Dead End Read online

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Epilogue

  Other books by Debbie Cassidy

  About the Author

  Copyright © 2019, Debbie Cassidy

  All Rights Reserved

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, duplicated, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior written consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Cover by JMN Art

  Chapter 1

  It was déjà vu. It was chaos. It was heart-pounding, rage-inducing interaction, but there was no way I’d be backing down.

  Not this time.

  Not for anything.

  Five councilmembers stared back at me, but there were only two familiar faces—the Sanguinata who I knew now to be Greta, the head of House Crimson and Danika’s liege, or whatever they called their head of house, and Deacon. The rest were Protectorate. This was the secondary council, the next tier, because Harker was gone, and her death had taken Bane, Orin, and Ryker with her. The neph hadn’t been seen for days. They had cloistered themselves away, grieving for the woman they’d loved and who’d sacrificed herself to save the humans from the feral Sanguinata Carmach had released from their sublevel prison.

  And Emory … I hadn’t seen him since the attack. My heart ached for his loss, and it bled for mine, but each time the pain threatened to break me, I pushed it down. Bry and Verona needed me to be strong. The humans in the Hive needed me to advocate for them. This was where my focus needed to be.

  Finn’s father was dead, and the Lupinata that had joined him in his uprising were incarcerated. But things could never go back to the way they’d been. Carmach’s actions had shown us the cracks in the system. They’d strengthened my conviction that we needed to act now to stop Genesis. That the lies and the secrets had to end. But the council that stared back at me were most definitely not on the same page.

  Whereas the awful events of a week ago had stripped me of my doubt, they’d only seemed to add layers of caution over the council, and their ears were deaf to my arguments. Deacon was the only one on my side; the rest … The rest were cowards.

  Gem’s face came to mind—she’d died because of the secrets. There would be no more of them.

  “Greta,” Deacon addressed the Sanguinata. “We can do this. Emory is confident we can pinpoint Genesis’s location. Everything Echo told us when she came back from the dead zone is true. The attack on the sea realm proves it. We can’t wait any longer.”

  “Pfft.” She waved a hand. “Those were simply the desperate actions of a machine that is running out of time.”

  Yeah, this was her reaction to everything. Dismissal, flippancy, as if by treating the matter as inconsequential she could make it so. It was driving me crazy.

  “Scare tactics won’t work on us,” Greta continued.

  I lifted my chin and glared at her, unrepentant. “The heart failed a week ago. It could fail again. We can’t continue to sit back and do nothing. We can’t continue to lie to the humans and tell them we’re looking for Genesis when we’re not. We have a lead, and we need to use it to pinpoint his location. We need to be working on a way to end him once and for all. We need to strike now when he’s at his most desperate and weak.”

  Need, need, need. So many fucking needs, but no one in this room aside from Deacon and I understood that.

  “Or, we can wait until he simply runs out of fuel and dies,” Greta said. “That has always been our plan, and it should remain as such.”

  Finally, an admission. Her eyes widened when she realized what she’d let slip, and I crossed my arms under my breasts and arched a brow.

  She shrugged. “The plan has served us well.”

  Maybe it had for a time. But things were different now. “There are souls topside. Enough to keep him going for decades to come, limping along while we rot underground. Carmach may have gone about it the wrong way, but he had a point. The Lupinata can’t live like this for much longer. They will go extinct if we don’t get them topside soon.”

  “And they are free to leave if they wish,” Greta said.

  Deacon shot her a filthy look. “I’d like to hear you say that to their faces.”

  Greta smiled thinly. “If they can’t handle it down here, then they should leave. We’re doing just fine.”

  Of course they were; they had blood on tap down here. Human blood. I’d been doing a lot of thinking, and some interesting theories had come to mind. Theories I was ready to share with the group.

  “You don’t want to go topside, do you?” I locked gazes with Greta. “Topside means that the humans we have in the Hive may meet and interbreed with the Shedim or the Draconi, which means that the pure human gene pool will be polluted, which in turn means that you’ll no longer have a human blood supply.”

  Her already pale complexion paled even further.

  Deacon blinked slowly and then exhaled sharply. This possibility was news to him? He met my gaze with a wry smile, as if to say, shit, Patch, you could have clued me in on this line of thought.

  But he recovered quickly and steepled his fingers beneath his chin in a sage manner, which made me proud. “That is entirely possible. Greta, is this the reason behind your reluctance to vote in favor of our mission?”

  Greta’s expression was smooth as glass. “I hadn’t even considered this possibility, but now you mention it, it’s all the more reason to wait things out.”

  All the more reason for the Sanguinata to wait it out, but not for the other neph. The Protectorate were exchanging worried looks now, no longer on the same page. Greta hadn’t noticed yet.

  I bit back a smile. “But you wouldn’t just be waiting him out. You’d need to stay down here, keep the humans down here forever in order to have food, wouldn’t you?” I leaned in. “It seems to me, that’s the only reason you want to remain in the Hive. To save yourselves. It’s no longer about protecting the humans, is it?”

  She narrowed her eyes. “I don’t see the point in this line of conversation. It is what it is. We have a vow, and we will stick to it.”

  I shrugged. “And you’ll be condemning the next generation of Sanguinata. You’ll be condemning them to a life underground without the moon, without the thrill of a true breeze on their faces.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about evolution. By staying down here, you’ll change. Generation after generation will be born, but they will be born tailored to live underground. That is what you will become. But if you go topside now, there’s hope that your progeny can evolve to be able to live off the blood of humans who have otherworld DNA. You can give them a chance, give them the gift of a true life, one free from tunnels and cement walls and metal gratings. You can give them the moon.”

  Her fe
atures sharpened in thought as she turned this over.

  “She’s right, Greta,” Deacon said.

  The Protectorate on the council began to murmur amongst themselves. I stood at the end of the table, hope a beating pulse in my throat. This had to work. They had to sanction this. They needed to see it was the only way to end our exile from the world, but then Greta met my gaze, and I saw the denial in her eyes.

  She pressed her lips into a thin line. “We have a plan, and we will not deviate from it. Evolution will have to wait until then. The humans are safe, they’re happy with the official story of a gas leak. They’re oblivious to the truth, and we will keep them that way.”

  Fuck. “This is wrong. They have a right to know. This concerns their futures too. Why keep them locked up when with a little effort they could be free, we all could be free.”

  “A little effort?” Her brows shot up. “You have no idea what Genesis is capable of or how many lives he’s claimed. If you truly understood that you wouldn’t be advocating this ridiculous plan.”

  “I have no idea?” My tone was incredulous. “Who the fuck do you think has been tangling with Genesis for the past four weeks? It certainly hasn’t been you.”

  “Greta, we need to sanction this,” Deacon said.

  “No, Deacon, we don’t.” She looked to the Protectorate. “Harker died to protect those humans. She believed in our path. She believed that we needed to wait out Genesis. To take any other action now would be to say she died for nothing.”

  Oh, God, the bitch. She was using the death of the Protectorate leader to get them on her side. Any doubt, any possible allies amongst the neph slipped away as their expressions hardened. Harker had been their figurehead, after all.

  “Greta!” Deacon’s tone was sharp. “You have no idea what Harker would have wanted. It’s low of you to use her name like this.”

  Greta smirked. “Let’s vote, shall we?”

  She was confident in the outcome, and my heart sank. I’d come here to fight for us all, but how could I fight for people when they were determined to act against themselves?

  I locked gazes with each Protectorate. “I can do this. I can find Genesis, and I can end him. I didn’t know Harker before, but I know what I’ve heard. She was a fighter. She was a warrior, and she wouldn’t have walked away from a chance to end this exile.”

  “Echo’s right,” a deep voice rumbled from behind me. “Harker would want us to fight.”

  “Bane?” Greta’s eyes widened in surprise. “We weren’t expecting you.”

  Bane, Orin, and Ryker entered the room. Their huge frames ate up what little space was left in the chamber as they came to stand beside me. The fist of foreboding in my chest eased its grip. I shot Bane a grateful look, but his attention was fixed on Greta, his jaw tense and ticking as if he was holding himself back from great violence.

  “Of course you weren’t expecting us,” Orin said. “How could you when you never even informed us of the meeting?”

  Greta opened and closed her mouth and then composed herself. “You were grieving, so I decided to deal with this myself. Harker would have wanted us to get back to normal as quickly as possible.”

  Ryker leaned forward and pressed his palms to the table. “Don’t you ever presume to tell us what Harker would have wanted. You don’t know shit.” There was true menace in his tone that sent a shiver of apprehension through me.

  “Harker wanted what was best for the humans,” Orin said softly. He sounded drained. “For a time, remaining in the Hive was best, but when Echo came to us with her story of Genesis’s attack in the dead zone, Harker began to doubt our course of action. She believed we needed a plan B.”

  “She believed that if there was a chance for us to end Genesis, then we needed to take it,” Ryker said.

  Bane stepped forward and addressed the Protectorate. “We aren’t cowards. We don’t run from the chance to end a threat; we meet it head-on.” He looked to me. “If you can locate Genesis, and if Emory can come up with a way to shut him down, then you have my backing. I vote to sanction the mission.”

  “Bane.” Greta’s tone was saturated with irritation. “You can’t just walk in here and disrupt the proceedings like this.”

  Bane’s violet eyes glittered with suppressed fury as they fell on Greta. “You deliberately cut us out of this meeting so you could get the outcome you wanted. Don’t fucking tell me what I can and can’t do. You’re damn lucky I don’t raise my hand against women, otherwise you’d be a smudge on that wall right now.”

  Ryker’s lips curled in a sadistic smile. “Oh, Bane, she isn’t a woman. She’s a sucker.”

  Orin rubbed his temples. “Enough. We can’t regress like this. Harker worked so hard to build this community and bring us all together, but it was never meant to be forever. We need to finish what she started. We need to end our exile.”

  I looked to Bane. “The humans deserve to know the truth too.”

  He closed his eyes. “I agree.”

  “Bane!” Greta was on her feet now. “You can’t be serious?”

  Bane’s expression was grim. “Oh, I’m deadly serious; however”—he lowered his gaze to me—“the truth can only come out once we have a location, a means to end Genesis, and a plan. Telling them any sooner could be giving them false hope.”

  This way, if we failed to find Genesis or a way to kill him, then the humans would be none the wiser. As much as I wanted to break barriers and involve the humans in our quest, it wouldn’t be fair to endanger them and give them hope only to have to take it away again.

  “Agreed.”

  “Wait a second,” Greta said, her gaze wary and wild as it travelled from me to Bane and then back again.

  Deacon pushed his chair back and stood. “Let’s vote.”

  I did it. I had the council backing. The Protectorate had voted with Bane, and Greta … Well, she wasn’t happy, but fuck her. The room emptied out, leaving just Deacon, me, Bane, Orin, and Ryker.

  Bane’s shoulders sagged as soon as the door closed on the last Protectorate. “I’m sorry we didn’t get here sooner.”

  There was pain in his voice, in his posture. It radiated off him like heat off a water pipe.

  “I’m sorry too. For your loss.”

  His smile was small and sad. “I’m sorry for your loss too.”

  I blinked against the heat that sprang to my eyes. “Thank you.”

  “We’ll help as much as we’re able,” Orin said. “Just let us know what you need us to do.”

  What I needed was Emory. “How is Emory?”

  Ryker snorted. “He hasn’t left his lab since Harker …” He swallowed hard. “He can’t let go of the fact that she’s gone, and there’s nothing we can do to save her soul.”

  Oh, God. Oh, fucking God. Of course, with no soul orb and Death gone, her soul was at risk from Genesis.

  Bane inhaled and exhaled sharply. “Dwelling won’t help. There’s nothing we can do. We can only hope that Death somehow senses her, that he somehow comes back for her and finds her before …”

  “Because he loves her?”

  Orin’s smile was wry. “No, because her soul belongs to him. Serenity is the final piece of Death’s soul. She is what tethered him to our world. He just happened to fall in love with her.”

  But Death was gone. He’d gone into the mausoleum and sealed the doors to wherever the souls went. Would he feel Harker’s soul from there? I’d had my doubts about Harker’s motives, about her decisions, but it was obvious now that she’d dealt with some impossible choices. I hoped her soul found its way home.

  “You should go and see Emory,” Bane said. “Maybe he’ll speak to you.”

  Wait. “You haven’t spoken to him?”

  Ryker made a sound of exasperation. “The stubborn boy won’t open the door to anyone.”

  He was hurting. Grieving alone, and I’d left him to it, so caught up in burying my own grief and focusing on the plan. I’d thought he wanted to be left alone, to b
e with his family. But …

  I touched Deacon’s arm lightly. “Can you fill Micha and Lyrian in?”

  Deacon nodded. “Of course.”

  Bane offered me a curt nod. “Keep us informed.”

  The trio left the room, and I leaned into Deacon and pressed my forehead to his chest.

  “I should have listened to my gut and gone to see him.”

  Deacon wrapped his arms around me. “You can’t take care of everyone. You lost someone too.”

  I rolled my forehead against his breastbone. “Don’t.”

  “You need to grieve.”

  “No.” I straightened. “What I need to do is stop Genesis, and the first step is to get Emory on board.”

  Chapter 2

  Emory wasn’t in the Protectorate lab, which meant he had to be in his personal lab in the hub tower. I hurried across the Hive. No one I passed looked twice at me. Dressed in my civilian clothes of slacks, boots, and a loose tunic top, I was invisible. It was only when I got to the hub doors that it hit me: what if Emory had updated the security access to exclude me? I technically wasn’t a heart keeper any longer. I needn’t have worried. The door beeped, and the panel turned green as it accepted my biometric data, and then I was through.

  The whirr and hum of the machinery were a symphony that enveloped me in their soothing beat, and for a moment, the horror slipped away, and I was that girl again, the young heart keeper with stars in her eyes and hope in her heart. For one moment, I was free of obligation and duty and pain. But the moment was brief, and I was climbing the metal staircase to the tower.

  Danika shot me a glare as I entered. “What do you want, Echo? You no longer work here, and as far as I’m aware, Emory hasn’t put you in charge. Gunther’s been checking regular operations for the past week, and I’m doing the rest.”