The First Mate

Chapter 31: In The Shadows

Gabriel

That fucking piece of shit! My chest shook violently with pain as tainted blood courses through my slow moving veins.
The only downside to my now beating heart.
Poisons worked on me again.
One of Shifters I'd devoured getting to the small child named Katie.
I should have realised he was too willing to get in my way!
Pain rocked me again and I gripped the soil, biting down to stop my screams.
Shadows still hugged me, I was still concealed from the enemies around me.
But ugh, fuck was I weak!
Boss? Oliver's voice broke through, making me falter.
W-was that a mind-link?
His voice broke through again, a pressure on my temple.
Boss, can you hear me?
Vampires didn't have a mind-link, we spoke to the shadows to communicate.
Yeah, Oliver sighed, hearing my confused thinking. Lady Rose figured out we could also do it this way.
I-
Don't ask. Naomi's voice piped, slightly clipped. Just know, we're almost there.
Find the girl! I snapped at them, not intending to sound so angry but another heartbeat pushed poison, my skull feeling like it would shatter from the tension in my jaw.
She's with the mated Witch and Arthur.
I'd have chuckled about the mating bond that had sparked between one of my hoard, a Vampire named Arthur, and the Raven Shifter princess, but it hurt to even think about doing.
I groaned, moving to lay on my back from the fetal position I'd curled in.
My body, my muscles, my fucking atoms shook with pain and effort.
Was she harmed? I strained, feeling the shadows around me thicken and Oliver was crouched beside me.
"She'd hidden in one of the storm drains not far from here," he jerked his chin behind him as he pulled back my sleeve to my elbow. "Said something about monsters trying to eat her."
I cringed, partly in pain, but that also meant she'd seen a Changelings true form.
Horrid, disfigured skeletal beings with stringy flesh that covered their bones and eyeless, only two nose holes and a mouth that opened to rows and rows of teeth.
Naomi kneeled beside Oliver, pulling out a syringe filled with thick, red liquid.
I could smell it was blood.
She caught my confused, and slightly concerned, expression, smirking. "Our Lady said this would help." She didn't say anything else before stabbing the needle into my veins and pushed on the plunger.
My veins burned for a moment, making me hiss, then sigh in relief as a familiar sensation washed over me, filling my body with a spark and warmth.
It's your blood. I awed through my bond with my little mate.
Rose's voice sounded through my mind as the pain and tension of the poison, my strength reforming and I sat up, feeling my veins warm slightly, replaced by Rose's sweet blood.
The only thing that could ever make me feel so strong...so alive.
I paused, hearing her strained giggle.
Darling? My panic flared to her and I felt her sooth it, like she reached out and stroked our bond lovingly.
I'm okay. She whispered weakly, sounding tired.
Xavier felt my concern, my vision being taken by his, showing me Rose.
She was sitting in the den of the lunge, pale and tinted green with a bucket between her legs.
She felt you be poisoned. He explained softly, the mindlink only being shared between us.
How? I didn't need him to answer.
I looked at the stone on my wrist, seeing a shimmer of fiery orange.
Though her stone was black, all her mates knew the colour of her beautiful soul.
The stones connected us physically to her. So-
She could always know if we were lying about being injured. Xavier gave a soft chuckle finishing my thoughts, I joined him.
Is she okay? I couldn't stop the edge of worry in my voice, seeing her heave her food up after she'd tried to eat a piece of bread Theo was feeding her in bits.
I felt Xavier's worry pulse back. She drew out some of the poison.
Anger flashed, the thought of her harming herself. It died quickly, knowing she'd only done it gives Naomi and Olive time to find me.
Somehow it had dampened my connection to my hoard, my Shadow.
Rose heaved again, her face scrunching at the end as she tasted something she didn't like.
I heard her voice through Xavier's mind-link.
Ugh, when did I eat thujone
Violence shook through me, my strength flourishing and I became darkness.
I sent one message to my hoard.
Drain no one. Kill them all.
Naomi and Oliver fell beside me as we began our new hunt for the tainted Shifters.
Veron had learned.
Vampires avoided intoxicated feeds incase they had absinthe or vermouth in their veins, both of which contained thujone.
A chemical which cut our connection to the Shadow if we weren't careful.
In small doses, it was manageable, but the amount Veron had given his fighters, it was lethal.
Especially to Vampires.
I growled in annoyance as I snapped the neck of a Bear Shifter, half the size of Xavier with ease.
I smirked with pure enjoyment. My sparring session with the other mates had made me more formidable against their kind, making easier to take them down, but not being allowed to kill them was always a spoil sport for me.
Another three down.
I enjoyed a true fight.
Another.
The feeling of life leaving the body beneath my cold hands.
Two more dropped like sacks of meat.
There was nothing like the thrill of the kill.
I tracked more of them, my eyes narrowing.
Between the three of us, and my six hoard members also hunting.
We'd taken twenty out already.
There was still more coming.
They seemed to be circling the lake, trying to draw us closer.
I slowed in my rage, my shadows hugging the treeline as I watched.
They grouped together, crouched and waiting to be attacked.
But anytime one of the Pack did, they'd move closer to the water.
I saw the small ripples, others coming out of the lake and creating new groups.
Dane. The Wolf dropped his mental shield. Recall the Packs.
Why? He growled, his Alpha nature taking hold. They didn't take orders well.
I suppressed a sigh, letting him see the lake through my eyes.
Such an odd feeling, a pressure against the back of my eyes, a small flash before I felt almost like I had double vision.
I hadn't quite mastered how to do it myself without one of them guiding me, but everytime the uncomfortableness, it made me almost glad I hadn't.
I turned my head about, letting him see what I did, piece together what I had.
He snarled, returning my vision.
Even though I didn't need breath often, it always made me shudder from the weight that left when he did it so roughly.
Gentle, I sung at him in teasing. He responded with another snarl.
They've been recalled. Whatever you're planning, hurry up. He snapped at me, but there was an edge to his voice.
One I couldn't help but aggravate.
Oh, do you miss me, my sweet Wolf?
He growled, making me laugh. Get home. Rose wants needs.
As if sensing I didn't believe it, Xavier pressed, showing me Rose looking up at him, tears brimming her eyes.
I can't feel him with the poison in my system. Her full bottom lip shook in fear.
My slow beating heart tore like a jagged blade through skin.
Oh, my darling, I breathed in a moment of agony for her. The need to be with her and sooth her worries.
I turned into death again, unable to say anything, only to ensure my task was completed and I went home to my mate.
A woman I'd spent six thousand years searching for since I came into existence.
Never knowing I was looking for her, but something had always pulled me close to where she'd been.
Romania had the first place I'd ever truly felt her.
The small child with a scrapped knee, sobbing as another child teased her for her fiery red hair and freckles.
I'd never killed a child before.
I still haven't.
But I'd considered it that day, when that small red haired girl looked up at me, not with fear or hatred for my kind, but pure curiousity and childhood wonder.
She'd let me hold her and tend to her wounds, thanking me by kissing my cheek innocently in thank you, before she tried to run off blushing.
It was the first time I'd called her darling, scolding her for rolling her eyes at me when I made her hold my hand to walk across the roads while she led me to her house.
I'd been unable to stop myself from handing over all the gold I carried with me that day, seeing her dress with slight stains from her blood and fall in the mud.
Her father had tried to refuse, but her mother, a sweet woman with the same face as Rose, but not as beautiful somehow, had taken then bag of gold, kissing my cheek as her daughter had in thanks.
Rose had found me some years later, when she was a woman and the call of our bond had formed enough, she came looking for me.
She didn't know, I'd been looking for her as well, always a step behind her in her own search.
The moment she stepped into my bedroom, being introduced as my chamber maid, I was already on one knee, begging her to be mine.
She'd blushed, running away and I found her crying in one of the broom closets.
She'd panicked and got lost trying to find her bedroom.
Then got her foot stuck in a bucket that broke her ankle when she'd tried to remove it.
Eventually, after getting her unstuck and tended to, she'd admitted others had asked for her hand so blatantly before, men she knew to be of 'no good nature or grounding, men of greed and lust', in her words, but she didn't want to reject me.
She was just scared.
But she accepted my proposal.
The moment we kissed, everything made complete sense to me.
Like the Goddess showed me my purpose for living.
My heart beat for the first time, a slow, gentle thud, everyday for sixty years, until Roxanna died in our bed, surrounded by myself and her three other mates.
Men who had followed her scent, the feeling of her, knowing she wasn't intended for them this time around, but their desires for her and her for them, was something that couldn't be severed.
When I'd realised their significance to her, I had to do anything I could to ensure she lived her next life properly.
With all of us.
It was her soul that I feel in love with, having felt it arise eighteen years ago, I went searching.
But, she had been shrouded in misery and hate, her love and beauty lost to me in a world of cruelty under Jordon's foot when she was taken.
I'd searched like a man gone crazed. Killing anyone who stood in my way of finding her.
But they kept her hidden.
Until she found them, awakening the bond and, besides dealing with a small issue of my own, I headed right for that glorious spark that was my Rose.
That issue, was now a problem.
I looked across the water, seeing the rippling and shadows build.
Oliver shifted uncomfortably beside me as realisation settled over my hoard, thirty more of them answering my call and falling in around the lake.
Naomi's near black eyes widened at the Shifters in the lake, seeing the shadows form around them like cloaks.
They're fucking Wraiths. She hissed, her disgust and rage being echoed through the hoard as they started to Shift, their forms taking the likeness of slender, bald people, cloaked with shadows and their voices echoed as clicks and screams not of this Plane.
My jaw clenched. Tell me Abe is with someone.
Naomi moved, her shadow fading for a moment.
Helsing gave a small chin jerk at me, stepping back into the shadows.
Good, tell him to start casting. The rest of you, don't leave anything alive. We dismember and burn the bodies.
My eyes scanned to the fallen Pack that had been killed by Jordon's, technically, my own men and women.
Wraiths inhabited dead bodies.
Whole dead bodies.
I gritted my teeth in hatred, knowing the Wolf was going to give me so much sit for this.
But it had to be done.
All of them.
We turned into death as Abe unleashed lightning into the lake.