Chapter 6Varos

Chapter

Six

VAROS

I gritted my teeth against the feelings that coursed through me at the touch of the female. That I needed her help at all was like acid burning through my veins. For fucking eons, I endured every kind of torture imaginable. But it was the taunts that did the most damage in all the attempts to break me.

I knew my brothers were out there somewhere. Every fucking day I kept myself going with the hope that the next would be the day that my brothers found and relieved me from my prison. Instead of my brothers arriving, though, it was this small female with the long blood red hair and yellow eyes that matched the same of the High General. The man who gloated with a feral gleam in his hateful eyes and delighted in breaking my bones, slicing off my wings, and starving me to keep me from healing properly.

The one indignity I had yet to suffer was soon to come, I was certain. A new guard who the General had been training had a look in his eyes that I abhorred. The wicked things he promised to do to me when the High General wasn’t around made me wish for just a moment of freedom. I would rip his spine out through his mouth after I cut off his tongue and made him eat it.

I grunted as we made our way to the mouth of the staircase and ground my jaw until my teeth ached just to keep myself from letting out another sound. The female kept glancing up at me through her long lashes as if checking that I wasn’t going to collapse. I’d rather slit my own throat and bleed out for the rodents to feed on my corpse before I showed any weakness to this spawn of my captor.

I leaned my bare shoulder against the damp, cold stones after the first flight of stairs in order to catch my breath, ashamed that I couldn’t even make it more than a dozen steps. I heard the female whisper softly in encouragement and didn’t even attempt to smother the growl that rattled my chest.

I had been doing my fucking best to ignore the brand adorning my wrist since the moment the female stepped through the doorway of my cage. I had barely felt the sting as it came, the pain hardly more than an insect bite compared to the other pains I had dealt with for longer than I cared to think. But when she adjusted her grip as we continued our climb, I found my gaze repeatedly returning to the red mating brand.

I knew little about mates, having been very young when my life went to shit. My brothers and I had just reached our twentieth year when we were captured. We were at a tavern, enjoying round after round of tibane and enjoying our flirtations with the demonesses flocking our table, when it all happened. I had been eyeing a pretty raven haired female with a shy smile and a wicked promise dancing in her eyes, and was seriously considering taking her as my first conquest. Our mother had stressed the importance of mates to us from a young age, regaling us with stories of how the instant bond would be worth the wait, but that deep into my cups, I was ready to say fuck it and fuck her instead of waiting. I could see the lust in my brother’s eyes and knew they were thinking along the same lines that I was.

I was just about to yank the female into my lap as she batted her long lashes at me with an annoying giggle I had been doing my best to ignore, when the doors to the tavern were kicked open with a violent crash. As everyone else screamed and scattered, my brothers and I quickly withdrew our swords. I was certain that had we not been so inebriated, the soldiers would never have been able to take us. As it was, we had dispatched nearly a dozen before becoming overtaken. A sharp blow to the back of my skull was the last thing I remembered before waking in the same cell I had just been liberated from.

The fucking High General had been there to greet me as I jerked awake, only to find myself chained to the floor. I knew the chains were no threat to me, but as I strained my muscles to pull myself free, the High General just laughed, utterly unafraid of my abilities and strength. That was when my anger at having been imprisoned began to be swallowed by my fear. I began to realize that the chains had been magically spelled. No amount of struggling would free me. It was a couple hundred years into my imprisonment that the fear morphed into hopelessness.

Although the High General never explained why I was in the belly of his cold and damp dungeon, I knew he wasn’t solely responsible. Even through the torture, my memories never faded. My hatred and promise to myself that I would one day exact my revenge at the atrocities I faced almost daily kept me going even through the gut wrenching horror at the thought that my brothers were dead. No, the General was holding me in his cell, but the crest the soldiers were wearing that night was that of Lucifer.

There wasn’t a part of my body that didn’t ache as we reached the open entrance to the dungeon. My muscles burned with the effort of walking up the staircase, and though I loathed the touch of the female, I had to give a grudging bit of gratitude for her help. I wasn’t sure that I could have made it alone, and that was enough to have shame coating my throat like acidic bile.

With gently murmured words, she urged me to cross the threshold, and as much as I was eager to feel the taste of freedom coat my skin, a part of me hesitated. A shameful part of me wanted to crawl back into my cell. It had been my only home, the cold stone walls familiar. This outside world was… not.

With a determination I hadn’t felt in far too long, I raised my right foot and took that first step into the outside world, away from my prison. As I took the next step and the next, I had to blink back moisture from my eyes. Inside my broken body, the young man I once was wept for what was lost, for what the future now might bring, and for the moment of realization that I might actually have a future that no longer promised pain and torture.

“We have to get across the fields,” the female whispered urgently beside me, and I bit back an instinctive growl at her very presence, uncaring that it was she who freed me. “I don’t know if anyone is out patrolling. I didn’t see anyone as I came in, which I found surprising.” She glanced up at the sky, and that was when I noticed the deep purple of the night was lightening in the distance, indicating that a new day was cresting soon. She didn’t have to explain that once the day broke, we would be much easier to spot, and the effort of our escape would all be for nothing. Did I care if she were caught and possibly executed for helping me? Fuck no. I didn’t care that she bared my mating brand. She was nothing to me and never would be. And I would continue to ignore the small, nearly silent voice in the far corner of my mind that whispered liar.

I simply grunted, the same as I’d done before, not caring to speak to the female. Not that I really could speak. My vocal cords had been severely damaged over the years from my screams. Even after I was given the most meager of meals to allow enough healing that my body remained alive, my voice hadn’t recovered much more than a grating whisper. It was why the High General stopped questioning me a long, long time ago.

The journey across the fields of rocks and sparse vegetation went faster than the climb up the stone staircase. By the time we made it to a treeline the female had been headed to, the sky was almost fully dusky pink, and I was almost used to the feeling of being outside. Feeling the breeze across my bare flesh had my skin prickling with unease, and I was finding I hated the sense of exposure. There were no walls to shield me, no darkness to keep my fears hidden from prying eyes.

As we stepped across into the treeline, a sudden movement and strange sound came charging toward us, and an instinct I hadn’t realized I still possessed had me reaching for a sword I no longer kept at my side. As my hand brushed nothing but my tattered trousers, I growled and instead reached for the hilt of a knife I’d seen hidden in the female’s strange clothing.

I withdrew it quickly, but before I could swing the blade, the female’s frantic words stilled my actions.

“No! Don’t hurt him! Max is my friend. He won’t harm us.” She turned to the creature darting excitedly at her feet. “I’m so glad you waited. You’re such a good boy, aren’t you?” she cooed as if speaking to an infant. I wasn’t sure why my chest felt tight at the sound or why a small flare of anger filled my stomach at the female showing affection to another creature. I chose to ignore both and instead scowled down at the sonwhen, which was little more than a pest of the forests.

She turned her head to look back up at me with a brilliant smile curving her plump red lips, and I found myself staring at them until I shook my head, ripping my gaze away from her face entirely and glancing around. The area we were in was not safe. It was far too exposed, and we were still too close to the High Dungeon. They would notice my absence very soon. Before I could try to communicate those thoughts to the female, she adjusted her hold on me.

“We need to hurry. I need to get you out of sight before they send out the call that you are missing. We can head north towards those mountains in the distance to hide until you get your strength back. The walk to the portal is still another day and a half from here, and that’s without stopping to rest.”

What portal? She wasn’t speaking of the Earth realm. She couldn’t be. Why the fuck would we go there? I needed to find out if my brothers were still alive or truly dead, as the High General had taunted me with centuries ago. I also needed to find my mother. I knew there was no way it was possible she had been a part of Lucifer’s plan. One thing I had held fast to in all the stories I had been told was that my family had no part in what had happened. And I was certain that my brothers, the ones I had shared a womb with, were not dead. I would have felt their loss.

I needed to find my brothers.

But the female was correct; we needed to seek shelter because there was no way I was returning to that prison.

We headed toward the rocky hills in the distance, slower than I would have liked. The rodent following closely impressed me with its skills of the hunt and seemed very protective of the female. I found it interesting that a creature such as the sonwhen, known for viciousness and preference for solitude, was so eager to protect but also displayed characteristics of a bonded pet.

A hissing sound came from above just seconds before a scaly vipreth dug its claws into a twisted tree limb and launched itself at my face. I still clung to the dagger I had taken from the female and raised it defensively, not having the strength to charge it before it could reach me. I waited to feel the sting of its fangs but found myself falling heavily against the trunk of the tree, and watched as the female withdrew a sword I hadn’t seen hiding under her clothing at her back and sliced the vipreth in half. The sonwhen pounced on the twitching body and raked his daggerlike claws across the underbelly, where it began to feast with happy trilling sounds.

“That’s gross, Max.”

The female turned to me, where I was breathing heavily with the exertion of holding myself upright so I wouldn’t fall to the ground.

“I’m so sorry,” she murmured quietly. “I had to free my arm. Are you okay?”

I bared my teeth at her and used my arm to push myself away from the small but sturdy trunk. My wings were screaming in agony at the way I had crushed them with my weight as I fell.

“Look, I know that you aren’t happy that we are mates?—”

I cut off her words. My voice was a rough growl, barely coherent, sounding like boulders grinding together. “You aren’t my mate. You’re nothing but the spawn of the demon who kept me caged for thousands of years. I could never mate you while seeing him in your face.” She flinched at my words but didn’t argue. It was as if she had expected those very words to come from my mouth. With a single jerky nod and an expression of resignation, she stood, waiting.

Without another word spoken between us, she helped me until I could stand upright once again and let me lean on her. I knew my weight had to be putting a toll on her. I could sense she was tired and hungry. There was also something else wrong with her I hadn’t noticed until that moment. There was a tightness to her eyes, a strain that told of more than just weariness. It made me wonder what it was. What she was. The High General was an incubus. Could the daughter that resembled him so closely be of the same breed?

It hit me then. My mate was a succubus.

My jaw clenched from more than just the effort of moving. As a succubus, she would need to feed regularly with sex. How many males had she welcomed into her body? How many had she seduced with her pheromones? I’d never had a chance to be with a female before being caged, but the mate I was given likely had more lovers than all the years I’d been imprisoned.

As we made our way closer to the rocky distance, my ire grew. I’d already hated her on sight, but now I was cursing her very existence. I never intended to mate with her to begin with, and her breed of demon just strengthened that resolve. I would leave the she-demon behind as soon as I was able to gain my strength. She said she could take me to my brothers, but I needed to get as far away from her as possible. I’d get the location from her, and when I left to find my brothers, she would be nothing but a distant memory. Only her act of assisting my escape kept me from planning her death.