Badlands: Next Generation Collection Read online

  She did, after all, protect me as best she could, but in the end she was weak.

  She let a lover drive her insane and ended up burned alive like a witch at the stake.

  Whoever she had been…coupled with my father, she’d created me, a slightly psychotic, depraved sick asshole revered as a prince.

  By the time I got out of the shower, the night’s festivities were in full swing.

  Meg had knocked on the door to tell me she was going to bed about fifteen minutes before they began, leaving me a plate in the fridge.

  I brushed my teeth using Trix’s homemade toothpaste.

  This was one of the highest requested items from the people we dealt with. Not surprisingly, no one with remotely decent hygiene wanted their breath to smell like ass.

  Exiting the bathroom after the rest of the basics, I took two steps before there was a soft tap on my door.

  “Who is it?” I asked, going over to my dresser.

  “Me,” Darrian replied, her Russian accent curving around the word.

  “Come in!” I raised my voice to be heard over the music that had been abruptly turned up.

  The door swung open and she stepped in, locking it behind her.

  “I see things with Ace went well,” she said, smiling at my reflection in the mirror.

  “And that’s what they’re celebrating,” I said more to myself than her.

  “I also heard you met a certain prin-cesss,” she sang the last word, dragging out the end.

  “Don’t bullshit me, Rin. Ask what you want to know.”

  “Fine, what was she like?”

  I stopped what I was doing and turned to face her. She sat on my bed; I leaned against the dresser and crossed my arms, watching her hungry opal eyes devour my naked upper body.

  “I was in her presence for approximately five or six minutes. How would I know?”

  “Does she look like the pictures? Is she prettier than me?”

  I raised my brows. “Is that an actual fucking question?”

  She shrugged.

  Why the fuck that mattered was beyond the realm of my understanding, and I considered myself to be highly intelligent.

  “You know you two look nothing alike,” I replied finally.

  “That doesn’t answer the question.”

  I rolled my neck and sighed. I was not in the mood for this shit. The larger portion of my brain wanted me to tell her the truth, but Darrian and I fucked, and we fucked a lot, off and on now since I was fifteen, regardless of whom else I messed around with.

  That was the extent of our intimate relationship. She claimed to love me, but it wasn’t me. It was the status.

  That aside, I considered her a friend—nothing more, nothing less—and while I didn’t get into the whole feelings shit and generally couldn’t care less about whose I hurt, I didn’t want to particularly deal with her being upset. I knew when certain things came about I’d be doing it regardless, but this was now.

  “You should already know the answer to that. You’re hard to compare to, Rin.”

  She grinned brightly, tucking a strand of golden hair behind her ear. I stared at the spot on the wall beside her, now picturing the woman in question again.

  Her long blonde hair hung down to a narrow waist, nearly touching the top of a perfectly round ass.

  Her skin was inked up, the devil’s mark in various places, one tiny inverted cross beneath her left eye.

  Speaking of her eyes…I wasn’t sure if it was the moon or if they were naturally the color of rainclouds. Oh, and that fucking growl.

  I smiled to myself, glancing down at the drawer I’d placed her Glock in.

  “Zane,” Rin said softly to recapture my attention. She climbed off the bed and came to stand in front of me.

  Immersing myself back in the present, I stared down at her pretty face. I rubbed a hand over my brow and pushed off the dresser, crowding into her. She wrapped her arms around my neck, bringing my mouth down to hers as I forced her to walk backward, returning to where she’d just been sitting.

  “Turn around and get on all fours,” I pulled away and commanded, removing the towel from around my waist.

  She swallowed, her lips slightly parting as she moved to do as she was told.

  That was one of the best things about Rin; I could do whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted, without any protest.

  I grabbed the waistband of her shorts and dragged them down her legs, tossing them to the side once I’d worked them off.

  Soon, this would be the Savage princess. Soon I’d see exactly how her face looked like when she came so hard she saw the sun behind her eyes, and I’d know how she’d sound screaming my name until her voice gave out. I could feel how soft her lips would be and what they’d look like wrapped around my dick.

  What I would do was tear that gorgeous fucking girl to pieces over and over again just to see how many times I could make her bleed for me.

  I would know exactly who Adelaide Deville was. When it was all over, I’d take every bit of credit for desecrating the Devil’s daughter.

  But until that time came, I was going to fuck Darrian just as I always had.

  Chapter Five

  qinque

  Copperfield.

  The XL’s headlights illuminated the name on the weathered sign as Annie pulled over and parked a few feet away from it. Beyond the sign were the peaks and crests of buildings that had long been abandoned.

  “This looks like an actual ghost town,” I mused, slowly climbing out of the truck.

  “It is a ghost town, Adelaide,” Annie replied in an utterly serious tone.

  “It won’t hurt you to call me Addy,” I quipped, opening the rear door to dig out some flashlights.

  Behind me, Luce and the twins got out of the Jeep, flashlights already on and shining around our surroundings.

  “So, the F3 that was supposed to be in my bag? It’s not there,” Luce stated.

  I processed his words as I grabbed two lights, one for me and one for Nyx knowing Annie would refuse one, and clicked them on.

  My irritation level was rising, and that was never a good thing. This night was not going anything like I’d expected.

  “Then whoever readied your gear bag screwed up, because we both know Dad would never forget something like that.”

  “I figured that, sis. You still wanna go in?”

  “Um, yes. Our family is supposed to be in there; we can’t just leave. There are six of us. Mom and Dad did shit like this with less of them.”

  He grinned at me. “I figured that, too, but I wasn’t going to leave you if you said no.”

  “Aw, love you too, baby brother,” I cooed.

  “I just got a tear in my eye,” Cameron sniffed.

  Luce flicked him off, ushering me forward as he began walking backward. “Mack said she got separated from them inside an old high school. That’s where she saw the Stag, too,” he explained, purposely aiming his light right in my face.

  “Quit it, dickhead,” I growled, shoving his arm down and shouldering past him.

  He laughed, spinning around to follow.

  Annie wordlessly fell right into step behind me, covering her brown hair by pulling up the hood of her acolyte robe.

  I passed Nyx her flashlight without stopping, heading for the town’s threshold.

  “What do you wanna do with Mack?” Butcher asked.

  “Leave her. Have her get down on the floor and lock the door. Her fear is a beacon for anyone thirsting for a late-night thrill, and I’m not much in the mood for playing superhero,” Nyx replied. “We need to focus on finding them. Sam has been gone too long.”

  “Well find them, babe,” Butcher soothed, wrapping an arm around her as if he hadn’t been in the dog house just a few hours ago.

  From my peripheral, I spotted Cameron frowning at them. I gritted my teeth, reminding myself that this was not my business. Not unless Nyx wanted it to be.

  Entering the actual town, the first thing I noticed was the severely uneven terrain. “Watch your footing,” I warned the others, continuing on my path.

  Cameron sped up until he was by my side. “I’ll be your guiding light, princess,” he jibed, shooting me a sly smile that I couldn’t help but return.

  “I’m honored,” I deadpanned, aiming my flashlight at the graffiti covered asphalt so we wouldn’t trip over anything while he aimed his straight ahead of us so we could see.

  I side-eyed him for a minute before focusing on our surroundings again.

  If I didn’t consider him my blood cousin just as much as I did Nyx, he would have been the perfect man.

  Unfortunately, it would be way too weird for me. Every time I looked at him, I saw Uncle Cobra. He had the same silver eyes, lean yet muscular body, and red hair. He also had the perfect combination of his and Aunt Blue’s attitude—a big heart, and lethal to anyone who hurt those he cared about.

  “Do you guys see that?” I asked after we’d been walking for another few minutes.

  “That looks like smoke,” Luce commented, shining his light over the same crack in the asphalt I was looking at, where a thin wisp of grey was rising.

  “Let’s just find these kids and get out of here,” Butcher said flatly.

  That I fully agreed with, even as each step deeper into this empty city of derelict buildings had a growing sense of foreboding in the pit of my stomach.

  I refused to consider the possibility that my baby sister had been snatched away by some unknown faction.

  They had to still be here—hiding or something, which wasn’t like Bella at all, but I was grasping at straws.

  We’d come this far.

  A flap of wings came from the right. Luce leveled his beam towards it, illuminating Charon, who I’d almost forgotten about.


  A soft breeze rattled a pair of wind chimes in the near distance. Aside from that, the entire town was still as death.

  “Did she happen to tell you guys where this school was?” I asked Cameron since he was right beside me.

  “Uhhh, negative. But it’s a high school; that can’t be hard to miss.”

  He had a point.

  We kept going, passing cars that had been left behind on the streets, now ravished by the elements.

  There were houses, churches, and old businesses that all looked like something straight out of a horror movie. Their roofs were caving in and they’d been significantly vandalized.

  There were electric poles with wires dangling down the length of them, and lone stop signs no longer serving a purpose.

  My light moved over a little girl’s doll. What had happened to all the people? There was a lingering sadness here, an echo of broken dreams and lost hope.

  “There are at least six bodies in there,” Nyx announced when we passed a supermarket that didn’t have a single window left intact.

  She aimed her light in its general direction and, sure enough, I could see the husks of human remains just inside.

  A much fresher body leaned up against the storefront, its rotting face smashed in with a tiny mouse hanging from its eye socket. There was a faint odor of death but not enough to overpower my sense of smell.

  I paused momentarily outside an old cemetery, studying the graves. They’d all shifted and dropped along with the earth beneath them.

  “Not even the dead can rest here,” Annie remarked.

  I looked away and continued to walk. As I did, my rebellious thoughts decided that now was the most opportune time to revisit the enigma that had cornered me on that narrow trail.

  I’d be lying if I said the Venom faction never once crossed my mind. I just didn’t fixate on it like other girls did, The lure of the forbidden just didn’t do it for me, and I couldn’t understand why my brain was so focused on it now.

  That man was nothing but a stranger to me, a violent daydream I needed to stop conjuring.

  I stared up at the massive decrepit high school sprawling out in two different directions. Vines crawled over its brick exterior, slowly consuming it.

  Not a sound could be heard from within, but lights shined in three different windows.

  “Creepiest building in the whole damn town,” Cameron observed.

  I seconded that.

  Part of me was screaming not to go inside; the other was more than ready for whatever might be lurking within, bloodlust beginning to take root.

  “Come on,” Luce said, walking past me and starting up the first set of stairs.

  We followed, careful to keep an eye on everything around us.

  There wasn’t a quiet way to enter the front doors. They were so rusted, they’d become the color of a dirty penny, groaning loudly when Luce pushed them inward.

  We spilled into an atrium that split in three different directions at the end.

  “Look, someone was expecting our arrival,” Luce joked, aiming his light at the wall right in front of us. Welcome to hell had been spray painted with the number 666 beneath it. There was a set of arrows pointing horizontally beside it.

  “Lovely,” Cameron lilted.

  We passed it without incident, heading straight. The air had a dust and mildew-like smell to it, and debris and layers of old paint covered the broken linoleum. If not for our flashlights, we’d be completely in the dark. That, I didn’t mind; the dark had never bothered me, but there was something inherently creepy about being in an abandoned school.

  “A lot of people died in here, someone recent,” Nyx said.

  I was a second away from flipping out when she added, “Not one of ours.”

  I didn’t know how she could tell the difference, but she’d never been wrong before. While her observation didn’t exactly make me feel ecstatic, it did give me hope for Lil, Sam, and Bella. I couldn’t give two fucks about Jesse at this point.

  A sudden bang sounded from behind us, causing me to jump out of my damn skin.

  “What the fuck was that?” Butcher asked as we twisted around, lights shining back the way we’d come.

  “Sounded like the entry doors,” Luce answered.

  I silently agreed, but there wasn’t anyone or anything there.

  “Great. It’s haunted,” Cameron remarked.

  “Not haunted, but there is a little girl watching us from the end of the hall,” Annie said quietly.

  She was already pulling her shotgun from the restraint beneath the acolyte robe.

  What? I turned back around, shining a beam of light ahead of us. Oh, come the fuck on, I thought the second I saw a kid with what looked like a goddamn machete in her hand.

  A baby deer mask covered her face, which I assumed meant she was one of these ‘Stags’, since there were tiny antlers on the front of it.

  “The blood on her blade is fresh,” Luce pointed out.

  “Hell to the no, no,” Cameron sang beneath his breath, making Luce and Butcher chuckle.

  “Um, hi?” I called to the little girl, unsure what else to say. I’d never been great with small kids.

  “What are you doing? Don’t talk to it,” Butcher whispered.

  “What are you doing in here?” I asked, ignoring him and slowly inching forward.

  I had to be cautious; I knew being a child didn’t make her any less dangerous than I was. Dad taught me how to bleed people out nice and slow when I was ten, which was considered late by most standards.

  She giggled like a tiny possessed demon, pointed to the left hall, and then proceeded to dart up the stairs, disappearing into the dark.

  “Did you guys notice her lack of flashlight? Kinda feel like a giant pussy now,” Cameron joked.

  Annie scoffed at him and surged ahead of us. I stayed right behind her, slowing when she held a hand up for me to wait.

  She checked right, and then looked left. “It’s nothing,” she said after a minute, dropping her arm.

  “So they’re still here.” I started moving forward again. “Where do you think they’re keeping…?” I trailed off when I finally saw what the little girl had been pointing at.

  “That’s what you consider nothing?” I asked Annie, gesturing to the body strung up above a door labeled Gymnasium.

  She shrugged, “This isn’t anything special.”

  “There’s your fresh kill,” Butcher said to Nyx after they rounded the corner behind me.

  I shined my light over the man’s body, or what remained of it. His hands had been severed clean off, leaving bloody stumps in their place.

  A rusted chain held him up by his broken legs; both had shiny white bone piercing through his skin.

  If none of that killed him, his death would surely have been caused by the removal of his head, which was nowhere in sight. A thick pool of darkening blood was on the floor beneath him, no sign of the appendage.

  There wasn’t any particular smell that came from a killing like this, just the metallic scent from all the blood being spilled.

  “There is no way that kid did all this on her own,” Luce said.

  “I’m honestly more concerned with where his head is, because that gremlin didn’t have it,” Cameron replied.

  “She isn’t alone.”

  “Nope—and whoever is in here with her more than likely has who we’re looking for, and they know we’re here now,” Luce finished.

  “We need to split up and cover more ground. Annie and I can follow the kid; you guys decide who goes left and right.”

  Without waiting for them to agree, I started up the stairs with Annie, leaving them to debate amongst themselves.

  At the first landing a symbol was painted on the wall in blood. There were two straight lines in the center of a circle with an S over them.

  It was a tag. They’d claimed this school—probably this town—as their own. Couldn’t have been a coincidence they’d decided to do it only after we arrived.

  “Hm…” Dad would take it if he really wanted it, regardless of their marker.

  Moving quietly wasn’t much of an issue, however, when I reached the top level and saw the various overturned desks, fallen lockers, and overall debris.

  Stepping over a moldy, sunken floor tile, I cautiously moved past the first open classroom, and then the second. Another bang, this one with a resounding echo, came from somewhere further down the hall that I couldn’t see.