Page 14 of Broken Souls
She doesn’t react with the same annoyance I did. She just nods gracefully, ever the polite fucking lady – the one I am supposed to be learning how to be.
Biting back a muttered curse for a certain neanderthal, I start to pull out the ingredients needed for a stir fry.
Six
HIM
As my seven brothers and I all sit around the kitchen table, waiting to be served by Micha and Mother, we discuss the shitstorm we ran into last night. Antonio is faster than a fucking bullet – something that shouldn’t be possible and which caught us completely off guard.
His Family has always eaten the dead members of their pack as a way to keep their “souls” with them. Somewhere along the line, though, that ritual turned into actual magic, and with every soul consumed, they gain a small boost of power. But the keyword issmall.Antonio would have had to eat a whole pack, if not more, to gain the strength and speed he has now.
“You think he’s captured a rival pack?” Rudy, my second youngest brother, signs. He was born unable to speak due to Mother having been hit with a blast of magic while she was pregnant with him.
It’s a good question. Although the magic only works if
the werewolves eaten are part of the pack, he could have forced them in as omegas – those whose entire purpose is to be bullied to strengthen the rest of the pack, before he killed them.
Talon shakes his head, then signs, as we all do in respect to Rudy. “We would’ve heard something if he had.”
“He could be eating his own?” Maddox throws out as he glances at me.
“He would have been challenged,” Leno says. He is the second eldest and sees (and can also feel and taste) through his dog Krypto, having lost his eyes to a werewolf when he was a kid. Despite his injury though, he doesn’t hate them like Talon hates the vampires. If anything, he’s fascinated by their culture and knows more about them than most of us do.
However, even I know a werewolf isn’t born as an alpha. That is a position that is fought for, and most of the pack is made up of women he gets to fuck. If Antonio started killing his own pack just to eat them as a power source, they would have turned on him.
“So if it can’t be outsiders because we haven’t heard of any attacks,” Maddox, my youngest brother, says, kicking back in his chair until it rocks on two legs, “and it can’t be his own pack because they would have killed him, then who the fuck does that leave?”
My attention flickers away for a moment as Micha walks towards me with a plate of stir fry. I breathe in deep until I can smell her raspberry and cream body wash beneath the spicy aroma of the Schezwan beef. The tattoo on my cock burns as it starts to harden, and I am so godsdamn close to calling this meeting over so I can fuck her on the table.
All morning, I have resisted the urge to text her to come upstairs to my office so I could bury my tongue in her pussy while I thought of how to divide Antonio’s territory. After we started the blood bond last night, all I seem to want to do is laze the day away between her thighs. But I have a family to protect and a Family to run. So I force my gaze to roam around my brothers rather than go to her. “Regardless of who he’s eating,” I say, “Antonio must be killed before he manages to make a hybrid. That gives us only a few months max.” My gaze stops on Khalid, my brother and bodyguard and the reaper of this Family. “Which is why you and I are going to visit Aleric today to make a deal.”
“What?” Maddox shouts as he drops his chair down on all fours. Thethumpof it hitting the wooden floorboards is accentuated by the shattering plate beside Leno. He flinches. Krypto’s eyes were on me, so he didn’t see what happened. Mother is standing there in a mess of stir fry.
“Varius,” she starts, but I cut her off.
“We cannot allow hybrids to be made whatever the cost. I understand your disliking of him with everything you two have been through.” Her lips tighten into a thin line. “But this is not a discussion. We will eliminate the Death Hunt together, then divide their territory and business.” I’ve spent all fucking morning working out how we’ll split everything between our two gangs. We’ll capitalize on taking over the majority of their drug trade, and Aleric will get a monopoly on human trafficking.
“Why not kill them too?” Talon sneers as Mother bends down to clean up the mess she caused. His hands fist on the table in front of him. There isn’t a plate there, not yet, Micha having only served Leno and me so far. She’ll move to Khalid next, then Talon, working her way down the table from oldest to youngest. “What they have done to this Family demands retribution,” my brother growls.
Despite his word choice though, I know he means what they have done tohim.Talon’s hatred of them is surpassed only by Mother’s. Jackie, his childhood sweetheart, was a bloodbank – one of the humans the group feeds on. Unlike cattle – the humans that are bled dry in one go, bloodbanks hold rank in their gang. It is the lowest rank, but it is one nonetheless and they didn’t care for one of their own falling in love with the enemy. So they stalked the two of them on their first date, and when my brother left her alone for two seconds, they killed her and painted ‘witch whore’ on her forehead in her own blood. Talon got back just in time to watch her die in his arms.
He hasn’t forgiven them in the decades since and has constantly toed the line of our treaty, pushing against it as hard as he can but not quite enough to break it.
Holding his gaze, I say, “The Blood Fangs haven’t broken any terms of the treaty, and they make up almost half of the police department.” He starts to say something, but I sharply add, “Anda good chunk of the local court system. Weeding them all out will open positions for WALL to fill. A drawn out war will have more chances of bringing in the SCU.”
“They haven’t visited this city in decades.”
“Thanks to the treaty Mother got Antonio and Aleric to sign. That is now gone, and they will return if we drag out another war.” The Special Crimes Unit polices our kind here on Earth, but their numbers are stretched thin. So they leave us alone as long as we only kill other sups and don’t reveal our existence, but we can’t involve the humans in our death tolls. A war will not discriminate nor will it give us time to hide the bodies we kill with our magic under the blade of a knife. Such deaths will puzzle the local community, and they will call in the Special Crimes Unit. The humans don’t know that the private international company, famous for solving weird cases, is actually part of a world they know nothing about. But if we draw them back here and they get wind of Antonio trying to make fucking hybrids? They are a branch of the Elv’ve’Nor – the interplanal equivalent of the CIA or MI6, and they have a direct line to the fucking archangels.
“Our business does not clash with the bloodbanks and sex trafficking the vampires do,” I say to my brothers. “They will avoid hunting and dealing in our territory after this meeting.” I sweep my eyes across the table. “So until they become a threat, we will leave them be. There will be no more attacking them” –my gaze settles back on Talon as he seethes in silence– “nothing to break the deal I make with Aleric today. Do I make myself clear?”
Jerking his head, my brother gives me his obedience. He isn’t happy about it, but he knows ignoring a blatant order will see him dead. Traitors are not given second chances in this Family. Blood or not.
Feeling the weight of a recent loss, the torture and death of a man I trusted, I find Micha in my peripheral vision. She turns to me with a small smile, and I look away, not trusting my family to know she’s become more than just the womb I purchased her for.
The rest of my brothers all nod, though the tension of my decision does not dissipate as we eat. As the rich spices of the Szechwan stir fry fill my mouth, I can’t help but wonder if this decision has just damned my family.
If Talon or Mother or any of them breach the terms of this agreement, Khalid will be forced to kill them. But we cannot survive without the Blood Fangs’ alliance.
