Obsidian Souls (Soul Series) (22 page)

Kicking open the door to my room he dropped me on my back on the bed. I felt him ripping the dress from my body and all I could think of is I wanted sleep and was he really so lazy he couldn’t use the zipper?

The nausea was still cloying and the movement Carl was causing was pure irritation. I felt the air on my skin and realized I had nothing left on. He grabbed my breast, and I moaned, as he was painfully rough.

“You like that?” he asked in a guttural tone and I knew he enjoyed being rough.

I wanted to tell him he was a stupid oaf, but I couldn’t seem to get the words out past my fuzzy feeling tongue. I felt his weight settle on the bed between my legs, and I knew what was coming. Somehow, I still had the presence of mind to know tomorrow, I’d be mentally destroyed over what was happening tonight, but whatever they had given me, numbed me to the now. All I cared about was that I wanted it to be done quickly, so I could sleep.

Laying, there waiting for the worst, I felt a weird sensation running up my leg. Like pins and needles but without the pain. It was so odd that I had to look at what he was doing to cause this, but when I opened my eyes and looked down, he wasn’t even touching me. He was too busy opening his pants with his fat sausage fingers. I just laid there as the feeling intensified. As he leaned down, my leg lifted of its own accord and kicked him hard in the groin. So hard, in fact, that I actually watched him fly off the bed and land halfway across the room. My leg then collapsed against the bed, laying as limp as the rest of my body. Well, that was odd. Carl, laying in anguish, curled into a ball in the center of the floor, tears streaming down his face.

“You bitch. You’re gonna pay for that,” he gasped out in between struggling breaths. Turning my head I watched as he half walked, half crawled toward the door.

Whatever, I wanted to say, but I just thought it instead. It was too much trouble to speak.

He opened the door still bent over at the waist.

“What happened to you?” I heard a new male voice say.

“None of your fucking business. Get in there and don’t let anyone in,” I heard Carl say to the new guy.

I closed my eyes, and when I opened them again I saw another man, standing at the edge of the bed, looking down at me.

“Your pretty,” he said as he ran a finger up my thigh. I tried to pull away from this greasy haired man, but I didn’t have the strength.

“Don’t touch her. She’s mine,” Carl said from the door.

I closed my eyes and laid there dozing in and out with no sense of time. My body felt anchored to the mattress as my head felt like it was floating.

“Lex?” I opened my heavy eyelids and looked up into beautiful silver grey eyes right above me. I looked to the side of the bed and saw that filthy watchdog Carl had left with me was slumped over in his chair, his head bent at an odd angle.

“Caden.” It must not have sounded right because his face scrunched in confusion. He leaned down and smelled my neck.

“They drugged you.” He was speaking but it came out as more of a growl. Wow, even messed up as I was I could tell he was scary when he was this mad.

I watched him walk around the room looking for clothing. I was lying completely naked, not that I cared now, but he seemed to want to dress me. He came back with a thick white robe from the bathroom and pulled me up into a sitting position.

I tried to say no, just let me be, but he ignored me and wrapped the robe around me.

“Where did you get these bruises?” he asked as he tied the robe’s belt around my waist.

“Bruises?”

“Forget it. We’ll talk later. We’re leaving.”

“Uh huh.”

“Listen to me. Everything might go dark for a couple of minutes. It’s okay.”

He lifted me in his arms, and I nestled my head into the crook of his neck. He paused outside my door and then proceeded to walk down the main staircase. Even in a drugged state, I knew the front door wasn’t the best choice for exit. Then all of a sudden, nothing was there but total blackness. I couldn’t feel Caden holding me anymore. I was just floating in the middle of nothing, with no floor beneath my feet. I just hovered in the darkness. I opened my mouth to call for Caden and nothing came out. There was no light, no sound. Absolute nothingness. I tried blinking my eyes, because I couldn’t even tell if they were open.

I screamed, but again, nothing came out. I remembered him saying it might get dark but this was complete emptiness. And then I was in his arms again in the woods with trees whipping past my head. I reached up and tried to tighten my arms around his neck, scared he would disappear again.

“It’s okay. I’m sorry but it was the easiest way to get you out. I tried to shield you from it, but it’s not always selective when I have to use it en masse.”

“What was that?” I was still slurring a bit, but the sleep I had gotten combined with the huge amount of adrenaline now pumping through my vein had started to dull whatever they had given me.

“It was just an illusion for their human servants. Once they saw us, I had to blanket our immediate area. It only works on humans so as you change you will be less susceptible to it and then completely immune.”

He was still carrying me and also running at an inhumanly fast pace and he didn’t even appear to be winded. He suddenly stopped and I lifted my head from where I had buried it to see the other guys waiting. They were mounted on bikes waiting. Everyone but Mike that is, and my eyes started to mist. Mike would be here if he could. Did they hurt him? Had he made it out of the diner that day?

“Do you think you can hold on to me?” Caden asked.

I nodded my head yes, but I wasn’t sure that I really could. I wasn’t staying behind though, that was for certain.

He must have realized what a struggle it was for me to sit up. He sat me on the back of the bike, but kept a hand on me as he climbed in front. I wrapped my arms around him and he grabbed them, pulling me tight against his back and then holding my hands in front of him with one of his as he steered with the other.

I clung to his waist the best I could as he kept a firm grip upon my hands. My cheek was pressed against his leather covered back as the tears rolled down my face. Mike wasn’t there and it was my fault. I never should have put him in that position. Why did I do that?

The ground flew past our feet and I could see a misting of the sun on the horizon as dawn approached. Before I knew it, we were flying through the empty streets of the city at a pace that would have gotten anybody else pulled over.

We pulled in behind the bar, and Caden got off the bike. I was about to slide forward but I felt his strong hands hoisting me up into his arms.

“Where’s Mike?” I asked.

“Did you ask, ‘Where’s Mike?’”

I nodded. I guess I was still a bit slurred.

“I don’t know.” I could hear a lifetimes worth of pain in those three words.

I had nothing left to say. Something snapped in me and the force of everything that had happened fell upon me all at once. My body shook with the force of my sobbing. I barely noticed we were back alone in the apartment.

He carried me to my bed and left. When he came back, he had a glass of what looked like milk with him.

“Drink this,” he said. He put both my hands around the glass to make sure I didn’t drop it. I shook my head and shoved it back toward him, but he just brought it to my lips anyway.

“It’s going to clean out your system of the drugs they gave you.”

I took it and swallowed it back expecting a milk taste, but what I got was more along the lines of what I’d imagine cement to taste like.

He pulled the covers over me and I was out.

I don’t know how long I slept, but I woke with a horrible taste in my mouth, and wearing one of his t-shirts. I sat up and looked at the clock reading seven p.m. My head started to clear, and the details started rushing back to me, hitting like a cinder block straight to my stomach. I tried to compose myself while I was alone, but Caden was at my door within minutes of me waking.

“How are you feeling?” he asked as he sat at the side of my bed.

“I’ve been better.”

“What happened?” He stared at me waiting for answers.

I filled him in on what I thought was important, from the diner to right up to before he showed, including my unexplained burst of strength. I told him Carl and Rufus’s foiled plan but withheld the degrading details of the actual play by play.

“It was the craziest thing that I was able to kick him that hard and I didn’t even feel like I had done it.”

He just sat nodding at me taking it all in, not saying much of anything.

“Why do they want me to have their children?” Even thinking about it again made me nauseous.

“Strength and power. It’s all they care about.”

“Why do they think my children would make them stronger?”

“Even if it’s simply that the mutation would be stronger because it was passed down from both sides that would be enough motivation. I think they suspect what I do, that it would be more than that.”

“Them wanting to use me as a brood mare is really disturbing, but it doesn’t matter as much as what we are going to do about Mike. We’ve got to find him.”

“We,” he pointed from him to me, “aren’t going to do anything. I’ll handle this. I don’t want you involved.”

“Maybe he’s at the same place that they took me?” I said completely ignoring his statement about me not being involved.

“Joey checked the place while I was getting you. He’s not there.”

I could see the concern etched all over his face.

“I’m so sorry Caden.”

“It’s not your fault.”

He didn’t mean it. He hadn’t even been able to look at me when he said it. We both knew whose fault it was Mike was missing.

I was afraid to ask, but I had to. It was hard to get the words out, “Do you think he’s dead?” I waited through the dead silence for a reply. This time I was the one avoiding eye contact.

“He’s alive.”

“How do you know?” I didn’t want to brow beat him, but I needed the reassurance.

“I would have sensed it. When our kind is together for a long time, we develop a type of bond. I’d know if they had killed him. Plus, he’s more use to them alive.”

His words didn’t make me feel better after all. What use did they have for him? I now knew exactly what they wanted of me, and I couldn’t imagine their plans would be too great for him either.

He answered my unasked question. “They’ll use him as leverage to try to trade for you.” He cupped my chin and turned my head towards him. “Are you okay?”

He hesitated over the word okay, and I knew what he was trying to ask. He wanted to know how badly they had crossed the line with me. How do you tell someone that if it had been a race, that they had crossed every mile marker but the finish line? That they had taken it so far that sparing that one last marker was of little solace.

“I’m fine, really.” I didn’t want to talk about it. Him being all tender and sensitive like this was making me even more uncomfortable. I didn’t know why, but I was more at ease with his drill sergeant, toughen up persona, then this incredibly tough man sitting here being so sensitive. I didn’t know what to do with the emotions welling up in me.

“I saw the marks on you.” He ran his hand over a bruise on my wrist. “Nothing actually happened?”

“No, I’m fine.” I knew it wasn’t what I should feel, but I was embarrassed by what Carl and his man had done. How he had groped and touched me then left me there to be watched. It didn’t make sense that I felt embarrassed by their actions. I was a logical person by nature, and it was such an illogical reaction, but I didn’t want to acknowledge it or talk about it. I wanted to just push it off into the deep crevices of my mind and forget about it. Those deep dark crevices of my brain were starting to really fill up lately with the things I didn’t want to face. If I kept going at this rate, they’d be overflowing any day now. Then what would happened?

“What happened with my leg? Is that normal?” I asked looking to change the subject.

He laughed and shook his head. “No, that’s not normal. I’m really not sure what happened there. You probably had more control than you thought. You’re going to get spurts of strength. You were under a lot of stress and also drugged so you didn’t realize what you were doing.”

He was wrong. I’d had absolutely no control. I wasn’t going to argue the point. He didn’t know what had happened so there was no reason. I had to focus on Mike. He was gone and I wasn’t going to just sit here.

“Is Tamara upset?” She probably hated me as it was. Now she had a valid reason.

“She left the same afternoon they took you so she doesn’t even know.”

I was secretly happy about Tamara leaving but not enough to make me stop worrying about Mike. Nothing would fix that until I knew he was okay and he was back.

Chapter Twenty-Four