TW on sexual assault and coercion

Karhi Emelyn

Karhi opened his eyes and groaned. His head throbbed, and his mouth was sour. He rolled onto his side and felt hard tile beneath him. He was lying on the floor . . . what was he doing there?

He stood up, looking around the room, blinking harder. He was in a room in a house, maybe? The walls were painted a soft blue and the floor was pale slate tile. A fan hung from the ceiling, a switch for it on the wall. Light filtered through the windows with gauzy blue curtains.

He rubbed his head, trying to push off the headache. The last thing he remembered was falling asleep with Ilona in his arms. She had had one of her servants bring in alcohol, and they had gotten drunk. It had made all of the things he had to do with her a lot easier.

He found himself swallowing bile thinking about that. She made him so helpless. He was five hundred years old, and he was incapable of saying no to her.

Had she brought him here? Why? He had done everything she wanted. He had submitted himself to her, kept on pleasuring her even when he hurt and just wanted to go to sleep. He had catered to her every desire, let her into his mind. Allowed her to pick through him and look at any memories she wanted.

The same things he had done for her the night that he let Sloane leave from their first meeting without allowing Ilona time to play with her.

At least this time she hadn’t put him in a cage and made him pretend to be a dog.

His fists clenched, and he stood up. He looked down at himself to see that he was still wearing the green button-up and slacks he had worn to go see Ilona. He was fully clothed. His wallet was in his back pocket, but his phone was missing.

His last memory hadn’t involved any clothes. He had at least been able to get up and put his clothes back on, apparently.

He listened to his surroundings. A single, fast heartbeat came from outside of the room, further in the house.

He tried the door. It was reinforced with steel. And magic, as he learned when it zapped him as he tried to open it. He cursed.

He walked over to the windows and pulled aside one curtain to look out.

He didn’t know what he had expected to see when he looked out. But what he did see was not it.

He was in a residential neighbourhood. The yards were shabby, and some houses had an occasional boarded-up window. The sun was high in the sky, close to noon.

There were bars installed on the outside of his window. He couldn’t feel any magic coming off them. The window was nailed shut from the outside and the bars were made of iron.

He slammed his elbow into the glass, and it shattered. He heard a chair scraping outside of the room. Whoever was supposed to be watching him, then.

He didn’t stop, letting his claws grow out and scraping them across the bars. The sound and feeling of metal against his claws made the hair on the back of his neck stand up, but he continued. They cut deep through the iron on the first past and it only took two more to saw clean through bars.

He reached for them and pulled, bending a bar inwards.

He heard keys outside of the room, and locks tumbled open.

He darted from the window to stand next to the door. The door opened, and a hand with a syringe filled with red liquid entered the room before whoever held it did.

The scent of shapeshifter, some type of dog, filled the room. He knocked the syringe out of the shifter’s hand with a kick and grabbed the hand, pulling it in.

The hand belonged to a man already shifting, nails growing into claws. He swiped at Karhi, and Karhi barely dodged it. He tried to make space between them, but the shifter moved too fast.

His vision pitched, pain like fire tearing across his back, and he slammed into the ground. He heard his ribs crack.

He rolled over to his side and saw the shifter going for the syringe again. He was partially transformed, hands turned to claws, a mane of shaggy black fur down his head and back—a hyena, then.

Karhi kicked out at the shifter, and he made contact with his back leg. The hyena cried out, a strange half-howl, half-scream, giving Karhi enough time to get to his knees. He raked his claws across the back of the hyena’s thighs and the hyena collapsed to one knee.

Karhi launched himself at the hyena, driving him into the floor. He kicked away the syringe and brought one arm around his neck and the other behind him in a triangle choke.

“Why am I here?” Karhi hissed in his ear.

The shifter didn’t reply, elbowing him in the ribs, right where they had broken.

The air left his body, agony exploding in his chest. His vision went white with pain, and he roared. The hyena went limp against him.

When he could see again, he realized he had snapped the shifter’s neck. Karhi snarled, and for good measure, made sure to turn the man’s head 180 degrees to make sure he was dead.

Karhi let him drop to the ground and straightened up, breathing in through his nose and out through his mouth. He squeezed his eyes shut until the pain in his rib disappeared. His body was healing. Good. It hadn’t been that long since he had eaten, then.

He moved gingerly back to the window. He didn’t want to try to escape through the house when he could bend the window bars back to escape.

The dead man’s blood in the syringe had been the source of his headache and memory loss. It wasn’t lethal to human vampires like Karhi, but it was toxic, like a vampire roofie. He had no idea if Ilona had done this to him anymore. Dead man’s blood wasn’t really her style.

He finally pulled the bars in enough that he could crawl through the window and outside.

There was no one outside to intercept him and he fled.

He needed to get to his hotel. Change clothes. Take a shower. Sleep. Something. Anything to distract from what had happened in that house.

He barely knew what was going on as he made his way through downtown Phoenix back to his hotel. It was early afternoon, but downtown was crowded with people. He moved through the crowd like a zombie, barely registering people just in time to avoid them.

Until a teenager with curly brown hair rammed his shoulder into Karhi as he ran by. Karhi looked back at him and just barely avoided hitting a young girl running after the boy.

He heard shouting and a moment later, two cops ran past him, chasing the kids. The crowd parted to let them through, and Karhi saw when one cop tackled the boy. He went down shouting.

The girl continued past him for several yards before looking back and doing a double take. She slowed to a stop, seeing her companion down.

“Run, Genie,” he shouted at her.

The second cop tackled her, too. She didn’t make a peep except for a grunting noise when she landed on the concrete sidewalk.

The cop holding the boy shoved him into the ground, grinding his face with a knee to his back. The boy cried out in pain as the officer grabbed his cuffs and pressed the kid harder into the ground.

What the fuck was he doing? The kid was down and posed no threat.

“We just wanted you for questioning, but you sucker punched me,” the cop growled. “So, now that’s assault.”

The kid spat at him.

The girl wasn’t getting much better treatment. She didn’t have a knee in the back, but she did have a hand on the side of her head, pushing her into the concrete.

A crowd had gathered around the arrest.

“He’s a kid!” someone shouted at the cop.

Karhi turned away. He didn’t want to see this. He didn’t want to see two kids get violently arrested for no reason. He remembered when the police used to be slave patrols. Those kids weren’t black, but their skin was dark enough, their eyes and facial features different enough from white, for it to probably not matter.

He bolted. He didn’t want to see any more violence right now. He had seen too much in the past twenty-four hours.

La Suite Royale was a huge building, at least twenty stories high. It took up a quarter of the block it sat on, the entrance at a street intersection. It was one of a chain of hotels owned by the Ruaidhrí family, the ruling monarchs of the living vampires.

It wasn’t until he was trying to get into his hotel room that he realized his wallet was missing.

Had . . . that kid pick-pocketed him while fleeing from the police?

He had to go back downstairs to the lobby to ask for a new key card. Fortunately, he was a VIP member, meaning he didn’t have to show any ID proving who he was. Which was good, considering his ID was gone.

In the room, he called the man who managed his accounts to tell him to cancel all of his credit and debit cards and reissue them. Karhi still had a hefty amount of cash in his duffel bag, so he wasn’t out of commission.

He had just gotten off the phone with his account manager, sitting down on his bed to climb in, when there was a knock at his door. He groaned in frustration, getting back up to answer it. He just wanted to go to sleep. He hadn’t slept well with Ilona, and he definitely hadn’t slept well after whatever happened that led to him waking up in that house.

It was a Lunette, holding out his phone to him. His brow furrowed, taking it from her. He had assumed his kidnappers took it or something. “What?”

“You left it at Casa Vampiria, and Carrick gave it to me after my meeting with Ilona this morning to give back to you.” She looked him up and down before saying, “You look like shit.”

He didn’t reply, turning from her to walk back into his room.

“I see you got the same type of room I did,” Lunette said, following him.

He glanced up. It was simple, just a bedroom with a bed, a small table with chairs, and a bathroom. A TV was mounted on the wall across from the queen bed above a dresser. The floor was carpeted with simple grey fabric. It wasn’t shabby, but it wasn’t lush either.

Normally when he stayed at La Suite Royale,he got something more lavish with a living room, a kitchen, and a minibar. The bathroom usually had a jacuzzi tub.

“Carrick booked the rooms, I’m assuming,” Karhi shrugged. “He never books the nice suites.”

“God forbid he pay Hazel a cent more than he has to.” Lunette rolled her eyes, sitting on one of the chairs at the small glass table in the corner. She levelled her cognac-coloured gaze on him. “Spill.”

His brow furrowed. “What?”

“What did Ilona do to you?” She clenched her fists. “What did she do to you because of that little bitch?”

Karhi had never understood Lunette’s utter hatred for Sloane. From the moment they met, they were oil and water. They couldn’t even be in the same room for longer than a few minutes.

“Nothing,” he lied. He had never told Lunette about what he had to do to make Ilona happy. He had done a lot of things to keep Ilona off Lunette’s back over the years. And if Lunette ever found out about any of them . . .

She glared at him. “Liar.”

That wasn’t to say she didn’t still suspect something.

“No,” he said, finding himself bitterly grateful for a way to distract her. “I woke up in a random house with no idea how I got there.”

That erased all her doubt and concern about Ilona. Her brow furrowed in confusion. “What?”

He told her about what had happened to him that morning. He included his initial suspicions that it was Ilona, but now he was beginning to think maybe it hadn’t been her.

“Dead man’s blood . . .” she trailed off. “That’s an odd one. It’s hard to get that. The only people who sell that in the US . . .”

“The D’Aubignes, I know,” he said. “Some of them live in Phoenix, but as far as I know, they’re involved in illegal arms dealing here, not dead man’s blood.”

“Maybe that bitch is in town,” Lunette shrugged.

“Zero?”

“She carries it with her. How Theron travels with her, knowing she has that shit on her, is beyond me.”

“They are vampire hunters. And even though he’s a vampire, Theron uses it, too.”

She scowled at him.

He was getting off topic. “Anyway, what reason would those two have to do that to me?”

She didn’t have an answer for that, and he felt a bit of relief. He didn’t want to have to deal with Zero and Theron on top of Ilona and whatever the hell else was happening.

Karhi’s phone went off. He looked at it and groaned before answering it. “Hello?”

“I see Lunette brought you your phone back.”

He rubbed his eyes. They were itchy from exhaustion. “Yes.”

When Karhi didn’t bend over backwards to thank Carrick for returning his phone, Carrick said, his tone annoyed, “Ilona would like you to go visit the White Psychic to extend our respects to her.”

His brow furrowed. “The White Psychic?”

“As you know,” he said in a tone of voice that told Karhi he wouldn’t know anything at all, “Queen Hazel recently contracted with the White Psychic. To maintain friendly relations with the queen, Ilona wants you to go as an envoy to pay respects.”

Karhi hadn’t known about that. Ilona had to be furious. Rumour had it that the White Psychic was a neuropath who could read minds, do telepathy, and even kill people with her powers. Neuropaths could usually do one of those, but all three was rare. He hadn’t heard of one with that much power in decades.

But he couldn’t gain much enjoyment out of the idea that Hazel had an ally like that over Ilona. He was exhausted. Karhi sighed. “Fine. I’ll do it in a couple hours.”

“No, her only availability is in the mornings on weekdays. Go now.”

Karhi could hear the sadistic smile in Carrick’s voice as he spoke. It took all his composure not to snap at the dickhead. But he knew that if he rebelled against an order from Ilona, relayed through Carrick, it would make his life that much worse.

“Fine,” he said. “I need the address.”

Carrick rattled it off. Karhi didn’t recognize where it was, though he wasn’t very familiar with Phoenix outside of the Staetman Estate and downtown. He read it back, and Carrick confirmed.

“Alright.” Then he had an idea. He could get a dig in at Carrick while also getting more information about where he had been last night. “Carrick?”

“Yes?”

“What time did I leave Ilona’s bedroom yesterday evening?”

Carrick’s voice was tight, as if speaking through gritted teeth. “I don’t know. I arrived at ten last night, and you were gone. If you have no further questions, I am going to hang up.”

Karhi smirked, and Carrick didn’t even wait for him to answer. He hung up.

His smirk fell. So, he had probably left Ilona in the early evening. But the dead man’s blood had wiped any memory he had after he fell asleep with Ilona.

Had Ilona done that to him? He didn’t think so . . . it didn’t make sense. If she wanted to imprison him, she would just do it outright. He’d missed most of the early 1600s due to it. And one of the cholera pandemics.

“I’m coming with you,” Lunette told him.

He shrugged. “Sure.” He couldn’t blame her. The White Psychic wasn’t a celebrity, but she inspired the same kind of awe and disbelief. “I’m showering first though.”

“Please.”