1. Thrax

1

THRAX

" O n your knees, maggot! Kneel before me."

Thrax writhed uneasily, his eyes tightly closed.

"No…" he muttered, squeezing his pillow between his fists. "No!"

"Who said you could look up and meet my gaze? How dare you?"

"Please!" The sheets tangled around his legs as he turned over in bed, trying to wake. But still the dream gripped him like a fist.

"I think you've earned yourself a punishment, my beautiful boy. Tell me, what should I do to you? How can I teach you a lesson you won't forget? Oh, I know…assume the position!"

"NO!" It was a roar, ripped from his throat as he thrashed against the constricting bed clothes.

Suddenly a hand was shaking his shoulder.

"Thrax? Thrax, wake up!"

He threw a blind punch, trying to stop his tormentor but his fist didn't connect with anything.

"Whoa, there, big guy!" a familiar voice said. "Come on—it's time to wake up now."

Finally, the dream lost its grip on him. The face that had haunted him for years faded and Thrax opened his eyes to see the worried face of his partner staring down at him instead.

"Andi?" Her name was a ragged gasp, torn from his lips. "Thank the Goddess!" Relief flooded him and he launched himself at her, enfolding her in a hug so tight it made her squeak.

"Easy now!" she gasped, as Thrax hugged her to him, nearly encompassing her entire curvy body with his much larger frame. "Can't…breathe…"

"Sorry." As the last dregs of sleep cleared from his brain, he realized what he was doing. He made himself let her go at once.

"That's more like it." Special Agent Andrea Peterson—Andi for short—looked at him with concern. She had long, curly hair that was somewhere between mahogany and auburn, which she generally wore in a loose ponytail, and big brown eyes the color of the Earth liquor called whiskey. She also had the figure of an Elite—a woman the Goddess had blessed with extra full curves.

A smattering of the tiny pigment dots humans called "freckles" across the bridge of her nose and a mouth that had an extra full bottom lip that looked just made for kissing completed his partner's face. Thrax sometimes wondered if she had any idea how fucking gorgeous she was.

"You okay?" she asked, frowning at him. "You took a swing at me, you know—you're lucky I have good reflexes."

"Did I? Fuck—I'm fucking sorry," Thrax growled. Sitting up on the side of the bed beside her, he ran a hand over his horns. They were short and curved out from either side of his forehead. "Devil horns" Andi affectionately called them. Thrax had them capped with bronze to blunt the points and avoid any accidents.

"That must have been some dream," she remarked, still studying him. "You nearly squeezed the life out of me when I woke you up. You remember what it was about?"

"Huh? Uh…no." Thrax shook his head, not meeting her eyes. "Can't even remember it at all, now that I'm awake," he added.

Andi stared at him for a minute.

"You're a terrible liar, you know that? For a seven-foot devil, I mean."

She liked to tease him about the Dae'mon part of his heritage but Thrax never took any offense. He thought it was funny that his red skin, golden eyes, and horns made him look like the human version of the personification of evil.

Of course, being a Hybrid Kindred, he was only half Dae'mon. The other half was Pitch Blood Kindred and he had the sharp, curving fangs where a human's canine teeth would have been to prove it.

It was his fangs that Andi was looking at now.

"Hey—those look extra sharp," she remarked. "Have you had a drink lately? You know how grumpy you get when you're thirsty and we're about to go on a long mission—you'd better fuel up."

"I visited a donor last night," Thrax growled irritably. "I'm not fucking thirsty." His fangs were always sharp around his partner—though he couldn't tell her that—a Blood Kindred's fangs didn't get sharp until he found the female he wanted to Bond with. He ran his tongue over one needle point and grimaced as he drew blood.

Like the monster from human mythology called a "vampire," the Pitch Blood Kindred needed small amounts of blood from a living donor every few days to keep going. Thrax took care of his thirst on a regular basis by visiting paid donors who allowed him to drink from a vein in their wrist for a few credits, but the experience wasn't a satisfying one. It was fueling up as Andi put it—nothing more.

He wondered, not for the first time, what it would be like to sink his fangs into the faint blue vein he could see pulsing just under the surface of his partner's slender throat. But that kind of intimacy wasn't part of their partnership—Thrax doubted it ever would be. Andi just didn't see him in that light—to her he was just her best friend and partner and nothing more. And since he was a Hybrid, and therefore incapable of Bonding a female to him, he didn't push things.

"Glad to hear you're all fueled up because we need to get moving," she said, clapping him on the shoulder. "They're folding space for us in an hour and we still need to visit Kat for our costumes."

"Yeah, yeah, okay." Thrax scrubbed a hand over his face, feeling the rough rasp of whiskers—he needed a quick laser shave and a shower before he went anywhere. His stomach rumbled—he needed something to eat as well.

"You want some breakfast?" Andi offered him a rather squashed looking bagel with cream cheese oozing out the sides. "Brought you this because I figured you'd still be in bed," she remarked as she handed it to him.

Thrax accepted the human food—which he had grown fond of—without comment and took an enormous bite. His partner was one of those annoyingly cheerful morning people—she popped up before sunrise with a song in her heart every day. But at least that meant she usually brought him breakfast. It made it easier to stand getting up early when he would much rather sleep until midday and stay up until the darkest hours of the night.

"Hnks," he mumbled, his mouth still full as he headed for the shower—First Meal speak for "thanks."

"You're welcome, big guy." She grinned at him affectionately and Thrax looked back and caught the expression. Andi had those little dents on either side of her mouth that the humans called "dimples"—they made her fucking adorable. Not that he would ever tell her that.

He finished the bagel in two more bites and stepped into the shower, which immediately came on. It was pre-set to his preferred temperature—one of the perks of living aboard the Kindred Mother Ship.

Thrax washed his hair and scrubbed his horns and the rest of his body as he tried to shake off the after-effects of the dream. He hadn't had it in ages—the Goddess knew why it was rearing its ugly head above the surface of his subconscious again after all these cycles.

The Goddess isn't the only one who knows, whispered a little voice in his head. You know too, Thrax. You know why you're dreaming of her…of the things she did to you. It's because of the mission—the one you're about to go on with Andi. Do you really think this is smart? Do you?

Thrax pushed the voice aside, ignoring the hard shiver that ran down his spine which caused his dark red skin, covered in curving black tattoos, to pebble into chill-bumps. This mission was important—he wasn't going to back out of it because of a stupid dream that came back every once in a while, to remind him of what he'd gone through over twenty cycles ago.

Besides, he and Andi had gone on similar missions before and it hadn't bothered him. As Special Agents in the WLA—the Warrior Location Agency—they went all over the universe. Anywhere a Kindred warrior had gone missing, they traveled to try and find him and bring him back.

The Agency was a creation of Commander Sylvan, the head of the Kindred High Council. It had become necessary after the Mistress of Yonnie Six—a female owned planet—had decided that Kindred warriors made particularly good bodyslaves, mostly because they refused to hurt women under any circumstances.

But that wasn't the only kind of slavery the Kindred were forced into. Many were captured and conscripted into the Blood Circuit, a fighting organization that moved from world to world, putting on deadly matches where patrons could bet on who died first. Since the Kindred were all over seven feet tall and extremely strong and muscular, they made ideal Blood Circuit fighters.

So many warriors had been abducted for various reasons that Commander Sylvan formed the WLA. He favored partnering Kindred with humans, which was how Thrax and Andi had first met. She had been a detective in a police department on Earth and Thrax had been a member of Kindred Elite Espionage Corps when he'd been offered a job in the new agency.

He'd been reluctant to take it at first, but he had felt immediately drawn to Andi, who had just moved up to the Mother Ship. Her dimpled smile and big brown eyes were fucking adorable and her curvy Elite figure was gorgeous.

Even though Thrax knew he could never have her—since he was a Hybrid and, at the time, she was still attached to her human mate—he'd said yes after their very first meeting. They had been partners ever since and he'd done a damn good job of concealing how he felt about the curvy little Elite—to Andi, they were just best friends. Which was how things had to stay, no matter how badly he wanted her, Thrax reminded himself.

Their first meeting had been three solar cycles ago and now Thrax couldn't imagine his life without his human partner. Andi brought light into his life. Despite some of the grim things she'd seen working as a vice detective on Earth, she was almost always cheerful and light-hearted. He, on the other hand, was what Andi called "growly and dark."

The two of them couldn't have been more opposite, not only in temperament but in size, since Thrax was seven feet tall and Andi was barely five foot three—to use one of the human systems of measurement. She was almost always bubbly and bright while Thrax was brooding.

He pretended to be annoyed with her sometimes, but the truth was, he loved their dynamic. They just fit together somehow, like two pieces of the same puzzle. Even if he could never have her romantically or sexually, at least he got to keep her in his life as a friend and a partner. That was enough for him—mostly.

But Andi wasn't all sunshine—she could get serious when the situation called for it—even deadly. She'd saved Thrax's life more than once and he had saved hers as well when they got into sticky situations. He knew that he could trust the curvy little Elite no matter what went down and that meant a lot to Thrax—Seven Hells, it meant everything .

He wondered uneasily if their partnership would be tested by this new assignment…by the roles they would have to play.

At the small of his back, an itching began…the old burning ache flaring to life for the first time in years. Thrax reached back and rubbed it, feeling the rough scar tissue covered by the thick black ink of his tats. Gods, he had to push this out of his mind—all of it—or he wasn't going to make it!

Everything is going to be fine, he reassured himself for the hundredth time. Commander Sylvan said the place we're going is nothing like Yonnie Six. And even if it was, it's not like she would be there. Take it easy, Thrax—you're getting all worked up for nothing. Just concentrate on the facts of the case and forget the past.

Closing his eyes against the pulsing water that rained down on him, he tried to do just that and go over what Commander Sylvan had said about the new mission in their meeting yesterday…