeling. The warrior my father had wanted from the beginning. No longer was there reprieve from my dark side. I was him entirely.

  And the world would feel my wrath.

  The Impetus

  I felt her distress immediately. Something was wrong with Isadora. In the early hours of the morning, long before the sun would reach the horizon, I ran to her as though a life depended on it. My worst fear was that hers did.

  Storming her home, I came to find Izzy lying alongside the bed, convulsing. Foam escaped the corners of her mouth as I looked on, her head banging violently against the floor. I crashed to the ground beside her, gently laying her head in my lap and cradling it to prevent any further damage. Her eyes silently pleaded for my help, but I had little to offer. What rudimentary skills in healing magic I had acquired were inadequate for the job. Healing the Healer simply was not possible―not by anyone.

  “Izzy,” I whispered to her, stroking back her sweat-soaked hair from her face. “What happened? Who did this to you?”

  Her eyes flashed with fear at my questions, but she was totally incapable of answering. Whoever had come to take her life had scared her horribly, fueling the raging fire of guilt that was ablaze in my chest. An unsettled feeling was in the air that evening. I should never have left her alone.

  Her seizures started to weaken as did the death grip she had on my arm. She was frightened, undoubtedly sensing that the end was near. Even though I knew it was an exercise in futility, I used my power on her, trying to force whatever ailed her to cease. For a fleeting moment, the tension in her eased.

  I held her like a child, not wanting to move her. Nothing could help her, and inflicting any more pain on her seemed cruel, so I sat by her bed and rocked her until death came for her.

  * * *

  The Healer had fallen. I watched as the life left her eyes and she choked on her last blood-filled breath. Before I was born, Healers fell with regularity, none of us capable of keeping them alive forever, but after I had gained control of the brothers, that stopped. Until that moment.

  Disbelief and anger coursed through me. Nothing about her passing made sense. She had been fine when I left her, but she was lying on the ground choking on her blood, the source of which I could not find, when I returned. Someone had targeted her, and the attack was both devious and malicious. To attack the PC was madness, but to go after the one we cherished most was insanity. All in the supernatural community knew this. They also knew that the penalty for such an act was death.

  A very painful one.

  I held her delicately as I carried her back to the remote village where the brothers lived, her angelic face stained with blood and treachery. It would haunt my dreams for many years.

  When I arrived, Ares stood waiting in the great hall where all official PC business took place. His anger was palpable.

  “What has happened to her?” he asked, taking Isadora from me.

  “She was murdered. Poison was the culprit, I suspect, since there are no signs of injury anywhere on her body.”

  He placed her down gently on a long cypress table before turning on me.

  “You have failed her, Aniketos. And in so doing, you have failed me.”

  I nodded once in a sharp motion. He was right. Had I taken my job more seriously in that moment, she would likely have still been alive. It was a harsh lesson, but one that needed learning. In order to serve as I was designed to do, there was no room for trivialities, jovialities, or anything else of the sort. Lives depended on me. I would not let them down again. From that moment on, I was driven to be only that mindless warrior and nothing more. I felt a shift deep within me smite out any light I still possessed.

  Instead, a cold darkness pervaded.

  “We must replace her at once,” Ares decreed. His voice was emotionless, and I realized that it was a trait he'd earned after centuries of warring. Casualties occurred. They could not slow you down. “I must go and meet with the keeper of the Healers and assess the candidates. You will bind her to us, Aniketos, and with any luck, this time you'll manage to keep her alive.”

  He pushed past me toward the door, not sparing a backward glance.

  “What of the body?” I asked, feeling little more than the need for revenge.

  “Leave her. She will fade on her own.”

  “And what of the perpetrators?”

  “This has all the markings of the elemental ones,” he sneered, using the most demeaning term for the fairies. “The fey are extremely sneaky, and though they will not have left any trace of their actions, I know this is their doing. Mark my words, Aniketos, they need to be brought down. Not today. Not tomorrow, but they will be put to death. All of them.” With a declaration of war as his parting words, he left me alone with the body of our Healer, to protect her in death though I was unable to in life.

  “That is a task I will gladly carry out,” I whispered into the darkness as it swallowed me. “May the wind carry my words to them. I want them to know that death is coming.”

  The Poison

  Ares returned days later with his only potential Healer. Her appearance was arresting, her beautiful dark hair hanging long and straight down her back in a braid. Her brown eyes were mesmerizing, full of promise and eagerness to serve. Her passion was plain. She was brought before the brotherhood by Ares to be scrutinized by all of us, but I alone would have the say as to whether or not she would be bound to us. Judging by her interest in me, she knew that all too well.

  I approached her slowly as she stood, unfaltering in her gaze. The heat that emanated from it fueled me, and I soon found myself standing nose-to-nose with her.

  “You are the one,” she said as a statement, not a question. Her self-assuredness was intoxicating. “Say it is done,” she whispered up to me as her fingers ran lightly down my arms. “Say that I will serve you for eternity.”

  Her words were right, but their tone held another meaning altogether. It was not just the PC she wanted to serve; it was me in particular. My heart raced at the thought.

  “Tell me your name, girl,” I demanded, my voice low and commanding.

  “Sophie, daughter of Herodotus,” she replied, her eyes still speaking more than her words.

  “And you will serve my brothers and me?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you know that once bound you are bound for an eternity?”

  “Yes.”

  �
�And if you ever fail us, you will be stripped of your bond and die as you should have before your vow of service was taken?”

  “I understand,” she said softly, weaving her arms around my back. “And I accept.”

  The fire between us raged, and suddenly, I didn't care that anyone else was in that room. I wanted to be in her. Mark her. Mate her. She was a sweet darkness that I needed to explore.

  “It seems as though you two are quite taken with one another,” Ares commented from somewhere deep in the room. “I had a feeling that might happen. There's something about her that just draws you in, isn't there, Aniketos?” He came to stand beside us, but I hardly noticed. “If you choose to do this, you may be bound to her personally as well as binding her to the PC. Is that of interest to you both?”

  She pressed herself tighter against me and my chest rumbled with approval. Whatever needed to be done had to happen quickly. I wasn't certain I could wait until the officiations were through.

  We didn't part through the entire ceremony, Sophie clinging to me as if I were the very air she needed and I counting down the seconds until I could bury myself inside her. My thoughts grew dark while I should have been listening to the goings-on around me, but they could not be helped. My entire focus was on what I was going to do to her the second we were alone. My muscles flexed as I fought against my rapidly failing better judgment.

  The second the pact was sealed, I threw her over my shoulder and ran to my home. She laughed wickedly as her head bounced off of my back. I had no concern for her comfort on the way, and once we arrived, I had none either. The things we did to each other were beyond depraved. Nothing was off-limits between us, and it seemed the more we did, the lower we sank.