7. Asher
Seven
Asher
Another night, another city.
Another failed fucking search.
I’m tired. Tired of the ache I feel across the void of existence.
Out there, somewhere in the cursed light of day, my soulmarked waits for me. Waits and is hidden from the darkness.
I can feel her at times, feel her heart beating against the bond. I can feel her emotions, so many of them. Rarely is there ever true joy and happiness. Do they keep her in such awful conditions that she knows no happiness?
Even when I fade into her dreams there’s nothing but turmoil. She carries the heavy weight of guilt across her shoulders like a yoke. Why does she feel this? Why does she loathe herself so much?
I miss her. Even if I’ve never met her or been near her, I miss her presence.
This is what it means to be soulmarked. It’s a curse ever-present in our minds. It’s an aching wound we can never fully heal, not without being joined.
I’m dying.
None of my children know it, save for Andrei. He alone knows that whatever happened the night my soulmarked was born has become my death sentence.
I have five years left to live, in his opinion.
Andrei has forever been the optimist though, and perhaps a bit of a child in his way of avoiding the ugly truth.
I’m going to be dead within a year, at the most.
I guarantee it.
Will I live to find her?
What if I find her?
Our small procession of vehicles pulls into the private airport, and I shake my head to clear it.
I seem to be ruminating over the past more and more these nights.
Stepping from the vehicle, I look to the jet-black plane that will be taking us to yet another city, and more than likely another failure.
Out of nowhere, a burning slash across each of my wrists drops me to my knees, literally.
No figurative bullshit.
For the first time in my life, as I feel the burning pain that comes from having your skin sliced open deep enough it could sever a tendon, I wonder if I’m going insane.
All five of the men with me spring into action as they try to determine the threat to me, and by proxy to them.
Raphael is instantly at my side, trying to shield my body with his own. Not that it does much good. I’m not much bigger than him, but with the way I writhe on the cold, hard tarmac, he can’t quite hold me down.
“What the fuck?” Raphael snarls as he fights with my body.
“Is it a spell?” Matthias asks, and I hear him checking the Glock in his hand to make sure it’s loaded.
“Witches no longer exist, you antebellum fuck,” Raphael spits out.
“I meant voodoo… or perhaps a druidic one, you barbaric milksop,” Matthias snaps right back at him.
“Shit. I don’t know…” Raphael growls then wraps his arms around my thrashing torso.
All the while I want to scream at the both of them to shut the fuck up, but words refuse to pass my vocal cords. This, whatever it is, has paralyzed my most needed functions, and I feel utterly powerless.
“Get him in the fucking plane,” Andrei says as he grabs my legs.
“Agreed,” Matthias snaps back as he grabs me around the waist.
Truly, each of these men should have no problem lifting me off the ground and into the plane, despite the size and weight of my body. We’re fucking vampires, after all. With how hard I’m thrashing around though, I’m not easy to move.
The pain was enough to drop me to my knees, but when I feel blood seeping down my wrists, I scream.
I scream from the loss of my vitality, my sanity, and my essence. It’s a violation I’ve never felt before, and it makes me feel profane . It makes me feel as if I’ve been truly dirtied for the first time.
“My wrists… I’m bleeding out!” I scream into Raph’s face as my men wrestle my uncontrollable body up the stairs.
“I don’t see any blood,” Andrei spits out before one of my hands belts him across the face.
“I don’t either, but it doesn’t matter. We need to secure him,” Raph says.
They toss me into the plane.
My face slams into the hard floor, and I feel two heavy bodies dropping down on top of me.
That’s one way to hold me down, I guess. Although I’m going to hurt someone once I can get up again.
The pain is less now, but the anger and hurt that’s not physical still remains. It’s the violation and humiliation of it. I’m not a natural-born vampire. I was turned when I was an adult, not born to a vampire man and woman.
I know of violation, the feeling of having zero control over my fate…
But this is so much worse.
Tears leak down my cheeks as an unfamiliar humiliation seeps into my very pores, and I can’t stop them. Nothing has truly happened to me, nothing I or anyone else around me can see, but there’s an old throbbing ache inside me. Like what I’m experiencing is a process that’s been done time and time again.
Suddenly the awareness of my very essence being raped stops, and the knowledge that I’m still Asher and not a victim brings a flood of relief.
It wasn’t me being tortured… It wasn’t me who was being violated…
It was Chloe.
Rage like no other surges through my veins, and a red haze appears in front of my eyes as I push myself up, off the floor, tossing Raphael and Andrei into the walls of the plane.
The plane wobbles as if we hit turbulence.
“I’ll kill every single motherfucker in the Order. I’ll gut them and bathe my body in their fucking entrails,” I spit out to the open air.
Whatever they were doing was a violation to my beloved, my soul mate.
And they’ll fucking pay for it in blood and carnage.
Matthias tries to settle me, but I can’t stop myself from slamming my fist into his calming features.
Grabbing him by the throat, I let loose all the hatred and fears I feel in a roar.
Men from all sides tackle me to the ground again. Each trying to weigh me down as my bloodrage burns with a fury that can only be brought on by the cuntsores in the Benedict Order.
Raph appears in front of me, and I snap my fangs in his face. “Calm the fuck down, Asher. We don’t want to drain your ass!”
If there wasn’t at least five men securely locking my body down, I don’t think I’d be able to stop myself from tearing into the closest being next to me and draining them dry.
“Calm yourself, Asher.” Matthias says from behind my ear as he wraps his arm around my neck. “We drain you and you’ll be worthless for the next few days. That won’t help us find Chloe any faster.”
Chloe , the balm for my burning, fiery skin.
The bloodlust eases enough for me to regain a fraction of control. I’m still feeling quite murderous, but the name alone allows me to gain some focus.
Rolling her name though my mind over and over, I pull up the feelings I felt when I entered her dream. I push those feelings of longing and completeness through my veins. Forcing them through my heart and out to the rest of my body.
I miss her .
Though I’ve never been within a mile of her, I miss her. I feel the ache deep down in my soul.
I miss her, I love her, and I need her.
Taking what amounts to a breath of foul air from Raphael’s mouth, I growl, “Get off me.”
“We good, Asher?” Raphael asks. “You going to make Matthias even uglier than he already is?”
“I take offense to that, you milksop,” Matthias grumbles. “Asher, Raph and I will be getting off you as soon we see you have full control of your faculties.”
“Close enough, asshole,” I growl, and start to slowly push up from the floor.
No one moves for a moment, but by the time I’m at full extension, they’re all off me and waiting around like they’re afraid I’ll break at the littlest of things.
Raphael quickly steps up to me, grabs me by the face, and leans in real close. “What the absolute fuck?”
I feel his fingers wiping right below my eyes, and I’m about to deck him until I see the red streaks on his fingertips.
What the fuck are those?
Confused, I reach up and swipe at my cheeks. When I pull my own fingers away, they’re smeared with blood.
Did I actually cry? Why the fuck are they blood tears?
Yanking me forward before anyone else can see, Raph wraps his arm around my shoulder and says, “We need to talk.”
Moving with him, we walk up to the front of the plane, near the cockpit, before he speaks again.
“What the fuck are those?” Raphael murmurs quietly so the others can’t hear.
After reaching up to swipe at my face again, I can only shrug. “They appear to be tears.”
“Tears?” Leaning in close, he studies me as if I’m some sort of bug.
Slumping back into an empty chair, I feel like I could really go for a bottle of blood and rum mix. Something to settle the nerves in my body. The twitching I feel is awful. Like I’m a bundle of live wires ready to electrocute someone to death.
“What the fuck happened just now?” he asks.
“I don’t fully know,” I say as I pull my suit jacket off and start unbuttoning my sleeves. “I swear to you, on my blood, I felt my wrists being sliced open to the tendons. I was being physically drained.”
Looking down at my arms, I search for any evidence of the wounds, but there’s nothing there. Nothing at all.
“I felt…” I trail off as I remember the crushing feelings of shame, violation, and pain.
There was also guilt… Some type of guilt that seemed so fucking fruitless.
Taking a seat across from me, Raphael leans forward. “Felt what?”
“Chloe was experiencing something. Something humiliating and painful. It was a violation of her mind and body, but I don’t know what it was. I swear to you, Raph, it felt like I was the one being slit open,” I say, and look back down at my wrists.
“That’s not unheard of, but it’s very rare,” Andrei says.
Moving silently into the small space, he takes the remaining chair.
For a man as large and bulky as he is, Andrei moves as quiet as a shadow. He can even sneak up on me, his fucking sire, and it’s rare I catch him if he doesn’t want me to.
Looking at my cheeks, Andrei frowns. “That’s even rarer.”
Leaning forward, he swipes a cotton napkin across my cheeks, wiping off what blood is left.
Trying to knock his hand off my face, I growl, “What the fuck are you? My nursemaid?”
“Stop it, you grumpy fuck,” Andrei growls at me as he keeps wiping at my face. “I’m collecting a sample.”
Raph starts to laugh. “I swear, if you lick your thumb to get the rest, Andrei, I’ll give you a thousand dollars right now.”
“No,” Andrei says quietly before finishing up whatever the fuck he’s doing.
“Why in hell did you need to do that?” I ask.
“It’s a theory I’ve been working on,” Andrei says dismissively before tucking the bloodied white napkin back into the inner pocket of his suit coat.
I lean forward. “Which is?”
“Nothing to concern yourself with just yet.” Andrei leans back in his chair. “I’ll know more once we find your mate.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Raphael grumbles. “You’re still on that?”
“Yes.” Andrei turns to Raphael. “And if you’d like me to assist in finding mates sooner rather than later, I suggest you shut the fuck up.”
Raising his hands up in the air, Raphael quickly wards off any further comments. “I stand corrected.”
Andrei is quite the oddity in our band of motley vampires. He’s all brain with a shit ton of brawn thrown in the mix. For the last ninety years or so, he’s been on a researching kick, trying to make strides in the field of vampires and their mates.
But any true progress always seems to come up short. We need more mates found and studied.
A phone rings further back in the plane, and I force myself to remain still instead of slamming my hands over my ears. Loud sounds don’t normally trigger me, but I still feel on edge and it’s affecting everything. Even the clothing I wear feels as if it’s rubbing me raw.
“Asher.” Andrei leans forward and his words come out with a soft calmness to them. “I need you to talk to me.”
“About?” I’ve got a feeling I already know what he’s going to ask.
“What happened out there? What came over you?”
“I felt her pain, Andrei. I felt someone slitting her wrists. I felt someone violating her. It was like my mind was being raped,” I say, my hands gripping the armrests.
The groaning of metal beneath the leather tells me I need to let up.
“Was it your mind or her body?” he asks quietly.
“She wasn’t being raped, not in a sexual way, but it was close enough,” I say, and think about those words. “Whatever was happening to her, it wasn’t exactly physical, but I could feel her shame and the violation.”
Matthias briskly walks past us to reach the cockpit, not stopping. “We got word,” he says before he disappears behind the door.
Standing up from my chair, I move to follow him but stop when the plane veers sharply, almost throwing us all sideways.
Matthias reappears, walking slowly now, and looks to me. “Bad news or good news first?”
“Good news,” I say.
“We were headed in the wrong direction, but I’ve got our course corrected. We’re on our way to where she might be located now.”
My mind instantly slams on the breaks. I refuse to count my chickens before they hatch. “What’s the bad news?”
Matthias frowns. “We’re flying to New Elysium.”
Andrei growls so loudly it almost drowns out both Raphael and me saying one word at the same time.
“Fuck.”