“We can’t play with her if she’s dead. Take her, I think.” Nev and Will shared a smile. Then, scenting prey in the wind, Nev carefully crept from his place on the rock he liked to think of as his throne. Keeping to tradition, he remained in his natural form—hisguer.His enhanced senses made the world crisper. Colors were brighter, smells riper. In the earthy forests and fields on the outskirts of town that bordered the government’s no-pass zone,realRavagers roamed the night.
Glad to be himself, even in this hellish place, Nev found what he’d been after. Moments later, a fat, juicy rabbit dangled from his bloodied claws. It squirmed to be free, finally slowing its movements until the spark of life left its bleak brown eyes. The fresh meat sated his appetite, at least for food. His belly full for the next hour, he turned to the other pressing need making it uncomfortable to walk.
Returning to the cave he called home, he sought Will, who busily rutted between a human woman’s thighs. Watching his packmate take the female, Nev couldn’t help wondering what Will thought as he fucked her. Ever since Diana and Kate Savage had rejected him, Will had become crueler than ever. A fitting temperament for the guard of the nexttrueRavager king.
“Should I make the kidnapping public or a secret?” Will rasped as he finished spending in the groaning female. He pulled out and pushed her aside.
She stumbled and fell next to her blubbering friend, another attractive human with light colored hair, large breasts, and ample hips. Sturdy, hard to break and fun to plunder.
“So eager, aren’t you, Will?” Nev licked his lips, intrigued with the liquid clinging to the brunette’s thighs—Ravager seed. As seductive as the blood lingering on his lips from his recent kill. “We’ll wait a bit, monitor the Savages and make sure Eric’s new toy is important enough to rate his worry. Who knows? He may just be amusing himself with a human.”
“A Conduit,” Will corrected and snarled at the blonde trying to crawl away. He slapped a chain from the cave wall to the collar around her neck and locked her down. The moon hid behind a cloud, and darkness settled over them. In the moment of silence, Will’s breathing and the females’ pleas for mercy echoed within the cave.
Outside, the rest of the Lawless clan played with whatever they felt like. Unlike Eric and his idiotic notions of change, Nev preferred the old ways. Might made right. Out here, Ravagers ruled the land. Any human or Voider stupid enough to trespass on Lawless territory deserved a slow, painful death.
“A Conduit,” he repeated to Will with vague understanding, his concentration on the growing hunger between his legs.
“A human with gifts. Psychic abilities that resonate with Void energy,” Will explained, as he had countless times before.
“Norm. Conduit. They still stink of human, inferior to clan.”
“For certain.” Will showed his teeth to the blonde, who unfortunately saw nothing in the dark. Weak, like the rest of her kind.
Nev respected strength. He might not like other Voiders, but he appreciated their power. The Valk could pierce eardrums with their screeching voices. Lites blended into any environment and became invisible. Vulcani harnessed alien fire. And Tommy Chen, the things that male could do…
A dozen or more Voiders lived in Cross Step alongside Ravagers. All of them had more of his esteem than the pathetic natives of this world. He still had a hard time believing Voiders and the feeble humans of Earth had any relationship. Yet, he couldn’t deny their compatible physiologies.
With a sigh, he recognized his pressing needs for the human treat just a few yards away. He felt Will’s interest and allowed his guard to watch.
It didn’t take Nev long. His first and second climaxes came all too quickly. But he took his time achieving the next two. To his surprise, the blonde remained alive and aware throughout his taking.
A glimpse of her made him think of another with pale hair, one he’d coveted for many years—Dominic, Eric’s guard, the man who’d once belonged to Nev, his servant and best friend in another life, in another place.
Glaring at the reminder of Dom—yet another loss at Eric Savage’s hands—Nev withdrew from the sniveling woman and gave her to Will, who rode her hard.
Predictably, she expired.
“She lasted longer than I’d thought she would.” Will grinned, his teeth flashing in the darkness as he pushed her away. Muffled whimpering drew his attention, and he took care of the brunette as well. One swift bite to the throat and the sweet smell of blood layered over the sex already lingering in the dank cave.
“Dump the bodies,” Nev growled, still hungry for something he couldn’t quite name.
Will nodded, unchained the women and dragged them from the cave. He laughed at something someone outside said.
The minute he disappeared from view, Nev felt his absence. The curse of Ravager existence, that pack-like mentality. It had never bothered him at home, where everyone was the same. But here, among so many other races, he saw frailties in his kind he was determined to eradicate.
Annoyed that the aloneness smothered him, Nev forced himself to be strong and paced to push away the vulnerability a leader couldn’t afford to feel. But without the presence of others to distract him from the past, memories invaded, the way they always did, pulling at the dark silence inside him, reminding him of the weakness that ran in his blood.
As if he’d passed through only yesterday, Nev recalled the coldness leeching his bones, the shrieking things clawing at hisguerand ripping at his sanityas he screamed his way through an intra-dimensional portal to this place—throughthe Void. He suppressed a shudder, wondering why his father hadn’t met the threat invading their world head-on.
The once-great leader of the Ravagers had denied his duty. He’d ignored the needs of his clan and shoved his family to the safety of the Void before destroying the cave in which it sat, effectively killing more than half his brethren in the process, Nev had later heard. If not for the sister Void on their nearby moon, which allowed so many others to escape, he never would have known the fate of his family. And never would have had to deal with Eric Savage and his brood either, he thought with disgust.
The Dekken would have annihilated the homeworld by now. The new Ravagers setting foot in Cross Step came from surrounding worlds, where they’d made hasty escapes. Of the millions of Ravagers who evaded the Dekken, hardly any found their way to Earth. If only they could figure out how the fucking Voids worked.
Nev wished he’d journeyed to another world, where his kind might have taken charge and established a commanding order. The thought of Cross Step being the last home to so few Ravagers made him want to kill all the feeble humans currently running the planet into the ground. What made it so much worse was that Eric Savage and his fucked up clan tainted their future by allowing so much impure crossbreeding.
Nev resolved to bring the clans together again. If not for Eric Savage, the Ravagers might have been strong enough to take over this pathetic city. It wasn’t as if they had anywhere else to go. Passing back through the Voids wouldn’t guarantee safety on arrival at the other end, wherever the hell that might be. And the United States government had an impenetrable boundary around the forty square miles of what they called “Cross Step, The Restricted Area.”
Instead of making the best of it, Eric chose to live in peace among non-Ravagers. He had the nerve to put aside his own history by allowing his Ravagers to mate with those outside their own kind, a source of constant strife at home.
