The Darkest Night (Lords of the Underworld #1)(4)
Author: Gena Showalter

Careful not to touch his friend, Maddox stepped forward. The indistinct blur gradually became thick, opaque lines. Trees, he realized. "Nice, but not something I was in dire need of viewing."

"Patience."

"Hurry," he countered.

Torin flicked him a wry glance. "Since you asked so nicely… I have heat sensors and cameras hidden throughout our land so that I always know when someone trespasses." A few more seconds of tapping and the screen’s view shifted to the right. Then there was a swift flash of red, there one moment, gone the next.

"Go back," Maddox said, tensing. He wasn’t a surveillance expert. No, his skill lay in the actual killing. But even he knew what that red slash represented. Body heat.

Tap, tap, tap and the red slash once again consumed the screen.

"Human?" he asked. The silhouette was small, almost dainty.

"Definitely."

"Male or female?"

Torin shrugged. "Female, most likely. Too big to be a child, too small to be a grown man."

Hardly anyone ventured up the bleak hill at this time of night. Or even during the day. Whether it was too spooky, too gloomy or a sign of the locals’ respect, Maddox didn’t know. But he could count on one hand the number of deliverymen, children wanting to explore and women prowling for sex who’d braved the journey in the last year.

"One of Paris’s lovers?" he asked.

"Possibly. Or…"

"Or?" he prompted when his friend hesitated.

"A Hunter," Torin said grimly. "Bait, more specifically."

Maddox pressed his lips together in a harsh line. "Now I know you’re teasing me."

"Think about it. Deliverymen always come with boxes and Paris’s girls always race straight toward the front door. This one looks empty-handed and she’s gone in circles, stopping every few minutes and doing something against the trees. Planting dy***ite in an attempt to injure us, maybe. Cameras to watch us."

"If she’s empty-handed – "

"Dynamite and cameras are small enough to conceal."

He massaged the back of his neck. "Hunters haven’t stalked or tormented us since Greece."

"Maybe their children and then their children’s children have been searching for us all this time. Maybe they finally found us."

Dread suddenly curled in Maddox’s stomach. First Aeron’s shocking summons and now the uninvited visitor. Mere coincidence? His mind flashed back to those dark days in Greece, days of war and savagery, screams and death. Days the warriors had been more demon than man. Days a hunger for destruction had dictated their every action and human bodies had littered the streets.

Hunters had soon risen from the tortured masses, a league of mortal men intent upon destroying those who’d unleashed such evil, and a blood feud had erupted. The battles he then found himself fighting, with swords clanging and fires raging, flesh burning and peace something of lore and legend…

Cunning had been the Hunters’ greatest weapon, however. They had trained female Bait to seduce and distract while they swooped in for the kill. That’s how they managed to murder Baden, keeper of Distrust. They had not managed to kill the demon itself, however, and it had sprung from the decimated body, crazed, demented, warped from the loss of its host.

Where the demon resided now, Maddox didn’t know.

"The gods surely hate us," Torin said. "What better way to hurt us than to send Hunters just when we’ve finally carved out a somewhat peaceful life for ourselves?"

His dread intensified. "They would not wish the demons, crazed as they would surely be without us, loose upon the world. Would they?"

"Who knows why they do any of the things that they do." A statement, with no hint of a question. None of them really understood the gods, even after all these centuries. "We have to do something, Maddox."

His gaze flicked to the wall clock and he tensed. "Call Paris."

"Did. He’s not answering his cell phone."

"Call – "

"Do you really think I would have disturbed you this close to midnight if there were anyone else?" Torin twisted in the seat, peering up at him with forbidding determination. "You’re it."

Maddox shook his head. "Very soon, I’m going to die. I cannot be outside these walls."

"Neither can I." Something murky and dangerous shimmered in Torin’s eyes, something bitter, turning the green to a poisonous emerald. "You, at least, won’t obliterate the entire human race by leaving."

"Torin – "

"You’re not going to win this argument, Maddox, so stop wasting time."

He tangled a hand through his chin-length hair, frustration mounting. We should leave it out there to die, Violence proclaimed. It – the human.

"If it is a Hunter," Torin said, as if hearing his thoughts, "if it is Bait? We can’t allow it to live. It must be destroyed."

"And if it’s innocent and my death-curse strikes?" Maddox countered, tamping down the demon as best he could.

Guilt flashed over Torin’s expression, as though every life he was responsible for taking clamored inside his conscience, begging him to rescue those he could. "That is a chance we have to take. We are not the monsters the demons would have us be."

Maddox ground his teeth together. He was not a cruel man; he was not a beast. Not heartless. He hated the waves of immorality that constantly threatened to pull him under. Hated what he did, what he was – and what he would become if he ever stopped fighting those black cravings and evil musings.

"Where is the human now?" he asked. He would venture into the night, even if it cost him terribly.

"At the Danube border."

A fifteen-minute run. He had just enough time to weapon up, find the human, usher it to shelter if it was innocent or kill it if circumstances demanded, and return to the fortress. If anything slowed him down, he could die out in the open. Anyone else foolish enough to venture onto the hill would be placed in danger. Because when the first pain hit, he would be reduced to Violence and those black cravings would consume him.

He would have no other purpose but destruction.

"If I don’t return by midnight, have one of the others search for my body, as well as Lucien’s and Reyes’s." Both Death and Pain came to him each night at midnight, no matter where Maddox was. Pain rendered the blows and Death escorted his soul to hell, where it would remain, tortured by fire and demons almost as loathsome as Violence, until morning.

Unfortunately, Maddox could not guarantee his friends’ safety out in the open. He might hurt them before they completed their tasks. And if he hurt them, the anguish he would feel would be second only to the agony of the death-curse that visited him every night.