Miscreants: Next Generation Read online

  If there was one positive about this mess she’d just created, it was that these deaths showed how loyal my people were. Though, to be honest, I wasn’t all that impressed by it. Loyalty was one of the only values I held to standard.

  I’d surrounded myself with ruthless miscreants to ensure that what was strong never weakened. The people that had been here for me from the beginning, and those that ultimately proved themselves, were devoted to me down to their volatile cores.

  I would never be ungrateful for them, and I didn’t take a single proselyte for granted, but I also wasn’t going to sit around and cry over a single fucking one. If that made me heartless, oh well.

  None of us could be classified as ‘good’ people. I’d always found the definition of that word to be subjective, anyhow. It was a label. After being falsely labeled for half my life, I’d stopped giving a fuck what anyone thought about me a long time ago. People would only see what they wanted to see, and their judgements always roared louder than my truths.

  I stared out at the lake’s glass-like surface, taking a few minutes to get my thoughts in order. If I didn’t reign in my temper, I would begin slaughtering everyone around me.

  She fucking left.

  I knew she would, but she actually fucking did it.

  I wasn’t an idiot. Confined to the indoors for half of my life, I’d had nothing but time to study the ways of the best of the best. The devil himself had been my mentor. He was the one who encouraged me to construct an empire beneath the noses of those at the very top—not excluding himself.

  Suffice it to say, I didn’t make it this far by not being smarter than anyone who thought they could outmaneuver me. This had been bound to happen. I’d predicted it months ago. But that didn’t make it any easier to accept. Knowing I was losing Lilith couldn’t compare to the reality of it.

  Last night, having her in my arms had brought me a comfort I constantly craved and only she could give.

  At the same time, holding her while my dick throbbed at the idea of feeling her wrapped around me again…that had been a new kind of agony.

  There was no way I was turning down being inside her. Holding and touching her incredible body, watching her every expression as I made her come, was a hobby I was quite passionate about. I could be on my death bed and would request her pussy as my last wish. If I were too hurt or sick to fuck, I would still shove my face in it.

  I shouldn’t have been so gentle with her.

  If she couldn’t walk, she wouldn’t have been able to run away.

  I knew fucking her until she couldn’t feel her legs or utter a single plea wouldn’t fix the issues between us. Words alone wouldn’t be enough either. That worked in my favor, though. I wasn’t good with words to begin with.

  It would be those and my actions making my intentions crystal clear, revealing to her what her role to play was.

  “They’re here,” Amo stated, pulling me out of my thoughts.

  I uncrossed my arms and turned away from the lake to watch the small procession of proselytes. Brody and Aurora had seen that the three in question made it here in one piece, along with two lags from the pens they’d recaptured but hadn’t killed yet. Dawn trailed behind them, a frown marring her face.

  “They were talking of leaving before we caught them,” Rory announced.

  “We thought it’d be best for everyone,” a proselyte explained.

  “You thought it’d be best for everyone? I could’ve sworn that it was me who made the decisions around here.”

  “She meant no disrespect,” the proselyte to the left rushed to her defense, “but we know what happens when one of us fails.”

  “Then you were going to run scared like little bitches?” Amo asked.

  “Calling them bitches is too much of a compliment,” Rory objected. “Bitches have loyalty, and they’re much cuter.”

  “We don’t have time for this. Burn their masks to set an example and then make them watch each other die.”

  “What about the two from the pens?” Dawn asked. “They’re the only ones left. The rest have already been killed.”

  “You just answered your own question.” I removed my blade and walked up to a man damn near cowering on the ground.

  With a quick jab, I split open the side of his neck. Turning to the older woman beside him, I repeated the motion, paying no attention to the plea she gave me to spare her. Stepping over their spasming bodies, I addressed Amo, Rory, and Dawn.

  “Handle those three and then pack any random shit you’ll need. We’re heading out before nightfall.”

  Leaving them to it, I walked away from the docks and headed for my cabin.

  It was strange being in here, knowing Lilith was gone. She was the one who made anywhere we were feel like home.

  Usually when I crept inside, she’d be sound asleep, never once waking as I stood over her and watched. Even knowing she’d be gone, I left her flowers where I always had. The same ones that made me think of her.

  Wildflowers.

  They thrive in the harshest conditions.

  They’re resilient—strong yet gentle. That was Lilith. I’d caged her in my prison of thorns, and she’d still found a way to bloom.

  Staring at the blood on my hands, I sank down on the sofa and rested my chin on my knuckles. If my uncle could see me now…

  I laughed to myself at the thought of that. It had been a long time since I’d come across anyone from my past. I wasn’t sure they’d recognize me. What they expected and what I had become were two drastically different breeds of predator.

  We’ve all got aspirations—something or someone we dream of being when we grow up. Born as a Savage, my path should have been an easy one, simple and already paved. I was meant to be death personified, a reaper in the flesh.

  My father didn’t look at me that way, though.

  I could see in his eyes that he didn’t believe I’d ever follow in his footsteps.

  That realization brought with it an expected degree of disappointment on both sides. It soon became obvious that my big sister was going to take up our dad’s gauntlet. I harbored no resentment towards Nyx for it. She was everything I couldn’t be, and I wanted something different.

  I didn’t want to be known as merely Grimm’s son. I abhorred the thought of being a copy or protégé almost as much as I hated the idea of becoming just another Savage. There were hundreds of them.

  So, while I didn’t have an issue with my sister, I resented that her taking my position didn’t free me. If anything, it made the chains around me that much tighter.

  Maybe I could have lived with all of that, but then the ultimatum came, and it wasn’t something I was willing to accept.

  None of that mattered now.

  I’d made my choices.

  I went down a path of destruction I could never come back from.

  Ironically, that didn’t stop my past from catching up to me. It came calling in the form of a summons that I’d buried in the bottom of a dresser drawer.

  An eloquent request to meet with my father and Uncle Romero. Two notorious legends in the Badlands.

  I had yet to respond or truly consider it.

  There were more pressing matters to handle before I dealt with the Savages.

  Lilith.

  And the inevitable bloodbath that was about to spill across the Badlands.

  If I didn’t come across them before either of these matters were resolved, they’d be handled last. No matter what, Lilith would always come first and foremost before anything or anyone else. Giving her up wasn’t an option.

  She had no right to leave my side when it was her fault I had become this way.

  They say that if you love something, you should let it go, and if it comes back it’s meant to be.

  That sounded like bullshit to me, which was why I came up with my own version.

  If you love someone, let them go. Then hunt them down and drag their ass back, kicking and screaming.

  I stood from the sofa and looked around the cabin, making a mental list of anything I may need. I hope she was prepared for the domino effect she’d just created.

  I’d always be her protector, but I was her predator too.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The woods were ominously quiet.

  It had taken approximately thirty minutes to cross the lake and reach a place level enough to get off the boat. We’d been footing it for another twenty, at least.

  The sun was sitting proudly in the sky by this point. Patches of blue broke through the tree tops every few steps. I couldn’t tell if they were helping or making it hotter. I already missed the early morning chill.

  This woodland wasn’t like the one on the other side of the lodge.

  People didn’t casually stroll through it when they wanted to take a walk. Therefore, there weren’t any man-made paths, making the journey onward that much harder. Our footfalls were dramatically loud in the stillness, moving over uneven ground as we pushed through underbrush and branches.

  “How are you doing?” Takara asked from behind me.

  “A little hot, but otherwise fine.”

  Poet glanced at me over his sweaty shoulder, pushing tendrils of brown hair away from his damp forehead. “I think she was asking how you’re doing about Samael. If she wasn’t, I am.”

  The question shouldn’t have come as any surprise, but it was jarring, nonetheless. I couldn’t very well tell them the truth—that this was all a huge mistake. Loving Samael sometimes hurt, but leaving him was an entirely new type of anguish.

  It was like purposely severing a vital organ because you were too damn stupid to realize you needed it to live. I told myself that time would make everything better, but that was complete and utter crap.

  My heart was chained to his. Going one way as it was pulled in another was killing me. I could do nothing but soldier on. Poet and Takara had risked too much for me to do an about face because I was selfishly indecisive.

  “Really trying not to think about that right now,” I muttered, swatting at some tiny brown bug that was trying to hitch a ride on my shoulder. “What’s the deal with him?” I nodded to Travis. I needed to change the subject and was genuinely concerned about this strange man traveling with us.

  He was as tall as Poet, yet skinnier than me. His brown hair was thick and wavy, going all the way to his nape.

  The fact that he was wearing a damn jean jacket was seriously grating on my nerves. It was too hot for all that nonsense. I was eighty percent certain he only had it on to try and cover up the nasty scar on the side of his lower neck.

  The skin looked as if it had been burned, a tell-tale sign that the faction he once belonged to had exiled him with enough respect not to kill him. That, or he’d run away and done it to himself. Probably the latter was more likely, now that I thought about it. Most factions wouldn’t let you keep breathing if you wanted out.

  “He knows how we can get in touch with your family,” Poet replied, pushing through another tuft of brambles.

  Your family. Those two words had my nerves fraying more than they already were. I wasn’t sure if my family considered me an enemy or not these days. I supposed I’d find out soon enough….

  “Considering I have no clue how to do that, can someone share those details with me?”

  “Once we make it to Phobos, I’ll give you a hint,” Travis answered.

  I didn’t like the sound of that.

  “Who is Phobos?”

  “Phobos is the town he’s leading us to,” Takara answered.

  “Never heard of it.”

  “We’ve got about thirty more minutes until we get there.”

  Thirty more minutes of this? That would need to be a swift twenty. I was beginning to itch in places that shouldn’t itch, and I seriously had to pee. Not to mention there was a whole damn faction about to be searching for us. We needed to haul ass and get as far away from them as possible, regardless of how badly I wanted to do the opposite.

  “Can we cut that down any?”

  Travis twisted at the hip and looked back at me with a wry grin.

  “If we run, sure.”

  If I never set foot in the woods again, it would be far too soon. Where we wound up wasn’t leaps and bounds better.

  Phobos was a husk of a town that looked completely out of place, located directly on the other side of the woods we’d just spent too much time in. We first emerged onto a road that offered us only one direction. The other was blocked off.

  “I don’t remember this place being here when Samael brought me to the lodging site.”

  “I reckon you came from the other direction. There’s another small town just before you hit the roadway to Camp Lazarus. This got—”

  “Camp Lazarus?” I interrupted. “Since when does it have a name?”

  Travis glanced at me from the end of our horizontal line, his gray eyes narrowed. “It’s been called that for as long as I can remember.”

  “Why are there no tags anywhere?” Poet motioned to the derelict buildings situated on either side of the road.

  Travis cleared his throat. “I haven’t known them to leave many visible marks. They seem to tag random buildings, old cars. Things like that. Then when they catch someone in their territory, like me, they can claim you trespassed.”

  “Sounds like something Mal would do.”

  “Somewhat,” Takara agreed. “But that places us in our own backyard, and there aren’t any proselytes here standing guard, which doesn’t sound like Samael at all.”

  “There’s also that.” Travis pointed in the opposite direction, referencing the blockade.

  A mess of cars and upheaved rubble with a manhole a few feet in front of it were back that way. The middle of the street looked like a giant mouth, ready to eat anything that got too close to it, effectively prohibiting anyone from going that direction.

  “With the only other road going to the camp blocked off, someone would have to retravel the path we just took to get here or there.”

  “Mostly impossible and suicidal.”

  “Yeah, but that’s not much different than what you three just did. It takes big balls of steel to piss off that guy.”

  “How do you know he’s going to be pissed?”

  “You guys just killed two of his people…and she’s his stolen treasure.” He pointed to me.

  Oh, so he was one of those.

  There were lots of stories floating around about Samael and me. Some described us as a romantic tragedy. Others claimed my older sister was the one he’d been madly in love with. Ultimately only one was closest to the truth, and the origins of it tied into our childhood.

  A cautionary tale of a silent wolf and his precious lamb. Everyone feared for the day the predator would snap and slaughter his prey. After all, wolves were notorious for making meals of lambs, weren’t they? But this story had one major flaw. How weak they portrayed this lamb to be was wrong.

  As wrong as the other rumors about him stealing me away like some helpless maiden.

  That always made me scoff. He’d taken me away in a rather unconventional way, but he didn’t kidnap me by any means.

  Takara gave me a soft smile, knowing exactly how I’d wound up where I had. I wasn’t going to bother correcting the guy. I didn’t know him well enough or care to change his beliefs. People could think whatever they wanted.

  Refusing to get hung up on any more thoughts of Mal, I decided to take in the sights around us. There was a time and place for everything; an abandoned town wasn’t the spot to have a breakdown.

  Besides, this was my first time being away from the lodge in forever.

  Patchy grass, yellowing and brittle from constantly being in the sun, had grown everywhere. On the sidewalks, beneath old buildings, in the middle of the street.

  All the homes and stores were clustered close together.

  They were arranged side by side in a way that meant you could climb from one window to the next. Very few still had any glass.

  It was obvious no one had lived here in ages. Maybe some animals and lags took shelter here when passing through like we were, but people couldn’t survive in a place like this for long. The town itself didn’t seem as if it should exist.

  “I don’t want to slow us down, but I really have to pee.”

  “Same,” Takara agreed quickly. “I didn’t want to be the first to say it. I have to go too.”

  “Uh.” Poet rubbed the back of his neck and started looking around.

  “There’s an old service station somewhere up ahead,” Travis offered.

  “Or we could pick one of these houses with overgrown bushes,” I replied.

  “Which one?” Poet asked.

  I looked to the left and chose randomly. “The one that used to be blue.”

  “We’ll wait here. Be quick.”

  I nodded and motioned for Kara to come with me.

  “I’ve got wipes in my bag.”

  She slipped it off her shoulders and passed it to me. “I knew I could count on you for personal hygiene,” she teased.

  “Well, of course,” I replied haughtily.

  We moved up a small hill and walked to the side of the house. The bushes had grown so uncontrollably they’d begun to merge. I tugged my bag open and retrieved my small casing of wipes, removing two before handing it to Kara so she could get her own.

  I popped my button and lowered my shorts, squatting alongside Kara, our bare asses a few inches away from the side of the depleted house.

  “I feel like I’ve been holding this for ages,” I confessed with a sigh.

  “We have. I can feel myself getting lighter.”

  Finishing up, I tossed the wipes down by the bushes and started to fix my shorts. Hearing what sounded like voices, I slowly redid the button, looking at Kara to see if she’d heard them too.

  “What is it?” she whispered, adjusting her jeans.

  “I think I heard someone.” I looked towards the far end of the house, unable to see around it. “Come on.”

  I grabbed my bag off the ground and tugged on the drawstrings, heading back out to the street.