Chapter Nine
“The Consortium”
“To exact revenge for yourself or your friends is not only a right, it’s an absolute duty.”
- Stieg Larsson
Private Island off Italy…
“We had them! We motherfucking had them!” Adam roared. “Why did you not engage?” He glared at Sophia.
Sophia smiled serenely. “I wanted to remind our favorite whipping boy how utterly powerful I am and how utterly weak he is.”
“I don’t give a shit about Xander. He is nothing! Less than nothing. We also had Alexi, Drako, and that little brat, Zora,” Adam hissed. “We could have ended a significant part of them tonight!”
“We know that, and they know it too,” Sophia dismissed. “Did you see the looks on their faces when I smashed their pitiful little shield?” Sophia’s cackle would have made her sister witches proud.
“This beating felt good,” Vincent crowed.
“Beating? Beating?!” Adam growled. “That bastard Drako killed Warren! Their wolves killed more than a half of our contingent! They even killed several of your demons! How the fuck was this a beating?”
“We killed Alexi, and the rest of them ran!” Vincent insisted. “And I’m not going to pretend that tonight was not a success because that idiot Warren got himself killed.”
“Warren was loyal to our cause and kept his people in line. Now the witches will scatter in fear.” Adam was livid and trying unsuccessfully to contain his rage. Over the centuries, he had never come this close to killing one of the Petrovs. Tonight, they could have eliminated four of them and a mate! How stupid were his allies?! Even when they stared victory in the face, they let it slip through their fingers. “We let the Petrovs get away again and, this time, with Alexi!”
“Calm down, Adam,” Sophia murmured. “Alexi is dead. We now know how weak their defenses are and how weak the younger brother still is. I should capture him again for shits and giggles.”
“I am through playing games,” Adam warned. “I want them dead. Dead! One-hundred-carat-gold dead!”
“Patience, Adam.” Malachi’s sudden appearance didn’t surprise any of them. Instead of traveling via teleportation, he traveled as a mist. And any part of that mist could be poisonous depending on Malachi’s intent. He was an immortal that they all feared. Not only did he seem to have omnipotent power, but none of them had a clue what kind of immortal he was. They suspected that he could be an offspring of one of the gods or some other powerful being.
Adam carefully blanked his thoughts. Adam knew that, like most powerful immortals, Malachi could read minds, and while he might be an ally, Adam didn’t want Malachi to know how terrified of him he was. The immortal was a deadly, unfeeling predator. And the scene at that nightclub tonight made it more than clear that Malachi could not be trusted. He had slaughtered every vampire and human in the establishment. Adam had seen and had taken part in some of the most horrific killings, but even he had never seen anything like that.
Malachi had left every corpse headless and drained of blood.
Adam didn’t even want to know how one entity could wreak such carnage or, even worse, how one immortal could consume so much blood in one feeding.
“Where were you tonight, Malachi?” Adam asked mildly. “We had a plan. At least I thought it was our plan to get the policeman to bring the mate to that nightclub. You were supposed to have some fun with her before Xander and Alexi appeared. She was with Xander and his brother at the policeman’s house looking quite normal. Quite human. Why didn’t you turn her as we discussed?”
Malachi smiled, but it wasn’t a smile of amusement.
Adam immediately recognized the deadly intent in that maniacal smile. Malachi’s eyes, black as hot tar, stared unblinkingly, and his razor-sharp fangs pressed against his lower lip. Adam swallowed hard, but he was proud that he didn’t back away.
“I answer to no one, Adam,” Malachi said coldly. “I have a score to settle with the Petrovs, and I will do that in my own time. I don’t need to play with a weak human female to achieve that.”
“She is a mate. That makes her a target in this fight,” Adam insisted, but he was careful to keep his voice modulated and nonconfrontational. “You have probably not heard of the powered children that the mates have polluted this world with in recent years. There is no telling what risk they present to the immortal world.”
“They are of no consequence to me,” Malachi dismissed.
“We are still waiting for one of Alexi’s sons to die a natural death.” Adam tried again to make his ally see the bigger picture. “They are dhampirs! They are not supposed to live this long. They should have died two centuries ago. And yet, they are still alive and reproducing like rabbits.” This time, Adam couldn’t hide his irritation and the darker urge to attack the immortal before him.
“This is not my problem,” Malachi said in a hard voice. “I want Alexi. He is my target. He owes me, not his children or their mates.”
“Didn’t you know?” Vincent interrupted the two immortals, who were giving off such lethal vibes the room was almost pulsing with it. He was desperate to defuse the situation. “We killed Alexi already. One of my demons gave him a soul death, more painful than any other death.”
Malachi turned an impatient glare on Vincent. “Alexi is not dead! He lives!” Malachi snarled. “I feel his stinking life force still going strong!” As members of the original Brotherhood of twelve Cardinals, not an offspring of a god that the other immortals thought, Malachi and Alexi were irrevocably linked. By all rights, Alexi should have been able to sense Malachi’s life force as well, but the fact that he couldn’t proved, at least to Malachi, that Alexi’s powers were inferior. Now he couldn’t wait to prove it more emphatically.
“You assured me that your demon had sucked his soul from him,” Adam snarled, now rounding on Vincent. “You told me that I didn’t need to take his head when I had him at my mercy, bent and helpless!” Adam got into the demon’s face, his fangs descended and dripping with venom and his eyes already bleeding to red.
“I…I…” Vincent stammered and stumbled a few steps back, hoping to avoid the snarling vitriol of the deadly predator before him.
However, it was too late. Adam, pissed beyond reason on yet another failed attempt against the Petrovs, was almost feral with the need to destroy something or someone. Even forgetting to hide some of his own powers, Adam lifted the demon using telekinetic powers and proceeded to snap every bone in the other immortal’s body, ensuring he felt maximum pain before he forced one of his orbs down the immortal’s throat to make his body explode from the inside out.
Sophia cackled and clapped her hands in delight. The sight of such violence and power seriously turned her on. She was assessing Adam quite differently now. Perhaps he would make a good concubinus. She hadn’t had a good hard fuck in quite some time. Her previous lovers were so damn breakable. Perhaps Adam would be able to hold his own. Determined to test her new toy, Sophia anticipated the spell she would have to cast to compel Adam to be her fuck toy. She cackled again at her own cunning.
“Looks like your plan wasn’t so great after all,” Malachi said silkily.
“It would have been perfectly executed if everyone would just do as they fucking agreed,” Adam dared to point out.
Malachi gave him an amused look. “You are an immortal that has allowed the petty weaknesses of most humans—jealousy and greed— consume you. You have let them rule you for too long.”
Adam’s lips curled in rage. He had heard those same words from an immortal before. Alexi had told him the same centuries ago, almost in the exact same phrasing. A suspicion on who Malachi was started to form, but he quickly dismissed it as impossible.
It had to be an impossible thought, right?