The Fallen One (Sons of the Dark Mother, Book One) (2 page)

He was screaming inside; he was
beyond rage. His family had fallen apart. Their parents had failed
them and he had done everything he could for two years now to make
up for the lack, to protect them, but now even
he
had failed them.

He bellowed like a wild animal,
screaming his rage at the sky. His entire world was gone, and now
theirs would be too. For without him, they wouldn’t last
long.

This gang hated him too much to let
this end with him.

He screamed, bloody and beaten:
screamed his frustration—screamed his rage. He had failed them. His
chest burned, his body burned: he was on fire. He’d never felt
anything so painful. The gang members just kept beating him down.
He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t move anymore. He knew he was
dying.

He wasn’t prepared for what
happened next. He was a sensitive: he knew things,
sensed
things the rest
of the world didn’t believe existed. But even he wasn’t prepared
for the change that suddenly came over his body. He stared at the
claws that had unexpectedly ripped out of the end of his arm. For a
moment he could
only
stare. The members of the gang stared too, and first, and
then, when he rolled easily to his feet, they backed warily away
from him. He let out an eerie cry: the cry of a jungle cat. The
gang backed farther away, glancing down the alley, clearly trying
to gauge their chances for escape while shock turned their faces to
chalk.

Menace filled his veins. He felt no
pain now—and neither did he feel mercy. Nothing could stop him; and
he didn’t stop, not even when they screamed, not even when their
blood sprayed across the clean, white snow like art gone crazily
awry. Everyone who witnessed the aftermath was left with a
horrifying sense of nausea once they realized what must have taken
place here this day.

He didn’t stop, not even when their
blood filled his senses. He didn’t stop until they all lay in
shreds—and when he finally did, he could only stare at what he had
done.

He stared down at his now-human
form, unable to absorb what had happened, what he had turned into,
what he had done. He bent over double, bile filling his senses,
along with the smell of their blood.

He had killed them.

He had killed them all. He couldn’t
grasp the enormity of it. Nothing made sense; his head whirled and
his heart pounded. He couldn’t absorb what he had become. Nothing
could have prepared him for this, for what he’d changed
into.

It started to rain, as though the
Goddess knew exactly what he would need here, now, on this day:
this day that would mar every other day of his life for years to
come. The rain felt warm and melted the snow even as it washed away
the blood. He stared up into the sky, amazed at how the cold, crisp
morning had suddenly turned warm enough to allow the rain, even
more so than he’d been by the beast that had ripped its way out of
his body. He stared, letting the rain drench his skin, washing him
clean.

He stared at the lifeless bodies of
his enemies, watching their blood run down the alley in rivulets,
and it finally occurred to him—with the sense of self-preservation
finally pulsing through his brain—that he should get out of here
before someone saw him.

He looked wildly around, expecting
to see horrified faces staring at the monster he’d become: but no
one was there—no one had seen what he had become. No one had
witnessed his murderous acts: well, at least, no one who had stuck
around afterward.

He straightened up and stumbled
back down the alley like a drunk. He bent and ran, watching behind
him, expecting at any moment for someone to chase him, for someone
to scream, “There he is, the murdering monster, there he is, let’s
get him….”

But they never came.
No one ever came for him.

He’d just made it to the end of
the alley when he saw her small face peeking out, staring in horror
at her gentle, loving brother, her yellow-green-gold eyes wide with
shock and terror, and he knew that
she
had brought the rain.

She controlled the weather, and
whenever she was really upset, storms were sure to
follow.

She was his youngest sister, and he
had no idea how it was she had escaped from her other sisters, but
there she was, hiding behind some cardboard boxes, staring at him
in horror, with her small body shaking—but whether that was from
what she had just witnessed or from the fact she was drenched, wet,
and cold he couldn’t tell.

She looked at him as if he was the
monster he now knew himself to be. And when he stepped toward her,
she started screaming, her screams shaking him worse than anything
else that had happened there that day. And then she ran.

He somehow made it home, although
he wouldn’t remember how he had managed it for many months, nor
would he remember how the people he had stumbled past had stared at
him in horror and fear, often quickly crossing to other side of the
street. He found his way into the bathroom, where he stared
horrified at his own reflection in the mirror and touched his face.
It felt surreal; he felt surreal. He felt numb, carefully touching
his face while staring at—and watching himself—in stupefied horror.
How could he possibly look the same? He’d become a monster. How
could he look the same—
ever
again
?

He tried to clean the blood off of
himself using the buckets of water they had hauled from a friend’s
house, since their water and electricity were now shut off. He
tried to clean and examine his wounds. He peered through bleary
eyes at his head. As near as he could tell, his head was split in
five separate places.

He needed to go to a hospital. But
how? How could he take himself to the hospital? Wouldn’t they
connect the brutal slayings in the alley to him, because of the
beating he had taken? He stared at the splits in his scalp. He
didn’t have a choice. These would never heal by themselves. He
stared at the gashes on his arms and on his chest. Blood covered
him everywhere. Finally, with despair, he began to walk the six
city blocks to the hospital. People stared at him, as they had
before, giving him a wide berth.

By the time he stumbled into the
emergency room, he’d lost too much blood. He spent the next three
days in a hospital bed, and received more than eight hundred
stitches. They sewed up the gashes in his arms, the knife wounds to
his chest and ribs, and the gashes in his head. They told him he
was incredibly lucky to have survived whatever had killed those
gang members. They said it looked like an attack by a wild animal,
and whatever beast it had been had cut those young men to shreds.
They couldn’t imagine what kind of wild creature would have come
this far into a large city, or how it had avoided detection. But it
had, for sure, been a large, wild animal.

The police questioned him. The
doctors questioned him. The news questioned him. And then it seemed
as though all the wildlife, fish, and game experts in the US had
come to question him. Finally, even the government came to question
him.

They said it was the gang’s fate,
for they were some of the worst scum around and had a reputation
for not showing mercy.

As for Justice, they repeated that
he was lucky to have lived. He had escaped both the gang and the
crazed, wild animal, and he was the luckiest young man
alive.

They couldn’t have known just how
true those words were—or how he’d managed to stay that way. They
couldn’t have known that the monster that had killed those gang
members—had also saved his life.

But now Justice had a problem. How
had he transformed? And why?

C
hapter One

Jes

Present day, in a small town
outside of Chicago

Jes stared down at the
pictures
strewn across her desk. She had
been staring at these same pictures for the past three hours. The
bodies in the pictures clearly told their story to someone who was
listening. Jes was listening; she knew a story existed here. She
just had to find it.

Jes had been tracking the monster
that had done this for years now. She sat back in her chair,
stretching her tired back. She was exhausted: frustrated and
exhausted. She didn’t feel any closer to finding him than she had
been the first time she’d come across those brutal slayings,
fifteen years before. She’d stumbled into this job by accident. She
was currently a detective and a forensic specialist, but back then
she’d just been a kid starting high school, not even knowing what
it was she’d wanted to do with her life. She’d been in the car when
her father had received the call. He’d parked where she couldn’t
see, and told her to stay in the car. But she hadn’t stayed; she
was too curious not to sneak a peek.

What she’d seen there had changed
the course of her life.

Jes knew immediately what kind of
monster had killed those gang members. She knew, and she had taken
every related class she could all throughout school, graduating
from high school at sixteen, and then going on to college quickly
to study anything and everything that stood even a remote chance of
helping her to track him.

She’d never forget what she’d seen
that day—nor could she ever forget all the bodies she’d seen since
then. She couldn’t get the blood, the dead bodies, out of her head;
she couldn’t forget what would happen if something were to go
wrong.

She lived in fear of it.

She could never take it for granted
that she, too, would never turn into such monster.

She must never forget what could
happen if the beast inside of her—ever turned into the same type of
monster he had become.

She looked down at the pictures on
her desk. She stared at each of the bodies, looking for clues. Each
one told her a story: a story of whom he’d been, how he’d lived,
and the monster each had been in his own right.

Every single one of them had been a
killer. But that didn’t excuse their killer from what he’d become.
Killing, even to destroy another killer, was wrong. Why did he do
it? What drove him to use his power in a heinous way?

She wouldn’t rest until she’d
brought him in.

The power they’d been gifted with
should be used to help the humans—not harm them. The Jaguar People
were an ancient race: protectors, Watchers. They were supposed to
keep an eye on things, to keep others with powers from breaking the
rules that were set up to protect the ignorance of the human
species.

The humans weren’t ready to know
who they were.

He threatened that status quo—every
time he killed.

He threatened them as a people. He
was putting them all at risk by threatening to expose them. The
ancient race of the Jaguar People had managed to remain relatively
unknown—perhaps not in folklore, but they’d remained unreal to the
humans, who considered themselves the
only
human-like race of beings in
existence.

Of course, humans had even managed
to convince themselves that the Fae were just a fairy tale—in spite
of centuries of folklore.

Humans were afraid of their own
shadows.

Jes shook herself out of her
musings and got up to pour a cup of the foul coffee that had, as
usual, sat much too long. She made a face as she tried to swallow
it, and then headed for the sink to dump it out and make a new
batch.

She had fresh coffee by the time
she sat back down at her desk, setting down her cup and looking at
the small newspaper someone had set on her desk: a
Thrifty Nickel
. She
frowned. Why had someone put this thing on her desk? She picked it
up, glancing around. No one paid her any mind. She had nearly
dumped it into the trash when something stopped her.

What the heck. She could use a
break.

She scanned the columns for a deal,
only half paying attention. She had nearly turned the page
again—when she spotted an unusual ad. She sat up, staring. What it
said made her look up and scan the office again, wondering who had
known enough to leave her this paper. But no one out of the
ordinary was in the office that day.

It said:
When injustice is the way of the day, a little justice could
pave the way.

She picked up her phone to put an
ad of her own in the little paper, but then set it back down. She
wasn’t one who was known for her patience. An ad would take too
long.

She got up, grabbing her jacket off
the back of her chair as she went.

It didn’t take her long to reach
the office that printed the little paper, and it turned out that
she knew one of the people who worked there. Well, truthfully, she
knew most of the people in this town.

He was too smitten with her not to
give her the info she was looking for, so it wasn’t long before she
was heading for a run-down, local tavern. The young man had told
her that anyone who answered that ad was always directed, by the
next ad, to an old tavern called Second Chances.